Page 11 of A Shade of Myself
Ava clamped her lips together but not before I saw her smirk.
I swiped my water bottle back and took a small sip from my precious, dwindling stash. Even the simple act of drinking was turned into a torturous mental game of rationing out swallows like I was lost in the desert. “I hate both of you.”
“You’ll love me when I buy you a beer at the top.” Jude slung an arm around my shoulder, which I shrugged off with a glare.
Like I wanted more hot weight on my body. I swear, if my boobs were detachable, I’d have flung them into the forest. No, wait. Those were keepers. My belly. Damn my love of carbs.
“Come on,” Jude said. “We’ll sing. Take your mind off it. You choose first.”
I picked my way over the logs stuck in dirt that delineated stairs in this part of the trail, since, apparently, the fancy rock stairs were a thing of the past. “You think?” Pant. “I have. Air?” Pant, pant. “To sing?”
“We’ll provide the soundtrack,” Ava said.
Thus commenced a five-minute debate between the two to pick a song they both knew the lyrics to, before defaulting to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It was an apt choice, as I too faced no escape from reality and was considering killing someone.
I figured being overtaken by the spry senior was a new low in my life, but when I found myself basically crawling over rocks up an almost vertical incline with my heart pounding so hard that I felt it in my head, I reassessed that decision.
Even Ava and Jude stopped singing. Sadly, it wasn’t because they were too tired, but because they opted to return to an earlier topic of speculating about what my parents had been up to since I’d told them that I was going to look into it.
“Make a list of possibilities,” Ava said.
Jude rolled her eyes. “You’re as bad as Miri.”
“Lists are important to stave off chaos,” Ava retorted and we fist-bumped. She uncapped her water bottle and took a swig before offering it to me, since mine was empty.
I exercised massive amounts of self-control and had only one small mouthful before handing the bottle back.
Their guesses were wild—bank robbers, treasure hunters, killers for hire—but I couldn’t discount any of them either.
Except for Jude’s idea that they were stealing exotic animals.
Once the rocks were behind us and we had a nice short stretch of level ground, I caught my breath enough to speak. “Why would my parents do that?”
“The stranger called you a baby shark, right?”
“So, I’m the exotic animal in this scenario?” I chuckled, shaking my head. “My parents weren’t trafficking kids, Jude.”
She looked abashed as she tightened one pigtail. “Yeah, I didn’t think that through.”
A man jostled her aside in his haste to pass her.
“Watch it,” she snapped. “The top of the mountain isn’t going anywhere.”
I wiped sweat off my neck with my sweater. “Enough of me. Ava, did Romi finish the socks for her nephew?”
Ava’s wife had been knitting a frenzy of baby clothes for her pregnant younger sister in Haifa.
“I’m not finished with this topic yet,” Jude said. “Will you be involving Emmett in your search?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “Why?”
“Living with Tatiana is no longer new and exciting.” She sighed sadly. “He’s bored.”
Ava pressed her hands together. “It’s sweet how much you care about him.”
“Bless your heart,” Jude drawled in her Savannah accent. “You see the good in everyone.”
Ava snorted her laughter and Jude winked.
