I refuse to write in feelings. Journalists seek the truth. They use proper grammar and sentence structure and some goddamn facts.
But tonight, when I sit down to do my homework for lit class, I don’t begin with a thesis statement for my Tess paper. I begin with one for me: I will leave Auburn and go to college.
Now everything I do must support that claim.
Like writing the winning essay for Auburn’s scholarship contest.
Chapter Thirteen
AT HALF PAST THREE IN THE morning, the door to my bedroom creaks, and I’m wide awake the same instant, blood coursing hard into my heart as fear floods my veins.
It was a nightmare. It wasn’t real. His gun isn’t out. The girls are safe. Mom is okay. I try to slow my breathing.
Light from the hallway filters in, casting beams across my carpet.
“Leighton?” The shape in my doorway is small and slight. Juniper.
“Yeah, babe?” I ask. My voice shakes, and I clear my throat to cover it. The rush of adrenaline has left me jittery.
“They’re fighting. Can I sleep with you?”
“Course,” I say, scooting over. With the door open, I can hear it, too. Not all-out yelling, but agitated voices. The foundation of a bad night is there.
Juniper runs through the dark room and dives into bed. I’m about to ask her where Campbell is when another shadow crosses my carpet. She closes the door behind her. The voices are subdued to a dull murmur, but now that I’m awake, the muffled sound irritates me, like having a song playing with the volume turned down low.
“Want to go back to sleep?” I ask.
“Too awake,” Juniper says. Her eyes always make her seem older than she is, but her detached voice in the dark reminds me that she is so little.
“Then let’s play a game instead,” I say.
“Anywhere But Here,” Juniper says.
Campbell sighs heavily and turns away from me. I elbow her, a little harder than I mean to.
“Play with us,” I tell her. I need her. She’s my partner in this—in keeping Juniper distracted.
A softer sigh this time, and she turns around.
“Okay,” I whisper. I run my fingers over the seams of the dragonfly quilt Nana made me, comforted by the texture. In the dark, their blue wings look black, and they remind me of the crows.
I wrap an arm around each of my sisters, one settling toward me, the other ever so slightly resistant. Juniper can still be little, and I have college to look forward to. But Campbell is trapped. And she’s old enough to know it and be angry.
“The Galápagos Islands,” I begin. “There are turtles a hundred and fifty years old. The sun dries their shells after it rains. Soft waves hit the pebbled beaches.”
I don’t actually know what the beaches of the Galápagos are like—rocky, sandy, pebbled? But that’s all right. Anywhere But Here is about escape, not accuracy. “Huge red flowers, bigger than your head, bloom in the forest.”
The house rumbles under us as he runs across the floor downstairs. My mind plays its favorite game: Worst-Case Scenario. What if he’s running toward her? What if he hurts her?
“London,” Campbell says. Her tone could cut a wire. “We pass Big Ben and the Tower of London. We see churches older than the United States of America. We drink tea, and then we take a ride on one of those double-decker buses.”
Something crashes downstairs. The girls jump in my arms, and a small sound catches in Juniper’s throat. Like for an instant she wanted to scream, before she remembered there’s no point. That it could even make things worse. Bring him upstairs.
“This isn’t working,” Campbell says.
“Shadows?” I ask. But they are already climbing out of bed, moving to our grandmother’s armoire. It was the only thing I wanted from their house when it sold. It’s absurdly big in this little room, but I love it.
Some nights we take our time before opening the doors, pretending that we will discover a pathway to Narnia. This isn’t one of those nights.
We squeeze inside, and I reach for the kerosene lantern that I have stashed behind an old box of books. I leave the door partially open to let clean air in and carbon monoxide out. The lantern was Grandpa’s and looks like it survived an actual war, but it works well, and it’s lasted us a lot of nights like this. My gestures in the dark have been rehearsed a dozen times before. My fingers close on a lighter that I keep hidden in a shoe. I turn the dial on the lantern to lower the wick into the vase of kerosene.
Tiny space, lots of books for kindling, small children, and flammable liquid.
I really do have all the great ideas.
But when I light the lantern, I’m greeted by two tired but eager pairs of eyes.
A warm, familiar glow fills the closet. Now it’s an adventure. There’s a twinkle in Juniper’s eyes. The smallest hint of a smile tugging the end of Campbell’s mouth. We are explorers camping on a mountain. We are astronauts, and we’ve just landed on another planet. Any sounds of the house are gone, masked by door after door we’ve put up to keep them out. Masked by our sheer, stark will to not listen to them any longer.
“All right,” I say as we crouch down in the armoire, folding limbs over each other until we find some semblance of comfort. “I’m ready. What’ve you got?”
“A horse,” Juniper says.
I think for a moment, then place my palms together with two fingers extended out to form a nose. My thumbs make ears, and the silhouette of a horse appears on the wall. Juniper giggles softly.
“That’s pretty good, Leighton,” Junie says.
“How about a cat?” Campbell asks. “But not just a head and ears. The whole animal.”
I sigh. Some people might say that midnight kerosene-lantern shadow puppets in a tiny space as we hide would be enough of a challenge, but not my sisters. They try to stump me with increasingly complicated requests.
I put my arms lengthwise against each other, one hand up and one down. I extend two fingers on top for ears and one on the bottom for a tail.
A black cat sits on the wall, twitching.
“Here,” Juniper says, reaching out. She gives the cat some whiskers, too.
“No helping,” Cammy says. “That’s against the rules.”
“There are no rules, Campbell; the game is made up,” I say.
“Just because they aren’t written down in a set of game instructions doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
“I wasn’t helping,” Juniper says. “I was impressizing.”
“Improvising,” I say.
“Improvising,” Junie says.
Juniper and I give Campbell our saddest faces.
“Okay, okay, I like the whiskers,” Cam relents.
I play the game for nearly an hour, until finally my request for another shadow challenge is met with silence. They are asleep. I consider moving them, but I would wake them up untangling our arms and legs. Besides, my arms are tired from so many shadows.
Dad taught me this game, when Campbell was still a baby and Mom was busy with her at night. He’d use a flashlight propped on the table by my bed and show me how to twist my fingers until a picture formed on the ceiling above us.
But that was a long time ago.
Tonight I make one last shadow. The head of a crow, its sharp beak formed by the tips of my nails. Then I twist my hands together and make the shape of a bird flapping its wings, rising. Another bird joins the first, a second small shadow on the wall. And then a third shadow bird flies with the others. I lie there in the dimly lit space, too warm thanks to the hot lamp and hot bodies, waiting for another noise from downstairs.
I let my hands fall to my sides, but the birds go on. Flap, flap, soar. Flap, flap, soar. They cross the wall of the armoire, back and forth, pulling me toward sleep. Lulling me into forgetting why we are hiding. I turn the dial on the lantern, lifting the wick from the oil, and blow out the flame. I keep my eyes open in the pitch-black, fighting sleep, and losing fast. Now everything is one shado
w, and this shadow takes the shape of a closet. This closet takes the shape of a sanctuary. This sanctuary takes the shape of three girls who are flapping their wings but going nowhere.
Auburn, Pennsylvania
September 28
CROW POPULATION:
22,367
Chapter Fourteen
THIS TIME HE APOLOGIZES WITH PANCAKES instead of flowers.
On Saturday mornings, the Auburn Diner is the most popular place in town. We have to wait thirty minutes for a table, which means a lot of small talk. Something my father excels at. The Barnes family has lived in Auburn for three generations, and my grandfather created Barnes Construction from nothing. His business is responsible for a lot of the buildings still standing, including our house, which my dad grew up in before buying it from his aging father.
Legacy is a strange thing.
My grandfather’s legacy in this town is literally carved in stone—his name and the dates of construction are chiseled into cement blocks on almost everything built here over the two decades when his business was booming. The legacy of the people he employed. But I’m starting to wonder how many men have two faces. One for inside their home, and one for outside.
“Hey, Erin.” Our waitress, Christine, greets Mom first. They work together here. “No shifts this weekend?”
“No, not in again till Tuesday, actually.”
“Lucky girl,” Christine says, her eyes falling on my dad. “You been watching these games, Jesse Barnes?” Christine is an old friend of Mom’s from high school. She would have watched the entire rise—and fall—of Dad’s football career.
“Sure am,” Dad says. “Auburn proud, right?” My father orders pancakes for everyone, because they’re cheap. But he adds coffee for him, Mom, and me, and hot chocolate for the girls.
“Aw, what a special treat,” Christine says.
She turns back to Mom. “So if you aren’t working, do you want to join us for girls’ night out, for once? Nothing special, we’re just meeting at Jimmy’s Tavern for a few drinks.”
Dad speaks first.
“That’s nice of you, Christine,” he says, and she flushes a bit when he says her name. “But Erin can’t tonight.”
“Aw, well. Maybe next time,” Christine says, still talking to Dad.
“Maybe,” Mom says, and Christine takes our order to the kitchen.
That won’t happen, either. Next time. One by one, Dad has found reasons to push people away. Your friends always hated me. They aren’t good influences on you.
Eventually, she just let those friendships slip away.
Our food doesn’t take long, but right as it arrives, someone else stops by our table.
“Hey, Jesse! It’s been a while,” Mr. DiMarco says. Officer DiMarco. He’s on duty, wearing his police uniform.
“Bill, how are ya?” My father stands and greets him. He hasn’t been over in a long time—his own kids are really young—but when I was little, my father’s best friend from high school was at our house all the time. I used to call him Uncle Bill.
He greets my mom and then looks to us girls.
“Wow, they’re all so big,” he says with a laugh.
“Crazy, right? Leighton’s applying to college this fall. Perfect GPA.”
“Ah, wow. Let me guess. You’re hoping she picks state college.”
“What kind of fan would I be if I didn’t?” Dad says.
I turn my attention back to my plate and take a bite of pancake. It’s covered in butter and syrup and sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar, but when I take the first bite, I gag, something sour flooding my mouth. Everyone else seems to be enjoying the meal. Juniper’s grin is huge and real.
I hate the bad nights. I hate how loud and cruel he can be. How scared he makes us.
But it is mornings like this that hurt the most. When we are expected to pretend that everything is okay. Because my legs are sore from how we slept in the armoire, an entanglement of limbs and fear, and the bite of pancake that I managed to swallow refuses to settle in my stomach.
“Hey, listen,” Bill says. “I heard the council didn’t pick your company for the library renovation. Tough break, man, I’m sorry.”
My mom and I look up in surprise. This is new information. Dad worked on that proposal for months.
“I didn’t realize—” Mom starts to speak, and my dad’s hand falls to her shoulder. He grips it, pats her back a few times. Squeezes again. All with a smile on his face. But there’s white tension in his knuckles, and a look that crosses Mom’s face. He’s hurting her.
“Yeah, well, what can you do? You win some bids, you lose some bids. That’s the job,” Dad says.
Juniper and Campbell sit forward in their seats.
Juniper’s eyes stay fixed on Mom, like she’s watching for a signal from her. How do we react? Do we smile and nod?
We do.
We smile.
We nod.
We say pleasant goodbyes.
But the milk in my coffee tastes curdled, and the sugar turns to salt on my tongue, and I’m bolting from the table, barely making it to the diner restroom before I throw up flour and sugar and salt and grief.
Chapter Fifteen
JUNIPER AND I ARE SPRAWLED ON a blanket in our backyard. There is a slight chill this early in the morning, but it will warm by the afternoon. I’m eager for the crispness of Pennsylvania autumns, but this year summer refuses to loosen her hold.
Campbell loves this weather. Bike-riding season is extended, and that’s where she is now. Mom almost called an early end to it after she learned about the rosebush accident, but I convinced her to let Campbell ride while she can. She needs her wolf pack on bicycles.
Juniper brought her book outside, and I’m alternating between calculus homework and newspaper research. I’ve brought my art folder out, too, but mostly so I can glare at it occasionally and wish it would spontaneously combust. I’m very terrible at it, and regret registering for the “easy” elective.
For a while we work quietly—or at least, we are quiet. There are crows all around us, and they make themselves known. The cawing of crows is the new Auburn Township soundtrack.
I finish up my calc work and reach for my crow research. I found out that this has happened before in other towns. In New York and Oregon. Even another little town in Pennsylvania.
“Experts estimate the murder of crows has reached fifty thousand or more,” I read to Juniper from that other town’s local paper. “Birds are still arriving by the thousands as they migrate south from Canada.”
“Fifty thousand?” Juniper yells. “How many are here?”
“No clue,” I say. “Not that many. Not yet, anyway.”
I turn over the Auburn Gazette, our local paper, which is barely more than a penny flyer. Front-page news this week is our football team’s win last night.
“Weird,” I say.
“What is?” Junie asks.
“Just our football team. They’re . . . winning. They’ve won every game so far this year, actually.” I would wonder if the headline was a prank, but Auburn takes football too seriously for that.
There are crows lining our fence, and I pull a box of raisins from my backpack and start to chuck them across the lawn.
“That’s against the rules,” Juniper says. “You said so in your paper.”
“You read my column, Junie?” I always bring home a paper copy for my writing binder, but the paper mostly exists online. I didn’t realize Juniper even had access to it.
“Yeah, Campbell always prints out your articles, and she lets me read them first.”
I like watching the crows flutter off the fence and land near us to snatch up the raisins. I like how they hop around. And honestly, I like breaking a rule for once. I’ll break the hell out of Auburn Township Ordinance 3417. I’m a rebel with a cause. Filling up Corvidae bellies, one raisin at a time.
“Here, Junie. Give it a try.” I hand her a few raisins, but then notice her bare wrist. The three of
us always wear the leather cuffs Grandpa gave us, but hers is gone. “Hey, your bracelet is off.”
She looks guilty. “I lost it. I’m so sorry. I thought it would be at home in my room, but I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Don’t worry. I’m sure it will turn up. I’ll look for it later, okay?”
I turn back to the pages in front of me. “It says here that this town hired wildlife experts to try to scare them off,” I say, mostly to distract her. I shouldn’t have said anything about the missing cuff.
“Scare them how?” she asks. She throws an entire handful of raisins at once, and a bunch of crows swoop down from a nearby tree.
“Flares, loud noises. They brought in falconers to haze the crows. With live hawks. They also opened up a crow-hunting season for several weeks.”
“Like a bird-killing spree?” Juniper takes the box from me and throws a raisin as high as she can. A crow catches it in midair.
“Pretty much,” I say. Hunting is popular around here. We even get off school when deer season starts. It’s never really bothered me, but I feel a weird twinge at the thought of the crows being shot. Juniper figures out the feeling before I do.
“I hope they don’t do that here,” she says. “The crows aren’t that bad. And I’d be so worried about Joe.”
“Joe’s pretty smart,” I tell her, pushing aside my own discomfort. “Besides, there aren’t nearly as many crows here. It says that there were so many crows in this other town that they blocked out the sun. We don’t have that many crows. Don’t worry.”
Juniper turns onto her back, looking up at the clouds like she’s imagining the sky filled with black birds. I don’t want her to be anxious about Joe, so I change the subject.
If These Wings Could Fly Page 5