Maybe a Fox Read Free Page A

into the Slip. If Sylvie got it into her head that it was time to take another wish rock to the Slip, nothing, not even Jules, could stop her.
    â€œNo,” said Jules again. “We’re already cutting it close.”
    Dad would be mad if they missed the bus. He’d be madder still if he knew about the Slip. Jules and Sylvie had never, not once, missed the bus, but what their dad didn’t know was that they had gone to the Slip dozens of times, hundreds of times, too many times to count. It wasn’t that far from their house, not far at all, just down the trail through the woods. They knew the trail, they knew the sound of the Whippoorwill River’s tumbling water, and mostly, they knew just how close they could get to the river’s edge. Besides, there was the Sylvie Sherman Motto: If we keep our feet dry, we’ll be safe.
    And hadn’t they always been safe?
    Yes, they had.
    Jules looked at her sister, standing there next to the tiny snow mom and snow dad and snow sisters. She was wearing her favorite headband, blue with yellow buttercups. It had been their mother’s. Sylvie wore it almost every day. All at once, Jules wanted it. Maybe that would distract Sylvie from going to the Slip, if Jules snatched the headband off her head.
    â€œHey, it’s my turn for the headband,” she said, reaching for it. “Gimme.”
    But Sylvie dodged Jules’s grasp and set her boots in the snow in a sprinter’s crouch.
    â€œSylvie, no .”
    Sylvie looked up and smiled. “Try and stop me.”
    Jules couldn’t and they both knew it. There was no catching Sylvie. She ran so fast she had a hard time stopping. Time after time Jules had seen her sister take a long skid before coming to a halt. Other times Sylvie grabbed onto tree branches or the porch rail to slow herself down, as if she had no brakes.
    â€œPlease, Sylvie. We’ll miss the bus.”
    â€œQuit worrying,” Sylvie said. “I’ll be right back.”
    But the feeling of no came swarming up through Jules’s whole body. No. Don’t go. She grabbed Sylvie’s hand to keep her from going. No no no. But as soon as she did, Sylvie gave a good, hard tug, and the orange mitten slipped right off, making Jules stumble backward. She caught her balance, then waved the mitten in the air, like a flame against the white snow. Come back! But Sylvie was already running, her one bare, mittenless hand inside the pocket of her hoodie.
    And once again, Jules was left in Sylvie’s wake.

4
    I t was true that Sylvie had never missed the bus. And she was so fast. She would be right back, and then she would get dressed, and they’d run out to the end of the driveway and jump on the bus, and there Sam would be, sitting in their usual seat, and they’d all smush in together like always.
    Jules went back into the warm house and put her rocks back where they belonged, on the windowsill and the bookshelves and inside the wooden box. She saved the blue-gray slate for last. There. Done. But something didn’t feel right, so she took the chunk of marble that Sylvie had given her and put it in her hoodie pocket. That was better.
    Sylvie was probably at the Slip by now.
    There were lots of stories about the Slip. According to Sam’s dad, who was a forest ranger, it was a freak of geology, the result of a seismic shift, a small earthquake that forced the river’s bed to disappear into a large cavern that was hiding there all along, opened up by the shifting earth. A hundred yards downstream it bubbled back up into the open air and formed a quiet pool before it remembered that it was a river and needed to ramble its way southward.
    That made sense to Jules.
    But there was another story, the Legend of the River Brothers, the one that their neighbor Mrs. Harless had told them, and Mrs. Harless’s family had lived beside the river for generations, so she should know.
    According to Mrs. Harless, it