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through the side of the trailer, holding them in front of her, against her straight waist, a square on a square. I kicked a rock at the dog and then walked to the Shop N Save to get a Suzy Q.
     
    Even in my cords my thighs rub together. My pants don’t wear out in the knees first. Ever. And, if I ever ran—which I never do—smoke would wisp from the hot friction, especially in cords. Something about the raised stripes mixed with the valleys between them. Air flow mixed with fusion energy or something. I think we learned about it in science class but I sit in the back, in the corner, away from everything, not paying attention, so I could be wrong. There is a window in the back of that classroom that looks out toward the road. Across the road there is an old farm. Next to the farm there is a field. Behind the field there is a row of trees. Behind the row of trees there is another field and then another row of trees and then there is the mill pond. I go to the mill pond a lot and so when I sit in the back of class and Mister Lewis is teaching about fusion energy and molecules and things, I stare out the window in the direction of the mill pond and his voice becomes cicadas.
     
    ***
     
    I take the long way to the mill pond now. Last summer I would take the shortcut through Mister Dean’s property because it cuts out almost a mile. I’d duck through the broken part in the fence that separates his property from the road and I’d follow the chicken wire alongside his east garden until it hit his cornfields, and then I’d walk through the widest row until I came to the end of it and go through the fence and down to the dried riverbed before following that to where the field for the mill pond started. If you kept going straight on the riverbed, you’d get to the outside of town and that’s where the Shop N Save was. Cutting through Mister Dean’s property was the quickest way for me to get to both of my favorite places.
     
    He’d always be out there in his garden. I’d hear him first. Whistling and humming, whistling and humming. He wore a ladies straw hat and it would bob above the tomato plants like a lady was there picking the ripe ones.
     
    I never really paid attention to Mister Dean and I didn’t think he paid much attention to me, until one day he was just there leaning against a fence post like he was waiting for me.
     
    “Your name’s Tinkerbell, right?”
     
    “Yes.”
     
    “Where you going all these times you walkin’ ‘cross my property?”
     
    I didn’t want to tell him the mill pond because I didn’t want anyone to know about my secret place, so I just told him I was going to the Shop N Save to get a drink.
     
    “I got a drink,” he said. “I got Kool-Aid. Why don’t you come up? It’s hot.”
     
    I looked at Mister Dean and then I looked at the fence post and then I looked at my feet and then the fence post and then Mister Dean again.
     
    “You come up or you don’t come ‘cross my property no more.”
     
    And because I dreaded going the long way and because it was really hot and because I didn’t know what else to say, I came up.
     
    And that’s how I started having Kool-Aids with Mister Dean.
     
    He had a real house with a porch that only had one chair. He would make me sit on the chair and he would lean against the porch rail facing me or he would sometimes sit on the stairs, sideways, so he could look at me. Mister Dean was about as old as my mom, I guessed. I didn’t like how I could always hear his breathing, this raspy gurgle. It never left him, even when he was speaking. It made me think of the cicadas at the mill pond and how their buzz never stopped, it just filled up the air like a jar. Mister Dean’s breaths were like that, but they never became part of the everything so that eventually you didn’t hear it anymore. His shirts bunched funny in the back and I wondered if he hid black filmy cicada wings under them.
     
    I found out later he did