The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Read Online Free Page A

first and black out the bad words before Shelby’s little eyes get tainted?”
    But Laurel had chosen well. Bet was one of the few DeLop kids who hadn’t dropped out before middle school. Even so, her handwriting looked like an eight-year-old’s, and she wasn’t literate enough to write much beyond “Hi, I’m Bet. I got me a dog name Mitchl. Do you got a dog?” The letters had tabled the discussion of DeLop until last summer, when Shelby, in a pen-pal coup, invited Bet to come visit her.
    That first year had been a qualified success. Shelby and her friends treated Bet Clemmens with elaborate courtesy. At twelve, they’d been more impressed by their own kindness to The Poor Girl than they were interested in Bet herself. Bet Clemmens stood it the way she stood everything, phlegmatic and unsurprised, plunking herself down on the fringes of Shelby’s gang. Laurel kept a careful watch, but Bet didn’t instigate liquor-cabinet raids or bring the drugs she certainly had access to or relieve the gangly boys in Shelby’s circle of their innocence.
    Laurel had a cautious hope that the visits might do Bet some good. After all, Mother had gotten out. Sometimes it happened. Maybe Bet would finish high school, let Laurel and David help her get through college. Laurel had driven over to get Bet again this summer. She hadn’t regretted her decision until now, as she watched Bet Clemmens stand rooted to the patio, practically dozing in the middle of the ugliest night Laurel had ever witnessed.
    The young fireman finished questioning David and walked back toward the other firemen. Laurel, who had kept her profile to the pool as long as possible, found herself tracking him. The other firemen had stopped CPR. The group shifted, and Laurel caught a glimpse of Molly’s face framed by black boots.
    Laurel said to David, “Molly looks like herself, only she’s not there. It’s the hatefulest thing I’ve ever seen.”
    No one spoke for half a minute, and then Bet Clemmens said, “I seen my one uncle who got drowned.” Shelby turned to look at Bet. They all did. “He laid out drunk in the crick. It was only five inches deep.”
    “Thank you, Bet,” said Laurel, meaning “Stop talking.”
    “He was out there dead all night afore I found him,” Bet offered. “The crawdaddies et his face.”
    “I don’t think that story’s helping right now,” Laurel said much too loudly.
    Shelby was looking at Bet with rounded eyes, as if her summer charity had shifted from a project to a person. “You’re the one who found him?” she asked. “You saw his face?”
    Bet Clemmens bobbed her head. “Et,” she repeated, and Shelby took a step closer to her.
    A flood of people, paramedics and policemen, poured through the glass doors, streaming around the four of them as if they were rocks in a river.
    David hunched his shoulders, compressing as they passed him. He had his hands folded together, the fingers tucked inside, and he was compulsively bringing his palms together and then apart, as if he were doing that hand play for kids that went
This is the church, this is the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people.
    With no more questions to answer and his yard filling up with human beings, he was looking to Laurel for cues. People were Laurel’s department. But Laurel was as lost in this crowd as David was in any. Laurel’s mother had read the “Miss Manners” column aloud at Sunday lunch, reverently, in the same voice that she used to read the gospel. Laurel had been raised on Miss Manners and King James, maybe in that order; neither source had ever told her what was proper on a night like this.
    She didn’t know if she should offer to make coffee or start screaming until someone gave her medicine. Both options seemed equally obscene. She needed a script to tell her what words to say, what actions were appropriate to perform, and she found herself wondering if this was how David felt when she gave dinner parties.
    Her only