Heart of the Jaguar. Katie Reus
“I— I hate it there,” he burst out. “You can’t understand, a kid like you, what it’s like to be trapped, spied on—” He clamped his jaws closed, as though he’d stopped himself from admitting something. That he missed home. That he longed to be free. Then he shocked her. “Listen, you ever kiss a man?”
“N-no,” she said slowly, shaking her head. She began to get up. He grabbed her arm and she shook him off.
“Boys? You ever kiss boys?”
Phoebe decided to lie. “A few,” she said airily.
He stood up suddenly and put his arms around her. “Kiss me.”
Then his face was right up against hers, and he nuzzled her nose and forehead, as though she were a kitten. He kissed her, softly at first, and then more and more intensely, and she felt rivulets of something weird shoot through her body, through her legs and arms, through her stomach. His mouth was wet and soft and faintly, disgustingly, smoky from his cigarette. But oh, so warm and exciting! Phoebe kissed him back, as well as she knew how, which wasn’t very well at all.
His arms were tight around her, iron bands. Then she felt his hands, cold and hard, under her coat and slipping up under her sweater against her hot skin. She moaned and shivered and pressed herself against him. Suddenly he released her and she nearly fell backward. His eyes were dark and flat. He pulled her sweater down and fastened her coat. “You’d better go, kid. Before we’re both in trouble.”
She began to make her way, stumbling, across the orchard. He called after her, “Hey, kid!”
She stopped. She needed to, anyway, her heart was pumping so hard.
“What’s your name?”
She hated her name. It was a stupid, old-fashioned, ridiculous name. “Phoe—” She couldn’t get the whole word out of her throat, couldn’t shout it back to him.
She turned and ran toward the house.
Later her mother had asked what happened to the scarf Granny Longquist had knitted, the one that matched her new mittens. Phoebe said she didn’t know. That she must have lost it somewhere. But she fell asleep dreaming that her scarf was wound around his neck or warming his hands—as she’d seen him do—and that he’d really meant it when he said she was a good kid.
Of course, it was a sin to lie. Especially to your own mother. But somehow this was different. Somehow this mattered less—and, at the same time, more.
When Phoebe was nearly seventeen…
THE NEXT TIME Lewis Hardin went AWOL, he came to Swallowbank Farm.
She and her sister Jill were picking raspberries at the back of the garden behind the house. Her mother wanted to make a shortcake. Normally Phoebe would have resented having to help with the garden, but today she was glad to be outside. It was a glorious late-June day and she’d been studying hard for her final exams. One more year of high school, grade twelve, and if her marks were good, she’d be in line for a decent scholarship. If that didn’t happen, she wouldn’t be going into the science program she wanted. She’d be taking a hairdressing course. With four brothers and sisters and a father confined to a wheelchair, there was no extra money for things like a college education, even with student loans. Not unless the Longquists won a lottery. And her mother, of course, didn’t buy lottery tickets—they were the devil’s work, she said.
So that was that. It was “be a good girl, get good marks and everything will work out.” She knew if she worked hard and did her part, her parents would support her any way they could.
They were good parents. She loved them both dearly. Her father had been injured in a farm accident working for her uncle Joe, her mother’s brother, who owned the place where they lived, Swallowbank Farm. Uncle Joe had kept her father on, doing the books and helping out with other farm chores that he could handle, but it was tough supporting two families on one hay-and-grain farm. Now that Uncle Joe was married, and his wife, her aunt Honor, worked two days a week at the law firm in town, things were a little easier. But not easy enough that anyone—the Gallants or the Longquists—threw money around.
In fact, her mother had told her this morning that she and Jilly could pick extra raspberries, if the crop was heavy, to sell to summer tourists at the neighboring farm’s roadside stand. But Phoebe was past that. She’d earned money doing that as a kid, but no way was she standing at the side of the road selling berries at nearly seventeen. She had a job lined up at the town library for the summer, although that didn’t pay much, either. It was depressing.
She thought of the little frog she’d had for so long. “Bring me some luck,” she muttered to herself, hunched over in the hot sun trying to fill her dishpan, which seemed to have a hole in the bottom of it. “I sure could use some.”
Phoebe had made several passes back and forth along the rows, looking for ripe berries, before she realized she was hearing something peculiar. It wasn’t the magpies chattering on the fence posts, although they did seem unusually agitated. It wasn’t the distant sound of Uncle Joe working in the fields on his new John Deere tractor. It was something else. Phoebe stopped, straightened and adjusted her hat, resting her dishpan half-full of berries on one hip.
“Pssst!”
She frowned. She could see nothing at all. Only the raspberry canes, stretching up six feet or more, thick and green, the white-painted fence behind them and then Uncle Joe’s hay field stretching out for acres and acres beyond that. Not even a tree to break the horizon.
She bent and began picking again, reaching through into the center of the rows to where the big fat berries hung, among so many still underripe. It looked like her mother’s prediction was good: there’d be a bountiful crop this year.
“Pssst!”
Phoebe glanced toward Jilly, who was at the other end of the garden. Naturally her little sister wasn’t helping at all. She was sitting on the edge of the strawberry bed, gazing up at the cloudless blue sky, her arms clasped around her bare knees. Daydreaming again.
“Pssst! Phoebe!”
Phoebe caught her breath. She didn’t know what to do. Someone must be nearby, but it was so weird that she couldn’t see anyone at all. Probably a wacko. Out here on the prairie? And how would a wacko know her name? Phoebe considered going into the house to tell her mother, then curiosity got the better of her. Whoever it was had to be hiding in here somewhere.
Probably Trevor. Her brother was a prankster. He could get up to anything.
She set down her pan of berries and moved quietly to the back of the bushes. She began to push her way behind the thicket, where the canes had grown up and intertwined with the fence, when she felt something—or someone—grab her ankle.
Her tiny shriek blended with his, “Shhhht!”
“Lewis!” She looked down and saw a male hand clutching her ankle, and a laughing, darkly handsome face. He was lying flat out in the long grass—no wonder she hadn’t seen him—and had snaked one hand under the fence to grab her as she’d crept along.
He let go and raised himself on one elbow, a finger to his lips and a significant nod in the direction of her sister.
“What are you doing here?” She leaned on the fence, ignoring his invitation to join him on the other side. But she wanted to giggle. Imagine!
“Come on over,” he urged.
She set her jaw stubbornly. “No! I want to know what you’re doing here.”
“Scared of me, huh?”
Phoebe answered by placing one sneaker on the lower rung of the fence and swinging herself over. She tossed her braids back—braids! He must think she was a real kid.
He sat up, grabbed her hand, and first thing she knew, he’d pulled her down beside him. “Careful! Don’t want anyone to see us.”
She did giggle then.