Cinderland

by Amy Jo Burns

  For the seven;

  and for all the others, too.

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART I: SPOTLIGHT

  Prisoner’s Dilemma

  Hide and Seek

  Emerge

  Figurante

  Denouement

  Breaking and Entering

  Torch

  PART II: SIMON SAYS

  Sober

  Vanity Fair

  Audition

  Understudy

  Mirror, Mirror

  PART III: ALL THE PRETTIEST GIRLS

  Impostor

  Paper Doll

  Origin Story

  Cinderland

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  BY THE TIME THE POLICE entered our houses uninvited throughout the fall of 1991, our mothers had already commanded each of us to tell the truth about Howard Lotte, and we’d already decided to lie. It was too impossible for anyone to conceive, even those of us who had sat with Mr. Lotte and his feckless hands through seasons of weeknight piano lessons, that such a man could commit something so unholy, even if he was a little bit fat. Everyone in Mercury knew which girls had already snitched. We saw what it had cost them. The best hope for the rest of us, we thought then, was to remain anonymous until winter arrived and all the talk turned to idle chatter before it disappeared altogether.

  But the gossip about Mr. Lotte would not be squelched, and so the police launched a formal investigation to put the rumors to rest. Making a uniform circuit around town, the squad stopped at the homes of each of Mr. Lotte’s peach-faced, preteen protégés. Some of the homes were split level and some were Victorian, but none of them were trailers. Mr. Lotte didn’t seem to take on those kinds of girls. Anyone who was anyone took lessons from Mr. Lotte—if you were female, of course.

  When each of our turns came to be questioned, the lies spilled out so easily we suspected they’d been planted long ago. There were few girls—seven, to be exact—bold enough to tell the truth, but their soft-voiced protests were almost drowned out by those of us unable to defy a town rallying behind one of its own. Though we were just ten, eleven, twelve years old, it became quite clear that men like Mr. Lotte secured a kind of protection that girls like us never could.

  The police supplied the questions, and we offered the answers we thought they wanted to hear. Like a swooping she-owl, our voices raised into an echoing chorus as mothers drew the shades for the night and the distant five o’clock bell signaled a shift change at the mill.

  Did he put his hands on you?

  No, Officer. No, he didn’t. No no no no no.

  The sound found its way to the woods by the edge of the school yard where an old basketball hoop had been torn from the ground and laid prone some time ago, the same spot where lovesick boys dared to press their burning palms against a girl’s. Then the sound moved toward the courthouse at the center of town where Mr. Lotte wouldn’t get the opportunity to appear before a jury of his peers. Our voices only weakened once they reached Mercury’s city limits, where the highway cut us off from the rest of the world.

  Now the town itself haunts us more than Mr. Lotte, even more than our own lies. It seems a story like this couldn’t happen anywhere but Mercury, a place that had become its own needy planet, a town we loved for its empty houses, abandoned buildings, and vacant lots. The people of Mercury liked their trucks, their Iron City beer, and the stench of burning leaves. They knew how to work with their hands—how to sew a quilt, how to fix a carburetor, how to patch a roof. They knew how to wait out a tough winter.

  Together we all lived in the afterlife of a city that was once a titan. A very long time ago, Andrew Carnegie evangelized the steel gospel. He followed a simple formula: Contain the coal. Set it on fire. Strip away the impurities. Dispose of the slag.

  This was how a legion of unstoppable steel rods was sired. But then came the Steel Apocalypse, and Pittsburgh’s satellite cities didn’t all become ghost towns only because many people had no choice but to stay. Instead, the loss of our lifeblood slowed everything to a pace that was barely detectable, and the era of waking sleep began.

  Workers who used to pull twelve-hour shifts in the mill at Cooper Bessemer Steel in the next town over now had nowhere to go. The roads once clogged with commuters became open highways. Mostly, people just sat. And the children, of whom we were some, watched. We remember now how people around town used to float through the amniotic air. Pumping gas. Ordering pizza. Waiting in line at the drive-through ATM. Pushing the shopping cart through the dog food aisle at Rip’s Sunrise Market. Taking long pauses in the middle of sentences. Not bothering to finish them. They used to think nothing could surprise them any more until Mr. Lotte proved them wrong. He proved us all wrong.

  Who are we? We are the girls who lied about Mr. Lotte when others told the truth and most of Mercury hated them for it. We performed for a fickle crowd and lost ourselves in the charade. From the moment we chose to protect a criminal, we also chose to forget everything that had happened. It was our best chance for survival. Even so, our lives were never the same. Our town was never the same.

  Our memories threaten to make a scandal of us, so we keep them to ourselves. We still remain in disguise (even from each other), but there’s one thing we know. Our Sunday school teachers had always taught us that an honest answer was like a kiss on the lips, and we were not the kissing kind.

  PART I

  Spotlight

  Prisoner’s Dilemma

  THE SUMMER I TURNED FOURTEEN, I got caught looking for love on Whore Hill.

  It had been four years since the start of Mr. Lotte’s investigation, three years since I made myself forget it ever happened, and over ten years since the steel industry fell and broke everyone’s hearts. In a town full of highways and unemployed mill workers, there was only one way to get out. The kids on the hill saw each other as escape routes, and so the games between us began.

  It was the summer of 1995, and it turned out to be the summer of rain. Throughout the month of June, the worst hurricane season in decades slammed the Atlantic Coast with water, the constant downpours a complement to the postindustrial sobriety that had washed over western Pennsylvania. Would-be days of sun and chlorine were supplanted by sluggish hours spent counting the seconds that split lightning from thunder.

  The glut of dreary June days sequestered the kids around town to their bedrooms, and collective lethargy set in. Like a propagating yawn, we were suckers for herd behavior. If one member of the herd bolted, we all bolted. If one member stopped to take a piss, we all pissed. Our silent pact was simple:

  I. Ain’t. Doin.’ Nothin’.

  As the rain fell, securing a backlog of paying work for my father’s small roofing business, the neighborhood kids couldn’t be bothered to leave their own houses. It was as if we’d settled into the crease of a communal couch and couldn’t summon the energy to get up. The pervasion of sloth limited most of our conversations that summer to some derivative of the following:

  “Hey,” one of us would say.

  “Hey,” the other would answer.

  “What are you doing later?”

  “Eh. I ain’t doin’ nothin’. You?”

  “Ain’t doin’ nothin’.”

  “Ain’t ain’t a word, dumb ass.”

  When the hurricanes tapered in late June, we reemerged, slovenly and pale, and swarmed the public pool in Silver Pulley Park. All the regulars (or the “pool rats,” as we were known) came out for the first swimmable day of the summer. I felt damp grass on my feet as the fellow members of my brood and I staked out the highest point of land by the steel fence, a territory the lifeguards had coined “Whore Hill.” A congress of available girls was always in session, though never without a gaggle of boys in t
ow. Girls in Mercury struggled to befriend each other, except as accomplices in crimes of love. Two binary maxims had been woven into our collective moral fiber: boys would be boys, and girls would be trouble.

  We’d grown up learning that the steel industry was our town’s long-dead lover, and we sat in the soot of what had once been a fiery affair. On a map, a cross marked the spot where Route 17, running north to south, impaled Route 44, stretching east to west. This was Mercury: an intersection, a meeting place standing halfway between Pittsburgh and Erie. There was iron in the water, coal in the ground. You could hold your breath and drive all the way through town without needing to exhale. At night, the courthouse clock tower in the town square gleamed like a lonely jewel in a rusted crown. On Mercury’s outskirts, Whore Hill overlooked the pool, the parking lot, and the metal jungle gym where kids liked to smoke. Despite the rain, parched grass covered most of the hill. Beneath a peaked sky, my comrades Nora, Jill, Becca, and I arranged our towels in a neat row on the rise of the hill. We leaned back, relishing the glint of the meager sun on the tops of our pasty thighs. If I squinted, I could see the distant tree leaves shaking in the wind.

  Jill, a math whiz better known for her body’s lusty curves, leafed through the pages of a paperback horror novel. We often traded and discussed these books at length, the plot twists, the evil twins, the red herrings. We dared the books to shock us. Becca switched on a portable radio, and Blind Melon’s distorted guitar notes wafted through the air. The red curls dangling from her pony tail lolled back and forth as she nodded to the music.

  “That’s my song,” I said.

  “Every song is your song,” someone answered as Becca turned up the volume.

  In the far corner of the parking lot, a handful of men spread hot pitch along half of the road that circled the park. These men had once spent their summers dawdling at the pool. That was how it was around here. You were the shit until one day you weren’t. We watched them push a smoking wheelbarrow full of gravel from one end to the other. Their bare backs glistened with sweat like a pop can in the sun as they raked the hot tar into flat lines.

  Nora, my closest confidante, handed me a cherry lollipop and I passed her the suntan lotion, SPF 8. We’d been inseparable since my childhood friend Carly and her family had left town three years ago after Mr. Lotte’s investigation ended. It was big news when people left Mercury. “They’ll be back,” people in town liked to say, and often they were proved right. But Carly was gone for good.

  Some of Lotte’s other girls—though no one called them that—dispersed through the crowd that day at the pool. Layne Richter laughed with her friends while taking a quiz in a teen magazine. An athlete, Layne was lithe, strong, and fearless. Another girl named Aria Tierney manned the snack shop, which operated out of one of the utility closets. Aria ran it when her older brother Simon left to attend basketball or soccer practice, and she sold ice-cold Milky Ways out of a freezer while an old box fan shot hot gusts of air out the door. I admired Aria from a distance for the same reason I admired Layne. Fear had never led them astray.

  Though Nora and I had both taken piano lessons from Mr. Lotte, we’d never spoken of him despite all the other secrets we shared. Speaking his name was a slur against the town, and we knew enough to ration our indiscretions. Slanting back on her towel, Nora swept her black hair into a ponytail as we watched a few boys race toward the water and dive beneath its still surface. Nora’s red bikini was dry, as was my navy one-piece. I’d never gathered the nerve to wear a bikini. I was known around town for what I wouldn’t reveal, especially if someone came searching for it.

  The frigid water only tempted brash boys looking to flaunt their cojones for an audience. With our cunning disguised in comatose stares, Nora and I had perfected the appearance of reluctant spectators. Secretly ambitious, we had plans. Plans to make something of ourselves. Plans to get out of this town.

  But for the moment, we sighed. We yawned. We tried to appear on the brink of sleep so if a boy happened to drip water on us, we could feign shock. Propped on our elbows with our dazed gazes sheathed in wide sunglasses, we started to shop for boys.

  There were two kinds of boys that we browsed from our perch at the top of the hill. The first was the “puppy jock,” a guy who was crisp and athletic, deeply tan, with very white teeth. He was a challenge—a little bit out of your league, and that’s how you liked it. He looked like a brightly colored Popsicle in his neon swimming trunks, jaunting across the slabs of concrete with his friends. He would take off his shirt in all kinds of weather. While it was true his sense of humor flirted with the idiotic, when winter came he’d wear his lady’s cheerleader pin on his jacket. He wasn’t afraid to tell her he loved her, and she never doubted he meant it.

  This was the kind of boy we liked to watch on the high dive, his body arcing with perfection as he leapt from the board, a fine specimen to examine as he penetrated the water. He’d be loyal, not to mention helpful around the house. Should his beloved need to take a trip to Rip’s Sunrise Market, he wouldn’t hesitate to step in and say, “Let me bag your groceries.”

  The second kind of guy hanging around the pool didn’t throw his money or his services around. We’d spot him slouching outside the fence or down by the jungle gym, but he never came inside. His accessories: clove cigarettes and a tiny stud earring in his left ear. For lunch, he drank a cold can of Hawaiian Punch that no one saw him purchase. He didn’t need to eat. He owned a large selection of metal band T-shirts, every one of them faded black.

  These two kinds of boys—separated by an old, rusty fence—never mixed, but the girls volleyed back and forth between them. There were three kinds of girls playing the game around the pool: those who advertised their participation, those who appeared to be oblivious to the game, and those who acted as if they were superior to it.

  Around here, a girl could not escape her reputation. Instead, she had to determine what it would be. Prude. Slut. Bitch. Snitch. I preferred the kind of reputation earned for what I didn’t do, rather than what I did. Accordingly, I designed a triad of rules for protection:

  1. No random hookups.

  2. No sex.

  3. No second chances.

  I tried. In one year’s time, two rules I would keep; one I would break.

  When I was still young enough to think pools were just for swimming and friends were made for keeping, the water seemed worth the fear I once had for it. Back then, Carly was still around, and I visited her one afternoon to go swimming in her pool. Floating in an inner tube, I leaned back and felt the sun on my face. I remember thinking I’d found Mercury’s only paradise. Even at seven years old, the summer had a way of making me infatuated with the only home I’d ever known.

  Without warning, an unseen force thrust me from the water. The inner tube upended and trapped me beneath it. I heard the water crash and saw the foam of the waves before I went under. Once submerged, everything fell silent. I grasped upward and flailed, but the bulging plastic had me pinned. My eyes started to play tricks on me. Aquamarine spots spread the length of the pool floor, like a leopard’s fur coat.

  Supine, I lay there for a minute, not yet drowning. I could see Carly’s tan legs kicking in the distance—but toward me or away from me? There I was, trapped in a paradise-turned-prison, and all I could focus on was the miracle of Carly’s rootlessness in an underwater realm where some things just didn’t float. Her kicking couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds. I couldn’t have known then I was looking through a watery crystal ball into her future, into the way her family would have to leave town—on their feet and in a hurry.

  I blinked and the sun shot through the water. The inner tube popped up, and I was free. Gasping, I sprang to the surface. Carly’s mother was the first thing I saw at the pool ledge, on hands and knees, her expression fixed with terror. She slumped with relief when she saw me. Her son, two years younger than me but twice my size, had overturned the inner tube and used his own weight to hold me down. “I was j
ust playing,” he said as his mother fished me out. It was the first time I was conscious of being completely overpowered, and I hated it.

  After that, my mother committed her summer afternoons to taking my older sister, my younger brother, and me to the Silver Pulley pool where I first caught a glimpse of the older girls on the hill. My mother sat with her paperback book but hardly ever read it, instead prepared to pounce if any of the older bullies started splashing one of her children. That was my mother: vigilant watchtower, faithful companion, the first person I ever loved. When we tried to cajole her into the water, she claimed it had never been quite warm enough in the small Maine town where she grew up for her to get the hang of swimming. Sometimes we’d convince her to slip in a foot, an ankle, or perhaps her torso. Mostly, she contented herself by watching us from the base of the hill, and I’d hang back in the shallow end testing the water with my toes, while Julia and Seth charged ahead.

  Years of swimming lessons helped lessen my phobia, but my final showdown with the water occurred when I was ten. I thought it was the day I’d conquer the last of my fears because I didn’t know what was coming. It was the summer right before the rumors about Mr. Lotte started to surface and everything in Mercury changed. That summer afternoon, my father had brought my sister Julia and me to our lesson to see us jump off the diving board. I had yet to attempt it, and I perched on the edge of the board for ten minutes, peering over the lip into the turquoise below.

  My father watched us from the top of Whore Hill on the other side of the fence. He leaned against it, his fingers slung against the metal. His skin was a deep tan from all the late afternoons he’d spent roofing that summer. Waiting on the board’s cliff, I stared at him, and then the water. I wanted so much to impress him, this man I loved who wasn’t afraid of anything. When fear overtook me, I crept back toward the ladder and climbed down the rungs. I looked once more at my dad and shook my head, and he waved me toward him.