Justin Kramon Read Free Page A

window, or pretended she was trying to suffocate herself. Anything to not be seen like this, so vulnerable, so compromised. She thought of herself like the white birch tree in her parents’ yard, which grew far away from all the other trees because it would wither in their shade. On its own, though, it flourished. She wanted to be like that, so odd and lonely and strong.
    She thought of things she could do to get them. She could stick a knife in her shirt and spill some ketchup on it, so it would look like she’d stabbed herself. Or she could take one of her mom’s earrings and hide it and pretend Raskal ate it. Or stick pictures of women inside her dad’s great men books. But all these ideas seemed silly, a little clumsy. She could see them shaking their heads at her, like she’d tripped over her shoelace, or accidentally put her underwear on over her pants. She was hopeless, they’d think, a bum toaster or a wobbly table, something they’d just have to live with because they’d already shelled out the cash.
    So she did the only thing that made sense to her. She ran away.
    She headed for the sliding glass doors in the back of the house. She thought it might be tricky to get out without anyone seeing her, that her mother might ask her where she was going, or her brother would stop her to see if she’d been crying and she would have to make up some story about her allergies, or how she’d just gotten up from a nap. But the house was quiet. They were tucked into some rooms, somewhere, watching movies or reading or doing work. Sometimes Finny imagined her dad with his great men like a kid with his toy soldiers, lining them up and having them fight, making little machine gun noises with his mouth.
    She slid the door open, stepped out, closed it behind her.
    This was in the fall. She walked down the hill to the split-rail fence that surrounded the horse pastures behind her house. She started walking along the fence, in the high grass. Some horses trailed alongside her. It was cool outside, and she hadn’t brought a coat, just a little green sweatshirt she liked to wear, with a hood she sometimes tied so that only her nose and eyes stuck out. She called the sweatshirt “the green reaper.” The sun was low and bright in her eyes, and the air had that smoky fall smell. A breeze carried the musky scent of the horses to her every now and again, and also the smells of crackly leaves and dirt and grass and manure.
    At the end of the fence Finny turned up the dirt path through the old vineyard that had been out of commission for years. On both sides of her some leafy vines wrapped a wire trellis, making a green wall that was just taller than Finny’s head. Plants sprouted from cracks in the hard soil, winding in with the vines. Finny loved coming here when she was by herself; this place had a magical feeling to her, like those hills she could just barely make out from her bedroom window. She kicked rocks and listened to the sound of her shoe soles scraping the dusty ground. She liked the noise of it, the bite of cold air on her face, her hands plunged warmly in the green reaper’s pockets.
    She thought of her mother. It’s almost dinner , Laura said. Where’s Finny?
    I don’t know , Stanley said. Sylvan! Do you know where your sister is?
    She left the vineyard, walking away from her house. She went up the dirt road that snaked through some hills where cows grazed in the afternoons. This was as far up as she’d ever gone. But she kept walking. Past a decrepit horse barn with a sagging roof, the rails in front of its entrance collapsed so that they made an X. Past a little pond with a fountain in it that someone had made on his property. Finny could hear the water splashing. Inside the pond there were some exotic-looking birds the man must have also bought. They had long, pointy beaks, and black lines around their eyes. Their feathers were streaked with bright colors, purple and gold and green. They looked at Finny through