Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  “You don’t need to dress up to be a writer,” Mémé is fond of saying.

  When you were younger, sometimes Mémé would humor you and let you dress her up. You’d paw through her clothes and find the prettiest dresses, drape her in all her chains and beads, curl her hair, paint her nails and powder her face. “There,” you’d say, when you were finished, and you would step back to admire your work—she looked beautiful, her gray-and-brown-streaked hair loosed from its everyday braid, her eyelashes darkened and thickened with mascara, her shape defined and emphasized by tight-nipped waists and flowing skirts.

  And she would even go out with you dressed like that—to the store, to the sandwich shop, to the park. You would hold her hand proudly, noticing everyone who noticed her as you passed.

  But as soon as you returned home, off came the fancy clothes, back went the hair, away went the makeup. And though you were a bit sorry to see your work undone, mostly it was a relief to see your own Mémé back again—no nonsense, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, bare-mouthed and booted.

  You slide closed the closet door.

  You told James you needed a nap, but you’re not tired, not really. So you decide you might as well start dinner. Maybe you can surprise Mémé with something delicious.

  You’ve barely poked your head in the refrigerator when you hear Mémé’s key turning in the lock. It’s not even four o’clock; on Wednesdays, she is usually gone until at least half past six.

  You hear the door push open, then shut, and then Mémé’s footsteps crossing the sitting room. She has not stopped to take off her shoes by the door.

  “Bisou?” she calls. “Are you home?”

  “In here.” You shut the fridge.

  Her expression when she crosses the threshold into the kitchen—for a moment, you are taken back to your childhood, so clearly does Mémé’s face, in that instant, resemble your mother’s.

  “Are you okay?” you ask her.

  When she sees you standing there, Mémé’s face rearranges, and whatever it was—whatever ghost, or shadow, that made her look so much like the woman who is always, always both between you and missing—disappears. “Of course I’m okay,” Mémé says. “Actually, that is what I was about to ask you.”

  Now her face is all Mémé: sharp; appraising; thoughtful; curtained.

  “I heard about the boy,” she says. “You knew him, yes? Why don’t we have a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.”

  Sickle Moon

  What is the right tea for this sort of conversation? Not English breakfast; it is midafternoon. Not Earl Grey; you don’t want to set that serious a tone. Chamomile is for sleeping, peppermint is a digestive . . . white tea, you decide, is the best choice. Clarity, energy, some caffeine, but not nearly as much as black.

  Mémé fills the kettle and sets it to boil. You spoon white tea into the ceramic pot. While you wait for the water to heat, you get down teacups, and Mémé arranges a few cookies on a plate. Just before the kettle screams, you twist off the gas and pour the water into the pot, breathing in the aromatic steam that rises up, then settling the lid into place.

  You sit at the table with Mémé. She passes you the plate of cookies; they are ginger snaps. You take one.

  In three minutes, the tea is ready. Mémé pours and passes a cup to you.

  All this time—while the water heated, while the tea steeped—neither of you has said a word. Now, each with a cup, each with a cookie, Mémé says again, “Tell me about the boy.”

  You lift your cup and sip your tea. Too hot—you feel the flame of it brush the roof of your mouth. You set the cup back down.

  You are not a practiced liar, so you begin with truth. “His name was Tucker Jackson. He was on the basketball team with James. They found him—dead—in the woods.” You look up at Mémé through the rising steam from your cup. “They say his neck was broken.”

  Mémé holds her cup in both hands. With both hands, she raises it to her lips.

  You wait. You wait for her to say something. You don’t know what you wait for her to say, but you feel yourself clenched in anticipation. And suddenly, you have a name for the expression that was on Mémé’s face when she rushed into the kitchen, the expression that made her look so much like your mother, her daughter: fear.

  “This boy,” Mémé says at last, “Tucker—he was naked when he was found?”

  Your tea burns the tips of your fingers through the ceramic, but you do not set it down. You hold it perfectly still.

  Then, at last, you speak. “Yes,” you say. “It’s true. That’s what they told us, anyway. At the assembly yesterday. Where did you hear about that? Were people talking at the library?”

  Mémé does not answer. She is gazing somewhere over your shoulder, at the cabinets behind you, but you can tell that she is not really seeing what she is looking at—she is somewhere else, somewhere far away. It feels to you as if she is wrestling with something. Trying to decide something.

  Then she snaps back into this moment, and it seems her decision is made, for she looks right at you and says, “I have a gift for you. Something I’d like you to have.” She takes another sip of her tea, then sets her cup in its saucer, pushes back her chair, stands.

  When she leaves the kitchen, you set your cup in its saucer. It rattles. You curl your hands into balls and pull them into your lap. You flatten your fingers against your thighs and spread them apart. You tell them to still, and, after a moment or two, they do.

  When Mémé returns, she is holding something in her closed fist. She sits again, places it on the table, and pushes it across to you.

  It is one of her necklaces—while she has many, she has no others like this. It is the only piece of jewelry that Mémé has worn with some regularity. The chain is thick, each link a quarter-inch long, and there is no clasp. Its only ornament is a large, rather heavy sickle-shaped moon in lapis blue, each tip affixed to one end of the chain. You remember the weight of that lapis moon from your childhood, from the occasions when Mémé would let you dress her up. Once, when you were eight or so, she found you playing among her things, and you had draped this piece around your neck.

  “Not that one,” she had said, and gently she had lifted it up and away. “Any but that. You don’t want such a weight on your neck. Perhaps another? Some pretty beads?”

  But now she has given it to you. Before you lift it from the table, you look up at Mémé. She is watching you. Her eyes flash green and gray.

  You pick up the necklace. It is, as you remember, heavy. You turn the sharp-tipped moon over and over, enjoying the weight of it. Then, for no particular reason other than to see if you can, you pull on it, one hand grasping the lapis-blue moon, the other on one end of the thick chain.

  And it pulls apart, the lapis-blue moon revealing itself to be sheathing something—a needle-sharp claw of burnished metal, a half-inch thick at its center, tapering to a deadly point. It is about four inches long from its base, still attached to the chain, to the tip.

  You look up again at Mémé—did she know the secret of this necklace? But her face—its lack of surprise, the way her green-gray eyes still watch you—tells you she has opened it herself.

  “No need to tell anyone about that,” she says. “It can be just a pretty ornament. I think it belonged to my grand-mère before me. But I’m not sure. It was given to me long after she was gone.”

  “It looks like . . . a weapon,” you say, touching the tip of your finger to the claw’s sharp tip.

  “I used to wear it during my menses,” Mémé says. “I liked to imagine that the blade could cut the pain. It worked for me, for many years. Now, perhaps, it can do the same for you.”

  “Thank you.” You fit the sharp-tipped claw back into its sheath, you push them together until the claw has disappeared inside the lapis-blue moon. Now it is just a pretty ornament again. You string it around your neck. You tuck the moon beneath your T-shirt. It is cold, first, between your breasts, but it warms quickly to the temp
erature of your skin, and soon you cannot feel where you end and it begins.

  “All right,” Mémé says. “Let’s finish our tea.”

  Later that night, after dinner, after Mémé has gone to her writing room to work on her latest novel, this one set entirely at sea, you unstring the chain from your neck and examine the moon beneath your desk lamp. Could it be that all these years this piece of jewelry contained this secret heart, that all this time it looked like just another pretty thing, tucked in among Mémé’s strings of beads? You run your finger along the tiny raised shapes that edge the moon. What do they represent? You’ve never clearly looked.

  You squint your eyes and adjust the lamp to shine more fully on the piece, and then you see that all along the edge of the sickle moon runs a series of tiny images—the phases of the moon, waxing and waning, again and again.

  This piece of jewelry has hidden its secret heart from you all these dozen years, since first you arrived at Mémé’s house. And now, you wonder—what secret heart might Mémé be hiding from you, as well?

  In the morning, the pad you’ve worn all night is dry. It’s just been three days—short for a period, you suppose, but it is your first, and you remember from health class back in middle school that it’s not unusual for a girl’s first few cycles to be short.

  Perhaps you’ll bleed more today, once you’re up and about. It’s possible. But you know it isn’t true. You don’t know how you know, but you are certain that, for this month, your period is behind you.

  It’s a relief, but it’s something else, too. Some quality of . . . awareness seems missing. Dulled. You have heard about pregnant women developing a hypersensitive sense of smell, and you wonder if perhaps the same thing happens during menstruation. Do all bleeding women experience the same thing—the heightened perception you have had the last few days, that you find yourself rather missing now? If so, it’s odd that no one has ever mentioned it to you.

  Tucker’s memorial table is still set up in the school’s front hallway, but now Raphael, the security officer, is keeping a close watch over it, his legs in a wide stance off to the side where he can watch both the front door and the traffic at the table.

  The condoms are missing, as is the Copenhagen. You wonder what other things must have been taken from the table, what gifts to Tucker’s ghost have been removed that the administration has deemed “inappropriate.”

  It’s not hard to come up with a list—you didn’t know Tucker closely, a deliberate decision on your part, but he was at every party you had been to with James since the spring, and probably many others. He liked to drink—beer, of course, usually Bud Light. Jack Daniel’s as well. Those were his favorites. He wouldn’t pass up an edible, either, or dip. But he didn’t smoke—not pot, not cigarettes, nothing. Lung capacity was too important to him, as an athlete.

  You slow as you walk by the table, but you don’t stop.

  James is waiting for you by his locker. He’s leaning against the bank of them, scrolling through something on his phone.

  “More kitten pictures?” you joke, peering down at the screen. James does have a sweet affinity for adorable animal memes. But it’s not pictures; it’s a stream of texts, and the group chat is named “B-Ball.”

  James has no guile; he doesn’t put the phone away or try to keep you from reading it. “Hey, Bisou,” he says, and he leans in to kiss your cheek. “They finished Tucker’s toxicology report. A preliminary one, anyway.”

  “Oh,” you say. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” James says. “Caleb’s uncle is a cop. He told Caleb all about it.”

  “Well, what does it say?”

  James scrolls up to one text, the longest one. “Tucker wasn’t sober,” he says, showing you the text. “But that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”

  His blood alcohol concentration, you read, was .12. “Is that a lot?”

  James shrugs. “Yeah, it’s pretty drunk. Probably not blackout drunk. Definitely hangover drunk.”

  You don’t say what perhaps you both are thinking—that Tucker did not wake to a hangover. Down below, you see words you don’t know—methylone and cathinone, followed by the word “Detected.”

  “What are those?”

  James shrugs, powers down his phone, tucks it away. “Don’t know. Caleb’s uncle says it’s going to take longer to do a full toxicology report. But Tucker was definitely on some shit.” James’s face, already serious, looks even more concerned. “Bisou,” he says, leaning in close, his voice quiet and deep, “I just keep thinking what could have happened if you’d run into him out there. That night, in the woods. After you . . . ran off like that. Tucker could be kind of out of control when he was drinking, and that other shit they found in him . . . who knows what that might have turned him into.”

  You remember the pewter wolf—the hate in its eyes, the thick, sharp, yellowed fangs. The aggression. No, you tell yourself. Not a wolf. Tucker. But this perhaps explains how he could have attacked you the way he did.

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t, then,” you say, and you lace your fingers with James’s. His hand is warm and feels so good in yours.

  He leans in to kiss you, this time on the top of your head.

  News spreads fast, and by lunch, everyone knows about Tucker’s toxicology report. Mr. Davidson, the math teacher, talks disapprovingly about “the culture of teenage drinking” and how “everybody loses.”

  During last period—US History—a messenger comes to the door with a note. It’s Darcy, the redheaded sophomore try-hard. She hands the note to Mr. Willis, and even though she doesn’t need to, she says, “There’s a couple of cops in the front office. They want to talk to Maggie.”

  The class bursts into whispered discussion. Maggie is sitting two rows back, so you don’t see her reaction, but you see Mr. Willis sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Darcy,” he says dryly. Then, “Maggie, you may as well take your things. This could take until after the bell.”

  At the front of the class, Darcy looks like a ginger cat who’s caught a fat blue songbird in her mouth. Maggie passes down your aisle on her way to the front of the room, and though you don’t crane your head up to look at her face, you do watch the set of her back as she heads out the door. Her backpack, thrown over her left shoulder, almost slips down her arm; her neck is curved forward; she looks afraid.

  After the door closes behind her and Darcy, the volume in the class ratchets up. A guy’s voice says loudly, “That girl.”

  Just two words. But the way he says them—the way he draws out the second word, “girl”—it’s clear what he’s saying about Maggie.

  “Did you see what she wore to the dance?” This from Lorraine. She is speaking to you.

  You narrow your eyes, say nothing.

  “Whore.” It’s a boy’s fake cough, but the word is clear, it’s loud, and three answering voices laugh in response.

  “All right, settle down,” Mr. Willis says in his “I mean business” tone that no one takes seriously. But that is all he says.

  The class returns to work, which means trying to outline an essay due next week about the three-world convergence—how European conquest of North America linked Native Americans, European whites, and enslaved Africans into an unsteady triangle. You rest the tip of your pencil on the page in your notebook where you’ve started writing, but your eyes drift toward the window.

  It is raining outside, that soft misty rain that is part of Seattle’s DNA this time of year. Usually the first few weeks of school have the kind of fine weather that sharpens the sting of being stuck inside, but by early October the days have grown noticeably shorter and the sky cloudier. Last year’s homecoming was the first really rainy night of the year, such a storm that, though the football game went on as planned, the parade—usually scheduled at halftime—had to be canceled.

  Staring out into the misty rain, you consider how today might be different if this year’s game and dance had been held on a different night. Had the danc
e been a day or two earlier, if the PTSA moms hadn’t petitioned for the date change, you and James might have gone to some after-party, might not have driven to the woods instead. The blanket in the back seat might have stayed folded. James might not have dipped his head down between your thighs, and if he had, he would not have looked back up with blood on his chin. You would not have run from the car, into the woods, barefoot. There would have been no need, no shame. You wouldn’t have been alone; there would have been no encounter with the wolf—with Tucker, there was no wolf, you imagined that, you must have.

  You wish you could rewind time and recast last week-end. Such a little thing, the date of a dance, and such long-unspooling consequences.

  The bell rings. Around you, everyone has already packed up their stuff, and the moment school is officially over, there is the flurry and shove of them leaving. You close your notebook and cap your pen, tuck your things into your backpack.

  It’s amazing how quickly a school hallway can clear out after the final bell. You walk slowly by the front office, trying not to look like you’re peeking inside.

  The vice principal’s door is closed. Is Maggie behind it, still being questioned by police? What could they want from her? You bend down and retie your shoelaces, though they don’t need retying, hoping that when you stand, that door will be open and you will be able to see inside.

  No luck. You walk past Tucker’s table again, and you see that Maggie’s locket is still there.

  Whore.

  Someone had said that about Maggie, and no one said anything in her defense. You hadn’t said anything in her defense. What kind of person does that—lets such a shitty thing stand, without saying anything? A monster? Is that what you are?

  A heaviness settles over you, a dark cold hand. The feeling—the hand—is guilt.

  You try to tell yourself that it’s none of your business, any of it—what people say about Maggie, whether or not she’ll be sorry later that she left her necklace on Tucker’s table. It’s not like Maggie is your friend; you’ve known her a long time, but until you started dating James, you and Maggie had barely ever seen each other outside of school. She’s never been to your house and you’ve only been to hers once, right after you and James started dating, for a party when her parents were out of town. Honestly, you knew almost nothing about Maggie, except what you’d heard other people say about her. And the person who had the most to say about her in the past few months was Tucker.