The Shark Curtain. Chris Scofield

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Latin.

      * * *

      “Everybody okay?” Dad calls. His flashlight bleaches the trail. It finds Lauren. “Lima Bean?”

      Lauren nods. She looks scared and confused. Her freckles spring on and off her face like Mexican jumping beans.

      “Lily?”

      The muscles in my legs relax as I pull sticks and vines out of my hair. The thick callous pads on my feet dissolve. I’m still panting from the run, and chilled by sweat I stand up in the bushes and press my hand to my burning chest.

      “Okay?” he repeats.

      Yes. No. “Okay,” I say, clearing my throat.

      “Kit?” Dad shines the light on Mom, curled around him. “There you are,” he jokes, kissing the top of her curly auburn head. They found each other first; they always do.

      Mom laughs too, then reaches for the picnic basket and says, “Whew! That was wild! Where’d they come from?”

      I know. My eyes are good at night. I recognized some of them, dogs from the neighborhood: the German shepherd from Sherwood Court, two yellow labs, the old boxer, the chubby beagle, the short-legged Lassie.

      At the entrance to the quarry, Dad unhooks the chain gate with the No Trespassing sign and gestures us through. “Bet the dogs passed here hours ago,” he laughs.

      Mom smiles, but Lauren and I don’t. We glance at each other. The dogs were cool but it’s wrong to break the law like Dad is.

      We follow our parents into the starlit open sky. The trees stand back from the big hole, silhouetted against the clear night sky like rows of spears. The heat of the day still clings to the barren ground. It’s a weird place, like the surface of the moon in comic books. Lauren slips her hand in mine. She looks around for the Flintstones’ steam shovels, but they’re nowhere to be seen.

      “Don’t forget what I told you about . . .” Mom peers at the sky. “Look! There’s one!” She points at the twinkling star mass. “How beautiful! There, did you see it? Stars, meteors, everywhere!”

      Meteors fall around us without touching the ground; they hang in the trees and shine in Lauren’s red hair.

      When Mom calls the stars “kisses from angels,” Dad grabs her and kisses her on the lips.

      “Girls?” Mom starts again. “You remember what we discussed about the pit, right?”

      Lauren puts her flashlight beam under her chin. “Do I look like a jack o’ lantern, Mom?”

      “I take that as a yes then?”

      “Stay away from the pit,” I answer for us both.

      “Is that your jump rope?”

      “It’s my lucky charm,” Lauren explains as we lay out our blankets. My sister doesn’t go anywhere without her jump rope. Sometimes she loops it over her bicycle handles or wears it as a belt; tonight she carries it in her afghan.

      Lauren jumps rope, chews gum, sucks her thumb, and throws up because of anxiety, bad ears, and motion sickness. When Mom told Dr. Goodnight that Lauren was a “nervous child, a perfect candidate for ulcers,” he smiled and wrote Mom a prescription for more happy pills.

      “A rabbit’s foot would be smaller,” Mom said to her.

      I got in trouble for burning my rabbit’s foot, even when I explained that it was the only way the foot and rabbit could be reunited. I read about it in Aboriginal Tales.

      “Ladies!” Dad barks. “Can we please be quiet and watch the stars? Isn’t that what we came for?”

      That’s not a real question; neither one of them are.

      Lauren and I don’t get close to the pit. Okay, maybe just a little. On top of Gramma Frieda’s afghans we pretend to be astronauts; the starlit white rim of the pit is the outline of the moon. My blanket is a flying carpet, a floating island where I sit and walk my fingers across the sky, leaping over meteors.

      Mrs. Wiggins loves the sky. When it’s a full moon, I don’t have to look outside, check the tide chart, or The Old Farmer’s Almanac, because Mrs. Wiggins jumps on my bed and stares out the window, so I know it’s full. Now that she’s sick and old, she pees a little when she jumps, so Mom covers my bed with old towels.

      I wish I could read Mrs. Wiggins’s mind. I tried her on a Ouija board once—shoved it under her nose and waited for her to nudge a series of letters that would spell out something—but she didn’t like it. She’s private, like me. After school one day, I found its chewed-up pieces in her dog bed.

      When we finish our picnic, Lauren and I lay back, counting meteors out loud and laughing. After a while, we hear our parents whisper and Lauren shines her flashlight on them.

      “I knew four flashlights were too many,” Dad says, turning his back to the beam. Mom lies beside him. He gives her a noisy kiss.

      “Oh, Pablo,” Mom giggles. She calls him Pablo when they’re kissy.

      “Oh, Pablo,” Lauren mimics, making loud smoochie sounds on her arm.

      “Girls!” Dad snaps.

      With my index finger I connect a series of stationary stars, and draw Mrs. Wiggins’s outline in the twinkling sky. A new constellation: Canis Wiggins.

      “Lily, do the dogs run through the woods every night?”

      I shrug but Lauren isn’t looking. I guess she asks me questions I can’t answer because I’m older than she is. Plus, our parents are making out, so she can’t ask them either.

      “Mommy and Dad-dy, sitting in a tree,” she sings as she jumps rope. I smell the dust kicked up with every twirl. The ground thumps when her feet land together. “K-I-S-S . . .”

      In the dark, on another flying blanket far away, Mom giggles.

      “First comes love, then comes marriage,” Lauren continues.

      Mrs. Wiggins’s water dish is in the stars too. And a cartoon bubble over her big square head that reads, STAY AWAY FROM THE

      Suddenly there’s a skid, and the rope stops turning. A thump. A moan.

      Lauren! I jump to my feet.

      “Lily?” she whispers.

      “Lauren?” I whisper back.

      “Girls?”

      “Mrs. Asher, please!” Dad is being silly. “Your lips, the stars. Your lips, the stars.”

      “For God’s sake, Paul, let go!” Mom flips on the flashlight and hurries toward us. I’m blinded by the glare. She quickly puts it down, and turning the beam away illuminates the gray scraped wall on the opposite side of the quarry.

      “What’s going . . . Where’s

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