Peaches

walked purposefully out of the room.
    A few minutes later she reappeared in the doorway. “I talked to your father.” She smiled. “You can go.”
    “Really?” Birdie hopped up.
    Poopie nodded.
    Birdie threw her arms around Poopie’s neck and gave her a big kiss on the cheek.

    It was just approaching dusk. The smoke coming from the dorm area smelled of barbecue. When she’d started down the stairs, Birdie had been planning to make a beeline for the picnic, but now, with her heart pounding, she let her legs carry her in the direction of the dorms.
    She walked past the barbecue area, scanning the group for Enrico but not slowing down when she didn’t see him. If she slowed down, she’d give up. She tromped up the stairs of Camp B and knocked on the door, not waiting for someone to answer before pushing it open.
    Birdie didn’t have a strategy. She just knew that if she didn’tdo this now, she would end up like that woman in Jane Eyre. She would stay an old lady in a young body. She would always be locked up.
    She stopped just a few feet before Enrico’s open door, her heart thumping so loudly she could hear it. And then she had a brief talk with herself. She was confident. She was brave. She was all the other things Murphy and Leeda had told her she was.
    She took the last few steps to the doorway and turned the corner.
    The room was empty. The sheets and blanket had been rolled up at the foot of the bed. The mini TV was gone. The books were gone. Everything was gone.
    Enrico was gone.

    Murphy swirled a fried mushroom cap around in a tiny tub of white sauce. Richard was feeding her mom a buffalo wing, which hardly made the special permission Murphy had gotten to leave the orchard worthwhile. Murphy would have begged to skip the free day and go back to work rather than watch the two of them act like teenagers. But she was already occupied thinking about Rex.
    She loved him. That was the conclusion she’d arrived at sometime between the picnic last night and waking up this morning. Only she could have managed to get in her own way like this. It was the crappiest, stupidest thing she’d done yet. Murphy lifted the mushroom to her lips and ripped off the cap with her teeth, sucking the juice out of the little pool of it under the cap. She looked up to see the TGI Friday’s waiter, who was staring at her suggestively, and frowned at him.
    “Honey?”
    “Yeah.” Murphy stuffed three more mushrooms in her mouth and washed them down with a swig of sweet tea.
    “Richard and I want to tell you something.” Jodee twined her fingers through Richard’s and stared at Murphy nervously. Murphy felt the mushroom caps congeal into a sickening glob in her stomach.
    “I don’t wanna know,” Murphy said.
    “Murphy.”
    “Look, I gotta go to the bathroom.” Murphy fled the table. In the bathroom she rubbed at her tight throat, took a few deep breaths, and then washed her hands compulsively twice. She looked in the mirror and shook her head. “Please, God, don’t do this to me.” Then she rolled her eyes bitterly, immediately realizing she hadn’t racked up enough good karma to ask God for much of anything.
    There was a pay phone in the vestibule just outside the bathroom door. Murphy had painted over the tiny holes of the receiver in black nail polish once, so people could hear through the phone but not be heard. Now she ducked out of the bathroom and picked it up, praying that someone had fixed it since then, and that today wasn’t the day her karma had caught up with her. She dialed information and got them to dial the Darlingtons’ home number.
    “Hello?”
    “Poopie,” she croaked. “Is Birdie there?”
    There was a silence on the other end. “Honey, I haven’t seen her in a couple of hours. You okay?”
    The lump in Murphy’s throat was so big that she couldn’tspeak. She shook her head until she finally got the words out. “I’m okay. Thanks. Bye.”
    “Honey…”
    Murphy held on to the receiver after she’d placed it on the hook, thinking of who else she could call. The only way she could reach Leeda would be through the phone by the barn. She tried that number, but it rang and rang. How had she lived in this town her whole life without racking up one person she could really talk to? Leeda and Birdie felt like a life raft that was floating too far away. She wanted to scream.
    If either of them had been there to hear her, she would have told them that Jodee had done a lot of stupid