My Tiki Girl by Jennifer McMahon Page B

in the summer,” she says, blowing the sweet smoke out, walking to the water to put her hand in.
    Jonah is jumping from rock to rock to cross the stream. Once across, he walks along the edge of the water to the right, toward the railroad bridge overhead. The embankment is covered with huge masses of broken rock. I want to tell Dahlia that this was done by glaciers, to remind her we learned about this in Earth Science, but I doubt she’d remember or care. She has little interest in things that happened so long ago—in tons of ice that changed the face of everything around us, only to melt away. Thinking about the size and power of the glaciers makes me feel small, insignificant, and dizzy. I’m afraid that if I shut my eyes and let myself really imagine what it was like, I might pass out.
    Dahlia’s always telling me I think too much.
    Maybe she’s right.
    I wish I could turn off my brain sometimes. Especially lately, when it comes to all the thoughts I have about Dahlia. I close my eyes hard, think of the glaciers.
    “You okay, LaSamba?” Dahlia asks.
    “Fine,” I say.

    Jonah struggles up the hill, navigating his way around boulders, stopping now and then to turn and look down at us on the other side.
    Dahlia and I share the cigarette and stare at the water flowing past us. I’m putting my mouth on the filter stained with Dahlia’s lipstick, and thinking this is the closest I will ever get to kissing her.
    “Come on, you guys!” shouts Jonah.
    We look up to see he’s almost to the bridge, just to the left of it, beside the giant concrete blocks it rests on. He’s on his knees in front of three large boulders. Two of the huge rocks are side by side; the third, a flat rock, is balanced on top of them. Jonah’s head is stuck into the crack between the two rocks.
    Dahlia leaps from rock to rock across the stream, playing her own kind of hopscotch. I follow carefully, being sure of my footing, even stepping in the cold, shallow water a few times just so I won’t fall. We scramble up the embankment to where we last saw Jonah. He’s gone now, his whole self having disappeared into the crack. The rocks ate him, just gobbled him up. I imagine finding his robe and bones in a pile in the cave. Dahlia gets down on her knees, peers into the crevice, calls to her brother.
    “Zamboni, you in there?”
    His voice comes back to us, small and echoey. “This is it. This is where the String Man lives.”
    Dahlia crawls partway in for a better look, then she’s gone, too, her feet disappearing last.
    “Jumping catfish!” she cries. “Come on in, LaSamba, you’re not gonna believe this!”
    So I squeeze between the rocks like some kind of animal, following my pack home. The crawling is hell on my leg, but I follow anyway. The ground is soft and mossy, then turns to smooth dirt inside. Once I’m through the opening, the space opens up into a sort of cave, big enough for the three of us to sit and crawl around, but not high enough to stand. There is a narrow beam of light coming through a crack in the cave’s ceiling where the boulder on top doesn’t quite meet.
    It’s a cozy den, this place, and instead of bones we find string. Lots of string. There are rolls of it stacked here and there. Thick string. Thin string. Yellow string. Old dirty string. Garden twine. A rough piece of rope is coiled in the corner like a snake.
    There is a flat rock used for a table. On it is a half-burned candle, some matches, a glass Elff Soda bottle full of water, some bent screws, bits of glass, pebbles, a blue jay feather, and some loose change.
    The cave is full of creatures: figures made from string, sticks, and bits of collected junk—animals, people, houses, birds. There is a mobile hanging from a tree branch stuck in the crevice at the top of the cave. It’s made of sticks lashed together with heavy thread, and dangling from the sticks are small figures—people made from twigs and string. Dahlia pushes on it to make the stick