I barely stay awake in first period. Mr. Blackburn is droning on about World War I, but all I can think about is what the pastor said in the car.
Has he told Aggie that I’m sneaking out? She didn’t seem angry at breakfast, which gives me hope. She’d be angry if she found out, but more than that, I know she’d be hurt. Devastated, even, that I’d been lying to her, and I feel like shit about that. I know she does her best. I know how badly she wants a better life for me. Better than Mama’s, though she would never say that out loud. When we moved out of Grandma Margaret’s house, Aggie claimed it was for her, so she could be closer to the bar, so she could finally get out of her childhood home. But I know that’s only half true. It was also for me, to get me away from Margaret. To keep me from being raised the same way Aggie and Mama were.
I was going to stop sneaking out so much anyway. Yesterday, I’d fallen asleep in the middle of chorus, which is usually the only class I actually enjoy. After Savannah poked me awake, I’d made a vow: I will stop going out to run at night, except on Saturdays. I will stop cutting class. I will sleep through the night, like a normal girl.
Maybe it’s unfair, to leave my sister alone for so long during the week, but she managed all right before this summer. I’ve told her she just needs to wait. In three years, I’ll be eighteen. I won’t need to go to school or sneak out anymore.
I’ve been helping out at the bar after school and over the last few summers, but Aggie doesn’t pay me. She considers it chores. I get an allowance of a dollar a week because that’s what Aggie got from Grandpa Joe back in the day and she refuses to adjust for inflation. I know that some months we’re only just scraping by, so I shouldn’t complain. But once I’m out of high school, Aggie will have to pay me for real and I’ll save up for a car so I can get a job in Delphi, where they have more than one bar that hasn’t gone out of business, and then I can buy a house far out in the forest, like Grandma Margaret’s, though smaller probably. Maybe just a trailer. Or a tent even, while I save up, but a fancy one, the kind with multiple rooms. My sister and I can live there, the two of us, and no one will be able to tell me what to do.
But that’s a long way off. Right now all I have is fifty dollars (saved up from my meagre allowance and a few small tips from friendly regulars) in an envelope under my mattress, so I’ve got to compromise. I’ve got to play by the rules for a while to survive.
Of course, if I stop sneaking out now, the stupid pastor is going to think it’s because of him. He’s going to think he won. The thought of giving him that satisfaction makes me almost as miserable as the prospect of having to repeat ninth grade.
Mr. Blackburn has found a way to segue from trench warfare to his most recent weekend fishing trip. Henry, who sits two desks up and one to the right of me, turns around and draws a finger across his throat, sticks his tongue out, rolls his eyes back until there’s nothing but white. I grin. Maisie, who sits at the desk next to me, notices and scowls. She and I used to be friends, but we drifted apart around the end of eighth grade when she started hanging out with a different group of girls. Cooler ones. She and Henry dated for most of last year, then broke up this summer.
Henry turns around and I stare at the back of his neck. It’s got this dusting of pale hairs like the secret fur of a leaf. When the sunlight hits them, they glow.
He died once when he was younger. His mother found him flat on his back on the front porch with his heart stopped. The EMTs shocked him back to life. Afterward everybody wanted to know what it was like, if he’d seen God. Henry said he didn’t remember, but people kept asking, so eventually he said he had seen a brilliant blue light in the shape of a lion. He said the lion padded toward him and opened its mouth wide and fitted its jaws around his head. It held him there, teeth pressing against his skin, until he woke.
He made that up, though. I know because he told me so himself. Told me he didn’t see a thing. Just darkness.
Henry and I used to be friends, too. When we were all younger, he’d hang out with me and Savannah. I mean, basically every kid hung out with every other kid back then. Lester is small. I liked Henry particularly, though. He was quiet and good at playing along with games. Didn’t try to ruin things the way some of the other boys did.
It’s all different now. Has been since some invisible line got crossed back at the start of seventh grade and suddenly nobody wanted to play games anymore because it didn’t look cool and boys couldn’t hang out with girls anymore or else they were dating.
So I don’t really talk to Henry anymore except in school. Savannah says she thinks he has a crush on me, but I’m not sure.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in history class I will take whatever Mr. Blackburn is going on about and put Henry and me in it. Henry marching off to war, and me, hair shorn and disguised in men’s clothing, marching off beside him. Henry mustard-gassed and shrapnelled, and me nursing him slowly back to health, cradling his bandaged head in my lap, gently sponging his wounds. It’s always very tragic, whatever I imagine. I don’t know if that’s the fault of history, or if there’s something wrong with me, that I like to imagine Henry broken and bleeding, helpless, in need of rescue. Henry and I shot at, captured, tortured. Henry and I fugitives, persecuted, living in the woods, sleeping under the stars. Henry warming his frostbitten fingers by the fire, and me catching rabbits for us to eat, breaking their necks swift as my sister does. But cooking them because I am not like my sister, not really.
* * *
—
In math class I actually do fall asleep, with my head leaning against the wall. When the bell jolts me awake, the teacher glares but doesn’t say anything. For the first month of school he’d come over and wake me up when I fell asleep in class but by now he’s obviously decided that I’m not worth the effort.
When I get to chorus, I take my seat in the back row next to Savannah, who’s got her phone hidden behind her music folder. I lean over and whisper, “Let’s leave after this.”
Savannah snorts. “That was quick.”
I’d told her yesterday about my vow. Or part of it anyway. Told her I was going to stop cutting class, start actually trying in school.
“This will be the last time,” I say.
“Right,” says Savannah, and then Mrs. Carol calls us to attention and starts hammering out scales for us to yowl along to.
When the bell rings, Savannah and I duck out and hide behind the gym supply shed until the second bell. The high school is nestled at the foot of a hill, with hardly fifty feet between it and the start of the national forest, so it’s easy for us to book it to the trees. We go the long way to Queen of Heaven Cemetery, winding through the woods by our usual route.
When we get there, Savannah goes to visit the grave of her uncle Tad, who was her all-time favorite uncle before he wrecked his motorcycle. He was only eighteen when it happened, three years older than we are now, which makes his death seem more real, somehow.
Mama was only fifteen, the same age as I am now, when she disappeared, but the police never found her body. She doesn’t have a proper grave, so I walk around the edges of the cemetery and collect all the silk flowers that blew away in the wind and I lay them at the base of a tree and I pretend that’s where she is.
Aggie and Grandma Margaret don’t like talking to me about Mama. They always tell me not to bring it up, to let the pain of the past stay in the past, so most of what I know I’ve learned from the drunks in Joe’s Bar. They aren’t the most reliable source, perhaps, but I take what I can get. Every scrap of Mama I can gather is precious. I would give anything to see her, to talk to her, even just to touch her hand. To have one single memory of her that was my own.
As it is, all I have are other people’s memories. Details change depending on who I ask or how drunk they are at the time, but there are a few things I’m certain about. Mama was fifteen when she got pregnant. Grandma Margaret kicked her
out of the house when she found out about it. Mama bounced from couch to couch for a while, ended up living with the Cantrell boys, Logan and Brandon, in their double-wide trailer out on the ridge. Logan Cantrell is probably my daddy, though nobody’s sure. Logan was a drug dealer and a thief. People say he was violent. People say they’re pretty sure he hit her. Say they saw the bruises.
People also say Logan wasn’t the only guy Mama hung around with. They say she was wild. Say she was friendly, a little too friendly, and I know what they really mean by that.
Officially, Mama is still missing. Officially, no one knows what happened to her. Not a soul laid eyes on her after she gave birth. But you ask practically anyone in Lester and they will tell you that they do know what happened. Logan Cantrell killed her, they’ll tell you, and buried her body in the woods.
* * *
—
When we’re done at the cemetery, we climb the hill behind it and pass through a band of trees into an overgrown yard with a sagging two-story house in the center of it.
Technically, the house belongs to Myron, Savannah’s oldest uncle, but it’s been empty since he got put away for dealing a few years back. No one ever comes here except the two of us, so in a way the house is ours.
The porch has collapsed and the back door is nailed shut, so I give Savannah, who is a good half a foot shorter than me, a boost through the kitchen window, and then I clamber through myself.
We hold our breath and creep through the hallway, past the Hornet Room (where Savannah once got stung four times) and the Pit-of-Hell Room (where the floor has given way to the basement) until we reach our favorite: the Naked Lady Room, where the walls are papered with pages from old nudie magazines. It used to be Myron’s bedroom. There’s a bare mattress on the floor and a dresser with two out of three drawers.
Savannah pulls out the bottom drawer and extracts her Tupperware of assorted cigarettes, begged and stolen from various sources and carefully hoarded here.
“Can I have the blanket?” I ask. “I was up all night.”
Savannah pouts, but she pulls the folded quilt from the drawer and hands it over. I spread it across the mattress, run my hands over the faded squares, each one a slightly different shade of blue, like little windows into a hundred summer days.
This is our secret hideout. We used to come here and play games. We’d pretend the house was haunted by Victorian-era ghosts or that we were archaeologists exploring an ancient and musty ruin. We’d make up elaborate backstories for the ladies on the walls. We’d carve pictures into the rotting floorboards with nails. I’d be Myron sometimes. She’d be Myron’s pretend girlfriend. We’d fool around.
Now, though, Savannah settles down cross-legged in the corner, cigarette in one hand, phone in the other. It’s a hand-me-down from her sister Dakota, its screen spiderwebbed with cracks, but it’s still way better than my phone, which is no phone at all. Aggie refuses to buy me one and I can’t afford it on my own.
I don’t need to ask Savannah who she’s texting. I know who it is: a boy. She’s been obsessed with the damn things since she first kissed one last year. She’s kissed at least eight more since then. Done more than that, even, with a few of them, though she’s never gone all the way.
The sorry truth is I’ve never kissed any boys at all. The only person I’ve ever kissed is Savannah, right here in this very room. But that was just a game, I guess.
I curl up on the quilt. My eyelids are already heavy. I let them close.
“Jo?”
I startle. “What?”
“Were you asleep?” asks Savannah.
“No. Almost.”
“Well, do you think you’ll sleep for long?” Savannah sounds petulant. Maybe she wants me to stay awake and talk. I would if I could, I guess, though she rarely wants to talk about anything interesting these days. It’s all boring real things with her these days instead of stories. She wants to talk about the other kids at school. About boys.
“I don’t know,” I say. I was out way later than usual last night, and I can barely keep my head up.
Savannah huffs. “You’re going to trip and break your leg some night and then get eaten by wild deer and it will serve you right.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, settling my head back down on the quilt.
Savannah knows I run at night, but she thinks I do it alone. She thinks I’m an insomniac. I’ve told her that I am, told her I run to relax. Which isn’t entirely a lie. Sometimes I get so angry that I am certain I will burn up from the inside out. If I run long enough, hard enough, push myself past pain and aching muscles, I can break through, into a state of absolute calm.
In middle school Savannah and I both did track and field, both loved to run (she did sprints, I did long distance), but Savannah quit at the end of last year and I wasn’t about to keep doing it without her. So now I only run with my sister.
When Savannah and I were little, I would talk about Lee sometimes. The first time Savannah stayed for a sleepover at Grandma Margaret’s house, I made her climb out the window of my first-floor bedroom with me at midnight. Margaret’s house is way out on one of the ridges, built by her granddaddy nearly a hundred years ago. It’s surrounded by forest and accessible only by a narrow dirt road. Savannah and I stood in the backyard for hours, staring at the dark wall of trees, waiting. But my sister didn’t show up that night, or any of the other nights that I forced Savannah to wait with me. Lee is scared of people, so I should have known that she would never come out of the woods if there was anyone other than me in the yard. After a while I stopped trying to convince Savannah that my sister existed.
In fact, I stopped mentioning my sister at all, to anyone. It was safer that way. If people found out about her, about the way she lived, they would take her away from me. When I was younger I thought that someday she could come live with me and Aggie and Margaret and go to school and be a normal person, but I understand now that could never happen, even if my sister weren’t afraid, because there’s this thing called the state and the state takes children.
When Savannah told me in second grade that the state took her cousins, I imagined a monster, something with claws and teeth, dragging them out of their beds while they screamed. Her aunt hadn’t been doing a good enough job raising her kids, I guess. Someone called the state and said her kids were too skinny and had bruises and were left alone in the house overnight while their mother went out to score drugs. If that’s all it took for the state to step in, what the hell would they make of Lee? Left alone for years. Skinnier than any kid in town. Matted hair and yellowed teeth. Fleas in the summer. Tick bites. Scars from head to toe. Two of her toes permanently numb from frostbite she got before she met me.
Someone would have to answer for that. Grandma Margaret still has custody of me, even though she lets Aggie do all the work, the same way she owns Joe’s Bar and Grill but does nothing except collect a check every month. Margaret owns me and Aggie both, in a way. And Lee should be her responsibility by law, I guess. Maybe they’d charge her for neglect. After all, I did try to tell Margaret. When I was very little, I told her about my sister, but she didn’t believe me and so nobody but me has taken care of Lee all these years.
I’ve done my best, but the state wouldn’t care about that, wouldn’t care that being forced into a foster home with strangers would send Lee wild with fear, that being locked up in a hospital or a psych ward (and I’m sure they’d think she was crazy, mentally challenged, stunted, backward, strange) would probably kill her. I think of her locked up, strapped to a bed, and my chest seizes as if her terror were my terror. She would be an animal caught in a trap, gnawing off her own leg to get free. I don’t know if she could survive it. I don’t know if I could, either.
Because I hide myself as much as I hide my sister. I hide the person I am when I’m with her. When I was a kid it was easier. How I acted in the day wasn’t much different fr
om how I acted at night. Outside of school at least, the kids of Lester roved about, playing in the woods behind someone’s house or alongside the train tracks, fighting with sticks, running races, trying to catch fish in Monday Creek, acting out plays with dead bugs as the actors. But as I got older, there were more and more things that weren’t acceptable or cool, especially for a girl.
I added them all to the secret half of me.
Sometimes I wish I could put the two halves back together. I wish my sister could come and live here, with me and Savannah, in Myron’s house, which the forest is taking back anyway.
I blink sleepily at Savannah, who is smiling down at something on her phone, the screen’s glow reflecting onto her cheeks.
There is nothing more peaceful than this. Smoke fluttering from her fingertips toward the ceiling. The naked ladies on the wall behind her gazing down protectively, big-breasted angels with ’80s hair.
I feel myself drifting. The ladies blur into a landscape. Bosomy clouds, blond waterfalls. Savannah a distant mountain.
I think of my sister, sleeping somewhere in the woods even now. I close my eyes.
* * *
—
I wake to the sound of banging on the wall. I roll over to ask Savannah what’s going on, but she’s gone.
I jump up, heart pounding.
It must be the pastor. He must have followed us here somehow. Must have been watching me. Waiting to break my legs. I run down the hallway, kicking up clouds of plaster dust in my wake. The banging continues.
Then suddenly: silence.
I skid into the kitchen, and there’s Savannah. She’s leaning out the window, elbows on the paint-flaked sill, talking to somebody.
She’s swaying her hips a little side to side. She’s giggling. She’s shed her oversized hoodie, has it wrapped around her waist. Her pink bra straps clash with her olive-green tank.
Some Kind of Animal Page 2