Page 2 of The Sun and Her Star

She’s got a splash of dark brown freckles across the bridge of her nose that look like they were left by a fine misting of paint.

She’s shivering, staring ahead of her. Her lips vibrate around her chattering teeth.

I grab my towel from the ground next to her and hand it to her.

“Here, dry off.” She doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even look up.

Maybe she can’t hear me. The wheels in my head start to spin as fresh possibilities occur to me. Ormaybeshe doesn’t speak at all.Ormaybe she was raised by wolves.

“Can you hear me?” When she still doesn’t answer, a kernel of worry starts to unfurl in my chest.

I scan the lakeshore for signs of a family or anyone else at all. There’s no one. She’s too young to be out here by herself.

My eyes land on my little blue canoe bobbing up and down in the lake. I groan when I realize I’m gonna have to swim back out there to get it. If my book weren’t out there, I’d leave it until tomorrow. But, I can’t take the chance that one of those out of nowhere summer showers will choose tonight to surprise us.

“Did Daddy send you?”

Her strange question takes me by surprise and I look down at her. Her hand is pressed to her forehead to shade her eyes from the sun. But she’s peering up at me and, now I can see directly into her eyes.

Now that they’re not widened in fear underwater or squeezed shut in terror, I can see they’re the color of an impossibly black, moonless sky. They’re wide set and big but tip up sharply at the corners.

“You saved me, like an angel from heaven. My daddy’s there. Maybe he sent you,” she breathes out. Her dark eyes grow wide with awe.

I frown at her. “I’m not a damn angel.”

“I think you are,” she insists. A sudden tremor racks her skinny frame, and I thrust the towel at her again.

“Dry off before you get sick.”

She stares at the towel like she’s never seen one before for a full two seconds before she finally reaches for it.

She drapes it over her head and starts to rub her hair.

Her fingernails are painted gold.

My stepfather preaches about the sin of vanity every week—twice a week. On Wednesday at night bible study and on Sunday from his pulpit.

He says that women who adorn themselves are sinners. In our small community of Cain’s Weeping, he’s the judge, the jury, and the dispenser of justice.

He would say they were trying to tempt the flesh of men by casting the very sun into the shade. And there is something about the way the gold gleams against her sun-browned skin that makes the sun seem ordinary. Nobody who lives here would be caught dead with their nails covered in color.

If I still believed in any of the garbage he said, I might think this girl had been dropped down in front of me by the devil himself. To make me wonder where she came from and if she’ll take me with her when she goes back.

I want to live somewhere where girls can paint their nails if they want.

I’ve been coming here almost every day for two years, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone. The footpath that used to lead here is overgrown and nearly impossible to walk through unless you know where you’re going.

My curiosity starts to lean toward suspicion.

I stand back up and frown down at her.

“Who are you?” I cross my arms over my chest.

When she moves the towel off her head and starts to wipe down her arms, I squat down in front of her and get as close to eye level as I can.

I narrow my eyes at her. “Where you from? And why’d you jump off that cliff?”

Instead of answering me, she tilts her head to the side and whacks at one of her ears.

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