The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages

Author:Ellen Klages
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-23T16:00:00+00:00

April 12

UNDER THE FENCE

DEWEY NOTICED THAT Suze put a big red X on the calendar in the kitchen every morning after breakfast. She thought at first that it was to count down the days to some occasion—a birthday, or a trip to town. Then she realized that the first X was on the day that Papa had left. Suze was tallying the days Dewey had been there, like a convict in a Saturday Evening Post cartoon marking off his sentence on the stone prison walls.

“You better not walk with me, ” Suze had said on their first school day together. “And don’t even think about eating lunch with me. ” Dewey had only nodded. She’d never hung around Suze before, and staying at the Gordons’ hadn’t changed that. She left for school ten minutes early and stayed ten or fifteen minutes after the 3:30 bell, finishing some of her homework.

The third day of her visit, Dewey packed a thermos of milk and a deviled-ham sandwich and went for a walk at lunchtime, a picnic in the woods, where it was quiet and she could be by herself. Really by herself, without Suze in the next room sighing and thumping and letting Dewey know in a hundred small ways that she was just an unwanted intruder.

Then it rained for a week, pouring, drenching rains, and it was too wet and muddy to go outside. The boys sat in one corner of the schoolroom, eating and trading baseball cards and reading comics, and some of the girls pushed their desks together and played euchre. Dewey brought her cigar box with the bits and pieces of her latest project and sat at her desk near the window, ignoring Suze’s stares and working on it in between bites of her sandwich.

Thursday afternoon, finally, the sky cleared, and the breeze was soft and held the promise of spring. When the school bell rang, the other children ran, yelling, out into the playground. Dewey lingered behind.

When she walked out of the school building about quarter of four, Betty and Joyce and some other girls were playing jacks on the concrete, in a space where there were no puddles. Suze stood a few feet away, watching. Dewey was pretty sure she wasn’t playing with the other girls, just standing nearby and pretending that she would be, any minute. Sometimes Dewey felt sorry for Suze, because the other girls didn’t ask her to play very often. But she knew better than to say anything. It would just make Suze mad.

Suze was between her and the gate. Dewey thought about going back inside, but then Suze looked up and saw her. Suze’s posture changed. She stiffened, just a little, the way Rutherford sometimes did when another cat walked by the base of the stairs.

Dewey took a deep breath, gripped her cigar box, and focused on a spot about ten yards beyond the gate. She walked toward it, not slow, not fast, not looking at Suze. She was almost past when Suze casually, elaborately, pretended to sneeze, flinging out her arm at the moment of katchoo.

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