Read Two Rivers for Free Online Page B

Through the trees, I could barely see the shadow of a figure moving in the yard below.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Shhh,” Betsy whispered, pushing the back of my neck down so that my head lowered and revealed a better view.
    He was standing in the middle of his backyard in a sleeveless white undershirt, a pair of shorts held up by suspenders. When he bent over to pick up the hula hoop at his feet, Betsy let go of the tree branch and smacked me in the arm. Hard. Below us, Mr. Lowe held the hula hoop tightly around his waist before he set it spinning, released it, and let his hips do the work. Betsy covered her mouth to keep from laughing, and I smiled. He was diligent in this task. Ridiculous. When we finally couldn’t stand it anymore and Betsy started to giggle, the hula hoop dropped to the ground, and Mr. Lowe looked up. When he started to holler with that awful damaged voice of his and shake his fist at the sky, we scurried down the tree. By the time we got to the bottom, we were shaking with laughter.
    “I saw him naked once,” Betsy said.
    “Nu- uh ,” I said.
    “In one of those kiddy pools,” she said, nodding. “He was wacking off.”
    “Shut up,” I said, punching her arm. She didn’t flinch.
    “I know where there are some dirty magazines,” she said.
    “Really?” I asked. Earlier that summer Ray had stolen a copy of Modern Man from his dad’s collection. He’d even let me tear out a page with Bettie Page and Tempest Storm, both nearly naked, which I’d studied like a treasure map. As I traced breasts and teensy panties with my finger, I imagined myself an explorer, the topography both treacherous and thrilling.
    She nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
    Now I didn’t need another excuse to come back. I had a real, live invitation. And there was something pretty damn exciting about the prospect of looking at naked pictures with Betsy.
     
    I went back. Between June and August, I must have followed Mrs. Parker down that softly carpeted hallway a hundred times. Mrs. Parker was always wearing something none of the other neighborhood mothers (certainly not my mother anyway) could have pulled off. There was always something bubbling on the stove top, and she always had a frosted glass of lemonade or a Cherry Coke to offer. Betsy and I would gorge ourselves on homemade German chocolate cake or Lorna Doones until our stomachs ached, and then we’d take off on one adventure or another, usually spying on someone in the neighborhood. Betsy taught me the scientific names for genitalia both male and female that summer. And once, she even showed me a picture of Mrs. Parker wearing what looked like a skimpy caveman’s outfit, a giant bone in her hand. “A famous photographer took this of her. Before she married Daddy,” she told me. “She was going to be a model.” I beamed. I figured now that Betsy Parker trusted me, it wouldn’t be long until she loved me too.
    But about a week before school started again, I went to Betsy’s house and she said that she wasn’t allowed to have company and closed the door in my face. Stunned, I walked home and found my father unpacking a brand new Kenmore clothes dryer from a cardboard box. The folding machine hadn’t worked, and it seemed to me that my father’s reluctant concession was an admission of failure. But being the half-full kind of person I was, my own failure did not deter me. I went back to the Parkers’ house the next day. And the next. But each time, Betsy said simply that she wasn’t allowed to have guests and closed the door. By the end of the week, I began to worry. It was as if our friendship, like summer, had only been seasonal. As ephemeral and fleeting as Vermont sunshine.
    At school, Betsy was careful to avoid me. She wasn’t unkind, but she did make sure to sit across the room from me in homeroom, and she only spoke to me when necessary. By November, I’d forced myself to accept her indifference. I started to hang out with Brooder