The Waters & the Wild Read Free

news whose children had been abducted in malls or parks, just vanished. Women who could do nothing anymore except wait to die.
    Bee sat down on the dirty sand and scowled out over the gray water. She repressed an impulse to gather the chips of shell, put them in her mouth and crunch them to bits; popseaweed pods and suck the salt; bury her body in the sand like a corpse in a sarcophagus. Sandpipers paraded up and down, and gulls shrieked. A rumpled, dirt-caked guy searched for coins with his metal detector. There were even a few surfers out there in their wet suits, long hair matted with salt, bodies shiny and sleek as seals. Sometimes you saw dolphins, but it didn’t seem beautiful to Bee. Just sad, and sometimes, when the sun burned through so hot you could fry your skin in minutes, almost apocalyptic. But she felt safer here than at home somehow. Her doppelganger would never appear on a public beach like this, standing over Bee wrapped in windy strands of hair. Would she?
    When Bee looked up, someone was standing there, watching her.
    He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt andsquinting without his glasses so she hardly recognized him. Haze?
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    â€œI stopped by your h-h-house. Your mom said you were at the beach. She told me which lifeguard stand you usually h-h-hang out at.”
    â€œYou came to my house? At eight on a Saturday? How do you know where I live?”
    â€œI hacked the school computer system. It’s really easy.”
    â€œWhat? Why?”
    He sat down next to her, looking out at the waves, not at her, hunched in his sweatshirt. He had long, awkward legs and he didn’t seem to know where to place them.
    â€œI just wanted to t-t-talk.”
    It figured Deena would have told him where she was. Her mother was always trying to get Bee to talk to boys, make friends.Well, she’d done it in the last week, hadn’t she? And he’d told her in the first few minutes of their conversation that death wasn’t that bad.
    Who was Haze? He could be anyone.
    He was holding a skateboard; she hadn’t seen him skate before. Her mother probably liked that; it made him seem cool. On the bottom he’d drawn a picture of a creature with big eyes, a Mohawk, long eyelashes and long, trailing fingers, like a sexy punk E.T.
    â€œAbout what?” She wasn’t going to trust him that easily. Just because he was an outsider like herself. With pretty eyes.
    â€œI don’t know. Not everyone talks to me about doppelgangers. You seem interesting. More than most people.”
    â€œThanks.” She frowned at him. “That’s quite a compliment.”
    â€œYou kn-n-now what I mean.”
    He turned to look at her profile; she could feel his gaze. Her hair whipped against her neck and shoulders. It just kept growing, was down to her hips now. And her eyes scared people. They were widely spaced, big and bright, with strangely large pupils. She was too skinny, no breasts to speak of. But men looked at her anyway, even when she dressed in baggy boy clothes. She didn’t want men to look at her. It didn’t help to be pretty, or whatever word you wanted to use. She was still unpopular, still a freak.
    A freak with a twin—a fetch who visited her in the night.
    â€œI gotta go home now,” she said, getting up. He followed her.
    â€œHave you seen her again?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œYour doppelganger.”
    â€œWho says I saw one?”
    â€œYou did. B-b-basically.”
    â€œI was just asking you about it. For…something I’m working on.”
    â€œSo, in this thing you’re working on does the girl see her evil twin again?”
    â€œNo,” said Bee. “Not yet. But I think she will.”
    Â 
    Later they were on the boardwalk. It was more crowded now, Haze skating while she walked beside him, her arms crossed protectively over her chest. As if she were trying to prevent him having any further access to her