“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Mullins nodded. “Sam … if something ever put Hayley in danger, would you tell me? To protect her?”
Hayley had made it very clear I couldn’t tell anyone.
“Sure,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s anything. I really don’t.”
“Okay. Just … keep your eyes open, okay? I worry about you kids.”
“I will.”
“Okay, Sam. You can go change.”
I walked down to the faculty bathroom next to the counselors’ office—it had an actual locking door—and Mrs. Mullins had let me use that room to change every day after PE. I really loved her. She understood teenagers. She had a huge bowl of candy on her desk, but it was an open secret that she kept condoms in it. Real sex-education was frowned upon in Alabama, but she was looking out for kids, not her career.
Two hours later, I was sitting in English, texting back and forth with Hayley. She was sitting three rows behind me, but our English teacher, Mrs. Gottlieb, rarely bothered anyone with their phones out unless it was during a test. For the last week, we had been reading short autobiographical essays at the beginning of class, followed by a writing prompt. I rarely felt confident about anything in school, but I had enjoyed this unit a lot. I had written essays before, of course, but this was different. Somehow it was difficult to pin down exactly why, except that like when I played in Second Life, it was a chance to express myself. And I never got to express myself.
Hayley: did u hear back from ur mom?
Sam: she said she would call me l8r.
Mrs. Gottlieb began to write on the whiteboard in her spidery, barely legible cursive. Her message read: Select an important memory in your life. Write about what happened. Describe the smell, taste, sounds, texture.
Hands shot up across the room. Mrs. Gottlieb pointed to Ashley first. Naturally.
“How long does it have to be?”
“Length isn’t the point, Ashley. What matters is that you give a clear and vivid description. James?”
“Does it have to be real?”
Mrs. Gottlieb looked impatient. “I want you to write about something you remember, something that is important to you. It can be happy, it can be sad. It can be last week or last year or when you were three years old. Stretch yourselves. I want to feel why it’s important to you.” Several hands slowly dropped, and she picked one more person.
“What happens if we don’t finish in time?”
Mrs. Gottlieb rolled her eyes. “No more questions. I want you to take the first five minutes to pick a memory. Then I want you to start writing.”
She checked her watch. ”Begin. Put your phones away. I don’t want to see anything on your desk but paper and pencil.”
I dropped my phone in my backpack and took out several sheets of paper.
I tried to think of a significant memory. My mind immediately turned to Brenna’s birthday and her disappearance. I thought of the raw terror I’d felt when the police told us they had found her crushed phone.
No. I didn’t want to write about that. I reached further back. Birthdays. Fights between Mom and Dad. Brenna teaching me how to put on makeup. I sure couldn’t write about that. I sat there with my eyes closed, digging in my past.
A vision of Brenna laughing.
I remembered. I must have been eight or so, Brenna ten. Mom and Dad had taken us camping for three or four nights in the Shenandoah Mountains. It had to have been in the fall, because I remember the leaves, brilliant oranges and reds and yellows everywhere.
I took out my pencil and began to write. I started with a simple detail: the turtles. Mom and Dad had rented two canoes, and we spent a long and lazy afternoon floating down the river. The canoes occasionally scraped over gentle rapids and in and out of shoals and curves. At one point we had rounded a corner in the river and came into view of two trees that had fallen and were floating on the west side of the river, still barely attached to their stumps. Lined up in rows on both trees, heads and necks extended far out of their shells, were at least two dozen turtles sunning themselves.
Brenna had pointed, shouting, “Daddy, look!” Two dozen tiny heads turned slightly toward us, but the turtles stayed in position, apparently deciding that we weren’t a threat. Mom and Dad stopped paddling and let us drift for a few minutes, our canoes floating side by side. Mom leaned back, basking in the sunshine, then looked over at Dad and said, “This is heaven. I love you.”
Dad smiled. “It is pretty nice, isn’t it?” Then he paddled our boat right up next to Mom and Brenna’s. He leaned toward Mom. “I love you, babe.” I involuntarily let out a squeal as the boat tilted slightly, and Mom said, “Cole, you’ll tip the boat!”
“Just one kiss.”
Mom rolled her eyes and leaned toward him, then he leaned a little further, and then I let out a scream as our canoe capsized.
The water was a shock, but it wasn’t that cold, nor was it particularly deep. My feet touched the bottom and I kicked off, my life vest taking me back to the surface almost instantly. Dad reached out and pulled me toward him. He had a huge grin on his face, as he grabbed for the boat with his left hand while holding me with his right. Brenna was hysterically laughing and pointing. Mom tried to look annoyed then stern, but she couldn’t maintain the look: she cracked a smile.
Dad said, “Whoops.” That started Mom laughing.
I was half asleep when, a few hours later, Dad slowed the car to a halt on Skyline Drive. We were on our way back to the campsite.
“Oh my God.”
Something in Mom’s tone made my eyes pop open. Brenna said, “It’s a baby bear!”
Fifteen or twenty feet away, on the side of the road, a black ball of fluff was rolling on its back, paws extended in the air. It was a baby black bear.
“Can I pet it?” I asked.
“No way!” Brenna shouted.
“No, Sam. Mama bear is around here somewhere, and she won’t let anybody touch her baby. This is as close as we can get, and we stay in the car.”
I think I pouted for just a minute. But then I stopped. Because a massive rumbling in the bushes beside the road signaled something coming, and the next thing I saw was a full-size adult bear wandering into the road. She pushed the baby along with her snout, and the baby sprawled, then ran ahead, off the road. The baby bear wrapped its paws around a tree and scooted right up the trunk. Then the mama bear followed.
“Holy cow,” Dad said. He put his arm up, resting his hand on Mom’s shoulder. She looked at him and smiled, and they leaned toward each other and kissed.
“Ewwww!” Brenna screamed.
“Gross!” I yelled.
Dad laughed maniacally and said, “I’ll show you gross!” Then he kissed her again.
A car behind us honked, and Dad broke away, and Mom giggled a little as we began driving up Skyline Drive again.
Concentrating on the smell of the fall woods, the feel of the water, the sounds of the bear rustling in the trees, I wrote my essay for class. And I remembered. And I wondered. Could Mom find Brenna? And if so, could she bring her home? For a second, I imagined Mom was like that bear we saw all those years ago: cute, but dangerous as hell. At least that’s what I hoped for. Because I wanted my sister back.
I wanted my family back.
Sam
The text message from Mom was stark: I have some leads I’m working on, but we don’t know anything for sure yet except that she was here. I promise I’ll keep you updated. Call me before bed?
I immediately texted back: I will.
Mom: School going okay?
Me: boring
Mom: Can’t you come up with something more expressive than boring?
Me: it was soul crushing.
Mom: That made me smile. Love you
I was so wrapped up in texting Mom, I had forgotten my surroundings on the school bus. Normally that could be hazardous, but as I looked up from my phone I breathed a sigh of relief. No one seemed to be paying any attention. I had spe
nt the day alternately ecstatic about Brenna and terrified about my run-in yesterday with Ashley and Cody. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I knew bullies well enough to know that at some point, today or tomorrow, next week or next year, Cody and Ashley would get their revenge. My guess from my encounters with him so far was that Cody had a short attention span and primarily only went after targets of opportunity. Ashley, however … she would keep him focused on target as long as it took. I needed to watch my back.
Whatever. I couldn’t spend my entire life freaking out about when and how I was going to have to deal with bullies.
I picked up my phone and opened Snapchat, bared my teeth in a growl, then took a quick selfie. I sent it to Hayley with the caption: mall tomorrow?
A response came immediately, a photo of her, smiling, with her smile stretched and exaggerated. I laughed.
It was a couple of minutes later that the giggling at the front of the bus began to get louder. Three of the girls were laughing and looking back toward the back of the bus. I sat about halfway back. Were they looking at me? I felt heat on my face. Across the aisle from the girls, two boys suddenly burst out laughing. They were all looking down … laughing at something on their phones. Whatever the joke was, I wasn’t included. The laughter spread to the back of the bus, and the driver shouted, “Pipe down! Or some of y’all will be walking home.”
I looked down at the floor then fiddled with my phone so I could at least look busy. But then Billy, sitting next to me, burst into laughter. He doubled over, then looked at me and back to his phone, laughing even harder.
What the hell? “What is it?” My voice came out in a croak.
Billy just shook his head, murmured a muffled, “Oh my God,” then started laughing hysterically. I twisted over to get a look at his phone and froze. Then I reached out and grabbed it, stunned.
“Let go, freak!”
I didn’t listen. I stared at the phone in shock. It was a picture. My face, a little blurred but clearly me. I was red-faced, with hair in my eyes. It must have been taken by somebody when I was running with Mrs. Mullins. Someone had crudely Photoshopped my face onto a pornographic picture of a naked woman who was being held down on a desk with no clothes on. A muscular man with extremely dark brown skin and a large penis was fucking the girl from behind. Mrs. Mullins’ face, a black and white yearbook photo, had been Photoshopped in place of the man’s face.
I barely heard Billy shout, “Let go of my fucking phone!” I felt a twisting in my stomach as nausea swept over me. But then he grabbed the phone out of my hands and stood over me and began throwing punches.
The first connected with my nose, knocking my head back against the glass with a loud crack. The second hit was in the eye, and my vision went white. I threw my arms up in front of my face as he continued to wildly throw punches.
The bus jerked to a stop, and a moment later Billy was pulled off of me. I stared up in shock, feeling hot wet liquid running down my face.
“What the hell got into you, Billy?”
“Freak tried to steal my phone, sir! He wouldn’t give it back!”
The driver whirled on me. “Is this true, boy? You stealing on my bus?”
I shook my head rapidly, unable to speak.
The driver gave an expression of disgust. “Billy, get to the back of the bus and keep your hands to yourself. And you, boy, you ever try something like that on my bus again and you’ll be walking the rest of the year.”
Nobody said a word. I rode the rest of the bus ride home in silence, holding my face in an effort to stop the bleeding from my nose.
Eighteen
Cole
My alarm went off at five p.m., waking me from what had been a sadly short nap. When I came home Sam had been in his room doing homework. I’d knocked, told him I was going to take a nap, then stumbled into the bedroom where I collapsed onto our uncomfortable discount mattress we’d bought at Big Lots when we first moved to Alabama.
I yawned. Naps rarely left me feeling refreshed, but I was so consistently short on sleep that I sometimes needed them just to function. I sat up, then got up from the bed. I hated having a mattress on the floor. It reminded me of summers in the North Georgia mountains when I was a kid. It reminded me of being poor.
I hadn’t bothered to change out of my uniform when I got home, because I had to go back in for shift change. Three nights a week, go in for shift change. Work six days a week. Sleep every once in a while. Last night third shift had called (at two in the morning) because they couldn’t figure out where the damned to-go cups were, and apparently their eyes weren’t functioning enough to spot them in the place where I put them every single day.
Sitting here and bitching to myself wasn’t going to do me any good.
I got up and walked down the wood paneled hallway. All it needed was orange carpet to finish the look of 1970s working-class near poverty. As I walked into the kitchen I reminded myself to call the landlord again tomorrow to complain about the broken front window and the rotting wood on the front porch. We had rented this house sight unseen before moving from Virginia, and the photographs shown by the management company had artfully concealed those shortcomings. Not that we could afford much better. But still.
I knocked on Sam’s door as I passed.
“Yeah?” Sam’s tone of voice was annoyed. When did teenagers become so antisocial? Was it just built into their DNA that when they turned fourteen they became unfit to live around other human beings?
“I’m going to make dinner, you’ll have to come out of your cave soon.”
“Okay.” For a second I put my hand on the doorknob and thought about pushing Sam to open the door. No … I would give him a few more minutes. Then we could have dinner, clean up together, and maybe I could persuade him to play a game of chess before I headed off to work.
I sighed when I entered the kitchen. My coffee cup from this morning. Sam’s plate from last night, three pieces of pizza crust still on it. Sam never ate the crust. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes, all were piled in the kitchen sink. In the middle of the floor was a bottle of Mr. Clean, a scrub brush, and a towel. Half the floor had been scrubbed clean, and the other half still had a slight layer of grime.
I smiled slightly as I picked up the cleaning supplies from the middle of the floor. That explained why Erin had smelled vaguely of citrus as we drove to the airport last night. She’d been scrubbing the kitchen. Not that I wanted to see her on her hands and knees scrubbing anything, but it was good that she was doing something. She’d been so hideously depressed, and truth be told, so had I. I felt almost as if a cloud had been lifted by Jeremiah’s words last night, a cloud of despair.
I quickly washed the dishes, scrubbing the rings of coffee at the base of yesterday’s mugs. Then I filled up the pot with water and began preparing dinner.
Every day we were in Oxford, I was vaguely reminded of my years growing up. Not because of the landscape—Oxford was largely flat—but because of the poverty. The gun stores and pawn shops and title pawn and check-cashing places; the liquor stores and beat-up pickup trucks took me back to summers in North Georgia. With the exception of his year-long deployment in Lebanon, Dad spent most of my childhood at sea six months out of the year. Whenever his deployments carried into the summer, Mama would pack me off to his relatives in Banks County deep in the back woods.
Daddy’s family owned a five-acre plot of mostly woods at the end of a three-mile-long dirt road with ruts deeper than drainage ditches. Grandma lived in a rounded steel single-wide marked with large swaths of rust and peeling paint. I had often been reluctant to go over to her place. Aside from the six chihuahuas she kept fenced in the kitchen causing the entire place to reek of urine and shit, she also hoarded everything from newspapers to tin cans, all of it in stacks and piled to the ceilings in the tiny rooms.
Daddy’s brother-in-law Big Bill lived in the double-wide next door with his wife (Dad’s sister) Donna. Big Bill didn’t do much. Like his deceased father-in-la
w, his primary contribution to the economy was the purchase of Budweiser and moonshine. Somewhere along the years he had built a rickety front porch attached to the double-wide, and most summer days he could be found on that porch lounging in a metal-framed lounge chair, shirt off, a beer resting on his rounded belly. Bill was prone to using his fists on people too small to defend themselves, like his wife and son. I remember him lecturing about being “in the big house.” Lucas followed in his footsteps and was in prison much of his adulthood. Sadly, I ended up using a lot of Big Bill’s lessons when I went to prison.
I never knew if Mama realized what her brother-in-law’s behavior was like when left alone. In polite company he generally behaved well enough, and Donna certainly wasn’t going to say anything to anyone. I still vividly remember one summer night when I was twelve years old, Big Bill burst into the trailer, raging and so drunk he was stumbling.
The second he came through the front door, Donna realized how things were. She screamed, “Run!” at Lucas. We didn’t hesitate. Both of us ran for the back door even as Big Bill yelled, “I’ll kill you, you little shit!” as he lunged at Lucas. We made it out the door and scrambled between the cinderblocks underneath the double-wide. For the next twenty minutes or maybe it was twenty hours, we heard Donna screaming. Lucas covered his ears and buried his face in the dirt, sobbing. I lay on my back, looking off into the darkness, swearing that I would never live like my family.
Three years later, I was fifteen when Lucas got his driver’s license. That summer, Daddy was in the Persian Gulf again, and a week after school got out I was on a Greyhound bus bound for Georgia. Usually Donna picked me up at the bus station, but that summer it was Lucas, sitting behind the wheel of an ancient Ford pickup. I grinned when I got in.
“You got your own truck?” I scanned the interior, with ripped upholstery and an obviously broken eight-track player.
“Hell, yeah,” he replied. “Got it for just five hundred dollars. Still needs work, but it runs.”
“Awesome.”
“You getting a car when you turn sixteen?”
“Not unless I can find a job. Daddy sure as shit ain’t gonna pay for it.”
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