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A Love Like Ours

By Becky Wade

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Prologue

Twelve-year-old Jake Porter never felt a hundred percent right unless Lyndie James was beside him.
She was his sidekick. Or maybe he was hers. She was the one with the flair and the imagination. He was the one with the even temper and the sense.
They were a pair.
Jake stood at the edge of the pond, watching Lyndie try to skip a stone. Without bouncing even once, her rock dropped straight into the afternoon sunshine sparkling on the top of the water. Another dud. Her fifth dud in a row.
“Well, shoot,” Lyndie muttered. Standing halfway up to her knees in the pond, she bent over to look for another rock.
“Hold still. I’ll get one for you.” He didn’t want her cutting her foot on a piece of glass or a sharp stone. Jake put his boots on just about as soon as he got up in the mornings. But Lyndie only wore shoes when her mom made her. He sort of wished her mom made her more often.
He handed her the two smoothest, flattest rocks he could find. Lyndie was ten. For a girl who could do almost anything else, she was getting kind of old not to be able to skip a stone.
Jake’s brother Ty approached them. “Still can’t skip one, Lyndie?” He grabbed a rock and showed her how to use her wrist. “Like this. See?”
Jake frowned at his brother, irritated. Ty was only fifteen months older than Jake, but he acted like he knew everything. It annoyed Jake, sometimes, to be the youngest of the three Porter brothers. He was only older than his sister Dru, which didn’t even count. She just two years old.
Ty sent his rock flying and it bounced off the water four times, leaving circles. Ty had always loved for people to watch him do stuff, so he picked up another rock and did it all over again. “See that?”
“Lyndie doesn’t need your help.” Jake had already shown her how to skip a rock lots of times. “She just needs practice.”
Ty looked at Lyndie and lifted one eyebrow. “I skipped one twenty times once.”
Lyndie’s eyes rounded.
Anger shot though Jake. “No, you didn’t. The most I’ve ever seen you do is six.”
“That one time, at the Millers’ house?”
“No.”
Ty shrugged and pushed sweat off his forehead with his wrist. “I’m getting hot.”
Now that the spring weather had turned warm, the Porter brothers and Lyndie spent their weekends riding horses, exploring, and seeing what kind of orneriness they could get themselves into when their parents weren’t paying attention.
“I’m going to jump in,” Ty said.
“You’re not supposed to,” Jake warned.
“Who said?”
“Dad.”
“Nah. I don’t remember that.”
Ty definitely remembered. Their dad had told them more than once that they weren’t supposed to swim in the pond without permission or without an adult around.
Jake looked toward their older brother Bo, who was sitting against the trunk of a nearby tree reading a book about horses. Bo was sixteen. Their mom had made him come along to keep an eye on the rest of them.
Jake cleared his throat. When Bo lifted his head at the sound, Jake pointed in Ty’s direction. Ty had already started climbing the hill that curved around the side of the pond.
Bo rose in one smooth motion, his book dropping to the side. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going swimming.” Ty pulled off his T-shirt.
Bo started toward him. “No you’re not.”
Jake gave Lyndie a small smile. Tattling on Ty made having Ty for a brother a lot more fun.
Lyndie smiled at him in answer, her brown eyes dancing. A few pieces of long, white-blond hair blew in front of her face. She reached back, grabbed all of her wavy, windblown hair, and brought it over one shoulder. She wore a shirt with a faded picture of a dog on the front and jeans she’d cut off herself to make shorts. Both of her thin knees had Band-Aids on them.
“Ty!” Bo broke into a run. “Don’t you jump in.”
Ty yanked free his boots. “Of course I’m gonna jump in, Bo. Rolling in or crawling in would take too long.”
Bo didn’t have a chance of making it to Ty in time to stop him. Jake reached for Lyndie’s hand and led her carefully from the water.
Two seconds later, Ty did a running cannonball off the hill. He hit the surface with a loud ker-splash.
Bo groaned and stuck his hands on his hips.
Ty came up smiling and laughing. He whooped and used both hands to send water high into the air.
One edge of Lyndie’s lips tipped upward. “Now how am I supposed to learn to skip rocks?”
“You could go ahead and skip them right into his head,” Jake suggested.
Lyndie laughed.
The sound made Jake’s heart turn big and warm.
Bo and Ty started arguing about whether Ty should get out of the water now or later. Lyndie watched them with her arms crossed and Jake watched Lyndie.
He’d known her always. Their moms were best friends. Lyndie had a younger sister named Mollie with cerebral palsy and since Mollie couldn’t play with Lyndie, Lyndie spent a lot of time at their house playing with them. Playing with him was a better way to put it.
He’d heard Lyndie’s mom say that Lyndie trailed along behind the Porter boys. But Jake had never let her trail. He’d always stayed beside her. And he’d never minded.
He had friends at school his own age, but he didn’t feel the same way about them that he did about Lyndie. He was a normal kid, but Lyndie? Lyndie was more than that. She could draw amazing pictures. She loved animals even more than he did. She was the bravest girl in Holley, Texas. And she had a really good imagination. Almost every day, she talked him into going on made-up adventures with her.
She was his favorite person.
“Did you hear that, Jake?” She stilled and turned one ear up.
“What?”
She looked hard into the area beneath a group of trees. “It sounds like chirping. Like a . . . a little bird.”
Together, they moved toward the sound. Off to one side, a shrub shook, and beneath it, a black cat paused to watch them. It had something in its mouth. Before Jake could take a step in its direction, it dashed off like a streak of black chalk.
Lyndie followed the chirping and located a baby chick covered in fluffy gray and yellow feathers. A swipe of blood marked its chest.
“Oh no,” Lyndie whispered, kneeling beside it. “Hi, little one. Okay. Don’t be worried. Did the cat get your nest? Hi.”
Jake dropped onto his knees. The chick’s mother had made a ground nest of mud, grass, and sticks but the chick had spilled out of it onto the dirt. If the rest of the chick’s family had been here earlier, they were all gone now.
Lyndie and Jake lived outdoors more than they lived in. They both knew they ought to leave a baby bird alone. This baby looked weak and injured, though, and Jake already knew what Lyndie was going to want to do. For years the two of them had been able to communicate without words, like two halves of a circle.
“He’s hurt,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to pick him up and take him to the house. If I don’t, that cat will come back for him.”
“What are you going to do with him once you get him home?”
“Mollie will help him feel better.”
Jake didn’t see how.
“And then my mom will take him to the wildlife center,” she said.
“You think your mom will take another animal to the center?” This wasn’t even close to Lyndie’s first rescue.
“She will when she sees him.” She scooped the chick into her palm. “Oh, little guy. Don’t worry. I’ve got you.” Then she pulled up the bottom of her T-shirt and used it like a hammock to carry the chick. She ran toward the horses, her legs moving fast.
Lyndie had more ideas than anyone he’d ever met. Some of them were pretty close to crazy, but when she got an idea in her head, she also got real determined about that idea. He’d learned that arguing with her was a waste of time. Keeping his mouth shut and helping her however he could worked better.
“Hey!” Bo called to them before they’d mounted up. Jake and Lyndie waited for him to draw near. “I can’t leave yet, Jake. I have to stay with Ty until I can get him out of the water.”
Jake glanced at the pond. Ty was doing the backstroke.
“I found a baby chick,” Lyndie said. Because Bo was twice her size, she had to tilt her head way back to speak to him. “I need to take him to my sister and my mom.”
“You can’t go by yourself,” Bo answered.
Lyndie’s attention moved to Jake. He saw loyalty and confidence in her face. “Jake will go with me.”
“I’ll go with her,” Jake confirmed. Of course he would.
Bo eyed them.
Next to their dad, Jake respected Bo the most. Everyone said he and Bo were a lot alike, both of them calm and responsible.
“Please, Bo,” Lyndie said.
“Okay, fine. Take her straight back to the house and keep her safe. All right, Jake?”
“All right.”
Jake cupped his palms. Like they’d done a thousand times, Lyndie placed her foot in his hands and he lifted her onto her horse’s back. He swung into his own saddle and they set off at a trot. Lyndie held the hem of her shirt protectively in one hand.
When the trees cleared and pasture opened, Lyndie’s horse moved into a gallop. Jake increased his own horse’s speed, riding close behind her and slightly to the side.
Lyndie’s pale hair spread behind her like ribbons. Her face sharpened with concentration as she leaned forward over the mare’s back. Her bare feet balanced on the stirrups. He’d never seen anything else on earth like Lyndie riding a horse. She guided the animals with willpower more than with her legs and the reins.
His dad called Lyndie a natural and that’s exactly how she looked, like God had made her to ride horses, like she wasn’t afraid even though her horse was racing toward home as fast as it could go.
Jake never could believe it, how such a small girl could make a horse run so fast. It impressed him. It worried him, too.
Keep her safe, all right, Jake?
That was his job, to keep her safe. And that’s what he would do.
She was his favorite person.
The chick lived.
But shortly afterward, Lyndie’s family moved across the country and took her away from Texas, from the Porters, and from Jake. The Porters went on about their lives. All the Porters that is, except Jake, who missed Lyndie terribly.
Her departure from his life broke their circle of friendship into two pieces and left Jake with only half.
Lyndie would return one day.
And when she did, Jake would be the wounded one in need of rescue.

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