Trouble the Water
Page 15
“I-I don’t know,” Wendell stammered, his cheeks going red as cherries. “Don’t see exactly what it’s got to do with me.”
“You live in this town?”
Wendell nodded.
“Your daddy pay taxes like mine do?”
He nodded again.
“Then it’s got something to do with you.”
Wendell scratched his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve got to go. My mom asked me to pick up a few things in town.”
“Go on, then,” Callie told him. “Free country.”
Grabbing his bike, Wendell pushed it out to the street and hopped on, King trotting beside him. Callie watched him ride up the street.
“Don’t be afraid! Jump!” a voice rang out from the other side of the fence, and Callie turned to see the little ballerina girl on the diving board, the low one, standing halfway between the stairs and the water. Callie calculated how many more days the pool would be open. Probably till school started up again first week of September. Maybe by then the girl wouldn’t be afraid to jump.
Well, she’d just have to stay around and find out, wouldn’t she? She could plant herself here every morning from ten to eleven, let folks get used to the idea of a colored girl at the pool. Each day she’d move a little bit closer to the fence, and then one day a couple weeks from now, why, she’d go on in and take a swim, just like that, and nobody would even blink an eye.
“It ain’t gonna make a difference.”
Callie didn’t even bother looking up. “Why you harassing me, Wendell Crow?”
“I mean it, what’s the two of us standing here gonna change?” Wendell came up beside her and shoved his hands in his pockets, started rocking back and forth on his heels. “Why do you think life’s gotta be fair in the first place? Everybody knows it ain’t.”
“Easy for you to say,” Callie said. “You can come swim in this pool that my daddy paid for anytime you want.”
“Still ain’t gonna make a lick of difference.”
But he didn’t go anywhere, just stood there rocking, his cheeks still red, sweat beading on his forehead. Callie shook her head. Wendell Crow. Maybe he was only halfway worthless.
“You can do it!” Callie yelled all of a sudden to the little girl on the diving board. “Go on and jump now!”
The little girl plugged her nose and took a step closer to the water, and then she took another.
“Don’t be afraid now!” Callie called. “Ain’t nothing to be afraid of.”
The little girl nodded. She took one more step and took another, and then she closed her eyes and jumped.
“Don’t that water look pretty?” Callie asked Wendell, watching the circles spreading out from where the little girl had slipped in, circles stretching across the water like they might keep going forever. “Ain’t it something?”
“It’s something, I guess,” Wendell agreed, and the two of them stood there, watching the children swim and the mothers spread on lotion and the babies crawl across the grass.
“I’m coming back tomorrow,” Callie informed Wendell. “You gonna be here?”
“You mean standing next to you?”
Callied nodded.
“I don’t know. I might, but I might not. I can’t say.”
“That’s all right,” Callie told him. “Because I’ll be here.”
“Okay,” Wendell said, and then they stood there for a long time, and Callie didn’t know if Wendell would come back or not, but he said he might, and that was something, wasn’t it? That was the beginning of something.
Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Children’s Book Award; Where I’d Like to Be; the bestselling Secret Language of Girls trilogy; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which received a Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker; Anybody Shining; and the teen novel Ten Miles Past Normal. She lives with her husband and two sons in Durham, North Carolina. Connect with Frances online at FrancesDowell.com.
A Caitlyn Dlouhy Book
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster • New York
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids
authors.simonandschuster.com/Frances-O-Roark-Dowell
Also by Frances O’Roark Dowell
Anybody Shining
Chicken Boy
Dovey Coe
Falling In
The Second Life of Abigail Walker
Shooting the Moon
Ten Miles Past Normal
Where I’d Like to Be
* * *
The Secret Language of Girls
The Kind of Friends We Used to Be
The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away
* * *
Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Blasts Off!
Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Erupts!
Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed!
Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Cooking!
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Frances O’Roark Dowell
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The text for this book is set in Palatino.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dowell, Frances O’Roark.
Trouble the water / Frances O’Roark Dowell. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4814-2463-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4814-2465-3 (eBook)
[1. Race relations—Fiction.
2. Segregation—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Fiction.
4. Dogs—Fiction. 5. Family life—Kentucky—Fiction.
6. Underground Railroad—Fiction. 7. Kentucky—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D75455Tro 2017 [Fic]—dc23 2014045331