Long Lost, стр. 6

Pearl hung from the tree, her hands locked around the branch above her head and her stiff-soled shoes balanced on a branch below. A thick swath of her brown hair was glued to the upper branch, sticking up from her head like the wick of a candle.

The sight nearly made Hazel laugh aloud.

“Hazel,” Pearl gasped, as her elder sister climbed onto the branch below. “I can’t hold on!”

Hazel took a calculating look. If Pearl let go of the branch above to grasp the sturdier one below, the swath of hair would be ripped straight out of her scalp. But if she lost her grip entirely, she would plummet through the branches, all the way to the distant ground.

“Why did you let your hair get wrapped around the tree like that?” Hazel asked. She drew herself onto Pearl’s perch. The bough swayed, and Pearl’s hands clenched tighter.

“I didn’t let it.” Pearl was too scared to sound truly angry, but Hazel saw her nostrils give their telltale flare. “It just happened!”

“Well, you shouldn’t have let it happen,” said Hazel, in her reasonable elder-sister tone, the tone that always made Pearl furious. “Don’t move.”

Hazel braced one arm against the pine’s sticky trunk. Positioned between Pearl and the tree, she reached into her pocket.

“What are you doing?” Pearl whispered, as Hazel drew out her mother-of-pearl-handled pocketknife.

Not an appropriate toy for a young lady, their housekeeper, Mrs. Rawlins, had declared when Hazel bought the knife with her birthday money. But Hazel’s mother had just smiled indulgently, and her father had laughed and said, Let her do what she likes. And so Hazel had kept it. It traveled with her everywhere: to the lake, to the woods, to church, slipped into a purse or pocket with ladylike discretion.

And it was not a toy.

“Just keep still,” Hazel commanded. She gripped her sister’s caught hair with one fist. Leaning against the trunk for balance, she sawed through the hair with the knife’s sharp blade.

Set free, Pearl gasped, letting go of the branch above, her hands flying to the trunk instead.

“There.” Hazel slipped the knife back into her pocket. “I’ll climb down first.”

Hazel descended the tree, branch by branch, making the final jump to the ground, where Pixie performed his joyous dance once more.

Pearl clambered behind, a bit more slowly. She hopped to the needle-matted ground. After a quick glance at her scraped palms, she patted the top of her head. The missing hair left a jagged tuft over Pearl’s forehead, which stood out from the rest of her long tresses like a rent in silk. The tufty hair—and Pearl’s stricken face—were so funny, Hazel couldn’t hold back her laughter any longer.

Pearl stared at Hazel, her face darkening, the ends of her chopped-off hair twitching in the breeze.

“Oh, it’s only hair,” said Hazel, ceasing her laughter at last. “It will grow back.”

“It will grow back in months,” answered Pearl. “And I don’t care about my silly hair, anyway.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Everyone will know.” Pearl’s eyes widened in exasperation. “They’ll know I was climbing trees again. I’ll be punished, and I can’t pretend nothing happened, because the proof is right here on my head!”

“I was climbing too,” said Hazel.

“But you can say that you had to, in order to save me. You’ll be the heroine, and I’ll be the bad one. Like always.”

“Not like always,” Hazel argued, although she knew Pearl’s words held a kernel of truth. Hazel was craftier, cooler headed, and far better at pretending to be the well-behaved eldest daughter of an important family. Hazel missed as many curfews and tore as many stockings as Pearl, but she had more skill at hiding these transgressions. And she was far better at stitching the perfect lies to cover them.

“You know Mother and Father won’t do anything,” Hazel went on.

“Mrs. Rawlins will.” Pearl’s voice was strained. “I was already in trouble for stealing those berries from the Ephraims’ garden. She said if I didn’t behave for the rest of the summer, she would give Pixie away.”

Hearing his name, the dog bumped his nose against Pearl’s hand. Pearl rubbed him absently.

Hazel grabbed Pearl’s other arm. “She can’t get rid of Pixie, silly. He’s ours. Father gave him to us. If Rawbones gets rid of Pixie, Father will get rid of her.”

But the family couldn’t do without Mrs. Rawlins, and they both knew it. If it weren’t for Mrs. Rawlins running the house, it would fall into ruin in no time. In fact, the girls’ father often said that without Mrs. Rawlins, they would all have died years ago of hunger, cold, or sheer dirtiness.

Pearl kept her eyes on the ground. Her face was such a mask of misery that Hazel couldn’t stand it.

At last, with a sigh, Hazel pulled the knife from her pocket. She lifted a hank of her own hair and chopped straight through. “There.”

Pearl stared at Hazel. Her mouth opened as though she was about to say something. The corners of her lips turned upward in the very beginning of a smile.

“Now when they ask us what happened,” Hazel began, “we’ll say that we were walking together in the woods, and we didn’t look where we were going, and a branch covered with sap caught in our hair, so we had to cut ourselves free.” She dropped the handful of hair to the ground.

Pixie snuffled at it. He let out a loud sneeze, sending up a burst of brown strands and rusty pine needles.

Hazel tucked the knife away. “Either we’ll both get in a little bit of trouble, or neither of us will get in trouble at all.”

Pearl’s smile widened, and Hazel knew that she had agreed. They would share the lie, half and half. They would keep yet another secret safely between them, one of them the lock, and one of them the key.

“Let’s go,” Hazel commanded. “We’re going to be late for dinner as it is.”

“All right,” Pearl agreed. “But I’m not