The Push Ashley Audrain (free children's ebooks online txt) 📖

the stables and then saw a roped-off corn maze in the distance.

‘Has anyone gone in there? I’m looking for my daughter.’ I was yelling then. I sounded frantic. I was trying to catch my breath.

A young guy repainting the ENTER HERE! sign shook his head.

That was when I knew she had left. She was punishing me for coming. We had learned to walk wide circles around each other in order to coexist – that was our unspoken agreement. But being on the field trip violated that rule. I ran back to the barn. I found the teacher and told him she was missing, that I thought she’d left somehow. He said he’d check the premises and asked another parent to alert the manager of the farm.

He didn’t tell me not to worry – he didn’t say, She must be here somewhere.

I saw a table of boys looking around, aware that something was wrong. One of them walked over to me and asked what was happening.

‘We can’t find Violet. Do you know where she might have gone?’

He was quiet. He shook his head and walked back to his friends, and they all looked over at me. I thought they knew something. I went to the table and leaned over the end and took a deep breath so my voice wouldn’t crack. ‘Does anyone know where Violet went?’

They all shook their heads, like the first boy, and one of them politely said, ‘Sorry, Mrs Connor, we don’t know.’

I could see then they had fear in their eyes, too.

The dad I’d sat beside offered to circle the grounds with me again. By then my head was spinning. My legs were numb. I’d felt this way before, when Violet was two and had scampered too far away at an amusement park, only to be found minutes later at the cotton candy cart. That had been minutes. Minutes during which I knew she was probably safe, probably a hairline out of sight.

And then there was Sam. I tried not to think about him. I tried.

‘I can’t breathe,’ I said, and the dad sat me down on the pea gravel.

‘Put your head between your legs.’ He rubbed my back. ‘Does she have a cell phone?’

I shook my head.

‘Have you checked your phone?’

I didn’t respond. He reached into my purse and found it.

‘You’ve missed six calls.’

I grabbed it from him and put in my password. It was Gemma’s calls I had missed.

‘Violet,’ I said in a cracking voice when she answered. ‘She’s gone.’

‘I got a call five minutes ago. From a truck driver.’ She paused, as though she might not tell me more. ‘She’s at a rest stop on the side of the highway. I’m going to get her.’ She hung up without saying good-bye. The dad helped me to my feet and we went to find the teacher to call off the search. I sat in the tiny gift shop with a bottle of water and tried calling you again and again, but you didn’t answer.

An hour later, we were back on the bus and took the same spots we’d had on the way there. The volume was noticeably lower now, the effect of the fresh air muffling the volcano of energy from before. Nobody said anything about Violet – it was as though she hadn’t ever been there. When we arrived back at the school parking lot, I crouched at my seat and watched the students make their way off the bus. I checked the back to make sure nothing had been left behind and found the bracelet on the seat where the braided girls had been. The purple and yellow and gold beads Violet had been diligently stringing the night before. She must have made it for one of them. It was untied, abandoned. I turned the beads back and forth between my fingers.

‘Hey,’ I called out to the three girls. They sat on the school steps waiting for their parents to pick them up. ‘Did you drop this?’

Two of them stared at the ground.

‘I said, did one of you drop this?’

I held it out in the palm of my hand and they all shook their heads. I closed my hand around the bracelet and stared at the girls until a car pulled up. They looked straight ahead and didn’t say a word.

At home I put the bracelet deep in my bottom drawer where I knew Violet wouldn’t find it. Everything that had happened that day changed how I saw her. She was powerless among her friends, and she didn’t want me to see that. She was no longer the girl who could so easily intimidate others, who could effortlessly hurt people with what she said or did. They could see through her now, and for a moment, I almost felt bad for her.

I called Gemma that night, although I wasn’t sure she would answer. I straightened in the kitchen chair when she did.

‘I just wanted to check on her. How’s she doing?’

‘She’s been quiet. But fine.’ I heard her cover the receiver and whisper something. She was silent. I imagined her turning to you and rolling her eyes. She doesn’t get it – she was running away from HER. SHE is the problem. I imagined you gesturing for her to hang up. I imagined the bottle of wine you would have opened now that the kids were in bed. I looked around my dim, quiet kitchen. I wanted to remind Gemma that I’d once been the mother she herself had turned to, before she had it all figured out. That she’d searched my face for the secrets of how to mother her own child. I had lied to her. But I was still the same woman she had called her best friend. I couldn’t help myself.

‘How are you? How’s Jet?’

‘Good-bye, Blythe.’

75

For a long time after the field trip, I didn’t see Violet. I filled my time