Toil & Trouble

by Jessica Spotswood

  We say this with conviction, but we also know what it’s like to have no idea what’s coming and to want to meet it anyway, no matter what anyone says. To ignore warning signs, to believe the best in people. A truck hit each of us, one after the other, and it’s still on the road, now heading for this girl.

  The shyest of us lost her virginity in the back of a green Dodge and lied for years, to herself and to anyone who’d listen, to say she liked it.

  The loudest of us came home from the trip to the county fair, where she spun around in the teacups and visited the fun house, and afterward she didn’t speak a word out loud for six months.

  The angriest of us, the one cradling the most fire, the most seething fight, wouldn’t acknowledge anything that happened between the year she was seven and the year she turned eleven and her uncle moved away. Whole gaps of her childhood lie in wait under wool blankets or are buried beneath sea level in dank caves. Yet she does remember. She has always remembered. That’s the point.

  We used to be little, and soft. We used to say yes before we even heard the entire question. We used to think we had no recourse for making someone’s heart ache like ours have ached, for resetting the balance in the universe, for striving for the thing we’re not supposed to want but we still do want: revenge.

  We are different ages, from different parts of town, from different schools and families and decades. Some of us have, and some of us have not. Some of us are beautiful. Some of us make the cashiers in the supermarket cringe. But all of us were girls once, in some way or another, back before we found each other. Before we realized what we had inside us. Before we knew what we could accomplish together. Before we yelled into the night and demanded it remember our names.

  The thing is, we couldn’t have stopped the girl if we tried. There she was, had we known to part the branches and peer out of the woods. She was on the side of Old Fork Road, waiting for the first peek of his headlights. She’d reached the bend.

  * * *

  Mirah waited, as instructed, at the bend in the road. She stood there and she waited for the sound of his car, the sight of his headlights, but it was taking Jayson Turner forever to show up. When her feet started aching, and she cursed herself for wearing the wrong shoes and such an uncomfortable, wriggly, snappish skirt, she found a large rock to sit on where she could see the road and where it could see her. She checked her phone every other minute, even with the volume up, and she watched for cars from either direction. She wondered why he wanted to meet here, of all places. Alone in the night, she started to do a lot of wondering. She kept her back to the trees.

  It was after a full twenty-eight minutes had passed, and after her eyes had adjusted to the stretch of darkness, when she noticed the two white sticks. They formed a cross, and they carried a name: Alison. She remembered Alison, a girl a grade ahead of her in school. This must have been the roadside shrine that marked where she got hit, at this bend, near where the overgrown path opened into the darkest knot of trees. Mirah hadn’t realized it was so close to her house.

  The shrine was a year old and not yet forgotten like other roadside memorials for other classes’ accidents long past. It was fresh from last summer, though not too fresh. The white paint was growing moss. Rotting gas-station flowers were scattered on the ground. Mirah tried to remember all she knew about Alison. Had she been on the softball team? Did she have an affinity for overlarge sweaters? It could be, if Mirah’s memory served, that they used to ride the same bus route, because the high school and the junior high got out at the same time and the buses were shared. Alison would sit in the first three rows with her friends, and she never ventured to the back, where the rowdiest of the boys held court. If a younger kid sat beside her, Alison even smiled and shared her seat. That was pretty much all Mirah remembered of her. That, and the faded facts of her accident last August.

  People said she ran out of the woods, probably drunk—the rumors were insistent she had to be drunk—and straight into an oncoming car. No one knew what she was doing drinking alone in the woods. They did know that the impact of the car sent her sailing, and the shock at her sudden appearance sent the driver in reverse. No one blamed the driver. It was a blind bend, a deliriously drunk girl. No one looked to the woods for answers, and it didn’t occur to Mirah that it could be anything else.

  While Mirah waited for Jayson Turner to show up, she got to her knees and crouched closer to the shrine. She wasn’t praying; she wouldn’t do a thing like that. She was only curious. Only looking.

  The shrine was simple, made with barely any effort, just the two sticks and Alison’s name painted on it. A Mets cap was perched on the ground, weathered and surely crawling with insects. It had probably once sat on Alison’s unwitting head.

  What a stupid girl. If she’d kept safe to the side of the road and crossed where the trees cleared, the car wouldn’t have even hit her.

  Mirah considered saying a few words, but nothing came. She knew this wasn’t a grave, yet still she searched the dirt with her fingers until she found a smooth, small pebble that felt right. She heard the sound of a car approaching, so she did it quickly. She chose a spot on the arm of the cross and left the pebble behind. For Alison.

  Then she scrambled back to a visible spot in the bend.

  * * *

  We don’t speak the name Alison to one another or even to ourselves—though we didn’t know her name that night, and some of us spent weeks not knowing. Once we learned it, we spent a long time trying to dislodge it from the tense ridges of our brains, until we realized she would forever be among us, even if she didn’t choose. So we mouthed her name into our mirrors without using sound. We wrote her name on slips of paper that we drowned in water, then air-dried, then tore to pieces, then burned.

  Alison was the first girl to find our fire. She came out from the trees on a summer’s night a year before this one. The way some of us remember it, she was down on her knees crawling, but others remember she was quick on her feet. She was slippery. Twice she escaped our arms, and three of us had to hold her down.

  “What’s she doing? Why won’t she stay still?”

  “Did she bite you?”

  “Get her! Get her legs!”

  We lost track of who was saying what. We can only imagine how frightened she was by the sound of us all around her.

  Once we had her, we tried to soothe her. We said, “You’re safe. You’re with us.” But she didn’t stop thrashing. We asked her, “What happened to you? Where were you? Why were you running?” But she didn’t have coherent answers. Did we frighten her, with the blood and earth and unidentified smears decorating our chests, our faces, the palms of our hands? Did the fire seem too sinister? Did the way we were dressed, or mostly undressed, upset her? Or was it the way our combined weight kept her pinned to the ground?

  She was crying openly at this point. It’s a thing we try not to remember.

  The most panicked of us tried to explain who we were. The kindest of us attempted to cover her with a cloak—long and thick enough to act as a blanket, mottled with leaves and twigs and stinking of fire smoke yet still warm—but she must have thought she was getting smothered. She wormed away and batted at us with her torn fists and kicked at us with her scratched legs. Something had done that to her before she reached us, something in the woods, and the most timid of us worried we’d been the ones to awaken it.

  “No,” we said, circling her, our arms reaching out to try to grab a limb, “we’re not going to hurt you. You’re safe here with us. Stay.”

  She didn’t stay.

  She took one last look at us and bolted through the trees in the direction of the road, and there was nothing we could do to stop her. She didn’t hear us calling her. She made it out at the bend, where Old Fork Road had the vicious turn and no sign to slow, though when we attempted to scry for her all we saw was a bright light that hurt our eyes and all we heard was the whisper
ing judgment of the forest.

  The car ended her life, but we drove her to it.

  We didn’t speak her name, but we would not forget it. It was Alison Darby Chance—a few of us searched out her house after and peered through the window at her grieving mother; the guiltiest of us attended her funeral. We could have helped her. We could have healed her and protected her and filled her up to bursting. We could have offered her a way to live forever and wear the pain of what happened like a crown of venomous snakes around her head so no one would ever dare hurt her again.

  “What do you want most in the world?” we would have asked her.

  That was the question each of us was asked, upon joining the circle. Intention.

  And she would have opened her mouth for the first time to speak a word to us and not scream, and her teeth would catch the firelight, red as her tongue, and our toes would curl in delight when she said it, though we’d been warned against wanting the very same thing.

  “Revenge,” she would have said, had she stayed.

  The oldest of us would have been on her right side, and the youngest of us would have been on her left, and both would have reached out to let her feel the raw power coursing through us from hand to hand to hand.

  * * *

  Mirah lifted a hand to the approaching car and waved. She wore the widest smile. “Jayson?” she called, but it wasn’t Jayson Turner. It was some random car passing on the road. When Jayson Turner finally did pull up, she had almost abandoned her perch on the rock and gone back home. She’d almost convinced herself that a ghost was walking, coming from the forest to check what flowers were left at her shrine, and she’d almost run off in fright to avoid it. But her head was only making stories. Her eyes were only making the darkness dance. When the headlights came fast around the bend, she felt every inch of herself bristle with energy and possibility. This car slowed. Here he was, Jayson Turner, downing the lights and parking on the side of the road beside the field. Here he was, stepping out. Jayson Turner.

  Only, when he emerged from the car he had too many legs.

  It seemed there were more of him than there should be. She’d thought this was a date, that he was taking her with him to a party, but had she misunderstood and was it something else?

  The darkness confused her, and her flashlight didn’t help it make sense. He hadn’t come alone. Here was Jayson Turner, and here also were two of his tallest friends.

  There were things she told herself to make sense of this, and there were other things best kept submerged. It was a party, she told herself. A senior party. Jayson Turner was the designated driver and giving his friends a ride...though she didn’t understand why they weren’t in the car anymore. Why they were crossing the road to where she stood with her back to the woods. Why all three of them were coming toward her.

  “Wait, where’s the party?” Mirah said. She didn’t want to get poison ivy, and if she’d known they were going in the woods, she would have worn sneakers with socks and a pair of jeans.

  “It’s in here,” Jayson Turner’s friend said.

  “Can’t you hear it?” said his other friend with what seemed like a smirk.

  Jayson Turner nodded at the trees, and then they were all looking, the three boys and Mirah herself, trying to separate the party sounds from the vast patch of unbroken darkness.

  She pitched her ears toward the trees, she strained herself seeking music and laughter and the beckoning sounds of an event not worth missing, one she would be seen at on the arm of Jayson Turner. A wild and unforgettable night that would shift her position in the universe, just in time for the school year to start. How she wanted to find that in there, how she ached for it. Yet all that came back to her ears were the crickets and the branches rustling, the howl of an animal, the bristling dance of the trees.

  She turned back. Jayson Turner covered his mouth and said something to his friends.

  “Wait, wait,” Mirah said, because she wanted so badly to believe, wanted it more than she’d ever hoped to know if there was a God who could answer each and every question (and she had so many questions), more than she wanted her parents to suck it up and stay together, more than she wanted her grandmother to come back to life the way she used to be before she fell face-first down the cellar stairs.

  “I hear it,” Mirah said. “They’re in there. I hear the party. I do. I hear it. Let’s go.” Before Jayson Turner could change his mind and leave her there all alone at the bend in the road, she led the way toward the trees.

  * * *

  The woods here have seen many things over the decades, and they’ve kept hold of it all. Only a sparse few nights that passed under these branches could curdle the blood. There have also been bird-watchers and camping expeditions, Girl Scouts counting flower species and collecting bugs, mud-spattered children chasing frogs in the creek, couples slipping into zipped sleeping bags skin to skin, drunk teenagers laughing and laugh-crying and vomiting in the brush, wandering hikers panicked about being lost, not realizing all along they were half a mile from civilization, people singing to themselves or arguing with themselves or standing very still in the center of it all, appreciating the sound of rustling leaves. All this swept up together in the memory of the place, as if it were happening at the exact same time, layer over layer over layer, time melded together to form one moment, the girl from the summer before and the girl from the summer not yet finished wearing the same face and screaming the same screams.

  There was no party.

  We’d been in the woods for hours—we came almost every Saturday night—so we knew that already. Soon Mirah would know it, too.

  * * *

  Mirah thought she knew Jayson Turner from watching him at school, from what she’d heard trickled down from other girls, from what he said when he’d texted her, but she didn’t, not at all.

  She did say no, and she did say stop, but her only witness was the blanket of night all around her, eyeless and armless and too helpless to do a thing.

  After they left her, Mirah did nothing for what seemed a long time. Then she sat up. She had the flashlight in her hands, and she didn’t know how it got there. She had lost her phone and her shoes, and she couldn’t feel her feet. When she started running, it was without a plan or a direction. She thought she might never stop; she thought her body not capable of stopping. She stumbled and she fell and she picked herself up and she kept going because out there in the wooded distance she saw a light flickering, a fire, she smelled the smoke, and the only thing she was conscious of knowing was that she should run toward it. Half of her wanted to be found and taken home, and the other half of her wanted to run straight into the fire and feel the flames.

  * * *

  She was the second girl to find our fire, but we wouldn’t let her get away like the last one did. She came when it was so close to midnight, and that couldn’t be coincidence.

  She found us. We said this into her matted hair and into her mashed ear. You found us. She didn’t put up a fight when the strongest of us led her into the circle. You found us. When the leaves were placed. You found us. When her blood was taken and dripped into the bowl. You found us. The water and the oil poured. You found us. We asked her the urgent questions (like where she lived, like who we should call), but she wouldn’t answer, so we asked others.

  Once she knew the after, she wouldn’t mind. The fire turned more furious, the frenzy faster, our voices one voice, our power growing roots in the dirt and reaching high into the night air as if it had been stitched together from all of us and we from it.

  She looked up at us like a soaked and startled doe who carried the arrow between her eyes.

  She didn’t recognize us as sisters yet. She may not have known we were even human beings, a few of us practically still girls ourselves. In the daylight she would see us for who we were, and we would let her: Her neighbors and the people she passed on the streets of
town. The librarian. The former prom queen. The gas-station attendant. The ballet teacher. The outcast who hung around outside the convenience store. The artist who painted the murals on High Street. The girls’ soccer coach. The scientist. The salutatorian. No one would suspect we shared these nights together, or what we could do.

  The most careful of us kept the girl cradled, so she wouldn’t skitter away. The one of us who was most skilled at calming leaned in and lent a soft voice to her ear. Some of us kept close, and others of us kept our distance. All we knew was that she had stayed this time, she hadn’t gone running for the road, and now we would help her, we would hear her, we would avenge her, if she wanted us to. Most of all, we would offer her what we had and let her in.

  The moon cast down its light onto all of us. We would tell her what was possible. How we could inspire accidents with four-door sedans or speeding bicycles. We could constrict airways. We could stifle the beat of fatty hearts from all the way across town. We could also do smaller things, like broken fingers and crushed egos, like fumbles and failures and debilitating bouts of the flu. We could do good in the world, too, like calm red rashes and stop night terrors, like show someone lost she was not alone. There were enough of us to do anything. As for Jayson Turner and his friends, they would never be able to hurt anyone else again. That, we could surely do.

  “How is it so bright?” the one of us called Mirah said. The moon had grown along with us, and she was looking up at it.

  She didn’t understand she’d done it. We all had, and we were only getting started. She didn’t realize that all her roaring, living, breathing anger could create so much light.

  * * * * *

  DIVINE ARE THE STARS