Birthright by Judith Arnold

her knock-knock jokes to distract her. Grace had offered her a cookie from the backpack of snacks she’d brought, but the thought of eating had nearly made Lily throw up, which was more proof she hadn’t just bruised her foot.
    Her father had soon arrived, skidding to a pebble-spitting halt on the dirt road. He’d taken one look at her foot, bound it more tightly in the towel, then carried her to the car and raced back to his office, grilling her about what she’d been up to. “I just fell,” she’d told him, satisfied it wasn’t a lie. “I fell and hit my foot on a rock.”
    As it turned out, she’d broken two bones in her foot. Nothing life-threatening, nothing that wouldn’t heal. She’d had to wear a cast, which meant she couldn’t swim or ride her bike for the rest of the summer, although one of the boys was always willing to let her ride on his handlebars when the River Rats were going anywhere. And, best of all, she’d gotten to quit taking ballet lessons. She’d enjoyed ballet until that final year, when the teacher had made her start dancing en pointe, which she’d hated. It had hurt her ankles and toes and calves, and since she wasn’t planning to become a ballerina, anyway, she didn’t know why she’d had to study pointe.
    Once she’d broken her foot, she didn’t have to study it anymore.
    Sometimes something positive came out of something painful. She’d be wise to remember that.
    Now, twenty-three years after she’d tumbled off the limb, she inched along the shoreline toward it, wondering if she’d be able to find the rock that had liberated her from the agony of ballet lessons. She didn’t see it at first, since it was covered in moss and dead leaves. But the shape was unmistakable, and the way it protruded into the river. This was definitely her rock.
    She touched the furry moss on it and smiled. Perhaps if the rock had had so much moss on it twenty-three years ago, her foot wouldn’t have broken. But if the rock didn’t look and feel exactly as it used to, the atmosphere around it felt the same. The scent of the air was the same, the soothing whisper of the river, the sporadic plunk of some critter moving in and out of the water—a frog, most likely. She lowered herself to sit on the mossy cushion and gazed around her, feeling more content than she’d felt surrounded by friends at the Penningtons’ house. She was surrounded by a friend here, too—the river.
    In the distance she saw a light winking through the trees. She hadn’t remembered a house so close to the river. The only buildings by the river back then had been shacks and fishing cabins.
    Wasn’t the Miller place just upriver from here? It had been a rustic cabin like the others, and the one time she and the River Rats had prowled around it, Old Man Miller had emerged and yelled at them to get away or he’d shoot them. Shrieking, they’d dived into the river and swum like fiends, certain their lives depended on their speed—until they’d reached thelimb and started to giggle and argue about whether Old Man Miller would really have shot them. He was such a crabby old geezer, he’d probably derived more satisfaction from scaring them than he would have gotten from shooting them.
    Aaron owned Old Man Miller’s cabin now, she knew.
    That light winking through the trees like a beacon, like a star, belonged to Aaron Mazerik.
     
    G IVEN THE HEAT , the night wasn’t too buggy. He had a couple of citronella candles burning, and he’d slapped on some insect repellent. The mosquitoes were steering clear of him.
    One of these days he was going to have to consider investing in an air conditioner. Charlie Callahan had given him the name of an electrician, who had upgraded all the wiring in the three-room house to accommodate the electric range, the refrigerator and the hot-water heater. Aaron supposed one of those window units wouldn’t short-circuit the entire place, especially since he couldn’t imagine using it and the