I want to smile, and I think I do a little as I nod.
Amazing. I wonder if the cut were deeper, would I have to bite harder? And does it have to be biting? Can I do something else to make the pain go away?
She releases my hand and smiles up at me. “It doesn’t make me happy like Oreos in ice cream, but it’s relief.”
Oreos in ice cream, huh? Yeah, I like that, too.
We sit there for a while, enjoying the noise of the waterfalls, the maze falling quiet and the lightning bugs starting to spark up around the hedges. The music and party and nothing else exist except our little hideaway.
“I wish we didn’t have to leave the fountain,” she says.
We don’t. Not yet anyway. Let them come find us.
“Why do you wear the rosary?” she asks.
I follow her gaze, looking down and seeing the wooden beads peeking out from under my shirt where they’re caught on my collar.
“They get mad when kids wear it like a necklace, you know?” she points out.
A laugh escape
s me, and I can’t help it. I swallow. “I know.”
That’s why I do it. They give the girls white ones and the boys wooden ones for first communions. Father Behr was really mad when some of us put them around our necks. When I found out how wrong it was, I started wearing it like that all the time.
There isn’t much I can do to fight back—at home anyway—so I pick dumb things I can get away with.
I pull it off over my head and hold it over hers, slipping it on.
“Now you’re bad, too,” I tell her.
She looks down at it, rubbing the cross between her fingers, the silver over the wood.
“You can have it,” I say.
She can remember me, then.
“Are you mad I’m here?” she asks all of a sudden.
Do I seem mad?
When I don’t answer, she looks up at me.
I shake my head.
“Can I come back again, then?” she presses hopefully.
And I nod.
“Let’s do this,” she says, taking off the rosary and then unclipping the silver jeweled barrette from her hair.
She takes both and sets them up on the little alcove under the upper bowl, hiding them in the niche there.
“Since it’s our secret hiding place,” she tells me with an excited look in her eyes. “It’s like part of us is always here. In our spot.”
I tip my head back against the fountain, looking up at the items that claim our nook, and I smile. She’s nice. I like how she talks to me.
And she likes it here, too.