Read A String of Beads for Free Online Page A

stalls, three sinks, and a big plastic trash barrel. The mirror above the sinks was scratched
     with initials. She couldn’t imagine why some woman would make use of a diamond that
     way.
    Jane used the farthest stall and thought about the luxury of it after three days on
     the trail. She came out the door and sidestepped along under the eaves, where there
     was a curtain of water coming down. She stopped at the men’s room door and knocked.
     “Jimmy?”
    “Coming.” She heard a flush.
    She waited until he opened the door a few inches. “Come on in.”
    She said, “No, it smells like pee. Let’s wait it out in the ladies’ room.” She remembered
     thinking that men and boys’ anatomies gave them the option of missing, but didn’t
     want to say anything that would start that kind of discussion.
    “Okay,” he said. They sidestepped to the ladies’ side and entered.
    There was a switch on the wall like the ones in hallways at school that kids weren’t
     supposed to be able to operate because only teachers had keys. But the girls Jane
     knew had discovered by second grade that a bobby pin was just as good as the principal’s
     light key. She had a couple of pins in her jeans pocket, so she took one out and stepped
     to the switch.
    “We don’t want light,” said Jimmy. “It’ll attract attention.”
    When they started out they’d both been convinced that they had a perfect right to
     be exploring a part of the Seneca homeland on foot. They also believed that if the
     state police came along they’d be arrested and their mothers forced to drive to a
     remote police barracks to bail them out. “Yeah, you’re right,” Jane said, and put
     away the pin. There was light coming through the small, high window from a streetlamp
     lighting the parking lot, so they could see well enough.
    They sat down on the concrete floor together and listened to the rain. “It’s raining
     harder,” she said. “We’re lucky we found this place. We’d better plan to sleep here.”
    Jimmy shrugged. “When we get home let’s not tell people we slept a night in a bathroom.”
    Jane imitated the shrug. “In the old days the warriors would have loved a nice, dry
     girls’ bathroom to stay in.”
    Jimmy laughed. “But one of them would have said, ‘Let’s not tell anybody. ’ ”
    They unrolled their sleeping bags and found that they were only soaked around the
     edges, where their covers had left an end exposed. Then they took out a few items
     to see if they had also stayed dry. Jane was already thinking about the awkwardness
     of changing clothes in the restroom, but she was pretty sure she was going to try.
     She had packed fairly well, with her clean clothes in a couple of plastic trash bags,
     and her snacks in another. The maps and other papers had been in a pocket on the side
     of her backpack, but even they seemed salvageable.
    She opened the road map they had used the most because there were details besides
     roads, and held the paper under the hand dryer on the wall for a couple of minutes,
     until it was crinkly but dry. At the same time she surreptitiously moved her lower
     body under the dryer too, and found that the hot blast of air helped. She turned around
     to look at her friend. “Jimmy,” she said. “What’s that?”
    In his left hand was the frame of a small gun-blued revolver, with the cylinder pulled
     out and to the side. He was wiping it carefully with a rag made from a torn-apart
     cotton undershirt. He had emptied the cylinder onto his sleeping bag, and Jane could
     see nine .22 long rifle rounds. “I’ve got to wipe it down so it doesn’t rust.”
    “Where did you get a gun?”
    “It was my dad’s,” he said. “I guess that makes it my mother’s now. It’s only a twenty-two,
     but it holds nine rounds. He was going to take me out shooting cans and things, but
     I didn’t get old enough in time.” Since Jimmy and Jane had both lost their fathers,
     she was familiar with the