Excerpt from Go as a River by Shelley Read, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Same," he said with a shrug and a grin, like he knew something about belongings that I did not, which proved to be correct in the end. He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living. If he had told me this then, I wouldn't have had the ability to believe him. But time pulls our strings. 

I couldn't think of an excuse to follow him into Dunlap's. Even if I hadn't been in the company of a strange boy, a girl didn't go into the flophouse without a proper reason and a trusted escort. It was also getting on about supper time, and I still had the foul task of dragging Seth out of the poker shack and getting him home before Daddy came in from bailing the last of Mr. Mitchell's hay. 

I suggested it was time to part by sighing, "Well ... ," but I didn't actually begin to walk away. I expected him to take the cue, make the next move, but, again, he maintained a relaxed stillness, smiling at me, occasionally looking skyward as if reading something in the wispy early evening clouds. 

"I guess I better be moving on," I finally said. "Supper to get and all." 

Wil glanced at the sky again, then asked if I'd meet him the next day, show him around, share a piece of pie or some such. 

"After all," he added, "you're the only person I know in this little cracker of a town." 

"Well, you don't know me," I said. "Not much, anyway." 

"Sure, I do." He winked. "You're Miss Victoria, queen of Iola." He bent and twirled his hand in a mock bow as if to royalty, and I laughed. Then he stood and eyed me so long I thought I'd melt like chocolate in the last rays of sun reaching low across the porch. He said nothing, but I felt as if he knew impossible things about me. He moved closer. I took my first deep smell of him, musky and sharp and strangely inviting, and stared for an instant into his bottomless dark eyes. 

How does one live for seventeen years without ever considering whether she is known? The idea had not previously occurred to me, that someone could see into the heart of things and there you'd be. I stood on the dusty flophouse steps feeling transparent, held up to the light in a way I never imagined before meeting Wilson Moon. 

Shyly, I stepped back; then I agreed to meet him the next day. I wanted more of him, like a craving for sunshine hidden too long behind the clouds. But before we could share a plan—choose a time, a place, a reason—a familiar voice hurled at me from the middle of Main Street and hit me like a rock. 

"Torie!" 

There stood my brother, Seth, swaying in the middle of Main, his left hand gripping the neck of a brown beer bottle. 

"Torie, get away from that filthy son of a bitch!" he slurred, pointing at Wil with the bottle, spilling beer in dark splotches onto the dirt road. 

"My brother. Drunk," I sighed to Wil, turning quickly. I trotted down Dunlap's steps, throwing back an exasperated, "I've got to go," and rushed to Seth's side before he could cause trouble. 

"Who is that bastard?" Seth grunted through the Lucky Strike dangling from his lips, aiming the question more at Wil than at me. "He's nobody," I said, pushing Seth down the street from behind, one hand on each of his shoulders as if holding the reins of a reluctant mule, steering him back toward the intersection of North Laura and Main. Though over a year younger, Seth passed me in height near his fifteenth birthday and had grown at least two inches in the six months since. I was not a tall girl, however, and, compared to other boys his age, Seth was still short and sturdy, built like a boxer in body and temper. I struggled to get him out of Wil's sight and away from the other onlookers and get us on home.<br>

Excerpted from Go as a River by Shelley Read. Copyright © 2023 by Shelley Read. Excerpted by permission of Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.