Kin by Lesley Crewe Page A

stove, and not by David, who was also warming up. To sit and stretch her legs out was a relief. She leaned against the wall and rested for a while.
    Two boys came up and stood in front of her.
    â€œYou must be new in town. I’d remember a face like yours,” said the first one.
    â€œHow old are you? You look old enough to kiss,” said the other one.
    David answered for her. “She’s twelve. Bugger off.”
    The two boys moved away when David approached them. With his skates on, David looked imposing. Her heart beat a little faster when he came near her. That had never happened before.
    He sat down beside her. “Don’t let guys talk to you like that.”
    â€œHow am I supposed to stop them?”
    â€œGrowl.”
    Lila laughed.
    â€œNo, the thing you have to do is pretend you’re Annie. She dares the boys to say something to her and they keep away.”
    Lila looked over at her friend screaming with laughter on the ice as her friends whipped her around. “I’ll never be like Annie. She’s special.”
    â€œSo are you.”
    David left her there on the bench and went off with his friends. Lila watched him from the doorway as he crossed his skates over each other around the turns, gaining momentum with that effortless speed and grace that hockey players had.
    Lately she was noticing boys more, and she had to admit that David was very good looking. She wondered why she had never realized that before.
    That summer the Macdonalds arrived at their bungalow, but David was missing. He wanted to stay in Louisbourg with his dad so he could hang out with his friends. Lila was a little disappointed at first, but Annie was allowed to bring Erna Jean and Bernice as guests and it became the best summer of Lila’s life. The four friends swam all day and lay out in the sun. On rainy days they stayed in and made chocolate or brown sugar fudge, eating every bit of it. They even had a taffy pull and made quite a mess, but the cleaning up was fun. While the candy cooled they’d work on jigsaw puzzles and play games.
    On the occasional gloomy day, they’d hole up in Lila’s upstairs bedroom and have a picnic lunch that Aunt Eunie prepared for them. Lila knew Aunt Eunie loved to have the girls around and hear their laughter and nonsense, so they made sure to spend some time with her.
    With the wind howling and the rain hammering against the windows, they’d tell each other ghost stories. Annie would inevitably pinch someone in mid-sentence and the resulting screams from all of them would startle the cat.
    â€œBut the strangest thing I ever heard,” Annie said, “was about my mom and dad. It was before they were married. Dad and Mom’s brother were friends and they sometimes got up before dawn to go fishing. Mom got up and made them breakfast before they left. They told her they were going to take the boat out to Port Morien. Mom went back to bed and she had a dream that she could see both men in the water and Dad was holding up a radio. She got so spooked she called someone she knew in Morien and asked them to go down to the wharf and see if they could see a boat, and sure enough he saw the two of them floundering in the water, my dad with the radio held over his head. He went out and rescued them and they were nearly blue with cold.”
    â€œIs that true?” Bernice asked.
    â€œCross my heart and hope to die. Ask Mom. She’ll tell you. She can sometimes sense things.”
    â€œI can sense things,” Lila said.
    â€œHow?” Erna Jean said.
    Lila hesitated. “Sometimes I know what a person is going to say before they say it.”
    â€œWe all do that,” Erna Jean said. “It’s called being observant.”
    â€œAnd sometimes I see colours around people or animals or things.”
    â€œDo you see a colour around me?” Bernice asked.
    â€œI can’t do it all the time. It just happens when it