A Taste for Red by Lewis Harris

Author:Lewis Harris [Harris, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Fourteen

Fumio went off to play the coin toss, and Foote practically dragged me over to the Ferris wheel. "Snap out of it, Svet."

He'd see me snap if he called me "Svet" one more time.

The bag of water in my hand slopped from side to side, the poor goldfish wiggling to make sense of the world. At the Ferris wheel, we queued up in a short line. The giant ring of steel spokes and buckets rotated lazily to the piping of canned music.

Foote pushed his sliding-down eyeglasses back up his long nose. "You don't like Ms. Larch much, do you?"

"Why do you say that?"

"I can tell."

His magnified eyes blinked blue. His teeth were straight, except for an errant one at the bottom that leaned away from the rest like a lazy fence picket. He had a goofy look on his face—maybe a guilty look.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said, glancing away.

What was he acting all weird about?

The Ferris wheel began pausing in brief jerks as riders were let off and new ones let on. The line moved, and we handed over our tickets and dropped into a rocking bucket seat. The earth fell away as we were lifted into the air. I was taken by an uneasy sense of vertigo and gripped the safety bar. The sickly sweet odor of rot and corruption followed me, even as we moved higher into the clear sky. I had Larch on the brain.

"Well, how was your first week of school, Svet? Did you like it? You never went to a real school before, huh?"

"No."

"No to the second or the third?"

"No to three. Number one and two are okay. And don't call me Svet."

"You'll like it more—you'll see." Foote smiled sheepishly, rocking his big head.

From the top of the wheel, I could see over the roof of the school and the tops of tents and the cars parked up and down the parking lot and streets. I saw beyond the trees and roofs of nearby houses. Some of the taller downtown buildings poked up in the distance. Forested hills spread away to the east. The Ferris wheel peaked, and then we seemed to gather speed as we rotated back toward earth.

"What do you think happened to Sandy Cross and the others?" The question popped out of my mouth on its own, even though I didn't want to ask it.

Foote said he didn't know, the smile dropping away from his face. "They must be lost on the other side of City Park. It borders the national forest. They could have gotten turned around in there. I've been camping back in those woods, and anyone could lose their way, easy."

"For days?" It didn't make any sense. "They're all marked trails. And what about the girls' bikes? Searchers would have at least found their bikes if the girls had walked off into the woods."

"Maybe the bikes have been found," he said. "Mobs of searchers showed up at City Park. There was even a television news crew there. Those girls'll get found and probably end up being famous—go on The Oprah Winfrey Show and all that junk.

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