Читать книгу Water Steps - A. LaFaye - Страница 7

AIR

Any old dummy can take a digital photograph. But how many kids can take a real old-fashioned shutter shot of a purple hairstreak butterfly in flight? Not too many. That’s how I earned a red ribbon at the Cortland County Fair last year. I could’ve taken the first place blue if it weren’t for Gaylen Parker, the girl with gigabytes for brains.

She had to enter with her digitally muckety-mucked picture of a Pocono Mountains sunset. No way does nature paint with that kind of a brush, but computers sure do. She can swear to fifty thousand judges that she didn’t fix-up that photograph, but I’m not going to buy it. Thanks to her cheating, pixel tweaking pinkies, I lost the blue.

“Too bad you can’t get her to spit in water, Kyna,” Pep told me the morning after the fair. He’s always coming up with these wacky Irish traditions no one but the leprechauns have heard of.

“What good would that do?” I asked, helping him set the table for breakfast.

He paused, cocked his eyebrows, then said, “Well, some folks say if a liar spits in water it doesn’t float.”

“Did you pick that up from one of your fairy friends?” I asked. I needed a real solution to my problem, not fairy dust.

“How many times do I have tell you? Fairies aren’t friendly. They’re pony-riding, baby-stealing little fiends, those fairies.”

Pep always spoke of the make-believe critters from his Irish homeland as if they were as everyday as the village priest. A running joke he’d played with Mem since the day they adopted me. I tried to tell them I was too old for all their shenanigans, but Pep just told me they’d have to be leprechauns to get up to any, so that was that.

Coming in from the garden with some nasturtium greens for the salad, Mem said, “All that Parker girl would have to do is eat a bit of salt before she spits, Ronan. You should know the way around that test better than anyone.” Dumping the greens into the bowl next to Pep, she elbowed him, saying, “Mr. ‘I’ve got tickets to see the Chieftains in Dublin.’”

“I had them. Just couldn’t use them. A bit damp they were.”

They laughed. I’d heard the story of the soggy concert tickets he found on a rock along the shore a thousand times, how he used the promise of them to get Mem to finally go out with him, then hid them until they’d reached a pretty cove south of Dublin for a moonlit swim. I knew that story word for word, but I still loved the way it made them laugh, then start chattering in Irish, their hands flashing to the rhythm of the memories they told each other.

They’d smile, fall shoulder to shoulder, then finally remember I was still standing there and one of them would say, “Sorry, sweet, little swim down the memory channel, there.”

No matter. I’d taken a little trip down memory lane, myself. I prefer land travel. I went back to the day I finally got my shot of the purple hairstreak. I’d been hanging out in the Garrington Gardens on Clark Street for days. My kind of place. In the center of the town of Perryville, high in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, plenty far from the ocean. The park didn’t even have a pond. I spent my days there hovering over flowers, my camera focused and ready for just the right bug to fly into view. I had shot after shot of bees and moths, and I almost caught a hummingbird beak-deep in a honeysuckle, but I sneezed, so all I got was a big blur of a photograph and a bruised eye from where I clonked into the camera.

But there’s something triple-chocolate-cheesecake good about hanging there with my camera ready, the I’m-going-to-get-it-today tension of waiting for just the right shot that can’t be beat. Not with skateboarding or tree climbing or any of the other kooky kid things my classmates are always going on about. I’ll take a camera and a roost on a good rock any day.

And the gotcha moment makes it worth the leg-cramping wait. After two weeks at my flower post, I snapped the shot just as the purple hairstreak opened its wings a flutter above a yellow rose and I knew I’d caught a miracle right by the antennae. You couldn’t buy that with a zillion dollars or a truckload of blue ribbons.

And I even got my picture in the paper for all of that hard work. Actually, the whole family is in the picture. Me in the middle with my picture held up, Mem and Pep on either side, squeezing me for pride’s sake. So what if it was only half the size of Gaylen’s and on the fourth page of the family section. This year I’d take a picture no silly computer could touch. They’d pin that pretty blue ribbon on there and we’d have a nice big picture on page one.

That was the plan until Mem and Pep came up to my room in the attic, looking all “we’ve got something to tell you and you’re not going to like it.” Didn’t matter if I had a summer full of plans. Sure, I wanted to get a shot not even Gaylen Parker could beat. But I also had some great ideas for summer upgrades on my tree fort in the backyard and my best friend Hillary and I planned to start our Get With the Land project for Girl Scouts in the state park by mapping all the walking trails complete with nature guide signs along the way. I even saved up my allowance to buy a compass. I had my whole summer set for great adventure, but no, Mem and Pep had other plans that washed all of mine away.

They plopped down at the end of my bed, knee to knee, knuckle to knuckle, as they cranked up the smiles.

“What?” I asked, not wanting to know.

They put on their fake chipper voices, then Mem said, “We have a plan.”

Pep must have seen the bury me now look on my face, because he said, “An opportunity, really.”

“We’ve rented a cabin for the summer.”

No way would they pull me in with their little bait. I’d just wait for the hook. The hard barby piece of the news I couldn’t swallow.

“And . . .” Pep couldn’t say it. That spelled bad news to me. I gripped the seat of my chair.

Mem leaned forward and whispered, “It’s on a lake.”

Pep jumped in with, “A magical lake with silkies in it.”

A lake?! Felt like they’d sucked all of the air out of my lungs with straws. I couldn’t live on a lake. I’d rather be chopped up and fed to lions. Live in the middle of the desert in a tin shed. Spend the summer on a frozen tundra ice floe with a parka and a pick. But not near water. Please, no water.