Little Red Lies by Julie Johnston Page B

sergeant ordered me to go up and check out the space above. I climbed thinking each step would be my last, shrinking as much as I could against the wall. When I was high enough to look around, I moved my rifle in a slow sweep. I heard a sharp intake of breath. At first, I thought it was my own, but in the moonlight I saw a young guy, a kid really, sitting, aiming a revolver at me. His eyes were glistening with hatred or tears. I don’t know which
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    Writing about it now, well after the event, I’m sure I gave the kid a chance to surrender. I’m pretty sure. I also remember the immediate (almost immediate?) blast from my gun. But I have this disturbing sense that my trigger finger was part of the gun’s mechanism and that the gun went off without a conscious effort on my part. I was actually shocked when the kid slumped toone side. Rachel, he was like one of the cast-off dolls in your bedroom closet
.
    Outside his door, I call, “Have fun at the doctor’s tomorrow.” Before going into my room to do my homework, I add, “You’ll be able to check out the new Dingbat calendars. They’re even funnier than the old ones.”
    “You’re the Dingbat,” he says.
    “No, you are.”
    “So, what’s the verdict?” I ask him the next day, when I get home from school.
    “Doctor Melvin says my blood’s low, whatever that means. That’s why I have no energy and no appetite. I have to take pills and a tonic.” He’s stretched out on his bed.
    “Your blood is low?”
    “I think I’m registering only about half a tank.”
    I’m picturing the Dingbats getting blood transfusions from something that looks like gas pumps.
    “The doctor explained it, but I wasn’t listening,” he says.
    As spring warms into a promise of summer, Jamie religiously takes his tonic and pills and seems a lot better, as far as I can tell. Not only that, he’s been accepted into Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, admitted under the Veterans Charter, so no tuition costs. Now, unfortunately, he has time for his love life.
    He invites Mary over to listen to records in the living room, one evening near the end of May. Our family tactfully goes to bed early, although I have to make several trips downstairs—once to find the book I’m reading, once to make myself a brown sugar sandwich, and then to find my fountain pen. I’m sure I left it in the dining room. It isn’t my fault that they don’t notice me searching under the table for it.
    I can’t help overhearing Jamie say sweetly, “Mary, why don’t you move to Toronto when I do? You could probably get a better job than the one you have here.”
    “I’m not sure I want to live in a big city. And my mother wouldn’t let me.”
    “But this is your life, not your mother’s.”
    “Try telling her that.”
    “Listen, you’re old enough to stand up for yourself. I feel as if your mother is beside us every time I try to hold your hand or kiss you.”
    “Well, I can’t help that.”
    “Tomorrow is Saturday. Let’s just go somewhere. I’ll borrow Dad’s car; he won’t mind. We’ll drive up to, I don’t know, somewhere beyond Claymore. We’ll lose ourselves in the woods. There’s a lake about half a mile from the road. We can go swimming.”
    “I threw out my last year’s bathing suit.”
    “We’ll swim in our underwear.”
    “Our underwear!”
    Beneath the table, I clap my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp. If this idea doesn’t make Jamie’s heart pump more blood into his system, I didn’t know what will. Mine is certainly going a mile a minute.
    “Yes.”
    “It’s still only May. The water will be too cold.”
    “We’ll just wade.”
    “I have to baby-sit.”
    “Sunday, then.”
    “After church.”
    “Of course.”
    If his voice is anything to go by, I think his blood level’s dropped to an all-time low.
    Mary says, “I don’t know if I could do that after church. I mean, I’d be thinking about it all the while I was in church, and I wouldn’t be