“Roarke,” Mrs. Hicks says warmly and pulls her hands away from Mom’s. I’m embarrassed to see that Mom seems visibly crestfallen when Celia Hicks lets go. “It’s so very nice to see you,” the woman continues. “Your mother has just been telling me about Columbia. Congratulations. That’s quite an accomplishment, young man.”
I look at my shoes and produce the expected response: “Thank you, ma’am. I’m not sure it will work out for me to go, but I’m real grateful to have been given the chance.”
There’s no way I’m going to Columbia. I don’t need a financial aid letter to tell me that. Even with help, there’s no universe in which we could afford it.
“Well, that’s such a nice way of looking at it.” Mrs. Hicks turns back to Mom. “You’ve raised a fine boy, Suzanne. No doubt there.”
“We think so,” Mom answers, and then, when it seems that more is expected, she says, “Essie is getting quite grown up herself. I saw her just last week when I was picking up Roarke after school. She’s the spitting image of her daddy at that age.”
Mom went to high school with Pastor Hicks before he left town for college and then seminary. Celia Hicks, on the other hand, is an outsider, though most everyone seems to have forgotten that and for some reason she doesn’t seem happy to be reminded that Mom knew her husband long before she herself met him. Her lips press into a thin, hard line. It lasts only a second, then the expression softens and once again it’s the face we all know from church or else from television. The face that would have you believe that this woman is so pure, both inside and out, that her shit don’t stink.
She nods. “The girls always did take after Jethro, and the boys take after me. Though people say that Caleb’s eyes are the exact same shade of blue as his father’s.”
Of the boys, only Caleb seems to be around with any regularity, having just finished law school. I’ve heard rumors that he’s considering some sort of career in politics, which shouldn’t be a problem what with all the money the family has to throw into a campaign.
“Oh, I see that. I definitely do.” Mom is agreeing with her, though I’m fairly certain that she’s never seen Caleb Hicks’s eyes up close.
Both women stare at me for just a beat too long. Even with all the smiles and compliments, it’s clear that I’m intruding. I cough and shift my bag onto my other shoulder. I’m still in my baseball uniform.
“I think I’ll hop in the shower. It was a real pleasure to see you outside of church, Mrs. Hicks.”
They wait until I’m nearly all the way up the stairs before they start to talk again, and by that time I’m too far away to hear anything they say.
* * *
—————
The next day I see Essie Hicks everywhere I go. It’s strange, because I haven’t really noticed her all year. We didn’t go to the same elementary school, but I remember that when she was a freshman, it seemed as if every corridor I turned down had a film crew in it, just waiting to catch the perfect shot of her walking casually down the hall. Her hair was longer then. Light brown. The same color as her freckles. She wore barrettes with flowers on them, or sometimes birds or ladybugs. It was like they were trying to make her look younger than she was, to preserve that innocence that made her so popular with the press. Or maybe she just liked ladybugs. I never got close enough to ask.
Blake Preston got close, though. He’s the only one of my friends who’s actually talked to her directly, but not because he walked up and said hello like a normal person would. It’s because he failed ninth-grade math and ended up repeating it the year Essie started at Woodside. Blake sat behind her in class and instead of paying attention to Mrs. Nixon, he would spend the entire period trying to tie pieces of Essie’s long hair into knots without her noticing. It became a game. Every day he kept track of how many knots he’d tied before she finally moved forward in her chair. Eventually she turned around and told him to cut it out or else. And Blake did, he told me, because he could tell that she meant it, no matter how sweet she seems when she’s on TV.
The cameras don’t follow her in school anymore, so I guess it’s possible that I’ve passed Essie on the way to physics every day and just never noticed. But I don’t think so. And I don’t think she’s been in the third-floor hallway on any other day when my American Government class lets out. But today she’s standing there, tugging at the ends of her shoulder-length hair, listening to Lily Gaines talking about how she’s certain that she failed their Spanish quiz and how if she gets anything less than an A, she’ll never get into Vassar. It seems crazy to me that anyone would pay attention to such self-absorbed whining, but Essie manages to keep her eyes on Lily’s flapping, berry-colored lips. Then, as I pass close by them, she glances over at me and our eyes meet and she gets this little wrinkle in the center of her forehead like I’m a puzzle she’s trying to solve. Just as I’m about to stop and ask what her problem is, her eyes move back to Lily and she says, “Vassar would be crazy not to take you. I one hundred percent know that you’re going to get in.”
Lily probably will get into Vassar next year; not that I care one way or the other, but there’s a building there named after her grandmother and I know enough to know that this is how things work. It’s amazing the things money will buy. Lily and I went on one date last year when I was a junior and she was a sophomore, so I know that her house is the sort of place you would call a mansion. Her dad has some high-up job at the bank; he may even be in charge. I didn’t go inside the house, though, just caught a glimpse of the chandelier shining down on the polished white marble floors in the entryway. Still, I can pretty much imagine what the rest is like: high ceilings with soft recessed lighting, window treatments instead of curtains, a double-door fridge that’s probably filled with nothing but tofu and Vitaminwater. It’s the sort of house in those magazines that Mom likes to buy and then flip through and clip out pictures from. She puts these into a box labeled Inspiration, but as far as I know they’ve never actually inspired her to do anything more than buy another magazine and add more pictures to the box.
I took Lily to the movies, something with Theo James, and she talked about how hot he looked every second he was on-screen. It kind of made it hard to concentrate, even for me, and I’m someone who can tune out an awful lot. Also, she ate almost the entire bag of popcorn even though she said she didn’t want any when we were at the concession stand. That sort of thing drives me insane. So all in all, not a stellar evening. But then when we got to her front door, there she was, standing with her eyes closed and her berry lips turned up toward me. It was impossible at that point for me to do anything other than kiss her, not unless I wanted her complaining to all her girlfriends about what an awful time she’d had.
So I did, for about fifteen seconds. I know because I tapped out the seconds on my leg while my other hand brushed the curve of Lily’s chin. The way I saw it, it had to be more than a peck or else I risked going through with the kiss and having it not count at all, of still having her feel slighted. But it also couldn’t be a full-blown make-out session or else she might invite me to come inside, up to her room, that sort of thing. It would force my hand, make me tell her no. Or even if it was just front-step kissing, too much would mean I was a douche if I didn’t ask her out again, which I honestly had no intention of doing. So fifteen seconds seemed about right. Interested but still gentlemanly. Then, later that week, I told Blake and Sam Wells that I’d gotten back together with this girl I’d been seeing over the summer, hoping that it would get back to Lily and I would be off the hook.
Strictly speaking, this girlfriend was a work of fiction, but it was a ploy that I made use of on and off until the end of junior year. It got somewhat harder to pull off after I got my license and risked being dared to actually produce said girlfriend in the flesh. Before I could drive, all I had to do was invent little snippets of our conversations in order to be convincing, and if my parents didn’t feel i
nclined to drive me all the way over to Bridgeton to see her, it wasn’t really my fault that we hadn’t gone all the way. After I bought Little Jimmy, a blue second- or thirdhand hatchback with a dent in the passenger-side door, it became harder to lie.
So for three months at the beginning of senior year, I dated Gemma Moore. Her mother was a member of the New Light altar guild and the year before last their family spent Thanksgiving with Pastor Hicks. Gemma was prettier than Lily and wore less makeup. She had a round face and hazel eyes and a mess of dark yellow curls that she pulled back with some rhinestone-studded clip I would knock loose any time I slipped my fingers up into her hair. I was surprised by how much kissing was involved with dating Gemma. Her plain clothes and long skirts had not really hinted that this sort of thing would be open for discussion, but shortly after Gemma’s parents invited Mom and Dad and me to join them for Sunday dinner, Gemma started sneaking over after school to hang out before my parents got home. I never asked where her parents thought she was, but I knew it wasn’t in my bed sighing gently as we listened to Florence and the Machine and I tried to unhook her bra one-handed.
For one fleeting moment I wonder if Gemma has anything to do with the reason Esther Hicks was looking at me so strangely just a minute ago. I look back through the jumble of bodies pushing me along the hall, but Essie’s back is turned. Lily is still talking. Then the two disappear around the corner, and there is an instant when I think that I might run back, grab her arm hard and shake her and ask just what she’s playing at. But of course I don’t. If I did, I’d have to explain why I care about Esther Hicks at all and I don’t know what I’d say.
Mom was in a tizzy last night when Celia Hicks finally climbed into her giant black SUV and backed out of our drive. At dinner she must’ve said a dozen times how nice it was for Celia to stop by. It was the first time I’d ever heard Mom call Pastor Hicks’s wife by her given name. Each time Mom said it she lingered on the e a little longer, as if relishing her newfound alliance, until the name became practically indecipherable. Dad grunted something in response, seeming preoccupied, and generally just let Mom prattle on. It was only when she pressed him—“You’ll come, now, won’t you?”—that he looked up in a startled way and Mom had to explain all over again that they had been invited to the Hickses’ house for tea on Thursday. Dad frowned and actually looked over his shoulder to see if there was someone else that Mom might’ve been talking to instead of him. Then he swallowed his mouthful of hamburger and said, “I suppose there’s no way out of it.” And Mom was off talking again at lightning speed.
So what I want to say to Essie is that she and her parents should just leave us the hell alone. Are you allowed to say “hell” to a preacher’s daughter? Probably not, but I don’t care. I’d tell her that Mom doesn’t need Celia Hicks to come swooping into our kitchen in a fog of expensive perfume. Mom doesn’t need her attention in order to feel worthy. Dad doesn’t need to be forced into his only suit, which has gone shiny at the thighs and elbows, to sit stiffly in the Hickses’ parlor on a sofa that I know from the show is overflowing with matching pillows and has lace doilies draped over its arms. It will only embarrass him to have to endure that tea with your parents, I would tell Esther, so they should just stuff their Christian charity and their attention where the sun don’t shine. We don’t want it.
Except that apparently Mom does, desperately. After school, she does nothing but talk about the fact that they’ve been invited to tea at the rectory. She’s in an absolute flutter about having nothing to wear. Dad’s suit is already laid out with a matching shirt and tie even though the tea isn’t until tomorrow. She’s shining Dad’s shoes when I get home and there’s a smudge of shoe polish on one cheek where she must have wiped it. She looks thin and suddenly very old sitting there with the shoe in one hand and the brush in the other, and I’m overcome by how deeply I love her despite everything.
“You’re here,” she says brightly and I realize that she is not just stating the obvious: she is truly surprised and grateful for my presence.
I slouch against the doorframe as her wrist begins to swing back and forth again, bringing the brush lightly across the shoe leather.
“I kind of feel like hot dogs tonight, if that’s okay,” I tell her. “How about I start the grill and take care of supper? It looks like you’ve got enough to do.”
She smiles at me with an expression that tells me I am all she has ever wanted in this world. I am all her hopes and dreams come true. The look paralyzes me for a heartbeat and I feel panic rising up like acid in my throat at the knowledge that two simple words would forever wipe that look away. Then she drops her gaze to the shoe again and tells me not to forget the potato salad on the bottom shelf of the fridge, and I feel the panic fade.
Outside, I throw the dogs on the grill and then move back into the kitchen and get to work setting the table. Without even thinking, I switch on the television to fill the quiet, something I do when I’m home by myself and the place feels too empty. Usually I change it right away to whatever college football game is on, but today I run outside to check the hot dogs before I get a chance to flip the channel. While I turn each dog carefully, I hear a commercial droning on about some skin-care product that will make the years of crow’s-feet practically melt away. Then when I come back inside, she is there as well, as she has been all day long. Esther Anne Hicks is staring at me from the television screen with that same look she had earlier at school and I think for a moment that she can actually see me, that she is looking out of the television and into my kitchen, where I stand wearing my mom’s flowery apron and holding a barbecue fork raised in the air like a sword.
This is ridiculous, of course. Esther Hicks cannot see me, I remind myself. I take a step forward and then another until I am standing right in front of the TV. Her eyes flick away from the camera and back to whoever is interviewing her. A banner in the bottom left corner of the screen tells me that this conversation is being broadcast live. She must’ve left school and gone right to the studio, or wherever it is that they’re filming. For all I know, there’s a special room in the Hicks mansion just for this. Maybe they change the backdrops and the furniture to give the illusion of variety but make the journalists come to them.
“This year has been a busy one for you, hasn’t it, Essie?” the woman asks.
She is young and vaguely familiar. Pretty, though it looks as if she’s trying to hide that fact. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail and her collar is buttoned all the way up to her neck. Still, even in pants and the uptight blouse, you can tell that her body is smoking hot. Or so Blake would say.
“It has, Libby. It certainly has,” Essie answers. “But of course very rewarding all the same.”
“And you are really planning to graduate this year, a year early?”
Essie nods. This is news to me.
“I’m hoping to have enough credits to do it. I’ve taken extra classes each of these past three years at Woodside, some through independent study, a few others online by correspondence. It’ll be tight,” she says and here she smiles, a look that is utterly captivating even to me and I usually don’t go in for that sort of thing, “but I think I might be able to squeak through and leave high school behind in just a few months’ time.”
“Well, you certainly sound driven. Your parents, I know, are very proud.”
Essie blushes and drops her eyes; her lashes tremble and then she looks up again.
“And what are you planning to do next year?” the woman asks when Essie remains quiet. “We haven’t seen you going on any college trips yet.”
“Oh, no.” Essie laughs, a tinkling sound so unlike the cackles of the other girls at school. I wonder how I never noticed her laugh before. I must have heard it on TV, even from the next room, while Mom watched Six for Hicks or the entertainment news. That laugh is almost enough to make me trust her, but not quite.
“College
is not really in the cards for me right now,” Essie is saying. “Next year, maybe, or the year after that. Goodness knows I appreciate how important education is, especially for young women. But before that, I really feel that I want to do some good in this world. That’s why I’m planning a yearlong mission to help raise literacy rates for children of color in inner-city schools.”
And there, just like that, she loses me. Even with the laugh. She is seventeen years old and thinks that she can walk into some poor community and tell the people who have lived there their entire lives precisely what they are doing wrong and how things should be done instead. I blink at the screen and wonder if she’s ever even talked to a real live black person, since Woodside—and the entire county, for that matter—is not exactly known for its diversity.
Reggie White, our shortstop and a dude who fully appreciates the irony of his name, is the only black kid in the whole school and I know that he’s never spoken to Essie. He makes a point of avoiding her, in fact, given some of the shit her father’s said about African Americans in his sermons, which of course are watched by millions and so inform the national conversation on race more than any small-town preacher should. Of course, Pastor Hicks would say that he does not mean the White family when he speaks about how the blacks in our country are inclined toward violence, or lust, or having babies out of wedlock.
“You’re not anything like those people,” Pastor Hicks once said to Reggie’s father.
“The worst part,” Reggie said from inside the batting cage as he told the story, “is that he meant it as a compliment, that he really believed he was being kind.”
The Book of Essie Page 3