Bette shrugged.  “Yeah, I guess so,” she had said.

“It’s weird…get it w-E-I-r-d?!  There ain’t no ‘c’!” Tina had explained her joke.

Bette had opened her mouth in disbelief of the little girl’s cleverness and then she had started smiling.  “You’re so much smarter than you think you are, Tina…my gosh!”

Tina had smiled smugly, proud of herself.

After they would work on Tina’s reading skills, they would talk some more and Bette would read Tina a chapter from one of her childhood favorites.  The evening would wind down with the two girls out on the deck looking up into the trees, into the night sky, talking, sometimes lying silently, but it would usually then degenerate into Tina’s crude humor.  Sometimes it was a belching contest, other times a farting one, and sometimes it was just Tina telling Bette some story in her thick Tennessee drawl and humorous expressions.  It didn’t really matter what, the girls inevitably ended up laughing and giggling so hard that they had tears running down their faces.

When it was close to 9:30pm, Bette would reluctantly pull herself up and to the locked door that Tina would open for her.  Then Bette would stand on the landing just by the ladder and think how she wanted to hug and kiss that little blonde head goodnight, but she always felt awkward, so she’d just pat the girl on her shoulder or muss with her hair and then carefully descend down to the ground while Tina held the lantern to light her way.  As she would walked back to Miriam’s house, they would keep calling out silly things to the other, until Bette would finally go inside, upstairs and to bed, only to lay there thinking how nice it would be to have her friend there with her while she slept.

It had been a week since the incident at the gas station.

Now lying on their backs having a ‘farting’ contest, Bette noticed that the bruising on Tina’s face was faded, and so far the few times they had been to the reservoir to swim, Bette had not seen any evidence of a recent beating on the little girl’s body.  Nevertheless, Bette had taken note that the little girl was conspicuously absent around her aunt’s place this last week.  Tina didn’t want Miriam to know about the beating.