The Accident Season Read Online Free

train move away.
    Alice, texting one-handed, stands up, slings her bag onto one shoulder, and hurries back toward the main school building.
    “Where who are off to?” Bea asks distractedly, turning tolook after Alice. She starts to retune her ukulele with a series of loud twangs.
    “The kids in the car right there,” I say. She and Sam look after the departing train, but of course the car with the dressed-up kids in it has moved away.
    “What kids?” says Sam.
    Bea shrugs. “I didn’t realize there was anyone in the window.” She strums a couple of chords experimentally. “I just saw the four of us reflected in the glass.”
    I snap my head back up to look after the train, but by now it’s gone. Maybe I’m just hallucinating from lack of sleep. I think of the hospital last night; the nurses who know us by name at this point, the way we had to walk Alice around and around, ask her questions, keep her awake. My knee itches around the little cut from earlier where the blood has stuck the tights to my skin.
    All the rest of the day I find it hard to concentrate. When the three-o’clock bell rings, I follow Sam and Bea to the doors of the PE hall, but instead of going inside to get changed, I plead with Mrs. Smith, the PE teacher, to let me off class because of my sprained wrist until she agrees to allow me to go home. Bea, who would clearly rather not have to halfheartedly run laps in the sweaty, smelly hall, waves morosely at me as I leave to walk home alone slowly in the afternoon light.
    Our house is a couple of miles outside town, down themain road past shops and houses and housing developments, past fields and farms, and farther, down a smaller country road lined with hedges and whitewashed houses. Mostly, though, to get home from town, we follow the river. A little way off the main road, there is the river walk, which is sometimes no more than a rough track and sometimes a proper area with picnic benches and bridges to take you to the woods on the other side.
    The place I like to sit is close to the smallest of the bridges—really just a wooden placeholder across the water waiting for the council to build a proper bridge of stone. Instead of going straight home, I climb down and sit on the riverbank and take out a cigarette. The ground is hard and gritty beneath me. Across the river everything is yellow and red, the fallen leaves dry and crackly and inviting. There’s something about autumn leaves that just begs to be stepped on. I can hear them whispering in the breeze. I take off both pairs of gloves so the cigarette won’t singe them and I sit there for a while, a splash of color on the duller bank, smoking and trying not to think about Bea’s cards.
    Since I was little, since long before Elsie started with the secrets booth, I’ve come down here when there’s no one else around, to tell my secrets to the river. Sometimes I almost think I can hear it whispering them back at me.
    I open my mouth to talk about what Bea said and how I’m afraid this really will be a bad one; the worst one, ifthat’s even possible—although I can hardly imagine what could ever be worse than the one four years ago we so often try to forget—when suddenly I think I see a shape between the trees. When I squint my eyes against the sun to look closer, it’s gone. I stand up and come right down to the river, the toes of my Docs almost touching the water. I could have sworn I saw a flash of mousy brown hair moving between the trees.
    I take a last drag of my cigarette, put the end in the bin by the bench, and hurry over to the bridge. I’m halfway across when it begins to creak. I stop. I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times. It was built before I was born, but it’s sturdy; it has weathered the years. I take a careful step. Another creak, louder this time. Then, in a rush of wood and water, the bridge collapses.
    I grab the hand rail and hold on for dear life as the bridge plunges toward the river. It’s a short