The Tramp by Sarah Wathen - Excerpt

“Don’t go to the river, just stay around here and find another kid or something,” Grandma Pearl shouted through the screen door, reading his mind.
How does she do that? It was a skill John wanted to learn. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned his head in the opposite direction, to the neighbors’ house up the road. He knew the McBride family that lived there through stories and vague memories of holiday weekends, but he couldn’t remember anyone by name. There were always plenty of kids around at family gatherings, but the house seemed pretty quiet just then. He looked at the rambling ranch house, wishing he didn’t feel so weird and abandoned, when a glinting light over the white picket fence caught his eye.

Is that water from a hose? No—it was spraying crazy in all directions, like a…
like a Wet Willy?
John had seen one in a commercial once. Focused on the place, he
could discern faint music blaring from a radio. “Lucy in the sky-y with
di-a-monds…”
Then, he heard a loud whoop and the maniacal, high-pitched laugh of
a pixie.
“What the f—mmmph?” John sometimes bleeped himself. Even
alone, a pottymouth just seemed too wrong. Even though pottymouths
felt so good to think.
Feeling less weird, and more curious, John tramped up the road to find
out what the fmmmph was going on at the McBrides’s. As he neared the
yard and looked through the wooden fencing, he could see a skinny girl,
about his age, sporting a bright yellow and white striped bathing suit, and
clomping around in red rain galoshes. John couldn’t see much point in the
boots; he watched her dive with complete abandon onto a flooded Slip-n-
Slide, and the water sloshed out the tops of her shoes when she rose to her
feet. Then, as she bounded over to dance a kind of stomping polka under
the lunatic rain of the plastic-haired sprinkler, he understood. Obviously,
one needed boots for such a dance.

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