Read Online Wildwood by Drusilla Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

people and ideas and things she knew she should not do—but did anyway. Pretty soon she was kissing a lot of boys and her parents didn’t seem to notice so she kept on doing it. Making good grades: that was all that mattered to them. In history she and Jeanne and Hannah read about the Nonintercourse Act, collapsed in giggles, and got sent to detention.
    But even when she wasn’t thinking of him, Billy Phillips was with Liz, and she was pretty sure it was the same for Hannah and Jeanne because sometimes in the middle of an ordinary moment—sitting on the swings at the park, drinking Cokes at the Burger Pit—Hannah’s expression suddenly turned grave and vacant. Her body stayed where it was and she kept on talking, but it was obvious that in her mind she was somewhere else and Liz knew where. It was the same with Jeanne, even tough-minded Jeanne.
    The worst of it was, there was nowhere to hide from the memory of what they had done. Or not done. Liz just wasn’t sure about guilt and innocence anymore. Reading was no distraction, not even a really good novel like Marjorie Morningstar. And in the middle of a movie she would start to see things on the screen that she knew weren’t really there. A boy tumbling down a hill. A coyote snuffling around a body.
    For a while she had been desperate to talk about it, but when she did, Hannah looked at her like she’d suddenly begun to speak Swahili.
    Once Liz started up, “You know what happened at Bluegang? . . .” The three of them had been sitting on the edge of the fishpond in front of the high school wearing their roller skates. It was autumn and still warm. They wore shorts and cotton blouses. “Do you guys ever think? . . .”
    As if they were dancers set to move on cue, Hannah and Jeanne had stood up and skated away without glancing back at her. Liz could not forget the sight of their narrow backs and swinging shoulders moving farther and farther away, leaving her behind.
    After that she kept her mouth shut and gradually she thought less about Bluegang and more about school and boys and clothes. A hundred memories a day became a dozen and then once or twice a week, and after that she went for long stretches without remembering. Occasionally she wondered if the process of forgetting was the same for her friends and supposed it must be, but she knew if she asked them they would skate away again. And what if they stayed away?
    They were teenagers and life irresistibly happened all around them constantly, a dance they had to be half-dead not to join in. The arms of the world had opened up and swept them into lives where everything was a challenge or an adventure or a puzzle. Once in a while Liz saw old Mrs. Phillips and Bluegang came back to her. At such times she thought less of Billy’s death than she did of her failure to do the right thing. When her parents asked Can we depend on you, Liz? she always said they could but knew it was a lie.
    High school was a ball: high grades and student body offices, kissing Mario Bacci, smoking Marlboros in the upstairs girls’ bathroom, breaking rules when they could and just for the fun of it. They went to college—seventy-eight percent of the Rinconada graduating class did. Hannah married a doctor and bought a house on Casabella Road and raised two children. Jeanne married her college sweetheart and made a national reputation as an educator. And Liz grew up and led a disjointed peripatetic life and kept on breaking rules in small ways. She became a successful translator of modestly successful books and lived in France, as she had always wanted. She never spoke of Bluegang to anyone until the night, decades afterwards, when she woke, crying, because a coyote had Billy Phillips’s icy hand in its mouth and then it was her ankle it held and she couldn’t break away or cry for help because she couldn’t breathe.
     
     
    As the flight from Miami taxied into place at San Jose Airport, Liz rewound the tape she had been listening