Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  By the time she’s done, the words are practically spilling out of Maggie. You’re the first person she’s told all this to, you can tell by how relieved she seems to be to share it with you. But as soon as she’s done talking, another look of worry crosses her face and she screws her mouth into a tight frown.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” you say. “I promise.”

  Maggie nods. “I believe you. Anyway, I’m getting pretty tired of keeping secrets. I’m just getting over a cold, is all, and that’s why I haven’t been to school for a couple of days. Plus, someone put something gross into my backpack, and I just didn’t feel like being there.”

  “Something gross? What was it?”

  Maggie’s mouth forms a tight line, and she shakes her head, and you think she isn’t going to answer. But then she blurts, “It was a condom. And it was . . . you know. Used. Tied up at the end and full of . . .” Her voice trails off.

  “That is fucking disgusting,” you say.

  “Hearing it’s not nearly as bad as seeing it,” she says. “I just, like, reached into my backpack looking for a pencil the other day and there it was. Squishy and fucking gross.”

  “Oh, God. What did you do with it?”

  “What did I do with it? I put it under my pillow for the jizz fairy. Jesus, Bisou, I threw it away, of course!”

  “No, I mean—did you tell anyone? Like your parents, or a teacher?”

  She shakes her head, hard. “There’s enough going on, and besides, what was I going to say? And just finding it there . . . in my bag, next to my fucking Hello Kitty pencil holder . . . it made me feel so gross. Anyway,” she says, changing the subject, “I just needed a break for a couple of days.”

  “I get it. I think we should tell Keisha, though, about that text Darcy showed her,” you say, thinking about what Keisha does with unanswered questions. “I feel like she’ll understand. We don’t even have to tell her about the other stuff—about the herpes—if you don’t want to.”

  Maggie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says, “I’m getting pretty tired of all of it.”

  Maggie gets a robe from her closet and the two of you go down to the kitchen. She takes milk out of the fridge and cocoa out of a cabinet and starts heating them up in a saucepan.

  You sit at her table and watch her stir. You can see she’s had a cold; her nose is red. When the cocoa is steaming, she pours it into two mugs, hands you one.

  “So,” she says, sitting at the table with you, sipping from her cup, “want to talk about what happened upstairs?”

  You don’t, actually. It has been nearly a dozen years since you found your mother’s body in her bed, her throat ripped, her blood soaking the bed all the way down to the mattress. But Maggie has trusted you with her secret. And you like Maggie, you decide, suddenly and surely. Why have you waited so long to be friends?

  Of course, you know why. It’s because, even though you always thought Tucker was kind of a dick, when he started saying all those terrible things about Maggie, you didn’t bother to fact-check. You basically accepted what he said, assuming he was embellishing a little, as guys sometimes do. This is something to contemplate later—why you believed Tucker, who you never really trusted, instead of Maggie, who had never given you a reason not to.

  But now, by way of apologizing, you tell Maggie your story. And the story, you know, is the other part of the reason you have held off being friends with anyone, really, always careful to not be too close with anyone save for Mémé and, more recently, James. Always wary to begin things when you know that things can end.

  “When I was four years old, my mom took me to Canada. She was afraid of my father. Really afraid. He beat her up and stuff. I remember the last time, when he gave her two black eyes, broke her nose. That was when she loaded me up in the middle of the night and we hit the road.”

  The cocoa soothes you, and you stop to take a sip. Such sweetness, and such a bitter story.

  “We were living in Canada for a few months, through winter and into early spring, when I guess he found us. I’m not really sure it was him, but who else could it have been? It was a blood moon that night, I remember my mother telling me. Do you know what a blood moon is?”

  “Totally,” says Maggie, nodding. “It’s when there’s a full moon and the sun, the moon, and the earth are perfectly lined up. An eclipse that makes the moon look red.”

  “Exactly,” you say, and then you remember the last time you were over, when Maggie mentioned Mercury being in retrograde. “Are you into astrology?”

  Maggie nods earnestly. “Very.”

  “Cool,” you answer, though astrology has always seemed to you like a supreme waste of time. “Anyway, it scared me when my mother told me that—the words, blood moon, sounded scary. I was just a little kid. She said it was nothing to be scared of, nothing at all. But later a car pulled up. And my mom made me hide, and I heard things, but it was like I couldn’t move. Like I was paralyzed. I fell asleep eventually, and the next morning, when I woke up, I found her dead in her bed.”

  Maggie takes a sharp breath. This is not the way she expected the story to go, you can tell.

  “Yeah,” you say, “it was awful. Pretty much the worst scene you can imagine. And the weird thing is, the second-story window was broken, like someone had jumped out of it. The car was still parked in the driveway, keys in the ignition. It had snowed all night, so there weren’t any footprints, but whoever killed my mom—my father, I guess—had just disappeared.”

  You drink some more of the cocoa. You are grateful for it. Maggie reaches across the table to squeeze your hand.

  “Mémé—my grandmother—she showed up that morning. Which was also weird, because I hadn’t called anyone—the cops or anything, I guess I didn’t know how. I don’t remember much about what happened.”

  Maggie leans forward in her chair, toward you, her whole body practically vibrating with compassion. You can feel her wanting to hug you, and your throat thickens with anxiety and emotion.

  “I don’t think about it often.” You hear your own voice as if from a distance. It sounds flat, like you could be talking about anything, or nothing that’s important at all. “That happens sometimes, with trauma, early trauma, especially. That’s what Mémé says. Your brain will do whatever it needs to do to tamp that shit down. I do my best to help my brain out, you know, in forgetting. But you startled me, I guess, lying in bed like that. You reminded me of my mother.” You arrange your face carefully to communicate to Maggie that you do not want to be touched, not now, and look into her eyes, which brim with empathy.

  “Anyway, Mémé showed up, and I guess I was sleeping at the foot of the bed where my mother’s body was. And then Mémé brought me back here, to her house. I’ve lived here, with her, ever since.”

  “Shit,” Maggie says, but she doesn’t reach across the table, for which you are grateful.

  You sit quietly together for a while, sipping cocoa. Your hands, you notice, are steady as they raise the cup to your mouth.

  Maggie says, “Did they ever find your dad? Or, like, whoever killed her?”

  “The car was stolen, it turned out, so that was a dead end. My father disappeared from his place around that time, so everyone agrees it was probably him, and the Canadian police still haven’t shut the case.”

  “It was lucky your grandmother showed up when she did. Otherwise, who knows how long you might have been there like that . . .”

  “Mémé used to say over and over how she wishes she had gotten there sooner. But I don’t see how that could have helped. Then he would have just killed them both.”

  “Yeah. I wonder how she knew where you and your mom were. Do you think she’d been in touch with your mom or something? Could she have known that your dad might do something like this?”

  These were good questions, ones you’d asked yourself, of course—not at first, you were too traumatized and too young to question much of anything—but later, in quiet moments here and there, over the yea
rs. Those questions, and others, the more you settled into your new home, your new life with Mémé. Like, why were there no pictures of your mother in Mémé’s house? Why did Mémé’s phone never seem to ring? Why did you have a grandmother, but no grandfather? But you didn’t ask these questions, and Mémé didn’t offer answers. It was like you both wanted the same thing, to honor what your mother had asked of you—n’oublie pas d’oublier. Forget, forget, forget. And when you left Quebec, Mémé had not packed your things, perhaps feeling a fresh start, a blank slate, would be the best. You took nothing from the house, not even the skipping stones you and your mother had collected for when the ice would thaw.

  “I never really asked,” you tell Maggie. “I guess I could tell Mémé didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to bring it up again, make her remember.”

  Maggie nods, then says, “I’m really, really sorry about your mom.”

  “Thanks,” you say, and the word is insignificant and nearly nothing, a paper-thin tissue of a word.

  It feels good, to sit together like this. With Maggie.

  Maybe she’s thinking the same thing, because she says, “I’m glad you came over. I’ve been lonely.” She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her robe and thumbs through it. “None of my friends are texting me back, and the only person who wants to hang out with me is—” Her phone pings. “Oh, speak of the devil.” She laughs. “Jesus, this guy doesn’t take no for an answer.”

  She turns the phone toward you, so you can read the text. It’s from Graham. Seriously? it reads. Why not? What else are you doing that night?

  Maggie deletes the conversation, shoves her phone back into her pocket. “Anyway,” she says, “I’m glad you came.”

  A Wolf at the Door

  Two more Wednesdays, two more wonderful afternoons with James. Each time the sex feels better than the time before, more natural, though James is embarrassed about how he can only last a few minutes.

  “It just feels so good,” he says, which makes you smile.

  That third Wednesday, you decide to try again, after the first time ends quickly. And this time is different—you still don’t have an orgasm while he’s inside you, but it lasts longer, and you’re more able to focus on trying things that feel good for you.

  At school, you’ve invited Maggie to sit with you and James at lunch. The first day she takes you up on the offer, she does so with big, scared eyes, like she’s just waiting for someone to say something awful.

  But no one does, not even Darcy, who’s sitting across from you, on Big Mac’s lap. By the end of lunch, Maggie has relaxed and even laughs when James makes a joke about the way Big Mac dances—like an oversize chicken who doesn’t know his feathers have all been plucked, he says.

  And then, Saturday morning, Halloween morning, you wake to find a streak of blood in your underwear.

  It surprises you, even though you knew it must be coming soon; it’s been four weeks since that awful night. It seems so . . . odd, that this is something your body does now. That blood is part of your rhythm.

  I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.

  You heard some guys at school laughing at that line from an old movie. They thought it was hilarious.

  There’s a party tonight, of course, because it’s Halloween.

  When you were little, Mémé would take you trick-or-treating. Your neighborhood was good for that: friendly neighbors, happy porch lights, lots of kids. Since junior high, though, no one trick-or-treats anymore. It’s all about the house parties. This year, the party will be at Big Mac’s house. His parents are loaded, and they have a big house on Parkside Drive, backing up to Broadmoor Golf Course, right near the arboretum. James is excited about the party, and though you could take it or leave it, you’ll go because it will make James happy.

  You spend the day working on homework and helping Mémé with chores around the house. Last time, you barely had any cramps, but today is harder—occasional pains down low, in your uterus, and a persistent sore lower back, just a fragile feeling there, a dull ache. Mémé notices you massaging your back and takes the broom from you. “Why don’t you go rest for a while?” she says. “I can finish up in here.”

  In your room, you lie on your side, curled up in a ball, and consider calling James to cancel. But after lying there for a little while, you feel sort of better. You should go. It’ll make James happy, to be with you and his friends together. You text Maggie to see if there’s any chance she might want to come—you’ve been trying to encourage her to get out of the house, and besides, it would be nice to have at least one person there you can talk to besides James—but when she says thanks but no, you understand, and you don’t press her.

  You haven’t planned a costume, so you start pulling open drawers, seeing what you can throw together. There, in the top drawer, you find two necklaces—Maggie’s locket, and Mémé’s moon.

  You remember what Mémé said when she gave the necklace to you—I liked to imagine that the blade could cut the pain—and you string it over your forehead, tuck the moon between your breasts.

  Maybe it works because you want it to work, like a placebo or something, but your cramps do feel lighter; your back does feel better.

  And then it occurs to you what you can wear tonight.

  James picks you up at eight o’clock. You hear the doorbell and you call, “Mémé, can you get the door? I’ll be right out!”

  You hear the door open, and Mémé says, “Why, hello, James. That’s quite a costume.”

  There is his laugh. Then, “Sorry, Ms. Martel. I thought Bisou would answer the door.”

  “That’s all right,” Mémé says. “I’ve seen worse.”

  You look at yourself in the long mirror on the back of your bedroom door. You’ve put your hair back in a low bun, and you’ve drawn on a beard with brown eyeliner. A gray beanie, red-and-black-checked flannel, jeans, and brown leather work boots complete your lumberjack costume—you’ll be warm and comfortable, at least, at Big Mac’s party.

  Mémé is standing with James in the sitting room waiting for you. He smiles when he sees you, starts to laugh. You don’t get the joke at first, until you see what James is holding, scrunched up in his hand: it’s a brown, furry mask. He unfolds it, brings it up to his head, puts it on.

  “Look at us,” he says, his voice slightly muffled by his wolfish visage. “All we’re missing is Little Red Riding Hood.”

  Mémé is watching you, watching James. And you remember what she said to you—Sometimes boys become wolves.

  Big Mac’s house is ridiculous. No one needs this much room. And he is an only child. His real name is Mackenzie, named after his maternal grandfather, he likes to tell everyone, who invented some sort of medical device that revolutionized post-op surgical care. No one has ever asked him what exactly the device did; it’s clear enough from his address that the most important thing the device did was produce a shitload of money.

  James doesn’t pull his blue wagon into the long, horseshoe-shaped driveway; he parks on the street. His car leaks oil, so James never parks in driveways. You hold hands as you walk up to the house, weaving through the cars parked there. You can tell who’s at the party by the cars. Most of the basketball team, of course.

  And there, near the edge of the street, is Keisha’s funny little purple Bug.

  Though Keisha isn’t exactly the party type, of course she’s here tonight: this party will be a house full of Tucker’s friends, loosened up by music and alcohol. The gossip is sure to flow as easily as the beer. Last week, you told her a little about Maggie—nothing specific, just how Tucker had been a major asshole, and you suggested that maybe Keisha could back off, seeing as how Maggie had already gone through plenty. She had been noncommittal, sort of shrugging, but if she’s here, maybe she’s moving on to new targets.

  James stops before he rings the bell, unwinds his fingers from yours, fits the mask over his head.

  “How do I look?”

>   The mask hoods his entire head: thick brown fur; two black-tipped pointed ears; a long, rubbery snout, a shiny black nose, a yawning maw full of teeth. And there, through the eye holes, are James’s sweet brown eyes.

  “You look great,” you tell him.

  Inside, the party is exactly as you would expect it to be: dark, loud, cups in hands, a mash-up of costumes that felt exciting and dangerous two years ago, when you were a freshman, but now feel tired, cliché, and actually, pretty boring.

  You scan the crowd. There is Graham, circulating among groups, trying to insert himself here, there, anywhere. None of the guys like him, James has told you, but he sometimes shows up anyway, and no one ever has the heart to kick him out. He catches your eye across the crowd and grins, but then he must see James behind you—with you—because his smile drops, as if he’s tasted something sour, and his eyes flick away. This will be your last house party, you decide, even before you manage to get to the kitchen where you search, in vain, for a bottle of water.

  Before you started dating James, your idea of a good Saturday night involved hanging out at home, either alone or with Mémé. Since then, well, it’s not that James is a huge partier, just that he has so many friends. And parties fill him up, energize him. They drain you. As much as you love James, you don’t love parties. So you decide that if James wants to go to these things on the weekends, that’s his call, but after tonight, you’re done.