Page 6 of Long Way Down

Melissa plucked a fresh tissue from the box on the table and laid it gently over the girl’s knee.

Two

“That’s stupid,” Ivy declared, holding her hair off her neck with one hand and fanning her face with the other. Her teal nail polish flashed in the sunlight. “Bugs are gross and are for boys besides.”

Melissa, knee-deep in brackish water, trying to snag a dragonfly with her net, glanced up at her cousin on the path. “But look at it,” she said, pointing to the insect that perched on a lily pad ahead of her, nearly within reach. “Isn’t it pretty? It matches your nails.”

Ivy wrinkled her nose, clearly disgusted by the idea. “Ew. What’s wrong with you?” Her mouth fell open and her eyes popped wide. “Ooh. Wait. You’re not a lesbian, are you?”

Melissa frowned. “A what?”

“A girl who wants to kiss other girls. Is that why you like boy stuff?” Ivy dropped her hair and tossed her head so that sunlight caught the length of her blonde locks and left them shimmering like a banner. “I bet it is. I bet you’re a big ol’lezzzzz-bian.”

Melissa didn’t understand what that meant. She didn’t want to kiss anyone, though her parents made her kiss Grandma Josie after church on Sundays, and her leathery old cheek smelled like cheese. Melissa used to make a face about it, but Mama pinched her arm until she yelped, and she’d learned to keep her face smooth and serene as the surface of the pool in which she stood.

Her face wasn’t serene now, though. She screwed it up and propped her free hand on her hip to square off from her cousin. “I am not.”

“Yes you are. You wanna kiss girls.” Ivy made a series of obnoxious kissy sounds and faces, then pantomimed fright. “Omigod, you probably wanna kiss me! Ew!”

“No, I don’t!” Melissa stomped her foot before she could think better of it, and the splash of her strawberry-patterned rain boot sent the dragonfly off in a flurry of translucent wings.

Dang it.

Ivy shrieked and whirled, and went running off down the path in a show of great theatrics.

“Even if I wanted to kiss girls I wouldn’t wanna kissyou,” Melissa muttered under her breath, and clomped her way out of the puddle. Ivy could be so mean, always poking fun at Melissa’s hair, or her clothes, or the way she sometimes mispronounced a word. She called Melissa a baby, and would pretend to cry or suck her thumb just to try to get a rise out of her.

“Ignore her,” Granddad advised, often. “She’s just bored and looking for trouble.”

“She’s a little bitch,” Mama would hiss in an undertone Melissa knew she wasn’t supposed to hear. “Nothing but a tramp in training.”

Melissa didn’t know what a tramp was, either, but the way Mama said it, she knew it wasn’t anything good, at least not in Mama’s estimation.

Melissa took her boots off one at a time and stood on the hard-packed dirt in her socks while she poured the water out of them. Afterward, she realized how quiet it was without Ivy talking non-stop. It was only the droning of the cicadas, the call of birds, and the low, distant groaning that most likely belonged to a bull alligator. She shuddered at the thought of running acrosshim, and broke into a jog, net slung over her shoulder, to catch up with Ivy.

The path wound its way through a stand of scrub pines, and beneath the dappled shade of a massive old live oak bearded with Spanish moss. She swatted her way through a cloud of gnats, tripped over a gnarled root that stuck out of the ground like a bent knee, and began to worry that Ivy had truly run off and left her. Would she do such a thing? Would she bethatcruel?

Melissa had just gathered a breath to call for her when she spotted her a dozen paces ahead. With a deep sigh of relief, she jogged up from behind, brought to a halt when Ivy flung an arm out and caught her across the chest, blocking the way forward.

“What?” Melissa asked, verging on annoyed. Insults, accusations, and now a disappearing act: her patience was running thin. Who cared if Ivy was the older of the two; she certainly wasn’t thenicer.

“Look.” Ivy nodded forward, expression serious, voice hushed. Serious in a way that Melissa rarely saw her. If she wasn’t moony-eyed over the famous boys in magazines, she was saying something derisive or dismissive, always ready with a hair-toss or a close inspection of her fingernails.

Now, though...now she stood transfixed.

“What?” Melissa asked, and looked for herself.

Her first thought was:witch’s house. Granddad had a faded copy ofGrimm’s Fairy Taleshe’d let her borrow, and she’d just read the story of Hansel and Gretel, the temptation of a house made of sugar and sweets.

But the longer she looked at the little cottage beneath the swaying tendrils of moss, its walls fluttering with leaf shadow, the more she was able to separate fairy tale from fact. It was small, built of rough-hewn timber, the paint on its window frames peeling off in long, jagged strips like dead snakeskin. Spiderwebs swayed in the eaves, lacy tendrils dragging the dried corpses of beetles.

It didn’t look inviting, or cozy, or like anyplace good.

It didn’t look safe.

And that was what made it soexciting.

~*~