Mom sits down.
The line of his jaw is tight. It’s an expression so familiar to me that a chill runs from the nape of my neck down my spine, and I tug my sweatshirt tighter around me. I don’t know what to expect in such a public place.
He reaches down. It’s a subtle movement, but I’m watching now, and I see the pressure in the grip of his fingers on her forearm. “I told you we’re leaving,” he says.
She shakes her head.
The cowbells grow louder as the team returns to the field.
An alarm ringing in my ears.
“Get the fuck up,” he tells her, a little louder this time. A few heads turn in their direction. Mom looks around. People notice the commotion.
She smiles. A big, beautiful smile. You can’t even tell it’s broken from the outside, but there’s a fault line underneath.
“Not yet, Jesse,” she says, shaking her arm, pulling it from his grasp. She turns back to the field, tugging Juniper into her lap, and people closest to us avert their gazes.
My eyes are on him. If she’s a fault line buried beneath the surface, then he’s a volcano, about to—
“You make this so much more goddamn difficult than it needs to be,” he says. He seizes her arm again, and this time many people look over. His grip is like iron, and even though she has a jacket on, you can see where fingers are pressing into her. I want to scream at him. I want to throw up.
“Fuck it,” he says. “Suit yourself.” He releases her arm. It’s going to leave a bruise.
He pushes past me and climbs down the bleachers quickly.
“He’s gonna take the truck. Dammit. Stay with the girls.” Mom moves after him.
When I turn back to Campbell and Juniper, Bill DiMarco is watching us. It looks like he saw the entire thing. I’m sure he was close enough to hear it.
He looks back to his wife and small daughter, and then joins the crowd when they cheer. Wolves have the ball.
“This fucking town,” I mutter.
“That’s a bad word,” Juniper scolds me.
“Sorry, Junie. I have to go stop Mom.”
“We’re coming.” Campbell isn’t asking, and I’m not going to make her sit here alone.
We make our way down the bleachers, and Sofia is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She ignores me, turns to Campbell.
“Campbell! Hey, girl. I’ve been trying to catch you all night. Can we please talk about this dance, because I know Leighton is going to try to wear a cardigan over her dress and put her hair in a messy bun.”
Despite everything, Campbell smiles. Rolls her eyes. “Leighton, you totally would try that.”
“Can I keep them for a minute?” Sofia asks, meeting my eyes over the tops of Campbell’s and Juniper’s heads.
“Thank you,” I mouth silently. And then I hear my name from the bleachers, and see Fiona barreling down the stairs toward us.
“Leighton!” She throws her arms around me. “Are these your sisters?”
She turns to Campbell and Juniper. “I’m Liam’s little sister, Fiona. I’ve been dying to meet you guys. Leighton talks about you so much.”
Juniper beams, and I almost burst into tears.
“I’ve gotta run if I’m gonna catch her,” I say, and she nods.
Fiona has already tucked Juniper’s little hand under her arm, and they’re talking about getting cider.
I take off down the track after Mom.
Chapter Fifty-Six
BY THE TIME I GET TO where we parked earlier, in a field for overflow cars, his truck is gone.
Shit.
My chest aches, and I sit down right there, on the cold ground. I feel like I’m suffocating. I lean my head down to my knees, hug them to me, and try to suck in enough air. The thing in my chest is rattling its cage so hard it’s stealing my breath.
I hear footsteps approach, and then someone sits down beside me in the grass.
I finally raise my head. It’s Sofia, with her usual lopsided smile and bouncy ponytail and spotless cheering uniform now sitting in the mud with me.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hi.”
“Fiona has the girls; they’re getting hot cider. Are you okay?” She tucks the loose hair in my face back behind my ear.
“I don’t feel good, Sof.”
“Just breathe,” Sofia says, rubbing small circles on my back.
We don’t move for a few minutes. It starts to flurry outside, and the ground is freezing. I can hear when the game reaches halftime and the band starts to play. The cheerleaders usually perform at halftime. Sofia won’t just be missed, she’ll get in trouble with her coach. But she makes no move to leave.
When I can breathe normally, I sit up.
“Thanks, Sof. I’m fine now, really. You should get back to the field.”
“Don’t worry, it’s just a stupid game.”
“You’ll get in trouble. And you’re covering the game for the paper.”
“Coach will get over it. I’m the best one she’s got. And there are, like, a thousand people who can fill me in on the seven minutes of game time I’m missing.”
Sofia doesn’t budge, and I lean my head on her shoulder.
“Is it stuff at home?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“I honestly wasn’t even sure you knew.”
“I’ve known you forever, Leighton. I know why you hardly ever want to hang out at your house. And you are never fully relaxed around him, even when his charm is turned way up.” Sofia mimics turning a dial. “I’m not stupid. I knew. I just didn’t think you wanted me to know, so I pretended not to notice things.”
“I didn’t want you to know,” I said. “Or maybe I did. But I didn’t want to acknowledge it.”
“I can understand that,” she says. “Listen, if it gets scary and you need a place to run away to, I’ll literally leave my bedroom window unlocked twenty-four seven. Just come right in. Bring Cam and June Bug. We’ll have a slumber party.”
I laugh and shake my head, suddenly sniffling, and not from the cold.
“Thanks, Sof.”
“Ready to go back in there?”
“Yeah,” I say. She jumps to her feet and pulls me up.
“Are you frozen, snowflake?” she asks.
“You’re the one in a skirt,” I point out, and she laughs.
Just inside the stadium, I find my mom.
I wrap my arms around her immediately, and Sofia slips past us, giving me a little wave before jogging away.
“I thought he made you go,” I say, my voice a little muffled against her jacket.
“Without you guys? Never,” she answers. “Sorry, Leighton.”
“It’s not yours to apologize for,” I tell her.
“We have to figure out a ride.”
“There’s a bus that runs to Auburn. It passes right through this town, just a few streets over.”
“Do I want to know why you know that?” she asks.
I look up at her. “It runs by Nana’s place, too. If we want to go there tonight.”
“I just want to go home,” she says.
Home.
I let go of her.
“I’ll go get the girls and meet you at the gate,” Mom says.
She walks away, but I hesitate for a moment in the cold. I stick out my tongue and catch some snowflakes. They melt in an instant, and I wonder if that’s how my life will look. Here for a fleeting second, and then gone. If I don’t get through whatever this is, then that’s all I will be. A memory in my classmates’ minds. Their true-life crime story to tell at frat parties.
There has to be more.
I can be brave, like Campbell and Juniper think I am. Like I’m not just one little snowflake, about to disappear, but the whole storm. A force to be reckoned with.
I’ll be an entire season, but my season is not the soft brown earth of spring or a blue-sky summer. I’m not drifting yellow leaves or crisp white snow.
> My season is inconvenient, messy, loud.
The season of the crows. The color of mourning.
Nothing about Auburn feels like home anymore.
But if Auburn can have its miracle, however dark and strange and feathered it might be, then maybe I can have one, too.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
WE TAKE THE BUS BACK TO Auburn and arrive late. We use the phone at the diner to call the house, and it takes another hour before he comes to pick us up.
He doesn’t apologize this time.
We can hear the stereo from the front yard, and he starts yelling as soon as we are inside the house.
“How could you embarrass me like that, Erin?”
The coat closet is torn off its hinges. Our shoes are everywhere. One of his steel-toed work boots rests against the sliding back door, and there is a cobweb fracture at the base of the glass where he must have struck it.
In the living room, nothing is on the walls, and the frames on the floor are all broken, the glass inside splintered.
There is a dent in the wall where one of the frames was thrown. I bend down and pick it up. It’s the homecoming picture, but the two faces in the photo aren’t visible through the shattered glass. I set it back down gently.
I gesture for Campbell and Juniper to go to my room.
“You left us there,” Mom says. And there’s something there I haven’t seen before. Her own anger.
“I hate this town,” he says. “I can’t get work. The business is done, Erin. Done. And we try to get away from it all for one night—one goddamn night—and all anyone can talk about is my other major failure, even though it was twenty years ago. Enough!”
On the last word, he kicks the living room chair over, and it cracks against the wall. Dust and plaster fall to the carpet.
“It is enough,” Mom says. “You have to go.”
“What?” He stops, turns on her. “What did you say to me?”
“You need to leave.”
“This is my house.”
“Fine, then we’ll leave.” Mom heads for the stairs, but he cuts her off, one hand going to either side of her, so she’s trapped against the wall.
“Go upstairs, Leighton,” he says.
“Mom,” I start.
But he turns to me, lifts the vase from our coffee table, and hurls it into the wall next to me.
I run upstairs, but I don’t go to my room. I sit on the top step and peer through the bars of the railing.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he says, and he walks into the kitchen, takes Mom’s car keys off the counter, and pockets them. “You want your keys, come get them.”
Mom stands in the living room.
“Get them!” he screams. When she doesn’t move, he laughs.
“That’s what I thought.”
He goes into the living room and turns off his music. He turns the television on and starts flipping through the channels.
I slip into my bedroom before Mom comes upstairs.
None of us says a word when she climbs into bed next to Campbell, Juniper, and me.
Auburn, Pennsylvania
December 14
CROW POPULATION:
64,759
Chapter Fifty-Eight
WHEN WE WAKE UP, EVERYTHING THAT was broken last night is not broken anymore. But this time I know Mom sees it, because when we come downstairs, she runs her hand over the glass that is once again smooth in the picture frames, and the part of the wall where he smashed the vase near my head.
It is a quiet, long weekend.
He never gives her keys back.
He doesn’t let us leave the house.
He keeps the phone with him.
This time, I don’t feel like challenging him. This time, I don’t feel fearless. I feel powerless.
On Sunday afternoon, I’m working on my final crow column in my room. It’s about the town hall meeting and the last bit of crow folklore—the Morrigan. In Celtic mythology, she was the shape-shifting goddess of war, fate, and death. She was most often depicted as a crow flying over battlefields and crying out for the dead. Sometimes she was seen as a predictor of death, landing on the shoulders of those who would soon meet their fate.
I’m proofreading when a shadow crosses my desk. My room stays dark, and when I look outside, I see why—there are crows filling the sky. Dark like storm clouds, so thick they’re blocking out the sun.
I open my window and watch them fly.
Auburn Township voted to allocate thousands of dollars to bring in experts to help drive the birds away. They begin their work as soon as the new year starts, so the crows have just a few weeks left here.
The wind picks up, hitting a pile of papers on my desk, and pages start to fly everywhere. I slam the window closed and turn to clean up the mess.
A familiar pink flyer lies on the floor in front of me. The scholarship contest. The deadline is tomorrow at midnight. Auburn born, Auburn proud.
This is what I know of pride. I know that it keeps the secrets of cruel men. I know that it holds us in the shadows, because we are too proud to admit we need help. I know that pride values a man’s reputation over a woman’s life. It calls her selfish for speaking up, even when she speaks the truth. Especially then.
This is what I know of Auburn. I know about frantic knocking that goes ignored in the middle of the night. I know about men who look away when their friend is the problem. I know exactly how easy it is for people here to avert their gaze at a football game, comforting themselves with a hollow sentiment: It’s none of our business.
Because this is a town where people see only what they want to see.
This is a town where they see nothing at all.
So I begin with the thesis statement, the truest sentence that I know, and every word thereafter must support my claim.
It is not the crows that make Auburn ugly.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
LIAM IS A WRECK WHEN HE picks me up Monday morning.
“I wasn’t sure what happened. Fiona and Sofia filled me in, and I called all weekend—”
“Yeah, he took the phone.”
“Leighton,” he says. “I was so worried. I didn’t know if I should call the police. This isn’t normal. You need help.”
“I know,” I say. “Sorry I missed the end of your big game.”
“You know I don’t care about that.”
“I’m sorry you lost.”
“Doesn’t matter. Honestly, it’s kind of a relief. Who needs the pressure of a championship game?”
Who, indeed.
I’m not sure if what I’m planning is right. There’s so much unknown. And maybe it’s awful at home, but at least that fear is known. Familiar.
The drive to school takes twice as long today. All the roads near my home are covered with crows. They’re just everywhere now, covering every surface. Liam drives slowly, waiting for them to shuffle and fly away rather than risk hitting them. It takes ages to get there, and the whole time I think about how my silence benefits only one person.
When I get into school, I don’t even pretend I’m going to class. I head straight to the newspaper offices and crash into my desk.
Sofia stands up at hers, startling me. I didn’t realize anyone else was here. She immediately leans forward in her chair, as though she’s coming for me, and I hold up a hand.
“I’m fine. I promise. I’m just angry. And right now, I really need to write. My column is due, and I’m submitting this essay today before I lose my nerve.”
My voice is clear and confident, and there isn’t even the hint of tears today. I just need to get the words down while I have them.
“I’ll guard the door,” she says. She springs from her desk, shuts the door, and turns off the lights. She sits down next to it in case anyone disturbs us.
“Thanks, Sof.”
“Write!” she says.
I boot up my ancient public-school desktop. My dinosaur computer that I secretly love. I want to win this s
cholarship. But it’s more than that.
There’s another reason I want to submit this essay to them.
There is a part of me that feels like bruised flesh. That just wants to force them to read it. I struggled so much to write about Auburn, and now I know that it’s because I wasn’t seeing Auburn in its entirety.
This town isn’t just my grandfather’s buildings and my dad’s anger. It isn’t just people ignoring the thing right in front of them.
This town is also Sofia being there when I need her, and Fiona noticing something that grown adults didn’t see and helping my sisters. And Liam being so stoic and so soft and so good.
This town is Juniper’s notes to Joe and Campbell’s righteous rage and the unending depths of our mother’s courage anytime his anger shifts to us instead of her.
And it’s me. I’m part of Auburn, too, even when I criticize it. Even when I hate it.
Once I figure out what it was missing, the essay is easy to write.
It was missing me.
Chapter Sixty
LIAM AND I DRIVE TO THE same spot we went to that morning we skipped first period together.
Lately it’s been too cold to leave the car, but tonight isn’t so bad. Liam pulls a thick blanket out of his trunk, and again we sit on the hood of his car that is still warm from the engine. When we lean back and look up, the treetops form a circle around a patch of star-spotted night sky. The trees look like giant sentinels, steadfastly guarding this little patch of earth.
Or maybe it is us they are guarding.
I’m glad we came out here tonight. It was like we both just wanted to be alone.
Turns out we can be alone together.
It’s now been several days of strange silence in my house. Days since Auburn lost their semi-final game, and the town retreated from its football fervor.
I lean toward Liam and press my lips against his cheek. I snuggle a little deeper into the crook of his arm. With my ear pressed against his ribs, all I can hear is his heart. When he asks me something, I miss it, and have to pull away from him and ask him to say it again.
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