The Medium by Noëlle Sickels

boys the same age as Helen and Rosie who took an interest in acting like the older boys.

    Older girls didn’t seem to mind the scrutiny. If anything, at times, it was the boys who seemed nervous and tentative, especially if the girls arrived in a big group, as they often did. But the presence of those girls was no comfort to Helen and Rosie and their friends. They only made them feel like interlopers. Not by anything they did or said directly, but by how they slipped their shirts off bare shoulders, how they rolled over on their blankets, how they waded, shuddering, into the river up to their knees and scooped water over their rounded arms. There was some kind of power in all that, and the way to it was still a mystery to the new ninth-grade girls.
    â€œI’ve got an idea,” Rosie said. “What if we go swimming somewhere else?”
    â€œSomewhere else?”
    â€œIn the river, but not at Oratam Beach.”
    Intrigued, Helen sat up. Why hadn’t they thought of that before? In the woods lining the river, there were a few narrow footpaths that wound through the tangle of briars and ferns, then widened at the river’s edge to muddy banks with room enough cleared for two or three people to sit. These were fishing spots. They didn’t attract swimmers. Except at Oratam Beach, the river close to shore was reedy and its bottom slimy. If Rosie and Helen went to one of these places, it wouldn’t be as pleasant as Oratam Beach, but it would be private. And if they brought inner tubes, they could push out away from the reeds and the dreaded touch of green ooze and imagined eels.
    â€œWe could take the trail behind Dohrmann’s field right down the block,” Helen said, standing up.
    â€œNow we’re cookin’ with gas,” Rosie said. “I’ll go home for my suit.”
    â€œI’ll get the tubes out of the garage.”
    Rosie started out of the yard, then stopped.
    â€œHow’s about I take the trail off Cedar Street that joins up
with your trail? It’ll be quicker than coming back here.”
    â€œOkay. See you at the river.”
    Â 
    Helen held up her bathing suit and regarded it with disdain. She was still slender enough to fit into it, but she would’ve liked cups or bones to give her chest some shape and lift, even if Nanny said she didn’t need that much support yet. She put the suit on, pulling Bermuda shorts up over it. She braided her hair and pinned the braids on top of her head. Sliding her bare feet into a pair of beat-up moccasins, she felt something hard under the ball of her left foot. Perching on the edge of the bed, she shook out the offending object. A small stone dropped to the floor. It had probably been in the moccasin since last August, when she’d last been at Oratam Beach.
    Helen picked up the stone. Out of the blue, she felt dizzy. She closed her fist around the stone and shut her eyes. Billy’s face appeared in her mind. He was dappled with shadows, and there was something odd about his smile. “C’mon, let’s go,” she heard him say. He was looking at her, yet he didn’t seem to be speaking to her. Then the vision was gone.
    As these things went, it hadn’t been too bad an episode. Puzzling, but brief and bland. Ever since her run-in with Mary Steltman at Thanksgiving, Helen had been struggling to sidestep or ignore seeing and hearing things outside the normal range of experience. She no longer played with looking for the lights around people, and she rarely saw them spontaneously anymore. No spirits had appeared to her. Iris had kept her word to stay away.
    Helen had come to recognize a kind of hum emanating from a person that meant she was about to find out something about them, and she had learned to obfuscate whatever images or thought-messages came, however compelling, by reciting the multiplication tables under her breath. Sometimes, simply getting
away from the person prevented