looking right at it.” In spite of her annoyance at him, she felt a small twinge of compassion. The bruise was healing. She could tell by the way the color bloomed in the middle and faded at the edges. But it must’ve really hurt when it happened.
His eyes narrowed and his face turned hard, and for a second, he looked menacing. “It’s nothing,” he stated. “I fell off my bike. Big deal.” He whipped around and kept going, hurrying so that Lolly had to rush to keep up.
“Look, I didn’t mean to make you mad.”
“I’m not mad at you,” he barked at her, and walked even faster.
That was quick, she thought. Her first enemy of the summer. There were sure to be many more to follow. She had a knack for bringing out dislike in people.
Even though Connor said he wasn’t mad at her, he was mad about something. There was fury in his taut muscles, his sharp movements. Big deal, so he hurt himself riding a bike. Usually when you fell off a bike, though, the casualties were elbows and knees, maybe the head. Not the back, unless you went tumbling down a hill and slammed into something really hard. Unless you were lying about what really happened.
She was both intrigued by and disappointed in this boy. Disappointed because she desperately wanted to dislike him and not have to think about him again, all summer long. And intrigued because he was more interesting than he had a right to be. He was kind of edgy, too, with that too-long hair, low-slung pants, high-tops repaired with duct tape. And there was something in his eyes besides the usual stupid boy stuff. Those same ice-cube eyes that had read David Copperfield had probably seen things a girl like Lolly couldn’t even imagine.
They hiked around a hairpin bend in the path, and a loud, steady rush of water greeted them.
“Whoa,” Connor said, tilting back his head to look at the hundred-foot waterfall. It gushed from some unseen source high above, tumbling over rocks, droplets turning to mist on impact. Everywhere the sunlight shone through, rainbows glowed. “That’s awesome,” he said, his cranky mood apparently forgotten.
“Meerskill Falls,” she said, raising her voice over the roar of the falling water. “One of the tallest in the state. Come on, you can get a good view of it from the bridge.”
Meerskill Bridge had been constructed in the 1930s by a government work crew. Dizzyingly tall, the arched concrete structure spanned the gorge, with the falls crashing wildly below. “The locals call this Suicide Bridge because people have killed themselves jumping from it.”
“Yeah, sure.” He seemed drawn to the cascade, which misted the trail on either side, cultivating a carpet of moss and lush ferns.
“I’m serious. That’s why there’s a chain-link fence over the top of the bridge.” She scrambled to keep up with him. “It was supposedly put up, like, fifty years ago, after two teenagers jumped off it.”
“How do you know they jumped?” he asked. The mist clung to his dark hair and his eyelashes, making him look even cuter.
Lolly wondered if the mist made her look cute, too. Probably not. It only fogged her glasses. “I guess they just know,” she said. They reached the bridge deck and passed under the arch formed by the safety fence.
“Maybe they fell by accident. Maybe they were pushed. Maybe they never existed in the first place.”
“Are you always such a skeptic?” she asked.
“Only when somebody’s telling me some bullshit story.”
“It’s not bull. You can ask anybody.” She stuck her nose in the air and marched to the end of the bridge and around the bend without waiting to see if he followed. They hiked along in silence for a while. By now, they were seriously lagging behind the rest of the group but he didn’t seem to care, and Lolly decided that she didn’t, either. Today’s hike wasn’t a race, anyway.
She kept stealing sideways glances at him. Maybe she would experiment with liking this guy, just a little. “Hey, check it out.” She lowered her voice to a whisper as the path skirted a sloping meadow dotted with wildflowers and fringed by birch trees. “Two fawns and a doe.”
“Where?” He craned his neck around the woods.
“Shh. Be really quiet.” She beckoned, leading him off the path. Deer were not exactly rare in these parts, but it was always amazing to see the fawns in their soft-looking spotted coats and their big, shy eyes. The deer were in an open glade, the little ones sticking close to their mother while she browsed on grass and leaves. Lolly and Connor stopped at the edge of the glade and watched.
Lolly motioned for Connor to sit next to her on a fallen log. She took a pair of field glasses from her fanny pack and handed them to him.
“That’s awesome,” he said, peering through the glasses. “I’ve never seen a deer in the wild before.”
She wondered where he was from. It wasn’t like deer were rare or anything. “A fawn eats the equivalent of its body weight every twenty-four hours.”
“How do you know that?”
“Read it in a book. I read sixty books last year.”
“Geez,” he said. “Why?”
“ ‘Cause there wasn’t time to read more,” she said with a superior sniff. “Hard to believe people hunt deer, huh? I think they’re so beautiful.” She took a drink from her canteen. The whole scene before them was like an old-fashioned painting—the new grass tender and green, the bluestars and wild columbine nodding their heads in the breeze, the deer grazing.
“I can see clear down to the lake,” Connor said. “These are good binoculars.”
“My dad gave them to me. A guilt gift.”
He lowered the glasses. “What’s a guilt gift?”
“It’s when your dad can’t make it to your piano recital, and he feels guilty, so he buys you a really expensive gift.”
“Huh. There are worse things than your dad missing a piano recital.” Connor peered through the binoculars again. “Is that an island in the middle of the lake?”
“Yep. It’s called Spruce Island. That’s where they’ll have the fireworks on the Fourth of July. I tried swimming out to it last year but I didn’t make it.”
“What happened?”
“Halfway across, I had to call for help. When they dragged me to shore, I acted like I was almost drowned so they wouldn’t accuse me of doing it to get attention. They called my parents.” This, of course, was what Lolly had wanted all along. Now she wished she hadn’t mentioned the incident, but once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “My parents got a divorce last year and I figured they’d both have to come and get me.” The admission hurt her throat.
“Did it work?” he asked.
“No way. The idea of doing anything as a family is finished, kaput, out of the question. They sent me to this therapist who said I have to ‘redefine my concept of family and my role.’ So now it’s my job to be well-adjusted. My parents act like a divorce is all fine and not such a big deal in this day and age.” She hugged her knees up to her
