Read Online The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson - Free Book Online

drooling his days away. Every now and again, he’d stand up and whirl in frenzied circles and then lope back and forth across the room, grabbing and smashing anything he could touch. His daddy or his brother would wrestle him to the ground and sit on him until he went limp and could be propped back in his chair. Then he had burned down Uncle Petey-Boy’s shed and gotten arrested. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a state home instead of prison. Petey-Boy had said, “I coulda tol’ them he was ass-rat crazy a year ago and stilla had my shed.”
    Laurel had her own diagnosis; her cousin had gone with the ghosts when they wanted to show him things. He had looked too long, was all.
    Her great-aunt Moff still read cards for The Folks, and she was spooky-right when she laid them. Hearts for love, diamonds for money, clubs for family and friends, and spades for death. Moff left the ace of spades out of her deck because, she said, “If I dun, that ace drops ever’ time I lay. Shitfire, I dun need uh ace to tell that we’re all gonna die.”
    In DeLop, death came sooner rather than later. People who were born there tended to stay there. People who stayed died young and angry. No health insurance, so cancer, when it came, ate them. Too many drugs around too many guns. No jobs, restless young men with knives, drinking in small packs. The walls of the rattletrap houses were soaked in ghosts, all with things to show, all wanting to be seen. They eased into the genes.
    David had never seen anything like DeLop. He’d spent his childhood in affluent Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and he probably thought Laurel had grown up poor because her parents’ house had only two small bathrooms and Mother believed Hamburger Helper and a salad was a nice family meal.
    If David understood people, she could take his hand, lead him upstairs, and show him a piece of DeLop lying with eyes open, wide and dry, in the small guest bedroom. But people were one of her jobs, like balancing the checkbook was one of his. He couldn’t extrapolate DeLop by looking at Bet Clemmens. Without DeLop, Laurel couldn’t tell him about her ghosts, even though she’d been looking for Marty from the moment the drowned girl had appeared in her room.
    A woman’s voice came through the speakers that sat on either side of David’s monitor. “Dave? Are you back yet?”
    He turned his chair toward the keyboard and pushed that button again. “I need a few more minutes,” he said into the air.
    The voice said, “Okay. I’m going to go make a fresh pot of coffee. I’ll yell when I’m back.”
    David swiveled back to face Laurel.
    “Someone is talking in your computer,” Laurel said.
    “Yeah. That’s Kaitlyn Reese, the coder from Richmond Games.”
    “In San Francisco?” Laurel said.
    “Yeah. She’s there this week. We’re in TeamSpeak.” At Laurel’s baffled look, he explained, “It’s a voice-over IP application. Gamers use it to coordinate attacks.”
    “The San Francisco people call you Dave?” Laurel asked. He shrugged, waving away the question. If they were calling him Dave, he hadn’t noticed. “Can she hear us?”
    “Only when I hold down the tilde key.”
    “That’s so strange. If we lived in California, I’d be married to someone named Dave,” Laurel said. San Francisco sounded crisply green and temperate, like a place where she’d have fruit trees in a tiny yard with no pool. Her head hurt. “It must be three A.M. there. Did you wake her up?”
    David blew air out between his teeth, a quick, dismissive exhale. “She was up. She’s a coder.” He said it as if coders were some strange species of space camel that could walk through an airless desert of ones and zeros for days without water or sleep.
    “Coffee’s on,” said the woman’s voice. “Dave? Hello? We’ve got to demo these dogfights this week.”
    “Go ahead,” Laurel said. “We can talk about it when you’ve finished.”
    Still he didn’t turn away. “I