The Dead Run Read Free

allegiances were ever-changing, too mutable to trust. None of that helped her much. She was a girl without a country, her only weapon the carefully honed ability to disappear.
    She’d gone to the community pool today precisely because nobody her age hung out there. It would be crowded, on a scorching summer day like this one, but she could move unseen among the splashing brats and bathing-capped old ladies. Lose herself in the burn of muscle and the cool of the water, remember there was something she was good at. She had the trophies to prove it—or used to, before her mother, in one of her weirdest flip-outs yet, had decided they counted as idols, thou shalt worship no false gods, and trashed them.
    That was two moves ago, now.
    The morning had started so well. She’d looked up from her fourth or fifth lap to see a guy from her math class, Eric Lansing, settling himself onto a poolside lounge chair next to the one she’d dumped her stuff on. He was okay. Smiled indifferently in the hall. Lent her a pencil once, when hers broke during a test. He was an athlete, soccer and swimming.
    In an alternate world, they’d have shared a team bus to meets, Sherry thought as she sliced through the water—if her father were still around, to temper Melinda’s capriciousness, talk her down, make her laugh at herself. He’d been so good at that, when she was little. But Melinda had pushed him out—outside the house, and then outside the law. She’d won, and Sherry had lost the only stability she’d ever known. Was he a criminal, as Melinda loved to claim? Did he deserve to rot in jail? Sherry didn’t believe it for a second. Prisons were filled with innocents; you could ask anybody. And everything he’d done had been for her. She knew that. Believed it with a fervor that sustained her. Someday, he’d find her.
    Or she’d find him.
    Sherry finished her ten freestyle laps, then did another five of butterfly. Showing off a little, maybe. Climbed out of the pool just as the lifeguard’s whistle sounded the end of adult swim, sensing Eric’s eyes on her.
    â€œHi.”
    â€œHi.”
    A familiar feeling washed over Sherry as she toweled off. The way she dressed for school was designed to hide her body—her mother saw to that. No skirts, no tight tops, nothing revealing. After the move, her mother’s friend Ruth—ex-friend, now, though Sherry had managed to quietly maintain ties—had driven her to the nearest mall and helped her pick out a scoop-neck lilac blouse, as part of her well-intentioned, ill-fated help-Sherry-fit-in initiative. The next afternoon, when Sherry got back from registering for classes, she’d found it cut to ribbons in her closet, still on its hanger. No daughter of mine is going to dress like the whore of Babylon, her mother had said when Sherry confronted her, then proceeded to quote scripture for another five minutes, still talking when Sherry stormed out the door.
    She’d ended up walking around the block five times, slower and slower, then coming home.
    Nowhere else to go.
    And now, here she was in a Lycra one-piece, for all the world to see. Conservative as swimwear went, but Sherry could practically see Eric having a revelation about the quiet girl from math class as he pretended not to watch her arrange her legs on the hot plastic chair.
    â€œSo, uh, Sherry . . .”
    She’d opened her eyes, shaded them with a palm.“Yes?”
    â€œCan I ask you something?”
    He was kind of cute. A bit too conventional for Sherry’s tastes—not that she’d thought all that much about what they were—but easy on the eyes. Dark wavy hair, full lips, a kind of lithe grace in his limbs.
    A swimmer’s body, she thought, feeling herself blush.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow come I never see you at any parties?”
    The question caught her off guard. There were so many answers. She opted for the