Read Online When You Believe by Deborah Bedford - Free Book Online Page B

don’t fit into her perfect
     little world.” Then, with gusto, “I don’t fit into anybody’s world but my own.”
    Lydia looked around for a place to sit. She decided if she tried to fit into one of those nursery-school chairs, she might
     never make it out again.
    The resentment in Shelby’s voice eased, but only a little. “Were you trying to find me today?”
    “Yes.” Lydia had no reason to lie.
    “Why?”
    “Why do you think? I was worried about you.”
    “Well, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I don’t need anything from anybody. Least of all
you.
” They sized each other up across the room. “You said you’d help me. But you didn’t do anything.”
    “You didn’t come to school today.”
    “Yeah, and I guess you’d know why.” A suspicious thump of shoes on the carpet. A suspicious gleam of disenchantment in her
     eyes. Shelby dropped the soccer ball on the floor again, began to dribble it frontward with slight touches of her feet.
    “Have you told anyone about this but me?”
    “What does it matter? Nobody cares.”
    “Did you try to tell your mom?”
    All of her focus on the ball, a wild, wayward-shaking “no” of the bunched hair.
    “Why, Shelby?”
    Everything in this playroom was on a Lilliputian scale—chairs so simple and small they might have come straight out of a nursery
     rhyme, tabletops on square legs so short they abutted a grown person’s shins. A row of crumpled little stained-glass windows,
     fashioned from flecks of crayon ironed between wax paper, lined one wall.
    Shelby evaded that question. She aimed the soccer ball, shot it in frustration,
bam
against the wall. “I should have known better than to ask anybody for anything. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long
     time now. Guess I’ll just have to keep on doing things on my own.”
    The shot rebounded against Lydia’s calf. She grabbed it with both hands.
    “Guess I’ll just make better and better grades,” Shelby said. “Guess I’ll just beat the pants off of every goalie who tries
     to stop me.”
    Lydia held the ball, made Shelby look at her, before she bounced it back. “You’re going to break a hole through the drywall,
     you keep hitting it with the ball like that.”
    “The way you poked around and made me talk to you. I thought you’d be”—Shelby caught the ball beneath the weight of one foot,
     kicked again, shanked it—
“different.”
    “Shelby, you don’t have to take care of yourself anymore. People are going to listen.”
    “I did something to make it happen, didn’t I? I’m the one who could have made it all go away.”
    Those words hit Lydia like a fist. They grabbed hold, turned within her, invoked something sinister there. A memory of her
     own school years; a memory she’d always tried to escape, a situation that she thought she had prayed about and taken to the
     Lord a long time ago.
Her own sophomore year, and Mr. Buckholtz.
    She wanted to shake Shelby’s shoulders, but she couldn’t. “No. Listen to me. You didn’t
do
anything.”
    “I must have wanted it or I would have stopped it somehow. I’m thinking maybe I’m the one to blame.”
    “Don’t you ever think that, young lady.” Shelby’s words made Lydia panic. “You have enough information to know that if something
     like this happened to you, then what happened to you is wrong.”
    “It’s my fault. Everybody will know that.”
    If I do nothing else, I can still set this young girl straight about blaming herself.
    “You mustn’t think that. You mustn’t go there, Shelby.” Her voice sounded wise and fierce. All these possibilities and Lydia
     couldn’t let go of her own heart. And when she thought back to it later, she could never be sure why she’d jumped to this
     next declaration so quickly. “He’s outside this place right now, you know,” she said, in part because she wanted to warn and
     protect Shelby, in part because she wanted to shock Shelby enough to try to see where