Alice Hoffman by At Risk

Author:At Risk [Risk, At]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-01-30T14:26:05+00:00

Laurel does not know what all the children in town know; there is a shortcut, a dirt path through the pines, which allows them to ride their bikes from the marsh to the outskirts of town without having to pass the graveyard. The children have been taking this shortcut for so long most of them don’t even remember why they avoid this stretch of road. Some of them still get the chills just before they make the turn off into the woods. There is a sharp curve just before the graveyard, a place where the pines are especially tall; in bad weather the place is like a wind tunnel. Laurel always races her bike at this turn in the road, especially when there’s a moon and she can see the iron fence in the middle of the woods. She wonders about that fence, whether it’s meant to keep people out, or in.

It is dusk when Laurel stops, suddenly, as though she’d been pushed off her bike. The fence around the cemetery has turned green, and even from a distance it gives out a peculiar mossy odor, a mixture of rust and tears. There are not more than thirty headstones, and several of them have been cracked. Angels have been split in half, rain has worn away the features of little stone lambs and made them blind. There is a new cemetery on the other side of Route 16, so no one has been buried here for two hundred years, no one is remembered. It’s a place where grass can’t grow, where mockingbirds and crows nest in the boughs of the trees; they have plucked out so many of their feathers that in one or two of the hollows the earth looks black.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Laurel says out loud. Her head chums like a caldron, but she stands where she is, beside her bike. She waits for the dead, but they don’t come out to greet her. They don’t even whisper. Two inky feathers fall from the sky. “Say something,” Laurel Smith commands, but the silence goes on, broken only by twigs cracking and wind. Laurel touches the tip of one of the iron brackets of the gate; it is sharp, it could easily cut her finger.

Darkness has fallen by the time Laurel gets back on the road, and when she finally turns onto Chestnut Street, she’s certain she won’t be noticed. After the blackness of the road and the woods, she’s always shocked to see the white houses on this street, the globes of light behind the windows, the tubs of chrysanthemums beside the front doors. Laurel rests her bike on the grass across the street; she can see into their kitchen window from here. Sometimes she sees them all at dinner, she can smell vegetable soup and broiled chops when the wind is right. She’s checked some of the other houses on Chestnut, peered into other kitchens and living rooms. She feels giddy when she does this,-she balances on the edge of window wells like a cat on a ledge.

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