I Owe You One by Natalie Hyde

Chapter 1
    Inch by inch, I leaned farther out over the swollen spring creek. My left hand clutched a slippery tree trunk while my right hand reached for my favorite ballcap. It was dangling at the very tip of a narrow limb hanging over the water, and it looked like the wind would rip it off and send it down the surging creek at any moment.
    My mom would kill me if she knew I was this close to the flooding creek, but I was desperate.
    I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel path. My heart pounded. I was about to be caught doing the dumbest thing I had ever done. Well, maybe not the dumbest. There was that whole slime-mold experiment last summer. We couldn’t use our bathtub for a month.
    I made one last grab for my hat.
    You know, everything really does warp into slow motion when you are heading for disaster. And I certainly was. The May rains that had turned the normally quiet creek into a raging torrent had also turned the bank into a greasy chute heading straight for the water. As I lunged for my cap, I lost my balance. My feet jerked out from under me and I landed— splat! —in the mud and began sliding headfirst down the slippery bank. Just before my face hit the water, my right hand grabbed a root and I whipped around, almost dislocating my shoulder.
    And there I lay, half in and half out of the icy spring runoff while the angry current pulled at my legs. I held on to that gnarled root with a mighty grip. My other hand groped in the leaves and mud for a way to haul myself out of there.
    â€œHelp!” I yelled into the wind. “Is anyone out there?”
    I was saved from certain death by Mrs. Minton (who’s got to be at least eighty) and her old wooden cane. She was hanging on to a tree with all her strength. I could see her mouth opening and closing, but between the rushing of the water and the pounding of the blood in my ears, I couldn’t hear what she was saying.
    I consider myself pretty strong for an eleven-year-old, but it took every ounce of energy I had to put one hand over the other on that cane and pull myself out of the creek. It didn’t help that the cane was covered with little metal souvenir crests from Mrs. Minton’s trips to Europe. Every time my hand moved up the cane, the crests cut into my flesh.
    Standing on the muddy bank, shaking with the cold, my hands bleeding, I didn’t know which was worse: the trouble I would be in from my mom, or the teasing I was going to get from Zach for being rescued by an old lady and her cane. It was a tough call.
    â€œWesley James Morgan,” she said, “are you trying to get yourself killed?”
    Old people and your parents are the only ones allowed to get away with calling you by your whole name. I hate the name Wesley. No one—I mean no one—calls me Wesley. It’s Wes. Always Wes.
    â€œN-n-no,” I said, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. “I was t-t-trying t-to get m-m-my hat b-b-back.”
    â€œYou kids!” she said, smiling and wrapping me in her heavy crocheted shawl. “Never seeing danger. I was just like that.” It was a real granny shawl, multicolored, with purple and pink fringe. If any of my friends had walked by right then and seen me in that shawl, I probably would have jumped back in the creek.
    I watched in disbelief as she used the tip of her cane to snag my hat and present it to me with a shake of her head. “I bet your mother would be none too happy to hear her only son was almost washed away for the sake of a baseball cap.”
    The chattering was worse now that the wind was turning my soaking wet clothes to ice, so I didn’t try to reply. No use explaining to her that my dad had bought me the hat on our last vacation together.
    â€œWell, it was providential that I decided to go for a walk today, despite what the wind does to my hair.”
    â€œAre you g-g-going to t-t-tell my m-m-mom what happ-p-pened?”
    Mrs. Minton thought for a moment. “I