Surface Tension Read Online Free Page A

of wood from a fence, an old biscuit tin, the wheel from a bike – but there was no way to be sure. For all we knew they could have just been bits of junk people dumped there later.
    Once I saw a road. The weathered edge of a sheet of dark stones, tightly packed, leading down and away.
    The maps I had drawn in Mum’s class clicked into place inside my head. We were west, and on high ground, so it could be the Old Lenton Road, where it ran up and away into the hills. That would make the school over there and the supermarket over there and our place would be …
    I turned and scanned the water, the old streets laying themselves out like a jigsaw before my eyes, every piece perfectly formed to fit only and exactly in one rightful place.
    It made me feel strange, shivery. I couldn’t help imagining myself following it, putting one foot in front of the other, all the way down into the dark underwater town.
    But Elijah shook his head. “That’s not a road,” he said. “See?”
    He scrambled down the bank and kicked at the stones. They came away easily under his shoe and I saw that they weren’t black, not tightly packed, but loose and irregular, a patchwork of colours. Just a random assortment of stones masquerading as a way to somewhere.
    “But there could be roads,” I said.
    Elijah shrugged. “I guess.”
    “We could find one,” I said. Now that the idea was in my head it was difficult to shake. “We could follow it.”
    Elijah laughed. “It’s not Atlantis, you know.”
    I knew he wasn’t laughing
at
me, though. He had one of my old drawings stuck to the inside of his wardrobe where he thought I couldn’t see it.
    “Anyway,” he said. “It wouldn’t work. You’d just keep bobbing to the surface.”
    He was right. But I didn’t want him to be. I wanted to believe that somehow my feet would stay suctioned to the ground, that if I found a road, it would lead me down.
    Maybe, I thought, I could make myself heavy. I could put stones in my pockets and bundle them up in my T-shirt.
    “You want to weigh yourself down with stones and walk into a lake in the middle of the bush?” This time Elijah
was
laughing at me. “Idiot. This is why Mum doesn’t let you swim on your own.”
    That night, I dreamed about Old Lower Grange. I saw the streetlights hung with lake weed, dark fists of mud punched into the holes in the road. Crabs and yabbies made their homes in the hollowed-out buildings and fish cruised the streets, pausing at intersections to wave each other through politely with their fins. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of life was going on down there, without us.
    I never walked into town, though.
    We never found a road. I kept half an eye out for sheets of stones but never saw anything. Then the rain came and the water level crept up, and even the pile of stones I kept going back to have a closer look at disappeared under the surface.
    I stopped going up to the lake.
    Elijah moved to the city for uni and Hannah started working at the council. And she wasn’t the kind of person who would walk past signs and slip through a hole in the fence. She was more likely to redo the lettering, tighten the wire.
    Soon after, Mum started letting me go to the pool on my own. As long as I was sensible, she said. I was old enough now and the pool was safe. It was much better than a lake. It had lifeguards and clear water. There were no shifting depths or hidden dangers, unless you counted people randomly jumping on you or slamming you with tennis balls. And it was clean as well, unless you counted the bandaids.
    So I didn’t go back to the lake. Not to look. Not to float or skip stones or wonder about fish.
    Not until today.

five
    Dry sticks crackled underfoot as I came out of the trees into the open near the lake’s edge. The water stretched out in front of me, a shifting expanse of colour, sparkling in the light.
    In spite of myself, I glanced along the shoreline in the direction I’d seen the stones.
    The water