Read Online No Place Safe by Kim Reid - Free Book Online

ball and run up the driveway to take it out again, my shot was forgotten. But in the seconds between the shot and the next play, hearing a player from my team say “nothing but net,” or taunting the boy who’d been playing me with “in your face” or “you let a girl play you like that?” was the sweetest thing. Cassandra would never know that feeling (and probably wouldn’t care, anyway) because she always sat on the porch steps watching the game, along with the second daughter from the Beautiful Family, who was another prissy girl.
    We had just finished a game of Twenty-One, my side victorious, and were resting up so we could start another. I sat on the porch steps and could smell the pine needles someone had raked from the lawn and spread under the holly bushes that grew in front of the porch. It was barely a smell, the pine oil long since faded, just enough to remind me of something warm and pleasant.
    “We play Fulton High tonight. Who’s going to the game?” asked one Beautiful boy, who was the oldest of us and in the eleventh grade. Along with his brother and Marie, he went to George High like everyone else in our neighborhood. He tried to spin the ball on his middle finger like Meadowlark Lemon, but managed no more than a few rotations before the ball fell and he had to try again.
    No one outside the Beautiful Family planned to go to the game.
    “Why not Cassandra? You go to George, show some school spirit,” Marie said.
    “I don’t like sports.”
    “No one goes for the sports. People go for the cheering and socializing, and to hear the band and watch the steppers at halftime.”
    I didn’t say anything, only thought how different it was at my school, where the football game was everything, where the team ran the show because they had a tradition of going to the state finals every year since dirt was created. The band had no soul and I was certain no one at the school had ever seen a step show, much less knew what one was. In my head, I kept hearing, Who brought disco?
    Everyone was quiet for a while, and then Cassandra asked, “What about these kids turning up missing?” It was an attempt to keep the conversation from returning to her not going to the game. Or she may have asked because she was like an old person that way, bringing up the news or talking about the weather the way old people do when there’s nothing else to say.
    “Not just missing. Dead. Two dead and one missing,” Marie said. “You think it’s just a coincidence?” She said it in a way to make the you addressed to anyone, but we all knew she was directing it to me. I was the one most likely to know.
    “We don’t think so, but it’s too soon to tell.” I was good at giving just enough information to titillate, but not enough to get into any trouble. It was a politician’s skill I’d learned listening to Ma answer similar questions. I liked the way I could let we slide off my tongue as though I had anything to do with it, and the way none of the kids ever questioned my knowledge. “Just too soon to tell.”
    One of the boys who lived in the house went inside for a few minutes and returned with a stack of Dixie cups and a plastic pitcher of Kool-Aid full of ice. The drink was so sweet, we knew he’d made it, not his mother, and we were glad. The cups were tiny, with riddles and cartoons on them, made for preschoolers instead of sun-weary, half-grown kids, so we drank the first cup greedily, then settled into a resting spot to savor the second cup. We all had red mustaches as Kool-Aid dried on our upper lips in a breeze that briefly hinted at fall.
    Someone had brought a boom box, and now Sugarhill Gang’s new song was playing, “Rapper’s Delight.”
    “ That’s my song,” I said.
    “That’s my song,” said a Beautiful brother, and the challenge was on.
    After the music intro, I started singing along with Wonder Mike, hitting every word on beat, as if I’d written the lyrics. When Wonder Mike passed it over