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Show Woodworth/21 we got down, you made me promise nj3jt_jto_Jbr_y_to climb up there without <yxx around, and that I shouldn't try to climb a tree just because you did. You were always making me promise things, weren't you? I always agreed,^because I liked the way it felt, to have secret pacts between us like that. "I swear," I said, because that was what you always made me say when I had to promise. J thought you would smile at me that I remembered what to say, but you looked back up at the tree house. "I'm not going to be around much_any_ more," you .said.... ."Mom and Dad have decided that I have to go away to school." Your eyes were bloodshot. I thought that I would kill Mummie and Dad that night when they were asleep, because you didn't want to go. I thought I would get a knife out of the drawer in the kitchen, and stab them, because I couldn't stand the feeling that I got when I thought of not having you around when I got home from school, or was. through doing my homework. She lies back under the willow tree. Tries to think of something different, something present, something happy. She is hiking out, way out over the side of the boat so that her hair is almost into the water, and looking up at the mast at the blue pennant that streams straight back towards the island. Jake is next to her, pulling on the tiller to keep the boat tight across the wind. "If I had wings," he sings, "No one would ask me, could I fly? The bird sings, no one asks him why. I can see in myself, things I believe in. If you see something else, keep your thoughts to yourself, I'll fly free then." It all makes such sense. The tension of the wind, the water, the main sheet, the two of them, making a perfect pattern, an easy movement. An image of her mother fades in. Her body looks empty, as if the life-giving juices had drained out of her a_> well as out of the body at the front of |