Wildwood Read Free

You’re a girl.”
    “What’s that got to do with it?”
    “The church’ll have a big meeting and they’ll vote and you’ll have to move out of Rinconada. Maybe go someplace like Georgia or Alabama.”
    Hannah blinked and wiped her tears. A smudge of dirt and snot and tears spread from one cheek, under her nose to the other. “All I want is for it to be like it never happened.”
    Jeanne thought a moment. “Maybe it can be.” She stared down at Billy Phillips. “We could just go away and leave him.”
    “You don’t mean it. You know that’s wrong, you know it.” Liz’s plump cheeks colored. “Besides, dogs might get him. There’s coyotes around here . . .”
    “Someone’ll find him. They’ll just think he fell over.”
    “What about his mother?” Liz said. “She’s only got one son.”
    “What’re you talking about her for?” Hannah sprang up in outrage. “What about me? He said he was going to make me do something . . . nasty. I don’t care what happens to him. I wish coyotes would get him. I wish I could forget about this forever. I wish I could hit my head on the rocks and get amnesia.”
    “Like Young Widder Brown.” Liz nodded as if she now understood perfectly.
    “Yeah, well, if wishes were fishes our nets would be full. My dad says in real life people don’t get amnesia.” Jeanne tossed back her braids. “Actions have consequences and he says we have to take what we get and make the best of it.” She glanced down at her Mickey Mouse Club watch. “If we’re gonna leave we better do it before anyone comes along.
    “We’ll say you fell. We’ll say we went up to the flume and you fell off at that place where the boards are rotten. You could say you saw a snake, a big one and it really scared you and that’s how come you were crying. And you could walk through the poison oak on the way home. You’ll swell up like I do and no one’ll blame you for being miserable.”
    Half way up the hill Liz stopped and pointed at Hannah’s feet. “What about her toenails? Her mom’ll see—”
    “I don’t care!”
    Painted toenails and confession magazines and cigarettes were not important anymore. All that mattered was getting away from Bluegang and never coming back. Maybe then Hannah could forget Billy Phillips. Maybe if she lay down in the poison oak and rolled over and over, the poison on the outside would drive out the poison she felt on the inside.
    At the top of the hill, Liz and Jeanne put their arms around her in an awkward hug. She wanted to believe Liz when she said, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be like it never happened.”
     
     
    When Hannah got home her mother was in the kitchen fixing dinner, a pork roast with applesauce and summer squash and bowls of Jell-O chocolate pudding with sprinkles of coconut on the top.
    “I’m not hungry,” Hannah said on her way across the kitchen.
    “You will be by dinnertime. Have you done your chores?”
    Clean the upstairs bathroom bowl, scour the sink with Bon Ami, fold the towels in the special way her mother said was the only way to fold towels.
    “I will.”
    “Come back here, Hannah.” Mrs. Whittaker laid her palm across Hannah’s forehead. She was a tall almost-pretty woman with soft curly hair and wary eyes. “You look flushed. Do you feel all right?”
    Her mother worried about polio, all the parents did. If a kid got a fever or felt stiff or had a bad headache, the doctor made a house call that very night. Mostly it was too much sun or sugar, but sometimes it really was polio. The summer before two boys in Hannah’s class had been attacked—this was the way grown-ups always spoke of the disease, like it was an enemy soldier. One of the boys would have to live in an iron lung the rest of his life. The other was half-crippled and could never lead a normal life. That was the worst thing about polio, and another thing grown-ups always said: once you got it, you could never lead a normal life.
    Hannah hardly thought about