The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

thirteen, but I wasn’t with her much – you had somehow maneuvered things so that she came only once a week. At one point I emailed a lawyer, someone an acquaintance had used in her divorce. We set up a call and I watched my phone ring on the table when the date and time came. I had no fight in me, and besides, it seemed Violet was happier living without me.

So I was surprised when the teacher called me to ask if I would chaperone a field trip to a farm. It was the night before the trip – another mother who did this sort of thing regularly was sick and had to cancel. The thought of Violet treating me with her usual chill in front of her classmates filled me with dread. But I agreed to do it. I knocked on Violet’s door to tell her I’d be going. She had no reaction at all. She didn’t look up from the beaded bracelet she was stringing with patient fingers. Her hands looked so different from mine.

I sat somewhere in the middle of the bus, beside a father who mostly read emails on his phone while we bumped our way out of the city, listening to the cloud cover of teenage excitement. Violet was several rows behind me on the other side of the bus in the window seat. The girl she sat next to was tall with a burgeoning chest. Her back was turned to Violet as she leaned across the aisle to whisper with a pair of brunettes in matching French braids. Violet’s eyes tracked the rolling countryside.

She looked like she wasn’t paying attention to the whispers, but I knew she could hear every word: I saw the ball in her throat slowly slide up and then down. I remembered how that felt, to be excluded. I hadn’t thought Violet cared about fitting in with the cool crowd at school. She seemed to me far more comfortable on the periphery, and mostly on her own; she wasn’t like the other girls her age. She never had been.

When we got to the farm I dropped back behind the group and watched her. She walked in lockstep with the girls from the bus, but they didn’t speak much to her. When they stopped at the entrance to the apple orchard, Violet looked around to place me. I gave a small wave from the back of the group. She flipped her ponytail behind her shoulders and inserted herself stiffly into the small group of girls who were talking loudly over the farmer’s instructions about how to pick the apples properly so the bud wasn’t damaged for next year’s crop. The teacher handed out plastic bags.

We had one hour in the orchard before they were going to teach us how to make pies. I wandered away from the other parents, who mostly kept their distance as well, and found the McIntosh trees. Several rows over I saw the red of Violet’s jacket weaving between the narrow trunks. She was alone, holding her bag in one hand and reaching with her other arm up into the branches. There was a gracefulness in her movements that surprised me. She felt the skin of the apples, looking for imperfections. When she plucked one, she would smell it and turn it around in her fingers. She looked so mature, the plumpness in her cheeks gone, the line of her jaw more prominent. Despite the budding femininity that was beginning to define her, she moved just like you. I saw it in the way she shifted her weight and how she folded her arms behind her back. But she held her head just like me – tilted, with a tendency to glance upward when she was thinking of her response to something, finding the right word in a vocabulary that seemed to grow even faster than her long legs.

The breeze picked up every so often and distracted her, wisps of her dark hair whipping across her face. She placed the bag at her feet and pulled out a hair elastic, collected her ponytail again, and then ran her hand over the top of her head. She kept her eyes on the ground. I wondered what she was looking at, maybe a bird or a rotting apple. But as I walked closer, I realized she was staring at nothing; she was lost in thought and she looked sad.

Once she sensed my presence, she picked up her bag and walked toward a clump of students who had given up on collecting, eating their apples instead. I watched her sit down and cross her legs and bite into her own.

The teacher whistled with his fingers and started to wrangle the students. I watched Violet follow her class to the barn. As I made my way inside I lost track of her in the crowd of kids and scanned the benches as the students took their seats. I saw the girls from the bus sitting together at one of the tables.

‘Has anyone seen Violet?’

One of them looked up at me and shook her head. The others were spelling their names on the table with the curls of apple peel. ‘You guys are friends with her, right?’

Another girl glanced around the table, looking for permission to speak. ‘Sure. I guess. I mean, kind of.’

Two of them giggled. The one who spoke nudged them to be quiet.

My heart was pounding by then. I looked around the barn but still couldn’t see her.

‘Mr Philips, do you know where Violet went?’

‘She went to the bus to lie down. She has a headache – she said you were taking her.’

I jogged out to the parking lot, but the bus driver wasn’t there and the door was locked. The lot attendant said he hadn’t seen a student wandering around. I ran to the stables at the back and asked if anyone had seen a brunette girl. I checked the hay piles on the other side of