Read Lost at Running Brook Trail for Free Online Page B

their feet.
    Susan didn’t like the quiet of the woods. It scared her. Here they were looking at a canoe that was almost a tree. Canoes belonged on the water with paddles to keep them going. She wanted to hear something other than themselves.
    “Look at the water’s expanse …”
    “ What water are you talking about?” Kimberly mistook Susan’s first line of the second verse of her poem for her own thoughts.
    “It’s a poem,” Elaine volunteered.
    “Why would she know that when she spends class time looking at her face?” Miriam had now stopped inspecting the canoe.
    “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”
    “And see if you catch your offense. Perhaps not, the density is hard to conceive. Oh why are we all so naïve?”
    “You like that poem?” Elaine said. She liked that poem too. She always liked the ones that rhymed. They always seem to have a better rhythm coming off the tongue and helped in memorization.
    “Don’t know.” Susan really didn’t know why she was saying it, other than it started with “down by the water we go.” It somehow seemed appropriate.
    “You can say a poem by heart and don’t know if you like it?”
    “I know it, that’s why I say it,” Susan said. “They made us study it like it was going out of style.”
    “Maybe it was going out of style,” Elaine said.
    The canoe had presented a reprieve and a distraction in their walk. They moved on with the thought that civilization was getting farther away.
    “How come this gravel road is so long? You think someone brought all this gravel here?” Miriam continued to play soccer with the stones. With every kick, her brown-blond ponytail shook like a horse’s tail.
    “So much rock?’” Elaine asked. “I doubt that. That would be a lot of work.” She tried to picture men bringing tons and tons of gravel to make this long road but couldn’t imagine it, as hard as she tried.
    They walked in a straight line across the road, none wanting to be at the back or at the front. From an aerial view they might look like four linked sausages stretched out horizontally.
    With all the running and the haters clawing at her face, Kimberly had just remembered that she was listening to her iPod. Back to Britney! She stuck one bud in the left and one in the right and was running down her playlist to find a selection.
    Miriam saw this, broke the line and yanked one of the buds from Kimberly’s ear. “We all need to listen!” she shouted at Kimberly, standing in front of her as a dare.
    “You’re just jealous because you have nothing to listen to but your own stupid, useless thoughts. Arrrrrrrgh!” Kimberly screamed with her fists clenched by her sides. She pulled the other bud out in anger. She wrapped the cord around the iPod and placed it in her pocket.
    Susan had watched the episode and made an elaborate cross over her heart. From the beginning, something had been going on between Kimberly and Miriam, but Susan didn’t know what it was. Maybe she would never know, but she knew that neither girl would let up.
    “You know, Miriam,” Elaine said, “if we were to run over this”—she nodded toward all the gravel—“how far do you think we would get?”
    “Is this a trick question?”
    “It wasn’t intended to be, but now that you ask, I guess it depends on how you answer.”
    “Well,” Miriam said, tapping her head with her forefinger, “we would probably be grounded like that canoe back there. It’s hard to run on stones. I tried running in sand at the beach. It’s good exercise but it’s hard. So I can just imagine running over gravel.”
    Elaine drank some water and used some to wash her face and wipe around her neck. “You didn’t have to haul the earphone from her ear like that, you know.”
    “You think I should have asked her? Said something like, ‘Kimberly, could you please remove the earphones from your ears, we all need to be attentive at this time’? Is that what I should have done?” Miriam looked