Shadowed Summer

Nothing ever happened in Ondine, not even the summer Elijah Landry disappeared. That was an incident, and being specific, it was 'The Incident with the Landry Boy.'

Since he never was found, it gave me and my best friend, Collette, something to wonder about, and in Ondine, wondering was about all we had to do.

According to the sign out by the highway, we were home to 346 GOOD PEOPLE AND 3 CRANKY OLD COOTS and a good place to live, but that was a lie.

Ben Duvall's daddy hung the sign out during the evacuation. Ondine was on the way to Baton Rouge, and people seemed to believed if we touched up our paint, some of New Orleans' storm refugees would stay and make this home.

Nobody stayed longer than it took to get supper, and why would they?

We had gas station and a Red Stripe grocery store that rented out DVDs for three dollars a night- they didn't have anything good.

Collette's mama regularly lost her temper over the broken grill at the diner. And Father Rey was brimstone enough that even our Baptists would sit in his pews, especially if he trotted out the sermons about loving the sinner and hating the sin.

That was entertainment, and that's all we had.

When school was in, there was maybe ten of us, and we rode a bus forty minutes to St. Amant. That was different at least, but come summer, all we had was stale movies from the Red Stripe, extra Masses, and making stuff up.

Since we couldn't drive yet, me and Collette did a whole lot of making stuff up.

Well, we used to, anyway.

Sometimes, we'd be knights. It didn't matter that knights were supposed to be boys; we could ride horses and swing swords if we wanted to. Sometimes, we'd be witches, or elementals, or whatever good thing we thought up or got from our library books.

We found magic everywhere, in the trees and the wind, in teacups and rainstorms. We were bigger than Ondine, better than the ordinary people who came and went and never stopped to wonder what lay underneath the church's tiger lilies to give them such blood red hearts.

Nobody but us seemed to wonder, or bother, or ask about anything, and it strangled being the only ones. When we were twelve, Collette pricked open her finger to make a vow that we'd get out of Ondine as soon as she got her license.

It made me a little dizzy to see the red beading up on her skin, but I let her poke me, too. Anybody could make a promise. We had to bind ours with a spell.

But that was used-to-be, back when we had a New Orleans to run away to, before the storm, before we turned fourteen.

Fourteen changed everything.

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