The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“No one actually says that, you know.”
    “I do,” I replied, and flicked her lightly, playfully, on the left shoulder, as I was sitting on her left. She pretended that it had hurt and made faces. I continued, “They gave me the willies, and I went home and locked my doors and slept with all the lights burning that night. But I didn’t have bad dreams. I looked for them again the next night, and the night after that, but I haven’t ever seen them again.”
    “Were you homeschooled?” she asked me, which annoyed me since it had nothing to do with what I’d seen that night in the park.
    “Why?”
    “If you were, it might explain why you use old-fashioned words like
fancied
and
willies
.”
    “I wasn’t,” I said. “I went to public schools, here in Providenceand in Cranston. I hated it, usually, and I wasn’t a very good student. I barely made it through my senior year, and it’s a miracle I graduated.”
    Abalyn said, “I hated high school, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but was a pretty good student. Had it not been for most of the other students, I might have loved it. But I did well. I aced my SATs, even got a partial scholarship to MIT.”
    “You went to MIT?”
    “No. I went to the University of Rhode Island, down in Kingston—”
    “I know where URI is.”
    “—because the scholarship was only a partial scholarship, and my folks didn’t have the rest of the money.”
    She shrugged again. It used to irritate me, the way Abalyn was always shrugging. Like she was indifferent, or stuff didn’t get to her, when I knew damned well it did. She’d wanted to attend MIT and study computer science and artificial intelligence, but instead she’d gone to URI and studied bioinformatics, which she explained was a new branch of information technology (she said “IT”) that tries to visually analyze very large sets of biological data—she gave DNA microarrays and sequences as examples. I was never any good with biology, but I looked this stuff up. Bioinformatics, I mean.
    I stared at the ground a moment, at my feet. “There must be good money in that,” I said. “But, instead, you write reviews of video games for not much money at all.”
    “I do something I’m passionate about, like you and painting. I was never passionate about bioinformatics. It was just something to do, so I could say I went to college. It meant a lot to me, and more to my parents, because neither of them had.”
    Katharine Hepburn said something like, “Do what interests you, and at least one person is happy.”
    There was a breeze then, a warm breeze that smelled like freshlymowed lawns and hot asphalt, and I suggested we should head back. Abalyn caught me peering at the place beneath the chestnuts and oaks where I’d seen the not-nuns, not-raven people, and she leaned over and kissed me on the right temple. It was confusing, because the kiss made me feel safe, but letting my eyes linger at the spot below the trees, that sent a shudder through me.
    “Hey, Imp,” she said. “Now I owe you one.”
    “How do you mean?” I said, standing, straightening my shirt, smoothing out the wrinkles. “What do you owe me?”
    “Tit for tat. You told me a creepy story, now I owe you one. Not right now, but later. I’ll tell you about the time me and some friends got stoned and broke into the old railroad tunnel beneath College Hill.”
    “You don’t have to do that. You don’t owe me anything. It was just a story I’ve never told anyone else.”
    “All the same,” she said, and then we walked back up Willow Street to the apartment. Just now, I almost typed “
my
apartment,” but it was fast becoming
our
apartment. While I made dinner in the comfort of the butter-yellow kitchen, she played something noisy with lots of gunfire and car crashes.
    If there are going to be chapters, this one ends here. I’ve been neglecting a painting, and I’ve got extra hours at work this week, so I may not get back to it—the ghost