Don't Look Behind You (Don't Look Series Book 1) by Emily Kazmierski (summer reads .txt) 📗

There’s something warm in his tone that draws my gaze to his. “Yeah? How do I do that?”

Noah smiles at his dingy shoes. “You’re off to a good start.”

A pleased flush threatens to stain my already warm skin, but I fight it. I can’t go there. Not with Noah. It wouldn’t be fair.

Better to focus on the well he mentioned. When I look ahead, there’s a low stone ring covered by a weathered sheet of plywood. It doesn’t look at all like I’d pictured. “That’s a well?”

“Sure is. I dropped a brand new pocket knife down there one time.”

“You did?”

“Yep, and I was too embarrassed to ask my dad to replace it. Never got a new one. Want to see?” Noah shakes his head in amusement before sliding the plywood off the top of the cistern and propping it against the well’s cinder block masonry. A metal grate covers the opening, and there’s water inside, about twenty feet down. Noah’s and my silhouettes paint the still water in the late afternoon light.

“Come on, let’s keep going.”

After a few more minutes Noah stops, gesturing at a spot where the irrigation ditch widens before narrowing toward an underground pipe. The water is lower here, and bugs make faint ripples over the surface of the water.

“No way, it’s still here!” In an effortless leap, Noah flies across the ditch and lands in a poof of dust on the other side. Bending down, he picks up a rusty bucket with orange twine dangling from the bent handle.

“A bucket?” I ask.

“We used to use this to catch crawdads. My older brother and me,” he clarifies when he sees the question on my face.

“Crawdads?”

“Yeah. Look. See?” He points toward the shallow water, and I follow his direction. Sure enough, when I look closer, I can see what look like tiny lobsters along the bottom of the ditch. They’re difficult to see because of how their shells resemble the gray-brown concrete around them.

“So that’s what the net is for,” I say, holding up the pool skimmer Noah asked me to carry. His hands are full with the small cooler and a still-watertight bucket.

Noah grins. “Anza and Mattie have never had crawdads, and I figured it was time to rectify that situation. Plus, you like shellfish, don’t you?”

I bite my lip, not sure how to respond. I’m supposed to be a vegetarian, so I was hoping he’d missed that time I mentioned how I wished it was soft-shell crab the day the cafeteria was serving tuna sandwiches.

“Um, I’m not really eating meat right now.” I shrug lamely.

“More for me. Ready to learn how to catch them?”

“We’re not using the bucket and string method?” Kate, Nate, and the rest of us used the bucket method to try to catch minnows at camp that summer. We never caught a single one, but when we came back to our cabins barefoot and soaking wet, I’d never felt more alive. Now those kids’ parents are dead.

I climb out of the sadness threatening to drag me down, because if I let it, he wins. Pasting on an expression of interest, I focus on the boy squatting in the dirt beside me.

Noah laughs, his smile widening. “We’d be here all day. Now that you mention it…” He trails off, his eyes catching mine.

I clear my throat. “Better not. Aunt Karen wants me home by sunset.”

“Right. Okay.” He runs a hand through his hair, and I try to ignore the disappointment that flashes over his expression. “Here’s a foolproof way to catch crawdads. Just don’t tell my mom I’m using her drumsticks, okay?”

A few minutes later, after he’s shown me how to catch the crustaceans using the pool net, a raw chicken leg, and some string, he brings up a topic I’m sure everyone at school wonders about but hasn’t dared to ask.

“Why did you move in with your aunt anyway? Where are your parents?” He wets his lips before looking up from the bucket of crawdads to meet my eyes.

A pit forms in my stomach. I don’t want to talk about this. Don’t want to have to lie to him.

“It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about it. Forget I asked.”

I shake my head. Maybe talking, confiding in someone will help. Aunt Karen offered to send me to a therapist, but I refused. It had seemed stupid at the time, because talking about my parents wouldn’t bring them back. But maybe that wasn’t the point.

“They were killed,” I whisper, my fingers tightening on the string as Noah ties another chicken leg to its far end. “It was… sudden.”

“Oh geez. I’m so sorry, Megan. I shouldn’t have asked. I just wondered—”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t mind.” Somehow, it’s the truth. Confiding in Noah about my parents being gone has lightened the constant weight on my chest the tiniest amount. He’s the first person I’ve said these words to since it happened. Not even Aunt Karen has asked me about it, not really, since she already knew what had happened when I came to live here. I take in a breath. I can’t tell Noah everything, but I can give him this. Especially after he told me about his older brother.

“Was it the car accident?” He points vaguely at the scar on my cheek before yanking his hand back through his hair.

My throat tightens. Unable to speak the words, I nod.

We fall quiet. I’m not sure where to go from here, so I watch the chicken leg as it bobs in the water. Slowly, crawdads approach it, taking timid nibbles before latching on.

“My brother was killed, too,” Noah whispers.

I look at him, surprise bright in my eyes.

“I was nine. We’d run out of popsicles, and I wanted one. Mom and Dad couldn’t take me; they were still at work, but Simeon, he agreed to go down to the gas station and pick one up for me. He didn’t come back.”

I sit in stunned silence, trying to put together