Briar Rose Read Free Page B

crunch of body against metal as the car struck her friend, tossing her into the
air along with the doll.
    ‘Hey, you OK?’ Reena asked, joggling her elbow. She stood beside her now, the doll already retrieved and returned to the beaming toddler. The car had parked along the sidewalk.
    There’d been no accident, only Briar’s mind playing tricks on her.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ her friend asked.
    ‘Nothing.’
    But everything
was
wrong. She’d not told Reena the truth: the nightmare was starting to creep into the daylight now, showing up at random times, slowly taking over her life.
Like now.
    The town already thought her mom was strange. Now she was acting the same way.
    I’m not nuts. It’s just because I’m not sleeping well.
    ‘Come on, you need food,’ Reena said. Like a hummingbird to a blooming flower, she zeroed in on a bake sale, her drug of choice. From what Briar could see, the heat wasn’t
doing anything good to the frosting on the cakes, or the Methodist Church ladies running the booth.
    Relieved that the weird sounds had finally retreated from her mind, she scratched at a bug bite. ‘Same old stuff,’ she muttered. ‘Nothing ever changes here.’
    Briar tagged along with her friend, kicking at the dirt like a sullen child. She found herself wishing, for the millionth time, that something magical would happen to their home town. Unicorns
running rampant in the streets, a smoking dragon curled round the city hall bell tower, anything that would nullify the ‘norm’.
    When Briar was little, it hadn’t felt that way, but after you’d seen fifteen Fourth of July parades with the same people
every
year there was no excitement, just the grim
realization that she was trapped in what had to be the dullest part of the universe.
    Tomorrow she would be sixteen, and absolutely nothing would change.
    As soon as I graduate, I’m out of here.
    She sighed to herself. Her escape was as much a fairy tale as any the Brothers Grimm had collected. Once you were here, you never escaped. Bliss was a life sentence.
    Reena looked over at her, pointing at a plate of apple fruit bars. ‘Want some?’ she called out.
    Briar shook her head. ‘Nope. Thanks.’ Not with the acres of baked goodies at home.
    The area just in front of the three-storey city hall was home to Elmer Rose’s statue, erected on the hundredth anniversary of his death. To the left of the statue was another monument of
sorts, but this one wasn’t for one of Bliss’s heroes. The dry patch of red dirt and a gnarled tree stump indicated where Jebediah Rawlins, a notorious traitor, had met his end, executed
for conspiring with the Yankees.
    The Rawlins were distant cousins to the Quinns in some way, though the latter refused to claim them. That was probably best: the traitor’s name had been used to scare Bliss’s
children into good behaviour for decades. Even now, townspeople wouldn’t walk over that section of dirt, as if it were an entrance to hell.
    After Reena had bought a dozen macadamia-nut cookies and scarfed down two in short order, they parted company at the bandstand. With a wave, her friend headed east towards her house, her face
pensive. She’d been that way since they’d talked about her gran. In fact, she’d been a lot more solemn the last couple of weeks or so, for whatever reason.
    During the heat of summer, life slowed in Bliss. As Briar hiked home, she kept to the side of the street that offered shade. Something made her turn and look back towards the centre of town. The
grin came unbidden. She’d been wrong – there was something new. The water tower had received a fresh coat of paint earlier this week, white, like usual, except now bright red spray
paint announced that this side of the tower was HOT. She was willing to bet the other side said COLD. Someone was going to be pissed off about that.
    ‘That rocks,’ she said. Most likely it’d been Ronnie and Ben, a couple of the troublemakers from her class. She’d