by Sarah Gailey
I don’t say anything else, and Paulie doesn’t wait for an end to my sentence. She walks ahead, shoulders pulled back in that perfect cheerleader posture. She moves like she knows I’ll follow.
And of course, I do.
11.
PAULIE DRIVES FAST AND BRAKES hard. I buckle in and spend most of the drive trying not to grab the dashboard. Every time she accelerates, her cheeks dimple with a held-back smile. She keeps the windows up and weaves in and out of traffic with even more precision than usual.
“Where are we going?” I ask. She said “for a drive” before, but she’s driving like someone with a destination in mind.
“Barclay Rock,” she says. I laugh.
“Are you trying to make time with me, Paulie?” I tease. She laughs too, and wiggles her eyebrows at me. God, it feels good to be laughing right now. It feels normal, and I realize I haven’t laughed like this since I killed Josh.
Barclay Rock is the premier make-out spot in town. It’s on the other side of the hill from the reservoir. When you’re up there, you can see clear to the horizon. It’s a pretty classic destination for anyone who’s hoping to get some action, but there are also some decent picnic spots if you don’t mind getting harassed by aggro squirrels with no fear of humans. Paulie slows down for the switchbacks that climb the hillside. I lean my head back against the seat and stretch my legs out, resting my feet on the dashboard.
“Are you gonna miss it?” I ask, thinking of the conversation I had with Roya at the reservoir.
“No,” she says flatly. I roll my head to the side to look at her. She’s got her I’m-fine face on—a careful kind of casual disregard that doesn’t suit her at all. I stare at her, waiting, until finally she rolls her eyes. “What is there to miss?” she asks. “It’s a small town with a lot of small people in it.”
“Do you think New York will be better?” I ask. I try not to feel the sting of “What is there to miss?” I know she doesn’t mean she won’t miss me, but it’s hard to tell that to the flinching feeling of dismissal that came in the wake of her words.
“Yes,” she says with absolute certainty. “Definitely.”
“You won’t be lonely?” I ask, completely failing to rise above the fear that she’ll forget about us. That she’ll forget about me.
She grabs my hand without looking, sliding her fingers between mine. She rubs her thumb over mine, and a wash of blue glitter passes over my arm, shining brightly before it fades. “I’ll miss you,” she says softly. “And all the girls, and the cheer squad. But I’m going to be so much more there than I am here, Lex. There’s going to be so much more room for me to be me, you know? The pressure will be off and I’ll have the space to figure out who I am when I’m not … here.”
I realize all at once what she means. “You mean away from your mom and dad?” I ask. She nods. Her mom and dad are great, but they smother her. A lot.
Here’s why: Paulie had a little brother who drowned when he was four and she was seven. I found out about him the first time I slept over at her house—I walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, and her mom was at the kitchen table with an open bottle of wine and a photo album.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, and she invited me to come sit at the table with her. I was fourteen and felt awkward every time I talked to my friends’ parents, but I sat, and Paulie’s mom showed me the pictures of Paulie and her little brother. Pictures of them in the tub together. Pictures of them playing. Pictures of them wearing matching outfits.
The next morning, I’d asked Paulie about it, and she’d shrugged. “She gets like that sometimes,” she said. “I think she was kind of like … made to be a mom to two kids? And now she only has one, and I’m not always enough for her to put all her mom-ness into.” I remember watching her brush her hair into a high, smooth ponytail. I wondered, at the time, what it must be like to have too much of a mom. After that, I took to asking Paulie’s mom for advice every now and then, letting her teach me things I already knew. Anything to give Paulie a break. Anything to give her mom an outlet.
“They love you a lot,” I say to Paulie as she parks the car. She shrugs.
“I know,” she says. “I love them too. But I want to be someone other than the kid that lived. I don’t care how awful it is.”
“It isn’t awful,” I tell her, and something taut in her face relaxes.
“Thanks,” she says. She slaps her hands on the steering wheel briskly, then unbuckles her seat belt and launches out of the car. Paulie has this way of rocketing from thing to thing—once she’s done with a conversation, it’s over, and there can be no lingering. I kind of love that about her. I’ve never had an awkward silence with Paulie.
By the time I’m out of the car, Paulie is rummaging around in the chaos of her trunk. It’s crammed with clothes and cheerleading stuff and water bottles and textbooks. She holds an arm out behind her, clutching a sweater I thought I’d lost months ago. I take it, and she returns to digging through the debris with both hands. She emerges from the trunk after a few more seconds, triumphantly holding a duffel bag aloft.
“Is that—” I start to ask.
“Yep,” she interrupts. She unzips the bag and pulls out Josh’s severed leg. It doesn’t look different from how legs usually look, although it’s covered in a surprisingly thick layer of blond hair. I wish I had something in my memory to connect it to Josh. I wish I could say I knew it was his leg because of the birthmark on the knee or the scar on the shin. But I wouldn’t know his leg from any other random dude’s leg out there.
I only know it’s his leg because Paulie has it in her trunk.
“Wait,” I say as she starts to zip the bag back up. “What about the arm?”
“She’ll only be able to take one,” Paulie answers, and I don’t ask. I just hold the leg as she puts the duffel back into the trunk. I’m holding it in both hands like a baseball bat. Or maybe more like a lacrosse stick. It’s warm in a way that makes me uncomfortable, but I rationalize that it’s probably just the heat of the trunk. They don’t smell. I wonder queasily if the summer heat has been cooking the leg and the arm.
“Hey,” Paulie says, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Anyone home?”
“Yeah, sorry, what’s up?” I say, and I realize that the trunk is closed and she’s probably been trying to get my attention for a minute or two.
“We gotta go before someone drives by and sees you holding a leg,” she says. “Come on.”
I follow her away from the car, away from the overlook. She leads me across the road and into the trees that sparsely cover this part of the hill. She’s wearing a dress with a long striped skirt, and her bare shoulders are already turning a little pink in the sun. She brushes her hands across them, and I see a spark of magic fly over her skin, and then the pink is gone.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Sunscreen,” she answers.
“When did you figure that one out?”
“Last night.”
I can’t help it. I laugh, delighted at the way she just discovers things. “Teach me how?”
She aims a grin at me. “You know it.”
Once we’re far enough from the road that we can’t hear cars, she finds a tree stump and sits down. She pats it and I squeeze in next to her.
She leans her head on my shoulder, her blond hair spilling across the front of my shirt. She holds her hands out in front of her like she’s pushing something away, and a net of blue erupts from her palms. The net flies out into the trees, taking a long time to fade from view.
This magic, I know. I know it because I taught it to her. I’ve tried to teach the other girls, but they never really got the hang of it the way Paulie did.
“Who ya callin’?” I ask, tilting my head to rest it on top of hers.
“A friend,” she answers.
“Anyone I know?”
“Yeah, probably,” she says. “If you don’t know her yet, you guys will get
along great, though.”
“Cool,” I say, and we wait in the quiet. I listen to the birds that stopped singing when we crashed into the trees—they’re slowly coming to accept that we’re here, and their conversations are starting up again.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says, and I can feel her jaw moving against my shoulder.
“Of course.”
“What were you doing with him?” Her eyelashes brush over my collarbone and I suppress a shiver.
“I think that’s a conversation you should have with a grown-up, Paulie,” I joke, and she jabs me in the ribs with a knuckle.
“You know what I mean. Why would you try to climb on top of Josh Harper? Of all the people in the whole world? Of all the people in the whole school? Hell, of all the people at that party?” She lifts her head from my shoulder and looks at me, her face uncharacteristically still. Why does she have her I’m-fine face on? “Why him?”
“I don’t know,” I say, picking bark off the edge of the stump. “It was stupid.”
She doesn’t let me get away with that, though. “You’re not a stupid person,” she presses. “You don’t do stupid shit like trying to lose your virginity to Josh Harper.”
I flinch. “I don’t really need you judging me right now,” I snap. “I get that I shouldn’t have done it, but I did, so just let it go, okay?”
Paulie stares at me. She pulls her hair up into a ponytail, then nods at me. “Okay,” she says. “If you want to talk about it, we can. I don’t mean to push it. I just want to know that you’re okay.” She’s looking into my face and I feel like there’s something I’m missing, something I don’t understand, but then I say that I’m okay and she nods and rests her head back on my shoulder, and whatever it is that I was missing will just have to stay missed.
“Sorry I was a bitch just now,” I murmur into her hair.
Paulie pats my thigh. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.”
I’m struck by the sentiment. “It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things,” I repeat, and Paulie taps her fingers on my knee in a pattern I don’t follow.
“Yeah,” she says. “I learned it from the therapist Mom and Dad took me to after Drew died. I kept apologizing for being mad or sad or whatever. She told me that it’s okay to have feelings, and that it’s okay to be upset at things like my brother dying. It helped a lot.”
We sit and listen to the trees and the birds and I think about it. I wonder why nobody’s ever told me that before: It’s okay to be upset at upsetting things.
I think about what it would have felt like to be a little kid and have Nico disappear.
I’ve talked about it with Roya before a couple of times—both of us have younger brothers, although Nico is closer to the age Drew would have been if he’d lived. I try to imagine letting myself be upset about something that enormous, and I can’t. I grab Paulie’s hand and send a thread of magic into it, the same way she did to me in the car. I can’t see the glitter, but she smiles, and I know it’s there, dark bright purple or whatever the hell Roya meant. She squeezes my hand and then clears her throat.
“So, while we’re out here—there’s something I’ve been kind of wanting to talk to you about,” she says. She’s turning my hand over in hers and looking at the lines of my palm.
“Are you going to tell my fortune?” I ask, and she smiles down at my fingers before biting her lip.
“Not exactly,” she says.
“Wait,” I say, staring into the trees. I could have sworn I saw a shadow—“There,” I whisper, pointing. Paulie looks up and follows the line of my finger with her eyes. The line of her neck is rigid.
“Say hi,” she whispers back to me without moving her lips.
“What?”
“Say. Hi,” she repeats through clenched teeth. “I called her, but I don’t know how to say hi to her.”
I look into the trees and see the shadow again. It’s completely silent, moving toward us in fits and starts. I say hi.
The shadow doesn’t move.
I tell it that it’s come to the right place; that we have something to share. I tell it that we’re not a threat, but that we’re not to be trifled with either. I tell it without words, using the language I’ve known my whole life without knowing how.
“Paulie,” I breathe as the shadow steps out from around a tree. “Is that a coyote?”
“Holy shit, yes,” Paulie whispers. “It worked. Oh my god, it worked.”
She’s smaller than I expected her to be. I guess in my head, I always thought coyotes were just brownish wolves, but she’s small and skinny. Her tail and head are low, and her hackles are raised. I repeat that we aren’t a threat, but she still walks toward us slowly, pausing every few steps to stare at us with suspicious golden eyes.
Paulie’s got a tight grip on my fingers. “Is she, uh, nice?”
“She’s a fucking coyote, Paulie,” I mutter.
“Right, but is she a nice coyote? Ask her if she’s a nice coyote.”
I grit my teeth, but … it’s not like I have any better ideas. I ask her if she’s a nice coyote, and she freezes. She lifts her head, cocks it to one side, and sits. Just like a dog. It’s so bizarre, because she’s not a dog, but everything in my brain is screaming DOG and I don’t know what to do.
I stare at the coyote. She stares at me.
“What’s wrong with her belly?” she asks, and I drag my eyes away from the coyote’s. Her belly is droopy, slack. Tented.
“She’s nursing,” I answer. “She’s got pups somewhere.” I raise my hand slowly and point to the leg. The coyote’s gaze follows the movement, but she just stares at my fingertip, uncomprehending. I tell her to look, and she glances between my eyes and my finger with an expression that clearly reads as What does it look like I’m doing?
I stand so slowly that my thighs tremble. She mirrors the movement. Paulie stays where she is, quiet enough that I think she’s probably holding her breath. I move forward, pausing with every step, until I’m standing over the leg on the ground. The blond hairs on Josh’s shin glint in the sunlight that filters through the trees. I point at the leg.
The coyote steps toward me so slowly that I almost don’t see her moving. It takes her at least a full minute to reach me. The top of her pointed ear comes up to my knee. I don’t move as she raises her head to look up at me, lifts her snout to smell my fingertip. One of her ears droops slightly in an expression I can’t read.
For you, I try to tell her. She cocks her head, and I hesitate for a few seconds before reaching out a shaking hand and resting it on top of her head.
The flood of communication is instantaneous, if garbled. Who what smell pups far meat who touch why?
I swallow and try again. Meat for you, I tell her. Meat for your pups. She shakes my hand off and takes a few steps away. I walk backward until my heels knock into the stump, then sit down and grab Paulie’s hand.
“Did it work?” she whispers. “Is it gonna work?”
Before I can say that I have no idea, the coyote ducks her head. She takes the leg in her jaws and drags it backward into the trees, and by the time I can think to say anything, she’s gone.
“Jesus,” I breathe. Paulie starts laughing, these huge gulping laughs, and I want to be furious at her for calling a coyote and expecting me to deal with it, but instead I start laughing too. We lean into each other and laugh way past when we should stop. We laugh the entire drive back to my place, and when I get out of the car and turn around to say goodbye, she leans across the front seat, reaches out the window, and presses her palm to the top of my head. She doesn’t say a word, but I say, “You too,” and I can hear her laughter streaming out the open windows of her car as she speeds away.
Later that night, I send her a text. Hey I just remembered you wanted to talk about something?
Nah, she replies. Then, a minute or two later: I honestly don’t even remember lol
It rings false, which is strange, beca
use Paulie is scrupulously honest. I want to follow up. But I get distracted, because Dad taps his knuckles on my bedroom door. I look up to see him and Pop filling the doorframe. They look grim.
“What’s up?” I ask, trying to ignore that gut-clench of dread that comes with knowing, somehow, that I’m in trouble. It’s probably nothing, I tell myself. They don’t know about Josh. They couldn’t possibly know about Josh.
But they’re looking at me like they know every awful thing I’ve ever done.
I’ve done some pretty awful things lately. Dad steps into the room and I know that this is going to be bad.
“Hey, bug,” he says, unsmiling. “We need to talk.”
12.
“GOOD DAY AT SCHOOL?” POP asks. The light from my desk lamp is reflecting off his head, but his eyes are shadowy under the stern line of his thick brows.
I clear my throat and set my phone down. “It was fine,” I say slowly.
“Anything interesting happen?” Pop says, and he’s definitely using his overly casual lawyer-voice on me. My stomach twists again.
“Not … really?” Careful, Alexis. Careful. This is torture, because we all know that they’ve got something to talk about, but I have to pretend like there’s nothing it could possibly be until they decide to drop the hammer. They stare at me with identically unreadable expressions. I clear my throat and raise my eyebrows. Get it over with.
“How was fifth period?” Dad asks.
Not what did you do to Josh. Not we know you buried his head in the woods. Not even what the hell is going on with Gina Tarlucci and why is she terrified of you. None of those things. No. It’s how was fifth period?
I’m dizzy with a sudden combination of relief and guilt. I want to laugh, and I also know that I should be feeling the dread that comes with getting caught cutting class, but it just feels so small. I can’t muster the contrition that I know they’re looking for.
“I didn’t go today,” I say. They look at each other, and I can’t tell if they’re surprised that I fessed up or satisfied that they got me to cop to skipping.