Walk Me Home Read Free

today. But when you put in the miles they do, day after day after day, you wake up tired. There’s no such thing as rested. There’s no such animal as fresh.
    Jen stops and looks all around them, 360 degrees. She’s been doing that all morning. Thoughtfully. As if there were something out here to see.
    “Pretty here,” Jen says.
    “What’s pretty about it?” Carly asks, clear in her tone that the kid is talking crazy.
    “Well,” Jen says, looking all around again. Breathing in a piece of that sky. “There’s that.”
    She points at the wind-whittled formations just in front of the mountainous horizon.
    “You’re nuts,” Carly says. “It’s rocks.”
    “Pretty rocks.”
    “No such thing.”
    They walk a few steps more, Jen kicking a few more times. The crunch of their footsteps and the click of kicked gravel is the only sound. That and the wind in Carly’s ears.
    “The sky,” Jen says.
    “We have clouds at home, you know.”
    “Not the clouds. The sky.”
    Carly stops. Jen walks a couple more steps, then notices and also stops.
    “You’re being stupid,” Carly says. “It’s the same sky everywhere.”
    “No, it isn’t. I never saw a sky like this one.”
    “Don’t they teach you anything in school? The sky is the sky. Each place doesn’t have its own sky.”
    “I know that. But this sky is bigger.”
    “You’re just seeing more of it. You just can’t see so many miles of sky where we come from.”
    “Right,” Jen says. “That’s what I mean. That’s what’s different. That’s what’s better.”
    Carly sighs and walks again, and Jen joins her. A bit more subdued. And though it ignites a pang of guilt in her gut to admit it, Carly is more comfortable with Jen that way. That’s what’s been eating her about Jen all morning. How could she act…almost…happy? At a time like this?
    Out of nowhere, startling Carly, Jen squeals and breaks into a run, her backpack bouncing wildly. Carly looks up to see what Jen has seen.
    Horses.
    Three horses graze in a field, behind a fence almost laughable in its construction. It’s made with branches for posts. Some straight, some curved, some forked. Branches standing straight up out of the ground, at intervals, strung with three strands of wire in between. Not barbed wire. Just wire. And it goes on forever. Two of the horses are white, but not as pretty as that makes them sound. Dirty white, with long yellowish tails and ribs showing just a bit.
    But the third one is a beauty. A brown-and-white paint, with a brown tail and a thick white mane so long it trails down below the bottom of his neck. Carly never thought much about calling a pinto horse a paint, but she sees now why that description fits. It’s as though someone took brown paint to a white horse in big, broad splotches, then got bored and stopped halfway through.
    The paint looks younger. And he acts younger.
    As Jen gets closer to his fence, he’s infected with her energy. He runs the fence line toward her, then turns and runs away, bucking as if trying to shake off something invisible, kicking out his heels.
    Jen squeals laughter.
    Carly stops and watches, trying not to sort out the parts of her that both do and do not like what she’s seeing.
    Then Jen breaks stride and hops on one foot, four hops, yelling, “Ow, ow, ow, ow,” one “ow” for each hop.
    She hops over and stands at the fence, holding one branch post, and looks at the bottom of her filthy white sneaker. The horse has stopped running as well and seems to be trying to decide whether he dares approach her. Jen drops her foot and leans over the ridiculous fence, trying to entice the paint to come close and be patted.
    Carly breaks into a trot.
    “Don’t,” she says. “Maybe he bites.”
    “He won’t bite me,” Jen calls back.
    “And you know this
how
?”
    “He won’t.”
    By the time she catches up to them at the fence, the horse is rooting around in Jen’s palms with his muzzle, twisting his lips and