Chapter One
Laurie and I were out in the middle of the river before the Cods could stop us, before they eve's noticed we were gone.
Back on shore, the Cods were huddled around a bon-fire I was pretty sure that Ryan had been drinking beer that night, or at least he'd smelled a lot like beer when he tried to kiss me. I'd seen Kevin and Paul tossing empty cans into the fire, heard them making bets on which can would melt first.
If Ryan had kissed me this time last year, I'd have kissed him back. I'd have been so happy that I'd be enjoying the kiss and at the same time be dying to tell Laurie about it. But not now. So I wriggled out of his grasp, said "Cut it out.'' and ran across the parking lot to get Laurie who was hanging out with some juniors I didn't know. Laurie didn't know them either, but that didn't stop her the way it stopped me.
We grabbed an old, small aluminum rowboat that had been pulled up on shore and dragged it to the water to make our escape. I never would have stolen someone's rowboat on my own -- it was Laurie's idea. Everything was always her idea, including coming down to the boat launch that night, when we hadn't been there in months.
The Gods were Ryan Bouchard, Kevin Calibri, and Paul McGowan. That's what Laurie and I called them because they were like the gods of our school. They were football and hockey superstars, they were good-looking, and they were seniors, two years older than us.
It was bizarre because when Laurie and I were thirteen, it was like they didn't even know we were alive. They never looked at us. We had horrible, intense crushes on them, especially Ryan, but they ignored us, which is probably why we decided they were godlike.
But then all of a sudden, in the spring of freshman year, they wanted to sit next to us at lunch, to invite us down to the launch, to hip check us in the hallway as if we were on the hockey team with them. It could have been spring fever, I guess. But I thought that maybe they'd just suddenly gotten tired of-or run out of-the junior and senior girls. Birch Falls was a small town, and there weren't many potential dates to choose from. You had to be on the lookout for anyone new.
So then sometime last April, Ryan asked me out for ice cream, then to a movie, and I'd panicked and had to ask Laurie to come with me because I didn't know how to act around the Gods on my own. It was okay that I brought Laure, though, because Ryan brought Kevin and Paul. I guess none of us were all that good at being alone.
Anyway, that was last year.
We didn't think they were Gods anymore, but it was hard to break the habit of calling them that. The Duds, Laurie called them instead sometimes. Or the Gobs.
"You know I don't actually swim," Laurie said, peering over the bow of the rowboat into the river.
"Yes, you do," I said.
"Not well, anyway," Laurie said.
We both started to laugh. I remembered the last time I saw Laurie dog-paddle in King's Pond. She could hardly stop complaining about how if it was named after a king, it should be a lake or an ocean or at least a sea. She was too busy talking to swim. She ended up inhaling water and then coughing her way from rock to rock.
"But you know what's cool?" Laurie asked. "When you're out here it's like you have no connection to anything. Like we could be almost anywhere right now."
"If we couldn't see the smokestack, yeah." About a half mile downstream you could see the old, closed-down textile mill and the paper company that still functioned-large, long brick buildings. Half the town was dead, and the other half was on life support.
"Let's go back," Laurie said, sounding a little nervous.
"I was actually already trying to do that." I pulled on the oars to get us headed back toward shore, but the small rowboat kept spinning around, making a circle. I glanced down at the dark, murky water. I knew that I shouldn't be out here. I knew I was supposed to be watching TV or a movie at Laurie's house the way we usually did on Friday nights. We weren't allowed out on our own after dark, except for school events or to go to each other's houses. So we'd lied and invented a Valentine's Day school dance, even though it was a week past Valentine's Day. My father wouldn't notice a detail like that.
"A dance? Really?" my father had said, incredulous. "I thought you hated school dances."
"We're trying to get into the mind-set of a normal person," Laurie had told him. "It starts with going to crap like this."
My father had laughed and agreed I could go, and I'd told him that after the dance I'd be staying over at Laurie's, like I usually did on Friday nights.
It was easy to lie to him. It made me wonder why I didn't start doing it more.
"Alison! We're heading straight for the falls," Laurie said now.
"No, we're not. We're a mile away," I said, exaggerating just a little. "Don't worry, we have time."
But I couldn't steer the boat in the right direction. I'd noticed the oars were slightly different lengths when I slid them into the locks, but that shouldn't matter too much.
I was good with boats, or at least I usually was. My father had insisted on teaching me about the river so I could swim to safety if anything ever happened. He'd had me bail water out of a sinking canoe, tread water for ten minutes, and he taught me how to perform CPR and pump out someone else's lungs in case I was ever boating with my little brother and we capsized, as if my father would let me take Sam out in a boat without going along himself.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Alison Rules by Clark, Catherine Excerpted by permission.
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