Jess found this baffling. She could sense an undertone, but she couldn’t gauge it; she decided it probably was a dumb inside joke or a test of some kind, not recognizing how much of their tone was rooted in pride, insecurity, and self-preservation, a wariness that she, girl from the city, would dare to look down on them, the rural kids. After all, they’d seen this their whole young lives—from the news, from movies, from the very books in their backpacks, from other new kids before her: Rednecks. Dumb hicks. She should have recognized the tone; she’d heard it enough from her mother, about anyone with a better house, a better car, a better-paying job: They’re not better than us, J-bird. They just have more money.
Whatever was going on, Jess knew enough to keep her mouth shut, clutching her books to her chest, eyes straight ahead. “Ignore them,” her mom told her. “Take the high road.” She could do that. She imagined a literal high road, a berm or a bridge a few feet off the ground, and she fixed her gaze on the square alarm bell at the end of the hall. It was like in ballet class: keep your eye on one spot as you turn so you don’t get dizzy. They weren’t allowed to wear headphones at school, but she acted as though she had them on, as if she could hear only lyrics and guitar.
One day a girl wearing a yellow scrunchie in her hair called after Jess. She said, “God. Stuck-up much?”
Jess should have ignored it. At most, she should have shaken her head or said a simple No, I’m not. But that week, after Angie had had that strange fight with her father, roaring off in her car and leaving Jess to sleep alone in her friend’s bed, Angie had stopped returning her calls, had stopped waiting for her after school or offering rides. Had mumbled, “I can’t do anything after school anymore. I have to help my dad.” Her one lifeline in this town had been razored in half, leaving her reeling, untethered. No more eating pancakes or playing poker or watching TV with Angie and her nice dad, no more rides around town with music blasting from the speakers, thumping into her chest. Nights, she watched TV, but lately the news blared footage from the Gulf—wind-whipped sand and bombs exploding over the capital, burning oil fields, Iraqi soldiers on their knees—which tied her up in knots. She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling or watched her mother sleep and cry until she couldn’t stand it and ran outside. Last night, the moon had dodged in and out of the clouds, lighting up the edges, so the sky looked like a map of the earth. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the land and air had changed places. If the little lake could disappear like that—boom, drained into a sinkhole overnight—then why not the land and air? Nothing made sense. Friendship: How could it be even more elusive than love? What had she done wrong? What was wrong with her?
In the hall, with the scrunchie girl in her peripheral vision, part of her warned, Don’t. Keep walking. Ignore. High road, high road. The other part of her, though—the one worn thin by too much thinking, too much worry, not enough sleep, the weeks of navigating these halls and their whispers—had something else in mind: Head-on. Don’t blink.
Jess turned and looked at the girl. She pulled her book bag from her shoulder and held it by the strap, testing its weight. She carried everything in that bag so she wouldn’t have to stop at her locker. Books for US history, trig, Humanities, and chemistry, her notebook, pens, her hideous polyester gym clothes, copies of Bloom County and Life in Hell she hadn’t returned to the Phoenix library. A good fifteen pounds, if not more. She gripped the strap tight.
The girl lifted her hands, mocking. “What? You got something to say, Phoenix Girl? Oooh, Phoenix Girl has something to say.” She flipped her head to look at her friends, and her stupid ponytail whirled like a helicopter blade. They all laughed as if it were hilarious, as if any of them had the first clue about funny.
Jess said, “Yeah, I got something to say.” As the words came out, she took three long steps and swung the book bag underhand as if fast-pitching a softball. Fast, but not fast enough. The girl jumped back so the bag grazed her arm but missed nailing her upside the head, where Jess had been aiming. She stumbled into another girl to her left, and the whole clot of them stared at Jess, blinking, at first too surprised to react.
The weight and momentum of the bag had wrenched her shoulder, but Jess ignored the twinge. She slipped the straps over both shoulders and continued down the hall as if nothing had happened, as if she had nothing at all to do with the swarm of girls who had begun to buzz and screech behind her. But her heart beat fast, and she swallowed hard. That, she knew, was a mistake. A big one. She smiled and lifted her chin, spotting the alarm bell at the end of the hall and almost pirouetting toward it.
Sure enough, the next day—her seventeenth birthday—the little charmers started tagging her locker. “Bitch.” “Slut.” “Cunt from hell.” “Jess Winters spreads.” Jess walked past the locker as if it wasn’t hers. She didn’t try to cover it, let the words scream into the hall. She didn’t tell on them. She wouldn’t tell her mother. By midmorning the custodians had scrubbed it clean, leaving faded marks on the paint. When Principal López called her in to ask if everything was all right, squinting at her over his bifocals and tugging at his bushy mustache, she said she was fine. No, sir, she had no idea who was writing on her locker. No, sir, she didn’t need a new one. She was fine, thank you. No, sir, she didn’t need to talk with a counselor. Yes, she was going to apply to colleges. Yes, she had signed up for the PSAT.
Because of that meeting, she was late to Humanities. Ms. Genoways was already hot in the middle of reading out an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem. She wore silver rings on every finger, even her thumbs, and her hair looked as though someone had snuck in and given her a perm while she was sleeping. Before Jess could hand her the late pass, Ms. G held up her arm to Jess’s face and said, “See? The shivers—now that’s literature.” She went on to tell the class that Millay and other authors such as Oscar Wilde were banned all the time for their risqué content. She went on to say that love and all its permutations—she paused and wrote it on the board, “LOVE = permutations”—was the great question at the root of all literature. Was it Capital L Love? Or lowercase? Or lust, or longing, or loneliness, or loss? What was the difference? How did we know? A great big beating heart of a puzzle, she said. The great unknown.
Jess slid into her seat, ignoring the glares from the girl she’d knocked back, ignoring Angie’s averted eyes. She found a spot on the wall: a poster of James Baldwin, who was shown sitting in front of a bookcase with his chin in his palm, looking away from the camera. She focused her gaze on the twin grooved lines between his brow. Deep, like a river gorge.
After class, Ms. G told her to wait a minute, so Jess hung back near her own desk. She caught Angie’s eye and gave a quick wave, and Angie smiled before ducking her chin. After the last student left, Ms. G turned to Jess.
She tilted her head. “I let a couple of students have lunch in my classroom. Not everyone. Those who might need—” She paused, considering. She twisted the ring on her thumb. “Some space. You’re welcome, okay? If you like.”
Jess started to say, “Thanks,” but her throat seized up. She nodded and hurried out the door to her next class. The St. Vincent Millay lines Ms. G had recited ran through her mind: but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh / Upon the glass and listen for reply. The words were wet and warm under her tongue, and sure enough, the hair rose on her arms.
That night Jess’s mother brought home pizza and a birthday cake from Bashas’. White frosting with blue trim, a blue bird in the lower left corner with a large speech bubble: “Happy 17th birthday, J-bird,” it read, as if the bird were talking.
At the kitchen table, her mom lit the single candle. “February 17. Your golden birthday.”
Jess looked at the flame. The inside of the cake, she knew, was marble, her and her father’s favorite. Her father had sent a birthday card—in Caroline’s handwriting. “To My Beautiful Girl, With Love from Dad, Caroline, and baby sister Noelle.” Capital L Love. Jess had torn it in half and tossed it in the wastebasket under her desk.<
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She tried to smile. “A regular pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Little leprechauns are just shitting gold.”
“Jess.”
“I know. Sorry.”
Her mom sat down across from her and started to sing “Happy Birthday.”
Jess looked at the cute talking bird on the cake, at the candle beginning to melt. She started crying. It was just so sad, Capital S Sad, the two of them sitting there, with the little candle dripping blue wax on the frosting.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said.
Her mom got up and hugged her. “It’s too much. It’s too much for anyone. But we’ll get through it. I promise.” She squeezed herself on the chair next to her, holding her tight, and Jess breathed in her familiar scent, a salve of mint gum and clean sheets.
She rubbed Jess’s back. “You have your whole life in front of you. This is a blip on the radar. I know you don’t see it, but you have this glow about you.”
Jess sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “Radioactive.”
Her mother laughed. She tugged on a strand of Jess’s hair, pulling the curl straight and then letting it spring back. “No. You’re my Starshine, my strong blue-winged girl.”
Before bed, Jess wrote herself a big note in her notebook, in bright purple marker: “Capital P Perspective. Get some! Also: Get a job. And a CAR.” She wrote a sloppy draft of a poem based on the prompt Ms. G had given them: “Write a poem or scene that includes the sky.”
When we weren’t looking
the sky talked the land into switching places.
(The sky’s sly that way.)
So now we walk on patches of blue,
knock stars from our shoes,
skate around the corona of the sun.
Look up.
Boulders move fast across the dirt,
and the trees are setting.
Their veiny leaves burn on the horizon,
and the grass is in our eyes.
She wrote: “write more. do better.”
Classes, if not school altogether, helped with the perspective. In history, Mr. Manning began a unit on the Holocaust, and he assigned the comic book Maus. Jess read half of the first volume in one sitting, holding the book tight to her knees in bed. When she put it down, she let out a long exhale—as if she’d been holding her breath the whole time. She’d had to read Anne Frank before, but these scratchy black-and-white comics made it more real and true than the mythic nightmare she’d imagined. Somehow, the writer had even made her laugh at times. Her head spun with the size of the story, with how to hold all its truth inside. How did the world not rupture because of that event? Like, literally rip in half. She got up and pulled the torn birthday card from her wastebasket. She taped it together and stuck it instead in the back of her desk drawer. She fell asleep clutching the book to her chest, her finger marking a page.
The next day in Humanities, Ms. G began an art unit on the pre-Impressionist period. Artists were shifting to realistic paintings, which irritated the Salon, which Jess understood to be a bunch of dudes in charge of the art then. Ms. G showed slides of the work, pausing on a French painting called The Floor Planers, which showed three shirtless men on their knees scraping a wooden floor. This was scandalous, Ms. G said, not because they were shirtless but because they were workers. The Salon did not value depictions of ordinary life, working life. In their view, that was not the subject of art. “But look at that light,” Ms. G said, and she touched the screen, tracing the shine on the floors and on the men’s muscled backs. “Shivers!” she said, holding up her arm, and Jess got them, too. “The beautiful in the ordinary,” Ms. G said, and Jess wrote it down. Of course, the lights were off and half the rest of the class was sleeping, so Ms. G took off her shoe and chucked it against the wall, yelling, “Wake up! Wake up!” Under her breath she added, “Christ on a crutch.” Jess laughed her father’s loud honk, forgetting to try to hide it.
At lunchtime, Jess knocked on Ms. G’s classroom door. Her teacher opened the door with a smile, welcoming her with sweeping wave. The radio was on low, streaming classical music.
Jess went to her normal seat at the back of the room. She dropped her hefty book bag, pulled her brown lunch bag out of it, and slid into the desk before she realized another girl was there. She was sitting across the room under the James Baldwin poster, her face tipped toward a book on the desk.
Jess knew her name was Danielle Newell. They were in trig together. Dani, the teacher called her. In math, she always knew the right answer although she never raised her hand. When Ms. Simmons asked a question and it was clear no one would answer, she would turn to Dani, who would answer without prompt. “That’s right,” Ms. Simmons would say, and the class seemed to groan and sigh and hiss in one shared breath. Jess admired how Dani never flinched, never looked behind her. Straight ahead or down at her book, her shoulders straight.
Ms. G said, “Dani, this is Jess. Have you two met?”
Dani raised her hand in greeting without looking up from the book. As always, she wore her dark hair in a low ponytail. An enormous pair of eyeglasses, the lenses as round as navel oranges, dwarfed her small face. She looked tiny in the desk, childlike.
Ms. G stared at Dani’s head and then looked at Jess. “I’ll be over here, grading, if you need anything. Stay as long as you like.” She turned the volume up on the radio.
“Thanks,” Jess said. She pulled out a bruised banana and a PB&J, squished on one side from the weight of her books. She opened Maus and began to read. The room filled with the strains of piano and violin, the wheeze of the heater, the shuffle of papers, a few loud sighs from Ms. G, an emphatic scratch of her pen. Out the window, fat white clouds moved fast across the blue sky, and when she leaned forward, she caught a glimpse of the snow-tipped Black Hills, of the lump of black mountain she knew now was a slag heap from the old mines. She tried to chew her sandwich without noise, pressing at her clicking jaw, which her mother blamed on the rubber bands.
After a few minutes, though, she settled into the peace. Mouth full, hunched over the desk and immersed in the comic, she glanced up to brush a strand of hair out of her eye. As she did, she caught Dani Newell staring at her, her eyes wide behind the huge frames. Jess smiled, because of those ridiculous glasses. Dani looked away, but Jess thought she saw her mouth twitch.
In March, Jess interviewed for a part-time job working weekends at Overton Orchards, the pecan orchard about a half mile from her house—an easy walk, an easier bike ride. Her mom delivered mail at the orchard and had got to talking with Iris Overton, the owner, who said she was looking for some help with answering phones and with the gift shop.
Iris was tiny, maybe five feet tall, with little tan bird arms and legs, and she kept her head shaved. Like Sinead O’Connor, but silver. Jess thought she looked a bit like a pinball, and in fact she had the energy of one. She bounced into the room wearing large rubber boots, with a rake slung over her shoulder.
After introducing herself, Iris said, “Have you met my son Paul? He’s a junior, too. Tall? Needs a haircut?” She raised her arm over her head and stood on her tiptoes.
Jess shook her head. “Not yet.”
“You might see him here sometimes, but it’s track season, so he’s out running all the live long day. Or off with his girlfriend.” Iris smiled. “Takes after his dad. Took after.” Her smile faded. “Beau died last year. Unexpectedly. His heart,” she said, placing her palm on her chest.
Jess’s throat tightened. She kept saying she didn’t care if her father lived or died, but such a picture, one with her father cut out, didn’t fit, either. She hadn’t spoken with him in three months now, though he’d called and left messages on the machine she shared with her mother. Call me, honey, I love you and miss you, beautiful girl. Blah blah blah. What did he expect her to do? Get over it? She was the daughter he didn’t choose.
Her voice hoarse, Jess said, “I’m sorry.”
Iris said, “Honey, don’t I know it. Listen, don’t worry
about that. The job’s yours if you want it. Now I can’t pay much, four bucks an hour, but it’s not nothing, right? Let me guess: you’re saving for a car?”
Jess nodded.
Iris laughed. “I was the same way. Let me show you around.”
She gave Jess a tour. The main building, a cabin with heavy wood beams and a green tin roof, housed the gift shop and office. It was built in the early 1900s by her husband’s family when the mines still flourished and the town was flush. In the 1950s, when the mines went bust, the family turned to farming, which in that climate was best for crops, cattle, poultry, or dairy—or, her husband later learned, pecans, planting the first row in the 1970s when he inherited the land. Their house was off the back, connected by a covered breezeway. Beyond was a large barn, the cleaning shed, where they processed the pecans during fall harvest. Iris explained the three primary seasons: In winter, the dormant season, they planted new trees and replaced dying ones, pruned limbs, repaired the tools and cleaning sheds. In spring and summer, the growing season, they tested irrigation lines, watered, fertilized, mowed, and checked for insects and root rot. In late summer, the shells ripened, turning green and round as the pecan nut formed. Come October, the shucks would toughen and break open as the nut reached maturity. Time for harvest.
“Fall, all hell breaks loose,” Iris said. “Our busiest time. The shaking season.”
“What’s the shaking season?” Jess said.
“That’s how we get the nuts out. Shake the trees. Used to be we whacked them with big sticks. Now we have a tractor with a long mechanical arm, although last season it kept seizing up and we went back to sticks.” She shrugged. “Something’s always needing to be fixed around here. It’s a long season. The buds will break soon, in April, and we’ll be busy making sure they stay healthy and grow right. In the fall and winter, we’ll start staying open late on the weekends, selling bags of nuts and pies for the holidays. Sundown at the Orchard, we call it. I’ll definitely need your help then.”
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