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

open water and reentered the marsh plain from where they turned back. It would be dark soon, and their progress was slow, but for an hour or more Tiffany followed the bright green constellations of floating maple leaves down the black water, moving with the candied current through the greater channels. Their way was hidden by the surface of things, guided by deeper currents. The channels looked identical, they all had the same stands of cattails growing at their edges. But some channels moved the leaves and some did not, and so Tiffany found the way through.

“Can we stop?”

The sound of Miranda’s voice surprised Tiffany.

“If you need to,” she answered. In the distance, Tiffany could see the forest rising up on the far side of the marsh plain. She’d prefer to keep going, to exit the marsh and arrive at a single channel again.

But Miranda nodded. There was grave tiredness in her body.

“Okay,” said Tiffany. “I’ll find a spot.”

Tiffany glided the canoe around a bend of cattails where the river split in three. In the distance, on the right side of the river, Tiffany made out what looked to be large sandbars, and when her eyes moved to the shoreline, her paddle stopped midstroke. Miranda saw it too. Her good hand tightened on the gunwale.

Opening before them in the growing dusk lay a half-mile-wide stretch of shore that had been ravaged in ways Tiffany had only seen in newspapers. Pine trees were snapped and stripped of their needles—some treetops were missing, others dangled in the rain at awkward angles. Some trees lay flat against the ground, their rooted skirts revealed. The scene reminded Tiffany of the time a classmate broke his shinbone clean in half on the playground, how she and all the other kids gawked at the foot, the way it dangled from the boy at so unnatural an angle.

Tiffany paddled forward into the slough. The leaves didn’t move on the water here, and in places pine needles floated in mats so thick the water looked like solid ground. Tiffany aimed the canoe toward a large sandbar and cut a path through the debris. She spotted a stand of hardwoods set well back from the shore. The branches were bare as winter. In some places the cattails had been stirred to mud. In others they stood erect. A cedar grove was pressed flat, all except a single younger tree. Tiffany had heard of tornadoes behaving like this, selective almost, flattening every home in a trailer park but leaving a glass case filled with knickknacks untouched.

Miranda faced forward. Her shoulders shook. There was nothing Tiffany could say. Miranda’s son was out here, somewhere, in this devastation. Or was he? Was it possible the boys were already back in Claypot, eating cookies with Constable Bobby? She could almost see it, Bobby with cookie crumbs on his lips, poking a radio’s transmitter again and again—Sheriff? Sheriff? Bobby to Rover. And for that matter, was the sheriff even out here anymore? Tiffany took one or two more paddle strokes, too tired to consider at length the thought that she and Miranda were floating around out here for no reason, everyone else back in town. She shook it from her mind. The possibility was real, but her gut told her otherwise. There was something odd about that storm, the way it rose up and broke over them so violently—and the near miss with the boatman too—and the way Miranda’s spirit seemed pushed so hard it’d been hushed. Tiffany felt they were in the right place.

When the canoe grated against the sandbar, Miranda let out what sounded like pain.

“Are you okay?” Tiffany asked. She told herself she should have beached more gently. She’d forgotten about Miranda’s injured wrist.

Miranda gasped again, clutched both gunwales, and moaned, staring down at the loosely packed sand of the beach. She scrambled out of the boat, and on her hands and knees started patting the sand. Then she pressed her sandy fingers to her lips, her hair dragging. Tiffany couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, and the scene raised the hair on her neck. She stowed her paddle and rustled through the bag near her feet for a flashlight. Dusk had come. She didn’t want to be alone in this darkness. Miranda had been through a lot. Too much maybe. Thunder pealed in the distance. Tiffany was alone with a madwoman.

She felt the smooth heft of the C-cell Maglite, removed it from the bag, and aimed it at Miranda. In a snap of white light, the world grew small. What was left of the sky and the broken trees disappeared. Tiffany saw only the pointed bow of the red canoe, a sandbar strewn with leaves, and a weeping woman sitting on her denim hip, lifting and dropping fistfuls of muddy sand. Tiffany felt fear, and then noticed something odd about the sandbar. Surrounding Miranda in the sand, everywhere, were the shadowed rims of hundreds of small indentations, like crescent moons in negative, like heels and toes.

Heels.

And toes.

Tiffany shouted aloud, “Footprints!”

She sprang from the canoe, forgetting the stern was still afloat, and plunged down into waist-deep water.

“Footprints!” she yelled again, wading for shore. She fell to her knees next to Miranda and studied one of the indentations with her flashlight. Sure enough, there was a boy-sized footprint, and as she ran her light a few yards up the beach, she saw more and more of them. Despite the rain, the prints seemed fresh, and upon closer inspection there were clearly two different pairs of shoes, one with a deep zigzag pattern running from instep to heel, and the other flat-bottomed and worn.

A triumph rose in her body that felt physical, in the same way that running those rapids felt physical, the way that strange warmth arrived in that storm. Tiffany didn’t feel chilled now, or even wet. Her body hummed. She felt like leaping. She looked to Miranda, who was too overcome to smile or speak, just patting one