The Female of the Species

by Mindy McGinnis

  I didn’t understand then, but I do now. Anna never forgave him for leaving, for the absence that the checks—bigger every month once he owned his company—didn’t fill. But I know it was the better alternative, just like I know why he cried that day he found me in the garage.

  There are parts of yourself that you hate; parts that you know other people wouldn’t understand. And he knew his own worst elements had been passed on to me, this unwieldy wrath that burns through my brain, turning reason into ash. So I can’t be angry with him for leaving when I understand too well the reason. If he’d stayed, he would’ve killed our mother, eventually. Maybe when we were kids, maybe when we were older, maybe once we had left. But either way, it was a foregone conclusion. We could either have a mother and money coming in, or we could have a cold grave and a father in jail.

  And while I know he made the right decision for Anna, I don’t know about me. I want to tell him all these things that I have done. Whether he would be disgusted or proud, I do not know. But at least I would have someone to tell, someone who knows me.

  It’s the deepest part of who I am, a fundamental part of myself that has been shared with no one, the essence of who I am, the core of understanding me—and I’m the only one who knows.

  If Mom has guessed, she is neither proud nor disgusted. With Anna gone we listen for footfalls, each of us avoiding the other with an intense concentration. Occasionally we cross paths by accident, our bubbles of personal space like a Venn diagram, becoming darker where they overlap.

  Dad left.

  Anna is gone.

  I have never been here.

  22. PEEKAY

  When Alex walks into the church with me it gets still so fast it’s like there’s been a trachea rapture.

  This is not a quiet kind of church, so the little bubble of silence that surrounds us gains notice as it expands. It turns heads, exposing faces that still at the sight of Alex Craft. Here. In the old church in the woods.

  I hadn’t even thought about it when I brought her with me. Alex is within shouting distance of her sister’s last resting place . . . all of them. Alex isn’t Anna’s little sister to me anymore; she’s Alex, my friend. So when she came over and I told her we were going to a party, it never occurred to me I was also dragging her back to the woods where her sister died.

  Sara shoves a beer into my hand, the cold glass clinking against one of my rings. “Good to see you in church, Preacher’s Kid,” she says, her breath sugar-laced, lips tinged red with her own drink.

  “Cheers,” I say, clinking my bottle against hers.

  I step over a piece of the roof that has collapsed since the last party. The conversation starts up again, the anomaly of Alex’s presence fading fast while everyone chases their own goals for the night, whether it’s at the bottom of a bottle or in someone else’s pants. Alex follows me, her eyes combing the crowd of our classmates as I do the same.

  It’s already dark, but someone was thinking ahead tonight. Everyone has to raise their voices to be heard over the hum of a generator, loud and persistent, lighting the strings of lights thrown around the walls and feeding the space heaters. There are fires too, made in the places where the stone floor has been torn up, exposing the black earth underneath. The whole place smells like fire and ash, sweat and vomit, rain and rot.

  We love it.

  I bet our parents loved it too, when they were our age. Once some of us made a game of trying to find them in the graffiti, names and dates mixed in an obscene smear, a town history more colorful and honest than the stories on paper. I found my mom, her name paired with Park’s father, and then I stopped looking. I knew my dad didn’t write on the walls of any church, collapsed and broken or not. But I don’t doubt that he came here.

  Sometimes after I’ve had a few beers I think about their parents—our grandparents—and then back further, to people who loved this place for a different reason. People who pulled rocks out of the ground to make the walls, cutting timber for a roof that has now rotted mostly away. The supports still in place are stained black from ashes of the generations that followed, our hands hard at work to tear it back down.

  There are only five pews left, the rest cut up for fire over the years. Those that remain are high-value real estate, the only place to sit before you find somebody to sneak into the woods with. Branley has set up court at one, her eyes already artificially bright, her voice loud and brassy while Adam sprawls next to her, one arm thrown possessively around her shoulders. I flinch at the sight and look away to find Jack Fisher coming toward us, a beer in each hand, happier to see me than he’s ever been in his life.

  But he walks right past me, gives a bottle to Alex and takes her other hand, leading her over to a pile of rubble where the less fortunate sit once the real seats are taken. I take another swig of beer and my eyes slide back over to Adam. He’s looking at me. I jerk away, following Alex and Jack. I perch next to her on a rock, trying to find a spot to put my ass so that I’m not in pain.

  “I bought a phone,” Alex says to Jack. Her words come out smoothly, her voice more accustomed to use from hours of us talking at the shelter, sentences shared over dog shampoos, punctuated by the snip of the nail clipper.

  “Here’s my number,” she adds, with a note of confidence she wouldn’t learn even in years of conversation with me.

  Jack snatches the piece of paper she hands him like he’s afraid it’ll evaporate, punching the numbers in. He raises his phone to snap a pic of her, then puts it back down, cautious.

  “Is it okay if I take your picture?”

  She smiles hesitantly, but her arm goes around my shoulders, barely resting on my skin. I lean in, surprised at the contact, and what’s left of my beer sloshes onto my pants. “Shit,” I say, just as Jack takes the pic.

  “Oh, nice,” he says, laughing a little as he turns the screen toward us.

  I’m staring at my lap, my lips pursed right on the i in shit, mild annoyance stamped on my features like my own crotch offended me somehow. Alex’s arm dangles awkwardly near my neck, as if she’s not quite sure how to touch someone. She’s not smiling, just looking into the camera with the dead stare that makes feral cats reconsider their choices.

  “God,” I mutter. “Redo.”

  Jack shakes his head. “It’s perfect.” He stands to put his phone in his back pocket and leans toward both of us, his breath heavy with beer in a way that makes me feel relaxed instead of repulsed.

  “Park and I tried to chase off a couple of tweakers when we brought in the generator,” he says, head jerking toward a dark corner where there’s a circle of guys I don’t know. “Just be aware of them.”

  “I am,” Alex said.

  They’re older than us, their features vaguely familiar, like they’re either somebody’s brothers or graduated when we were still puckering our faces at the taste of alcohol. One of them is good-looking in a grungy way, lanky blond hair back in a ponytail, dark circles under his eyes that could be makeup, could be something else. The gauge in one of his ears is connected to his nose ring with a chain. He catches me looking and tips me a wink. I glance back down at my bottle.

  “I’m empty.”

  “Here.” Alex switches out our bottles, hers heavy and cold, mine light and warm from my grip.

  “I’ll get you another one,” Jack says.

  “No,” she says simply, eyes still on the tweakers.

  “I’ll get rid of the empty, then,” he says, but she shakes her head.

  “No.”

  “I’ll go get myself another one, come up with a different line of conversation, then come back and sit next to you,” he says, leaning toward her a little too much, taking up more of her personal space than she usually allows.

  But she’s smiling when she says, “I would like that.”

  He brings out the million-watt smile that’s separated more than a few asses in this room from their panties, but it looks genuine and sweet, like a little kid who found out he’s getting exactly what
he wanted for Christmas.

  “Okay, be right back,” he says. “Don’t move.”

  Alex flaps her arms maniacally in response and he busts out laughing, the sound carrying as he heads to the altar, where there’s a collection of coolers and a keg.

  “Um, hey, friend,” I say, nudging her knee with mine. “Part of this whole friendship gig is that you tell me when you like a guy.”

  Her mouth curls a little bit in a half smile. “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, it’s totally a thing,” I say, slinging back what turns out is—somehow—the last swallow of the beer Alex gave me. “I need another.”

  “So who do you like, friend?” she asks, ignoring my request.

  “Adam,” I say automatically, followed by, “Fuck.”

  “Why?”

  I look at the collection of glass scattered near the bases of the walls, some remnants of long-broken stained-glass windows, most the dull browns and greens of accumulated beer bottles. Even the sharp edges are deceptively beautiful in the flickering firelight and the weak glow of the naked bulbs hooked to the generator. The sea of colors is punctuated by flattened shotgun shells from the hunters who hole up here during deer season, and I spot—for the first time—empty hypodermic needles among them.

  “I don’t know,” I finally answer, bringing my bottle back to my lips even though there’s nothing in it. “Force of habit, maybe.”

  Alex takes the empty from me, carefully balancing it on a slanted rock between my knees. “Remind me,” she says. “Which one is he?”

  I sigh and rub my eyes. In the past few weeks I’ve grown accustomed to Alex’s ignorance of the names of the people we’ve grown up with, so now that I’m forcing her out into society she’s getting a crash course. But right now my brain is slowing down, my tongue growing heavy. Jack hasn’t made it back from the keg yet, his T-shirt snagged on Branley’s fingernails, sharp as blackberry thorns. She’s left Adam behind, and we look at each other across the sputtering fires, his features smeared in the heat shimmer.

  And I don’t have the words to identify him anymore. If he’s not my boyfriend, then I don’t know how to differentiate him from the others.

  “He’s there,” I say, pointing at him.

  “Oh, him,” she says, clearly unimpressed. “I don’t understand.”

  She squints at Adam, as if somehow my attraction will make more sense if he’s viewed through a fuzzy lens. And I don’t even know if I’m into him anymore, so it’s not like I can rant about how hot he is or how his eyes make me melt. Because they did back in seventh grade, but that was a hell of a long time ago. I’ve gotten so used to thinking of Adam as my boyfriend that his name and face kick in good memories and I’m salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs even when there’s no food on the way. So maybe that’s all I want anymore, the memories and not actually Adam. The explanation makes sense in my head but I’m a few drinks deep and don’t trust my mouth to make sense of it.

  Alex watches Adam watching Branley, who watches Jack, who only has eyes for Alex, and I think if there were lines connecting us all it would be a tangled mess. Jack disengages from Branley, who sulks back to Adam like he’s the consolation prize. A couple of sophomores try to escape into the privacy of the woods without anyone noticing, but the tweakers call them out on it.

  “Hey, man,” the shortest one yells. “Don’t let Comstock get her.”

  “Long as you get her first,” the blond says, sticking his fist out for a bump, which the sophomore returns even though the girl gives him a dirty glare. They slide into the shadows, but not before she shoots a furtive glance at Alex, wondering if she heard.

  “Sorry about that,” Jack says quietly as he joins us, and I don’t know if he’s talking about the fact that it took him so long to get back, or that someone casually dropped the name of Anna’s killer as if he were nothing more than an urban legend. Nothing more than a scary bedtime story to keep girls out of the woods, their pants above their ankles.

  He may just be a cheaply bandied-about name now, a capitalized word that makes us shift uncomfortably and drop our voices, but he was a real person only a few years ago. A real person who kept duct tape and a hammer in the trunk of his car, waiting for the right moment. A real person who spread legs and spilled blood.

  That blood flows in the veins of the person whose knee is touching mine, and as I finish off the bottle Jack brought me I wonder if she can smell the blood-saturated dirt, or hear her sister’s screams still echoing off of trees.

  That’s when I realize exactly how drunk I am.

  Lately I can’t eat much. My throat doesn’t want to do anything other than say Adam’s name and my stomach only wishes to digest him. I might as well have popped an IV in my arm and hooked up to the keg as soon as I got here. There’s no food in my stomach and the alcohol is passing straight through its lining into my blood, soaring through my body to infect my brain, my heart, my organs.

  Everyone around me is talking but my mouth doesn’t want to participate by doing anything other than wrapping itself around a beer bottle. I want to ask Jack if he’ll get me another one but he’s entirely lost in Alex, his eyes drinking her up like she’s the keg and he’s an alcoholic. I know I’m going to have to concentrate in order to stand up and I take a moment to identify the best way to do it, which foot to move first and what rocks to brace my hands against in order to get vertical.

  I make it happen, and I’m on a path for the keg when Branley beats me to it, shoulders bare even though it’s nearly snowing. She’s coated in a sheen of sweat from sitting so close to the fire, her blond curls losing some of their bounce. One of the guys who has taken up a post at the altar tells her she looks like she needs to cool off, and sprays her down with beer.

  She shrieks, her white tank top plastered to her chest. Beer is dripping off her and she stamps her foot, sending everything that will shake into a jiggle.

  “Holy shit, dude,” one of the guys says, staring. “That was . . . not cool.”

  “Yeah, not cool, man,” another agrees, but they all might as well have their hands down their pants.

  “Adam!” Branley yells, and he’s on his feet to come to her rescue, her jacket in his hand.

  I change my course, in no hurry to be near a wet, pissed-off, nearly naked Branley and my loyal—to her, anyway—ex-boyfriend.

  I’ve got an empty bottle in my hand and no one to give it to. Despite the fact that a bum could come out to the church and make a fortune in recycling, I’ve never had the nerve to just throw mine in a corner. I drove around with bottles rolling in my backseat for a week once because I couldn’t bear to litter.

  Sara’s deep in conversation with some of the other basketball players, something about how the ref lost them their last game. Everyone has settled down into groups for the night, people cuddled around fires they made, or curling up with each other in sleeping bags. I can’t even go out into the woods for fresh air and privacy because there are more people out there than in here by now. And they don’t want company.

  Somebody is taking the bottle from me, and I just stare at his hand for a second. Big knuckles with drying skin, a broad silver band on the middle finger.

  “Need a fresh?” he says and my eyes slowly find their way to his face.

  It’s the blond tweaker. The chain on his face accents his sharp nose, the hollows of his eyes dark in the flickering firelight. This close his skin has the unmistakable rough quality of a long-time user, pocked yet oddly clear. But his eyes are arrestingly blue, and as I look into them recognition dawns.

  “You’re Ray Parsons,” I say. “We were in study hall together my freshman year, third period, cafeteria.”

  He smiles, the chain resting lightly on his cheek when he does. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I go on, the details coming out with such clarity it’s obvious I kind of had a thing for him then. “You sat at the corner table. I’m Peekay. I sat over by the water fountain. You were a senior. You didn’t notice me.”


  “I’m noticing you now, Peekay,” he says, dragging his eyes over my body and not even trying to hide it.

  I know I look good tonight. I’m not Branley and I never will be. I’m not even Sara, with her athletic build, or Alex, with her green eyes and freckles. But I am small and cute, with a decent rack that I know how to accentuate. I put on a push-up bra tonight, opened my top two buttons, and zipped my down coat right up to the bottom of my cleavage. My tits couldn’t be more on display.

  And Ray Parsons is definitely window shopping.

  I feel a little rush in my stomach. A wave of motion that pushes my heart into my throat and makes my pulse skip. I haven’t felt that for anyone but Adam in a long time. Ray Parsons had my attention when I was a freshman. Basketball player, casual smoker, and the guy most likely to pull the fire alarm. He had an edge to him then that might have sliced some of the softer bits away in the past few years, but he’s still Ray Parsons and I’m so very alone right now that I don’t argue when he hooks a finger through my belt loop and takes me over to his friends.

  “Guys, this is Peekay,” he says.

  They all give me an up-nod and one asks what the hell kind of name is that.

  “Nickname for Preacher’s Kid,” I answer as Ray throws my bottle over his shoulder and heads to the altar.

  “Oh yeah?” They’re suddenly more interested, eyes going over me like Ray’s did now that he’s not here anymore.

  “You a virgin?” one of them asks.

  “Really?” another says. “You gonna ask her that?”

  “Yep,” I say, not caring.

  There’s a plastic cup in my hand now and Ray’s finger is back in my belt loop, his thumb rubbing up under my coat to press against skin.