Page 48 of Valley Girls
“Rilla! It’s ...” Thea took a deep breath. “It’s not a big deal. Next time we go into town. Can you make it until then?”
She nodded, feeling guilty. It was hard to ask for more when Thea had already given her so much.
“How’s homework going?”
The guilt deepened. “Good.”
“You don’t want to be held back.”
“No shit,” Rilla muttered to her knees.
“You’re smart.” Thea smoothed the covers of Rilla’s bed and shook her head. “Stay outta Ranger Miller’s way. Heisa dick. And he will eventually get you.”
“I hear you.”
“Mm-hm.” Thea eyed her. “I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be,” Rilla said. “I’m doing good.”
“You look better than when I got you, that’s for sure. I know it sucks to not fit your clothes, but you have more color and you look less exhausted.”
Rilla shrugged. A tan and some sleepnot on a buswould do that.
Thea looked at her like she was waiting for Rilla to say something. Again.
But Rilla didn’t have anything to say. “Sure.”
“All right ...” Thea sighed, and went back downstairs.
Rilla heaved a relieved sigh, before rolling over to her elbows and trying to do trigonometry. Her phone sat on the floor, just under the bed. Dark and quiet. No one knew her number, but no one from West Virginia had asked. The stab when she remembered wasn’t the same sharp desperation she felt at first. Now, it was more a deep, raw ache. Like something healed over on the surface, but festering somehow below.
She copied one problem into her notebook, before getting irritated at the soft, blunt, unsharpened pencil. If she was going downstairs, she might as well sharpen all her pencils, so she wouldn’t be interrupted next time she started her schoolwork.
It took twenty minutes to find all the pencils she’d brought. She’d forgotten she put them in with her toiletries. It had made sense when she packed, she was sure.
Downstairs, there was an old-fashioned pencil sharpener screwed to the side of the kitchen cupboards. Rilla dropped her handful of pencils onto the counter, and shoved the first one into the machine.
Whirr. Whirr.It sang a rusty song that reverberated in her teeth.
She pulled it out. It had barely sharpened.
Shoving it back in harder, Rilla sighed and resigned herself to the task. Only a little bit more and she could maybe squeeze in a climb before she had to babysit for Ranger Stafford and his wife’s twins, across the meadow, that night. The fifty-two dollars burned a hole in her pocket. From experience, she needed to spend it quick, or she’d end up spending it wrong; but fifty-two wasn’t quite enough for the shoes she needed. Everything else, she could borrow a little longer. With shoes, she could climb the many massive boulders, for practice, without needing other gear.
The pencil suddenly snapped.
She pulled it out. It’d over sharpened and snapped off inside the pencil sharpener. Shit. She eyed the hole. Now she had to fix the sharpener before she could finish sharpening anything. “Thea, where’s a screwdriver?”
Thea answered from where she was cuddled on the couch with Lauren watching a movie. “The drawer at the end.”
Rilla went all the way down at the end of the counter and wrenched the old drawer on its sticky tracks. It was stuffed full of papers, scissors, knives, mail, paper clips, nail clippers, magazines, and candy wrappers. How was anyone supposed to find anything in this drawer? She pawed at the top and then yanked the drawer all the way out. Clearing a space on the counter with her arm, she dumped it over with a crash.
“What are you doing?” Thea asked from the couch.
“Finding the screwdriver,” Rilla said. She pulled the garbage can over to dump the used wrappers and weird trash. Carefully, she stacked all the papers to the one side, stopping only to read the most interesting.Ah! The screwdriver.She set it to the side carefully, where she would find it again, and went back to sorting out the trash. The garbage can was so full, the last bit of wrappers fell off the top. She had to take it out. Rilla shifted to the can, tied the bag in a knot, and yanked it toward the door. Outside, she hauled it around the house to dump it in one of the locked bear cans for trash collection.
“Hey there,” Walker said, in a tone so bright and friendly, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
Seventeen
