August 1937 

The town of Hamilton, Pennsylvania, in the rural suburbs outside Philadelphia, had been smothered by the record breaking heat wave for weeks, with no end in sight.  The humidity had become this tangible thing, a curtain that seemed to drape over the Northeast and never let up, not even for a second.  Breeze didn’t stir the trees, and even though the sky had a permanent greenish grey tint, it hadn’t rained in eleven days.  The small town wasn’t exactly the Sahara, but at least the desert was a dry heat.   

Either Matilda Jane O’Malley was out of her mind, or she really did want to be a dancer.  That was the only explanation as to why she was out in her backyard in the middle of the worst heat she had ever experienced in her life, practicing her footwork exercises until she was blinded by the streams of sweat dripping in her eyes.   

The recession had not affected her family, with her father making a good living as the principal of the high school in town.  She was not completely unaware of the hardships of those who had lost their jobs.  Her closest friend from the seventh grade, Beth Grant, had moved away after her dad lost his job at the mill.   

There was food on her plate every night, there were chores to be done every morning, and there was still enough money to pay for her ballet lessons twice a week.  These were the things that concerned her most.   

She was twelve years old and gangly with it, all arms and legs, and she was nearly a head taller than her sister who was two years older than her.  Her brown hair looked nearly red in the right light, but her most striking feature was her eyes—an interesting shade of blue that edged towards violet.   

It had been a lonely summer, especially with Beth being gone, but she didn’t mind being alone so much.  She was a quiet girl, but with a stubborn, charming determination that frequently drove her parents absolutely crazy.  She had long ago convinced herself that being along was a personal choice.  She didn’t have time to walk into town everyday with her schoolmates for ice cream and soda’s at Lawry’s Malt Shoppe, because she had a goal in mind and there was no time for socializing if she was going to be en pointe by the fall.   

That is what she told herself when she watched her brother and sister skip off with their friends, shouting and laughing as they came back with arms sticky with the last evidence of ice cream.  That’s what she told herself as Bette Myers, the girl from her class that lived across the street, did not even both to invite her to go to the cinema anymore.  She did not want to go anyway, she insisted.  She had too much work to do.   

Her ballet teacher told her she had to wait until she was thirteen to start her advanced ballet classes, but she just knew if she practiced hard enough, she could be ready by the time classes resumed.  She practiced everyday for hours, filling her days with stretches and plies, with leaps and arabesques.   

But the heat was killing her—killing her dead—she thought dramatically before flopping on her back in the shade behind the big sycamore tree in her backyard.  It was pointless to practice in this killer heat, she reasoned, because all the practice in the world would be useless if she died from complications of it being too darn hot.  She would just take a rest for a few minutes, maybe go inside and beg some iced tea off her mother, and then she’d get back to work

If her father would just hurry up and build the barre in the basement like he had promised, she could be inside in the cool, damp air of the basement, practicing properly instead of twirling and swirling in the backyard like an amateur.   

She had helped her father clean classrooms four Saturdays in a row to get that barre, and it was infuriating her that he wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain.  She made a mental note to sit him down tonight and remind him of that fact.   

She heard the back door slam and looked up to see her fifteen year old brother, Michael, ambling down the sidewalk with one of their mother’s old, ragged towels draped around his neck.  She arched a brow and studied his attire, his oldest short trousers and the tee shirt that was splattered with paint from when he painted the fence out front.  What was he up to?  “Mikey,” she called, sitting up from her position under the tree.   

Mike turned around, both annoyed and concerned at being caught by his little sister.  “What?”  

“What are you doing?” 

“Nothing,” he answered quickly.  “Going into town to play ball with my friends.”   

“Why do you need a towel to play ball?” she asked suspiciously before gasping.  “You’re going to the creek, aren’t you?”  

“No!”  

“Yes, you are!” she said leaping up and bounding across the yard.  Suddenly, the prospect of a cool, refreshing dip was much more promising than more exercising in the sweltering backyard.  “Let me go with you,” she demanded.   

“No, now beat it,” Mike said firmly, horrified at the mere idea of any time spent watching over is pest little sister.   

Matilda smiled the slow, evil smile that any youngest child with leverage over an older sibling knows well.  “Mike,” she said evenly.  “You know Mama doesn’t want us going to the creek by ourselves, ever since the Adam Sullivan drowned last year.  I guess I better go tell her what—“  

“Fine,” Mike snapped, annoyed.  “You can go.  Just shut up, and don’t embarrass me.”   

“Wait for me,” she exclaimed, giving her brother a quick hug, despite her annoyance.  “If you leave me behind, or I’m definitely telling Mama.”   

“Just hurry,” he muttered.   

Less than fifteen minutes later, they were walking down the sidewalk of Sycamore Lane, and she was surprised to see another boy standing in front of the old Baldwin house.  She knew a new family had moved in recently, the new clinic doctor and his family, but hadn’t met any children yet.  “Who is that?” she whispered to her brother, elbowing him in the ribs when he didn’t answer.   

“Hi,” the boy called, pushing himself off the iron fence he’d been leaning on.  “Who is that?” he asked suspiciously.   

“James, this is my bratty little sister Matilda.  Matilda, this is James Wesley,” he said in a rushed, obligatory sort of tone.  Introductions over, he rushed them along, afriad of being spotted along the street with their rather obvious towels.  "Okay, let’s go.”   

“Hello Matilda,” James said with a small, kind smile, glancing over the younger girl and falling into step beside Mike.  He was taller than her brother, but appeared to be about the same age.  He had messy brown hair light green eyes, and Matilda wasn’t exactly sure why she was smiling anymore.   

She quietly walked behind the pair of boys, studying them with inherent fascination as they fell into easy, whispered conversation about all the things that concerned teenage boys—baseball and women.  She was sure they did not think that they could hear her, which only made this glimpse into the minds of teenage boys all the more fascinating to her.   

“You should have seen her,” Mike exclaimed.  “Bill was walking by with a bucket of water, and he tripped and threw it all over Melanie Watkins.” 

“No way!” James laughed with disbelief.  “What did she do?”  

“Well, she was running around screaming, and she took off one of her shoes and started to hit him with it, and the entire time you could see right through her dress, if you know what I mean.  It was a riot.”   

Matilda rolled her eyes at that point and drifted off to her own little world.  Boys, to her mind, were a ridiculous set of creatures that she had yet to completely figure out.   

While she was greatly looking forward to getting older and finally growing into what she thought to be her freakishly large feet, the whole growing up thing seemed like an awful lot of trouble anyway.  Breasts didn’t seem like they were that bad, but if boys were going to throw buckets of water on her just so they could see them, maybe they were more trouble than they were worth.   

She walked slowly along behind them, just close enough that she could hear them, but far enough away that they wouldn’t notice her practicing her hand positioning as she walked along, humming quietly along with some waltz in her head.  First position, second position, she idly thought, occasionally spinning in a delicate pirouette.  Third, fourth, fifth.     

Before she knew it, they were deep in the woods, about a third of a mile outside of town, where the sun cut through the trees in wavering streams, where the world took on a green misty color.  It was a mystery to her how it could be so cool, so refreshing in the small meadow while the rest of the world seemed to melt around them.  The boys were off and running, shoving each other and roughhousing as they stripped off their shirts, tossed their towels over a branch, and dived into the deep water.   

The town of Hamilton referred to the area simply as the creek, as if the formal name of the South Gunpowder Falls Creek was too formal for their little town.  It was kind of a poor name choice, the idea of a creek so normally being a tiny little bubbling stream of water.  It was a little larger than that, with some adventurous soul having built a damn out of rocks some time ago, leaving the water to back up and form a deep swimming hole that teenagers had been flocking to since her parent’s generation.   

It used to be acceptable for kids to spend their time there during the summer, but all of that had come to a close when Adam Sullivan had gone missing the year prior, only to be found a half mile down stream a few days later.  Rumor had it that he had swiped a bottle of his father’s whiskey and a pack of smokes to mourn the break up with his girlfriend.  Matilda was only twelve years old, but gossip that juicy had even made the rounds of her seventh grade class.   

Parents were not ones to blame the idiocy of a boy with a broken heart, but instead blamed the creek.  Parents across the town expressly forbade their children and their friends to play there.  As much as Matilda was one to follow the rules so explicitly under normal circumstances, it was too darn hot to humor the paranoia of her parents today.  She toed off her shoes at the edge of the creek, dipped her toes in the surprisingly clear water, and wondered how long Mike had been sneaking off to splash around with his friends.  It didn’t matter; she was grateful enough that he let her come along that she’d keep his secret.   

She kept to herself, ignoring the older boys as they splashed and wrestled in the water, each battling to dunk the other, shoving each other deep underwater.  They yelped and shouted, as boys tended to do, and she was more than content to float on her back away from the melee, languidly paddling as she daydreamed, closing her eyes and drifting away.   

When she opened her eyes again, she realized she had drifted about a hundred feet away from her brother and was close to the damn, and more interestingly, an oak tree that had fallen across the banks, creating a natural bridge from one side to the other. Fascinated, and sufficiently cool from her swim, she swam to the side, hauled herself into the bank, and leapt easily onto the tree.  Instead of feeling guilty about skipping her practice, she decided to take this opportunity to work on her balance.                 

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“What is your sister doing?” James asked, hesitating in his quest to bury Mike underwater.              

“Dancing,” he said with a marked tone of bafflement in his voice.  “She’s always dancing.  She wants to be a ballerina.”              

“She’s good,” James commented, unable to tear his eyes off her, the simple joy she found in her movements apparent by the coy, dreamy smile on her face.              

“How do you know?” Mike joked.  “A ballet expert are you?”             

James snorted, cupping his hand under the water and splashing water Mike’s way.              

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The considerable noise her brother and his friend made faded away, and her head was filled with music only she could hear.  She rose up on her toes and reached, loving the feeling of her muscles stretching as she strained towards the sky, flexing her wrists and dropping down to her feet.  Experimentally, she carefully leapt, testing the strength of the oak. 

When the tree didn’t even wobble under her weight, she moved to the middle and slowly, carefully bent her leg behind her at an angle, standing at attitude, then leaping into a series of batterie jumps.  She hesitated as she regained her balance, then spun around, settled her feet in fourth position, and then pliéd, her arms in first position.  She spun around on the balls of her feet and turned her left foot out, carefully circling her leg in the air in a perfect rond de jambe.             

Growing confident in her moves on the narrow beam, she leapt in the air and spun around, and immediately slipped, losing her footing as a piece of ancient bark shifted.  She wind milled her arms backwards as she fought for balance, but it was a futile effort.  She yelped a little squeal of a scream as she fell.  Her last thought as she hit the water was ‘how embarrassing’.  She only had a moment to register a quick flash of light and a split second of blinding pain before she felt nothing at all.                

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The boys turned at the sound of her shout just in time to see her hit the water.  They laughed, amused at her clumsiness, but there laughter died in their throats when she surfaced, face down in the water, completely still.      

“Matilda?” Mike asked, confused.  They stood in frozen shock for a moment before they were diving forward.  “Matilda!” Mike yelled, choking on water as he struggled through the water.              

Mike beat James by only seconds, quickly scooping his arms under his sister and flipping her in the water, supporting her with one arm and pushing the ropes of wet hair out of her face.  “Matilda, wake up,” he urged, smacking her lax face with the back of his hand.  “Matilda, come on, wake up.”  It was then that he saw the blood seeping from the long scrape along her left temple.  “Oh god.  She’s dead.”              

“No she’s not,” James said, cupping his hand under her nose.  “She’s breathing,” he said with a gasp of relief, revealing that he hadn’t been sure of anything in that moment.              

“What do we do?” Mike asked in a strangled voice.  James looked up and studied his face, struck by how pale he had suddenly become, his skin adopting a chalky white color, his eyes glassy and unfocused.  Something about the way he wavered in the water, dipping Matilda back into the water dangerously, had James convinced that Mike was only seconds from fainting.              

“Here,” he said, dipping his arms under Matilda and lifting her out of Mike’s arms.  “Run ahead and get my father, you run faster than me any how.”  He had no way of knowing if that was true or not, but knew that he’d have bigger problems if he had two unconscious people floating in the water.  “I’ll carry her back.”                         

“Okay, okay,” he muttered.  He didn’t so much as stop for his shoes as he sprinted out of the woods.              

James carefully cradled her against his chest as he struggled his way out of the water, climbing over the side of the back and walking as fast as he could without jostling her too much, careful not to bump her head against any of the low branches.  His father was a doctor and he knew it was important not to move her too much, because she could have hurt her back or neck. 

They had just hit the first sidewalk in Hamilton when he saw her eyes flutter.  “Matilda?” he questioned. “Matilda, can you hear me?”              

The quick flash of her striking blue eyes had him stopping dead in his tracks.               

The first thing she registered was the sound of an unfamiliar voice urging her to open her eyes, ordering her to wake up.  The light that seeped through her lids seemed blinding, so the idea of opening them further seemed cruel.  However, the idea of the staying the dark seemed worse.  She cracked her eyes slowly, groaning a little at the stinging pain on the left side of her body.              

She was met with a pair of kind green eyes and a lopsided smile.  “Hi there,” he said quietly, his relief tangible.                         

“My head hurts,” she croaked.              

“I’ll bet it does,” he answered with a nervous half laugh.              

She rolled her head into the curve of his shoulder and sighed.  “Your name is James,” she uttered before succumbing to the darkness again.

“Yeah, it is,” he whispered, picking up the pace as he saw his Mike and his father running in his direction.      

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Dr. Christopher Wesley diagnosed her with a mild to moderate concussion and ordered her to bed rest for a few days.   Mrs. Catherine O’Malley diagnosed both of her children with an incurable case of the stupids and sentenced them both to a life sentence of never leaving her sight again. 

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Five days later, James was too absorbed in his thought to hear Matilda approach him from behind.  He was greasing the chain of his bike, dreaming of the not to distant future when he could cruise the streets of Hamilton in one of the many cars he fantasized about each night before he went to bed.   

The gentle hand on his shoulder might as well have been a gunshot with the way he jumped, tipping forward from his crouched position.  He caught himself with his hands seconds before his face was splattered across the driveway.  He spun around only to see Matilda standing above him, her hand clapped over her mouth. 

“Don’t knock yourself out,” she managed over a burst of giggles.  “I’m definitely not strong enough to carry you into your father.”  

“You scared the life out of me!” James gasped, pushing himself over to sit cross legged on the gravel, a hand to his chest as he waited for his heart rate to return to normal.  

“I’m sorry,” Matilda said, but she couldn’t quite smother the grin.   He couldn’t help but grin himself.  She had such a pretty smile, and the sun brought out the hints of red in her hair, and her eyes were the same color little checks in her pretty sundress, and— 

He realized he was staring at her, gaping really, for an entirely inappropriate length of time.  “How are you feeling?” he blurted, clearing his throat nervously.   

“Much better, thank you,” she said, moving her hair to the side to show off the carefully applied bandages to her temple.  “I came to thank you again for your help the other day.” 

“I’m just glad you’re all right,” he said, wondering how silly he must look with such a dumb grin on his face.  She’s just a kid, he reminded himself.  Mike O’Malley’s little sister.  Mike O’Malley’s really beautiful little sister… 

“I made you these,” she said, holding out a plate of cookies.  “Your father told my mother that peanut butter is your favorite…” She trailed off with a little shrug.   

“Hey, neat,” he said, finally pushing himself off the ground to stand in front of her.  He snagged a cookie off the plate and stuffed it into his mouth.  “Wow,” he said with his mouth full.  

“I made them myself,” Matilda said, preening a little.  She wasn’t the best baker in the world, not nearly as good as her older sister, but she got a little flutter in her belly at the way he grabbed another two with his left hand before taking the plate out of her hands with his right.   

“These are very good.”  

“And to think, all you had to do was carry a half conscious girl for a couple of miles,” she said with a quirky, self deprecating grin.   

James was taken off guard momentarily.  From how quiet she’d been at the creek, along with how Mike had described her, he had not expected wit and sarcasm.  He thought she was just another shy, demure girl, and he was starting to that he had been mistaken.  She had a brain, not to mention a sense of humor.   

“I’ll carry you around once a week if it means I get cookies again.”    

There was something about him, she thought to herself as she shifted nervously on her feet.  There was just something about him that was warm and inviting.  He was her brother’s friend, she had to remind herself.  He didn’t want some little kid hanging around.  “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to what you were doing,” she said, slowly backing away.    

He didn’t want her to go, he thought suddenly.  “Uh, actually,” he stammered.  “I was going to walk into town, get a lemonade at Lawry’s.”  He decided it wasn’t important to mention the big pitcher of lemonade already sitting on his counter.  “Want to keep me company?”   

She should probably just decline and go home.  She should be at home in the basement practicing at the barre she finally guilted her father into installing.  And he was probably just being polite anyway.    

But instead, she smiled and nodded.  “I’d love to.”