Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  And it will be just the two of us. Alone, but together, in the dark.

  There’s a rumble in the distance, so faint I barely hear it. So faint it could be far-off thunder. But then, through the trees, I see it. What I’ve been waiting for.

  A car is coming. A truck, actually. In the lane closest to us. A big one. Eighteen-wheeler. Perfect. Better than I could have hoped.

  “Okay,” I tell my sister, “just like I told you. On the count of three.”

  We position ourselves behind the body. I put a hand on the hip, a hand on the shoulder, my sister reaches one hand out to the knee.

  “One,” I whisper. “Two.”

  The truck is rushing toward us. It’s bearing down. My sister sucks in her breath.

  “Three.”

  Together we heave, as hard as we can, my sister using only her left arm, and the body goes tumbling off the cliff. I watch him falling, see a flash of headlights. I squeeze my eyes shut, turn away.

  Behind me, the hiss of air brakes, the squeal of tires.

  I reach out, grasp my sister’s hand. There’s no going back now. We can never go back. I open my eyes.

  “One,” I say. “Two. Three.”

  And we run.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The rain comes before we make it back. It comes sudden. A moment of stillness, an intake of breath. And all at once it is falling. The sound of a thousand voices hushing us as it rushes through the leaves.

  The sun is gone now, hidden by clouds. It’s as dark as the hour before dawn.

  The rain grows stronger, louder, working itself up into a storm and I gulp huge mouthfuls of the cold wet air and it tastes electric and I am electric, too. Ecstatic.

  I run. Water pours down through gaps between the leaves. Magnificent. Thin trunks of trees dance in the wind.

  We are both drenched within minutes. My sister is running slowly. For once it’s me who runs ahead and has to wait for her to catch up. She clutches her right arm against her chest with her left, trails me like a shadow.

  A strong wind blows the water sideways, washes the blood from our hands, our faces. I run in circles, whooping. Screaming into the wind. The rain beats against my skin, every impact a reminder that I am alive. Alive. Alive. Thunder cracks in the distance. The sky flashes.

  Who needs houses, who needs walls and windows, roofs and doors, when there is this.

  * * *

  —

  In the small clearing where we made our campsite, without trees to interrupt it, the rain is coming down in actual sheets. The wind one moment steals my breath, the next rushes into me to replace it. Alive. Alive.

  The windbreak on the tent is barely holding, flapping wildly. My sister goes right over to it. She’s soaked through, her hair looks heavy and sodden. Her dress sticks to her legs and rain cascades down her arms, drips off the ledge of her nose. She hovers at the side of the tent, holding her wounded arm to her chest, waiting for me.

  I stand at the edge of the clearing, just beyond the break in the trees.

  I don’t want to go in. Don’t want to shut myself up. I’m soaked too, and the wind is stinging, but I want to run. I want to scream into the storm. I want to keep moving and never stop.

  My sister crouches, huddled, by the side of the tent. She’s miserable-looking, shoulders bowed as if they can keep the rain off the rest of her.

  I take a step backward, deeper into the cover of the trees. She’d do the same to me. She has done the same to me, left me on the bridge, left me at Brandon’s. Left and left and left. I take another step back and I feel like the wind is filling me up, like I’ll blow away on it.

  My sister cries out. Not with words, just a wounded, frightened gasp. She reaches toward me so desperately that she topples forward, has to catch herself awkwardly with her good hand.

  She has seen, of course. She has seen that I am going to run.

  The tent whips open and Savannah sticks her head out, wild-eyed. My sister shrinks back.

  “Jo!” Savannah shouts as soon as she sees me. She shouts something else, too, but the wind carries it away.

  She turns toward my sister. She’s saying something to her, but I can’t hear it. Lee has curled into a ball, wrapped protectively around her hurt arm. She’s put her head on her knees. She’s begun to wail. I can just make it out under the storm, a thin high keening that could almost be part of the wind.

  Savannah leans farther out of the tent. The wind is whipping the rain right through the open door.

  I see that Savannah is going to grab my sister’s arm. She’s reaching for her. I see, too, quite clearly, how my sister will react to that, in this state.

  If they ever catch you. If they ever try to touch you.

  I rush forward.

  Reach her just in time.

  * * *

  —

  “I was fucking terrified,” says Savannah. She still has to shout to be heard over the storm. “I didn’t know where you went.”

  Inside the tent is no quieter than outside. There’s a steady patter of raindrops on the taut fabric, and the windbreak whips and snaps above us. Water spritzes in through the mesh top. The thunder, when it comes, is right on top of us, so loud I can feel it in my bones.

  We’re all crowded in, even my sister, who stopped wailing once I approached. She crawled inside the tent after me with hardly any prompting. Savannah threw her arms around me in a hug as soon as I finished zipping up the tent, despite how wet I was.

  “I thought you were dead,” she shouts. “I looked for you and called you.”

  See how you like it. When the roles are reversed.

  “Lee fell,” I shout back.

  My sister and I are both dripping massive puddles onto the floor of the tent. Now that I’ve stopped moving, the cold has caught up to me. I yank off the wet sweater, pull off my muddy sneakers, and, with some difficulty, peel off my jeans. Shove the whole sodden bundle by the door. I put on the other sweater, the sky-blue one, the last piece of dry clothing we have. There are no extra pants, so I sit there in my underwear. Which is also slightly wet. And the same pair I’ve been wearing for days. Add that to the wish list.

  My sister hasn’t moved. She isn’t wailing, but she’s still huddled, hunched, head on her knees.

  “Come on,” I say to her, and reach for her dress. She flinches away. “Fine,” I say. “Die of hypothermia. Suit yourself.”

  She pulls her dress up herself, over her head, awkward with one arm, eases it ever so gently from her hurt arm.

  “Jesus,” Savannah says. I don’t know if she’s reacting to Lee’s complete nakedness or her skinniness or her wounds. There are some bruises already coming up over her ribs. And then there are her ribs, of course, which you can count. I remember the pastor. The goddamn pastor. She’s not getting enough to eat, he said. None of us are now.

  Well, fine, we’ll starve. Me and her together.

  “Can you move that?” I ask her, gesturing to her arm. “Is it broken?” If it is I’ll have to figure out how to splint it.

  Lee makes a nearly infinitesimal gesture, grimacing, flexing wrist and elbow. Probably just sprained, then, which is a relief. Maybe I can rig up a sling. I unzip the sleeping bag and wrap it around her, soft side in. She huddles into it, draws it tighter, tucks her head in.

  The next thunder crack sounds less directly overhead. The one after that practically distant. The rain slackens. Rivers still run down the side of the tent. But we can hear each other without shouting.

  “What happened to your arm?” Savannah asks. She isn’t asking me, she’s asking Lee.

  My sister looks up from her sleeping bag cave. She glances over at me, at Savannah, back at me.

  “Deer,” she mutters.

  “What? Jo, what is she talking about? What happened?”

  “She fell,
” I say, not meeting Savannah’s eyes.

  “You’re hurt, too,” Savannah points out.

  “Yeah.” I look down at my arms, my bare legs. I see bruises, scratches. I could be my sister. There are so many pains in my body it’s hard to distinguish them as they compete for my attention.

  “You have to fucking tell me what happened,” says Savannah, a note of barely contained fury in her voice that I recognize. That I know all too well. “Tell me the truth.”

  “Man,” says my sister quietly.

  “What?” Savannah whips around to look at her. It takes all my self-control not to yell at Lee to shut up.

  “Somebody saw us,” I say quickly. “Some guy. We tried to stay out of sight at first, but he shouted at us.”

  Savannah is still looking at my sister, staring at her. Lee has huddled back down into the sleeping bag.

  “He was hunting deer,” I say. To explain my sister’s first lie. The correct lie, the one we’d agreed on. “Or hunting something anyway. He had on an orange high-visibility vest and that’s why he was shouting at us. Because we didn’t. He was saying he nearly shot us and we’d better be more careful. He was yelling and coming toward us. He was super old,” I add. “With a gray beard.”

  Not at all like Clayton.

  Savannah glances over at me, frowning. “So?”

  “So she flipped out.” Close enough to the truth. Could I say she attacked this man? No, I already said she fell. “She ran so fast I almost didn’t see which way she went.” I gesture at my sister. “I went after her, but we got into this section of forest that was all cliffs and things. And she ran too close to the edge and some of the dirt came loose.” The whole world shifting under our feet. “And we both fell about ten feet down a cliff and got banged up and I think she broke her arm and then we couldn’t find our way back and then the rain….” I trail off. Shrug.

  “This is awful,” Savannah says, sitting back. “We can’t keep going like this.”

  I don’t have the heart to argue. She’s right.

  Something occurs to me. I grab my wet jeans, reach into the pocket. The picture of Mama is so wet it’s nearly disintegrating. When I try to pull it out, it rips.

  The rain is only a steady drizzle now, the thunder barely a distant rumble. I unzip the tent, peer out. The storm has knocked all the loose leaves off the trees, left everything wet and gleaming and smelling of earth.

  “We need to move the camp,” I say.

  “Why?” Savannah asks behind me.

  “That hunter guy might find us.” I start moving the Walmart bags outside.

  “We should go back for the car instead,” Savannah says. “Maybe we could go to Cincinnati. I’ve been telling Lee all about it. Right, haven’t I been telling you?” This last is directed, singsong, at my sister. To my pleasure, Lee doesn’t respond. Just stays slumped. “Lots of pretty dresses in the city.”

  Oh great, just what I need. Savannah trying to bribe my sister. I shove the wet clothes into a Walmart bag, set it outside. I pull my sneakers on, though they are still wet, and crawl out of the tent. Pantsless, but it hardly matters out here. No one to see. Not anymore.

  “Come on,” I say, beckoning to Lee, “let’s go.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, she follows me out, still clutching the sleeping bag around her shoulders. We squelch with every step, our feet sinking into the mud, the earth trying to drag us down. I crouch and yank up one of the tent stakes.

  “Jo,” Savannah says, crawling out of the tent after us. “What’s gotten into you?”

  I heave another stake free from the soggy earth. “The hunter might say he saw some weird-looking girls in the woods and people might realize who we are and come find us.”

  I move to pull out a third stake. Savannah positions herself between me and the sagging tent, hands on her hips.

  “All the more reason to go get the car,” she says.

  I hesitate. I shouldn’t say it. I mustn’t. I do anyway.

  “What about Clayton?” I ask.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see my sister stiffen.

  “What about him?” Savannah’s tone is guarded.

  “He might be there. At the junkyard.”

  He won’t be. I know for a fact he won’t. But she doesn’t.

  Savannah shrugs, face betraying nothing.

  “Something happened the other night,” I say. I duck around Savannah, yank up the third tent stake. “Between you two.”

  “Ugh. Why are you so obsessed with him? You jealous?”

  “He did something,” I insist, ignoring her. Was I jealous?

  Yes. I was. But that’s not why he’s dead.

  I stomp over and pull up the final stake. The tent slumps to the side. Lee shuffles backward, toward her tree. I push wet hair out of my eyes, snatch the windbreak before it flies away. I shake the excess water from it, splashing Savannah.

  I was protecting her. Protecting all of us. Doing what I had to do.

  He deserved to die.

  Right?

  “You came back all upset,” I say. “He did something bad to you.”

  Savannah frowns. “No.”

  He looked like he was twenty at least. Maybe older. Afterward, I tried not to look. Face pale, neck dark around the ragged tear. Her teeth went deep. Got the artery.

  “He must have done something.” I’m nearly shouting as I struggle with the tent poles, trying to pull them free. If he did something that means he deserved to die. Lee has backed all the way up to her tree. “Or forced you to do something. Something you didn’t want.”

  “You mean sex,” Savannah says flatly.

  I turn to face her. Is she admitting it? I make myself speak quietly, gently. “Yes. Did he force you to—”

  “Why?” she snaps, cutting me off. “Why is it so unthinkable to you that I would want to do it? Maybe I like it.”

  “Do you?” I ask, genuinely uncertain. I know Savannah thrives on attention, on feeling special. But Aggie and Margaret’s lectures always made sex seem like something girls got talked into. Not something we’d pursue on our own.

  I’m realizing, though, more and more, that I shouldn’t trust their version of the world. I’ve got to figure it out my own.

  Savannah shrugs. “I don’t know. Kind of. It doesn’t matter. We didn’t even do that. Just other stuff.”

  I stare at her. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not, Jo. You’re the liar.” She pushes me away from the tent, extracts the tent pole herself with an easy, fluid motion. She throws it on the ground. It clatters like bones.

  There’s no way that nothing bad happened. Something must have happened. Savannah is folding up the windbreak, shoving it into the tent bag.

  “What did he say to you?” I ask. It’s one of the things he said to us. Some of his last words. If you do see her, tell her I’m looking for her. Tell her I meant what I said.

  “What?”

  “Did he say something to upset you? Savannah, you have to tell me.”

  I have to know if it was justified. If he deserved to die.

  I have to know if I’m a monster.

  Savannah heaves an exaggerated sigh. She wheels on me, face full of disgust. “He doesn’t matter, okay? I was only using him, really. I told him a pack of lies. I was fed up with you. You were treating me like shit. But I didn’t tell him about you, okay? Is that what you’re so damn worried about? I said my parents were abusive. Said my dad hit me. I lied. Like you do. He said he could help me get away. He said I could come live with him. Said he could get me away from it all.”

  “No,” I say quietly. I believe her, but I don’t want to. “That can’t be all.”

  “The truth is I fucking considered it, okay? That’s all.”

  Was I really thinking of Savannah? Really trying to protec
t her?

  Maybe I am a monster.

  “We’re going back to the goddamn car,” says Savannah. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her quite this angry. She whips the other tent poles out of their sheaths. “You don’t get to call all the shots, Jo. I know you need to protect your sister, but I know her now too, okay? I’ve talked to her. She likes me. Right, you like me?”

  Lee is wide-eyed, back against the tree. She’d climb it if she could, I bet. But she can’t now. She says nothing.

  Does she feel guilty? Is that even an emotion she’s capable of? She’s the one who killed him, really. Right? It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Well, whatever,” Savannah continues, undiscouraged. She kicks the puddled tent fabric into a pile. “We’re going to go get the car.”

  “We can’t,” I say. There is truly no going back now. I’m a murderer, a monster. If they catch me they will lock me up forever and maybe I deserve it.

  “We can.”

  “We can’t. The police.”

  “The police probably don’t care about us. We’re just teenage runaways. Nobody cares about us.”

  I think of what Brandon said about Mama. They wouldn’t help her when she needed it. They didn’t give a shit about her, not a one of them. Not until they thought she was dead.

  Am I like her? Or am I worse?

  “I stole the car,” Savannah says. “The car is mine. I took the money, so the money is mine. This is all mine. I can do whatever I want with it. If you don’t fucking trust me, then fine, I’ll leave you here and you can see how well you get on without me.”

  It’s what I thought I wanted: for Savannah to leave, to go back to her old life without knowing the truth. I would let her go, make her go. Drive her away.

  But I don’t want to.

  “Clayton is dead,” I say. I don’t plan to say it. I am surprised myself, to hear the words leaving my lips. We won’t tell Savannah. We can’t.

  “What?” she looks exasperated, not shocked. She thinks I’m lying.

  “There wasn’t a hunter. It was him. He saw us. He was looking for you. He scared Lee. She knocked him down.”