When Light Breaks - By Patti Callahan Henry Page 0,2

with his dirty face and bubble-gum lips, but tears found their way into my throat, then rose to my nose and finally my eyes. I turned away. I’d known Jack my entire life; our birthdays were three days apart, and he’d never made me cry—except that time he’d thrown me in the river and I’d sliced my heel on the oyster bed.

He lifted his hands in the air. “Oh, I was only joking, Kara. Only joking. You didn’t really run away, did you?”

I nodded. “My mama’s gone and now Daddy is too.”

Jack dropped the baseball glove I hadn’t seen in his left hand—it was so much a part of him that I didn’t even notice it. “What? Your daddy . . . ,” he said.

Mrs. Sullivan held up her hand. “No, she just means he’s changed.”

“At least he’s around,” Jack said.

I glanced at Mrs. Sullivan. Pain flew across her face like a shooting star I wasn’t sure I saw. I flinched as I thought of her husband, who came and went as the alcohol allowed.

“He might be around, Jack Sullivan,” I said, “but he’s a different man. My real daddy is gone.” I straightened in my chair.

Jack sat down at the table with his mother and me, took a bite of my sandwich, then punched my shoulder lightly. “You wanna go help me find a conch shell for my summer project? I have to make a musical instrument out of something in nature.”

I jumped up. “Sure.” Then I turned to Mrs. Sullivan. “What time do we need to be getting home for dinner?” In my home, punctuality was a god to honor at all costs, and I assumed it was the same here.

Mrs. Sullivan stood, drew me in her embrace again. “Honey, you need to be at your own home by dark.”

“No.” I didn’t yell this or even have a fit, just stated the fact.

She nodded. “This family is a big enough mess without adding kidnapping to its list of charges.”

I shook my head. “Well, I’ll find somewhere else to live then.”

“No, you won’t,” she said, and pulled me closer. “Because you can come here whenever you want, and because if your Daddy lost one more thing he loved, he’d be destroyed for sure.”

And I knew this was true. Guilt washed over me, and it tasted like the time I’d been slammed down by an unexpected wave, biting my tongue and swallowing more seawater than I’d thought possible.

I followed Jack Sullivan out the door and into the pre-twilight evening of summer. This was the time of day when I wondered what had happened to the day, where it had gone. Had I used up the sunlight, guzzled the day like one should during the summer? Had I done everything . . . right?

I caught up to Jack, and skipped next to him; he looked at me and stopped.

“What?” I squinted at him against the fading sun, pink and periwinkle in the edges of the clouds.

“Do you really want to run away from home?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” I said, surer than I’d ever been.

He touched the bottom edges of my dark wavy hair. This was something he’d never done—touched me in a gentle way like I was a fragile shell that would fracture under his hands. He twisted a curl around his finger, and I felt it all the way to the inside of my head, through my scalp—a tingling of a sort I hadn’t known existed, like electricity, but deeper and wider and less jolting.

Then he let go, looked at me. “Why would you leave? You have the best family I’ve ever met.”

“Because it’s not the same anymore, at all. Mama’s gone and now it seems Daddy is too. Deirdre is mad all the time and Brian is too busy with his friends to notice me. So, it’s time for me to go.”

I thought Jack would laugh, but he didn’t. He stared straight ahead, looking at me but not. His eyes were gazing almost through me. “Just because your family changes doesn’t mean you can leave them. I wish my dad would change. . . .”

And it was right there, after he touched the edges of my hair, as he spoke of his dad with a color and depth to his brown eyes I’d never seen before, that I knew the need for his touch. Not the touch I’d felt with him wrestling in the ocean or shoving me off the dock into the river, but a different kind