The Wrong Side Of The Tracks (Leighton) Read Free

Nervously she kicked an old dusty beer bottle with the toe of her boot across the tracks; it rattled and clanked over the metal ties.  The seniors liked to sneak down the path and smoke cigarettes next to the tracks after school; she heard shouting and giggling coming down the bank behind her.  She darted across the tracks without any hesitation before she was seen.
    About fifteen kids played in front of The Boxes with balls, dolls, and some plastic trucks.  She started walking along the side of tracks, and not one of the kids looked up and acknowledged her.  Great, she was even invisible to five ye ar olds.  The children milled across the yards, and there weren’t any visible sidewalks or roads between the houses, just dirt paths.  She didn’t dare walk directly through The Boxes, with the luck she was having today an old woman with a baseball bat would come outside and attack her for trespassing.  She was going to have to cut through a line of trees and brush; about twenty feet wide and then she would come out on Sherman two streets over from her house. 
                  Alex had never been in the woods alone before.  It was only three thirty, so it wasn’t even close to sundown, but it still gave her the creeps.  And why was it so damn hot outside?  She pushed up the sleeves of her baggy gray Michael Kors sweater, and inhaled deeply.  Then she pushed herself into the brush.  She obviously wasn’t the first person to take this shortcut, and followed the narrow path across the strip of small trees and bushes towards Sherman.  Every time she heard an animal scurry or twig snap, she’d freeze and hold her breath until she found the source of the noise.  The red and orange leaves crunched under her Uggs with every step. 
    The third time she froze and strained her ears , she realized quick heavy footsteps were getting closer, and they weren’t hers.  Frantically Alex looked around for a bush or tree to duck behind, and then she seen him.  He had to be about sixteen years old and at least six feet tall.  But he wasn’t skinny, he was solid.  She could see every inch of his chiseled caramel skin that wasn’t covered by his lonely red mesh shorts and white Nikes.  Usually long messy hair repulsed Alexandra, but she had never seen wild black chin-length ringlets like his before.  His curls were the only part of his solid body that bounced as he walked towards her.  Her heart rate didn’t drop down to normal, but she wasn’t scared anymore.
    He stopped right in front of her and stared at her with angry dark green eyes.  The path through the brush was too narrow for him to pass her without her moving to the side.  For the first time all day s omeone was being forced to acknowledge her.   Judging by the beach towel he was carrying and the water dripping from his shorts he was on his way home from the swimming hole.  Lost Creek flowed behind The Boxes, under a few bridges in town, and deposited into the Hudson River.  During the summer Donavon always begged their mom to take them to the swimming hole, at the bend in the creek there were huge boulders along the bank and the water was about four feet deep.  When you drove by you could see people swinging on an old rope tied from a tree and flopping into the water.  Mrs. Riker always made comments about unsanitary conditions and how dangerous the current was and opted to take them to the indoor pool at the club.  Kids at Leighton always told ghost stories about the girl from The Boxes that drown at the swimming hole in the early nineties and haunted Leighton.  Alexandra shivered as she thought about the ghost girl wandering through the woods dripping wet just like him, and then he interrupted her thoughts.
    “ What are you doing on this side of the tracks?” he demanded.
    “ Uhh I was just taking a short-cut,” she stammered.
    She broke eye contact and looked down at her fresh French manicure; she nervously chipped away at her white