Raft of Stars by Andrew Graff (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📕

being cut against a countertop, the oddly comforting smell of blankets in need of washing. Hope was a work in progress. The sheriff’s arrival didn’t hurt. Fall came, the leaves dropped, the old sheriff died, and suddenly there was Cal.

Tiffany picked a coffee lid off the stack. She set it down again. She just had to be bold.

“I’m off this Tuesday,” she said, turning to him. Her eyes came level with the square line of his jaw, his neck in his collar. “If you want to—” she began, but was interrupted by the radio on Cal’s belt crackling to life.

He plucked it off. “This is Rover,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“—take me shooting,” finished Tiff, as quietly as she could.

A woman’s voice came loudly from the radio, and Cal turned it down a notch. “We’ve got a call for a disturbance on Bell Street. Neighbors heard gunfire coming from Breadwin’s Auto. Address is, hold on a second, okay, three-one-two East Bell.”

“What’s the time?” Cal asked.

There was a pause. Marge was working the Marigamie County dispatch, and she always held down the radio button too long. Hurried conversation came through the radio, quieter now, and Cal had to turn the volume up again.

“He said he wants the time,” said Marge’s voice.

“What does he want?” asked a man’s.

“The time, Bobby.”

“The time for what?”

The sheriff made a painful face, closed his eyes. “Dispatch, Rover,” he said into his radio, but he couldn’t get through because Marge continued to jam the airwaves.

“Did you tell him there were gunshots as Jack’s place?” asked the man.

There was irritation in the woman’s voice now. “Bobby, you heard me tell him that.”

“Tell him again, this don’t make sense.”

“ROVER, DISPATCH!” Both Cal and Tiffany recoiled from the noise.

“I copy the call, okay! I copy the call,” Cal said, turning the radio all the way down. “I copy, it’s fine.”

The sheriff placed his radio back on his belt, steadied himself with a breath or two, and adjusted the brim of his hat. He sighed.

“Well, I’ll see you, Tiff,” he said, turning to go.

“Just a sec,” she said. “Your coffee.”

She placed it in his hand and her fingertips touched his wrist. He looked at them, and then at her, and then she swore his face colored a tiny bit before he nodded and made for the door. He never gave her an answer about the shooting range. Should she ask again? Should she invite him for dinner? She could do spaghetti and canned sauce, an iceberg salad, buy bread. Not tonight, she thought, and a part of her wilted. There was time tomorrow, and the next day, she thought. There was nothing but time in Claypot.

Cal thanked her for the coffee, and on his way out he turned back. “I like the purple, Tiff,” he said, and touched his coffee to the brim of his hat, and Tiffany lifted her chin and smiled as the door closed behind him. She watched him climb into the driver’s seat of his truck. His black and white dog moved over to make room in the cab. She hadn’t met his dog yet. The animal seemed happy, though, wagging its tail.

“And I like you,” she said, hoping for hope again amid the humming coolers and racks of candy bars and jerky. The sky outside had turned from purple to silver. She could feel it in her gut and her hands. Change was coming. God, let change come. Tonight she would write a poem about a coyote, a female, silver-furred, sprinting like fire through pine.

THE TWO BOYS RAN WITH THEIR BIKES BENEATH EMERGING STARS through the plowed field. The earth was uneven and perilous, and sometimes one of the boys would tumble and take a mouthful of dirt, and the other would have to stop and untangle him. They reached a fence line between fields and collapsed for a moment’s rest.

“We’re almost there,” said Fish, heavily winded, panicked. Bread just panted and nodded in the moonlight, still unable to speak. Mud stuck to his cheeks, his eyes. They were crossing the fence line onto Blind Burt Akinson’s land now, which meant they were one farm away from Fish’s grandpa’s. Crossing Blind Burt’s fields was always a gamble. Last fall, Burt nearly ran them over with his new tractor, steaming on by with his thick glasses blazing in the midday sun. He hadn’t even seen them. But it was nighttime now, and the fields were empty of crops. Fish wished for a field filled thick with corn to hide in, but there was only bare earth, a bright moon, everything silver and exposed.

“Come on,” said Fish. “I’ll hold the wire.”

Bread dropped his bike over the barbed wire and slipped beneath it. Fish handed his bike over to Bread. The air was growing cool already. Fish’s lungs burned from running. Overhead, the stars brightened, and Fish’s pounding heart made them blaze with accusation. The sky had eyes, and it had seen what Fish had done. Fish needed a plan. He needed to think. He couldn’t. So he just ran again, all lung and heart and foot.

When they shot the coyotes that killed the calf, Fish’s grandpa had a plan. He got the deer rifle out of the bedroom, a .243 with a walnut stock and a Bushnell scope. The .243 shot flat and straight, and didn’t recoil as badly as the thirty-aught-six Fish’s grandpa used for deer in November. “Plenty of gun for coyotes,” his grandpa said, rummaging around in a crate he pulled down from the closet shelf. Bread was over that night and stood by the lighted doorway. Grandpa waved him in. “Dale, come carry a few boxes of these shells,” he said. The boys did everything they were told. The older man knew what to do. They only had to follow.

Over the course of the last three summers at the farm, Fish’s grandpa taught Fish to shoot. He started him out on tuna cans with a BB gun, and after a week or two of that,