A Child's Wish

“Ice, Kelsey,” he said, hiking his jeans up over the boxers on his hips and letting his long blue T-shirt fall back over them. “Crystal. It’s all the same thing.”

Kelsey brightened fractionally. “He makes those crystals?” She pointed to the bag. “I thought they were rocks from the ground.” Hadn’t Don said so? She couldn’t remember.

“Of course he makes them,” Kenny said. “And I sell them to kids at school.”

“No you don’t.” She shook her head. “You use them for your art.”

“Hey.” Kenny stepped back. “I don’t use them at all. I’d never touch that stuff. It could kill you.”

“How can crystals kill you?”

“It’s drugs, Kelsey. You know, methamphetamine. People snort them or dissolve them in coffee or smoke them, and they get high.”

How did people suck rocks up their noses? Kelsey didn’t want to know.

“Real drugs?” she asked. “Like on TV?”

He nodded.

“Like they tell us to stay away from?”

“Yeah.”

“Drugs are pills. Or needles.”

“They used to be,” Kenny said, sounding important again. He sure knew a lot. “But now there’s this stuff and it makes you feel really happy and energized and you can make it in your own house.”

“Like Don does.”

“Right. Except my dad says he does it different than most people around here. He does a ‘pseudo’ method, using cold pills, instead of Nazi, which used batteries or something because cold pills are watched now. Anyway, the cops aren’t used to that around here, which is why we won’t ever get caught.”

She didn’t get half of that. And didn’t care. “Do kids take them?”

He nodded. “You’ll learn all about them in fifth grade.”

“So I’ve been bringing you drugs.” She just couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe her mother would let her do something like that. Which meant that her mom must not know.

“Right,” Kenny was saying. “Don makes them. You deliver them. And I sell them to make money for a lawyer, so I can go live with my dad.” He sounded pretty pleased about the whole thing.

“I’m a drug dealer?” She’d seen shows on TV about that. The dealers were always horrible, dirty people who killed other people and then died.

“No, goof,” Kenny punched her arm lightly. “You’re a kid who don’t know no better. You’re safe. Trust me.”

She didn’t feel safe. She felt sick—and scummy. And like she couldn’t live with her dad at all anymore or some of her dirt would rub off on him.

“I gotta go,” she said, pushing through the bushes and scrambling over the fence so fast she scraped her arm. On the other side, Kelsey ran, as fast and as far as she could. And when she got too tired to do that, she lay on the ground and cried.

Until it was time to go to Josie’s to meet Dad and go home for dinner.

THE LETTER FROM the superintendent came on Wednesday. Mark hand-delivered it to Meredith’s room after school. And invited her to follow him home for dinner so they could talk strategy. She suspected he was also feeling sorry for her, but she went anyway. If she had any hope of surviving this intact, she needed his help.

She’d talked to Susan and her mother on Sunday, and both had adamantly insisted that she wasn’t crazy and that her only course was to listen to her intuition and her heart and to do what they told her. It had sounded so simple then.

“How’s Kelsey been?” she asked as they walked together out to the parking lot.

She wasn’t surprised when he frowned. “Odd,” he told her. “I think she got in a fight on Monday.”

“A fight?” Meredith stopped. That didn’t sound right at all. “With who? About what?”