CW: Sexual assault, child neglect, violence, bodily harm, kidnapping and abduction, death and dying, cannibalism, blood, pregnancy/childbirth, sexism and misogyny.
My mom was sixteen when a band of boys took her out to the woods and bound her to a tree and tortured her to death, like in Jennifer’s Body, so you see her womb was kinda already out of commish by the time she got around to wanting to have me. A year ago, after my thirteenth birthday, she made her first and only concerted effort at explaining it: she said, Mom movie night, double feature, and washed her hands of all that blood and flicked on the TV and put on Jennifer’s Body, all the way up to the part where Jennifer explains what those indie rockers did to her in the woods, but right before Jennifer and Amanda Seyfried’s character start getting it on. Mom didn’t say: Those rockers? That’s what happened to me.
Then Mom popped Juno in the DVD player (I didn’t even know where she got the DVDs, we never do movie night) and we watched through all of Juno. “And that’s it,” Mom said, one hand swirling around her beer and the other leaving her heat pack to flick my knee on the couch. It was the end of the film. Jennifer Gardner was on screen in the hospital, cradling a tiny little gray baby that the overtaxed teenage Juno had just shat out for her. “I found a couple who didn’t want their little baby anymore, and that’s how I got you.”
That was in Georgia, and I was pissed off that we were moving again. “So you didn’t just, like, cut me out of some pregnant lady before you ate the guts and placenta or whatever.”
“God, no, Sweet Lane,” she said, and her long pointer finger gave my knee a warning tap. “And don’t talk like that to your mother.”
I’m homeschooled. We move around all the time; right now we’re in Florida, which sucks because of all the obvious reasons, like the heat and the mosquitos and stuff, but it sucks extra bad because Mom’s been paranoid about the church people, which means she doesn’t even let me play with the one kid who bikes around the dust street that runs past our house. We’re living in the boonies—Mom’s tired of suburbs, with the bake sale moms who always want to know why I’m homeschooled. When they come by with brownies, Mom can never return the Tupperwares because Mom doesn’t know how to bake anything, how make anything to give them back, so now we just have a growing pile of Tupperwares that collects dust in the pantry and moves with us wherever we go.
Mom is out and I’m sitting in the kitchen with my worksheets and my textbook. Our house is small and cramped and the AC’s broken—the previous owners never even cleared out their shit, so we’re just comingling with their scattered old newspapers and cracked Christmas mugs—though the longer we’re here the more I suspect maybe Mom killed the old people who lived here instead of paying rent proper, since she can’t really hold down a steady job unless it’s one of the ones where they expect you to be rough around the edges, like dancing in the club or something.
I’m on Lesson 11.1 of Intermediate Algebra but it looks like I’m gonna have to crunch it in the cool hour past six p.m., after the sun sets but before Mom touches down and then flits away to do whatever she does for the night, because right now I can’t think for shit. Hot white light shines through the closed blinds. I watch sweat drip off the tip of my nose and hit the worksheet. It stains the paper dark.
It’s so hot in here.
Every so often I lean over and twitch open the blinds. The sudden light hurts my eyeball but I press my face to the opening and stare into the middle distance, beyond the long stretch of swamp-dirt tire tracks cutting through the gnarled trees weeping down with their Spanish mosses, out to where the tree line clears and the proper dust road runs past like it doesn’t want my Mom to catch it.
On the road, a red bicycle lazes past.
Paulie.
I don’t know his actual name, I named him after Juno’s boyfriend, played by Michael Cera. I could have named him after Amanda Seyfried’s character’s boyfriend in Jennifer’s Body but Jennifer eats him so I didn’t want to. He might be the neighbor’s son; he looks like he’s a year or two older than me but it’s hard to tell because he’s so skinny and lanky without being all that tall. He’s Hispanic I think (I’m Asian, Mom’s white, Mom said I’m Vietnamese once, then later, Japanese, not sure if she really knew when she took me).
Paulie has dark shaggy hair he’s always bucking out of his eyes like it’s a nervous tic, and he always wears a dark hoodie and dark skinny jeans even in the hundred-degree boonies heat. I only have a distant impression of his face since all I’ve ever seen of him is him on his bicycle, doing back-and-forths on the road. I think he might be a loser, since he should be hanging out with friends and doing clubs after high school but so far as I see he just comes back home and kills time on that cherry-red bike.
Mom’s forbidden me from talking with boys. I used to argue with her about this, a lot, until she’d go in her warning tone Lanie, and then she’d have me setting rat traps in silence for the rest of the night. I haven’t argued with her in a while, mostly because every time I want to I remember the cruel, pretty eyes of the lead singer in Jennifer’s Body as he waved the knife over Jennifer’s bound legs and bare stomach.
I can’t remember the last time I talked with a boy who wasn’t a cashier at the Dollar Tree.
I keep my eye pressed between the blinds, watching the boy appear between the trees as he crosses in front of our long shitty driveway, then after a while, appear again as he crosses back. His handlebars wink in the blistering sun.
Mom says people can sense when you’re staring at them, inconveniently, so you’ve got to be careful when you choose to. I stare at him so hard my pupil hurts.
He doesn’t look back.
• • • •
The next afternoon I’m back in the kitchen, sweating over Lesson 11.2 of Intermediate Algebra, and twitching the blinds open occasionally. Mom brought home lemon suckers last night before calling it in until the morning, when she woke me up before leaving like she always does. I don’t know what to call what she does—working? She calls it working. She’ll peck me on the cheek, and I’ll smell her extra-strength Listerine, and she’ll say, “I’m off to work, Sweet Lane, instant pizza in the fridge,” and sometimes she comes home normal but most times she’s covered in blood, furtive in the hallway and I’ll be lying awake in my dark room, facing the wall because I know she doesn’t want me to see.
The lemon sucker is sweet and acrid, sticking to my inner cheek ’cause I’m not licking at it enough. If I get a cavity I don’t know what Mom will do. We don’t have insurance. Maybe she’ll have to pull out my tooth with two claws.
I twitch the blinds open again, and there he is, passing by for the tenth time. Paulie. Today he’s wearing neon jogger’s cuffs around his wrists and a camo hoodie, which just ends up clashing, because does he want to be seen or not? His face is hard to make out, like it always is.
I think, God, let something, anything, happen.
His handlebars twist, and his cherry-red bicycle goes crashing into the dirt.
Holy shit. I lurch back from the blinds, heart pounding. I feel like Juno when she saw the newspaper advert with the perfect adoption couple on it. Like, is this the universe telling me something? Or maybe I’m like Carrie, from the book Carrie, mind powers, which I’ve heard about but never read.
I press my eye back between the blinds.
Paulie’s sprawled on the ground under his bike, and he’s not moving.
Oh, shit.
Did he hit his head? Is he dying? No one is coming to look for him. It’s really easy for people to die, especially if no one is looking for them, Mom doesn’t even have to tell me this, I just know. They die in cars in the woods, they die swimming nude after graduation, they could even die after hitting their head in the Florida heat. And dying is patently bad.
Which is how I find myself unlatching the front door and flinging it open and sprinting down the dirt driveway. The cicadas drone so loud and the shadows of the trees pass cool over my skin and every tiny thing I notice is mortifying because I really shouldn’t be leaving the house—
I stumble to a stop as I emerge onto the road, and the beating sun makes the top of my head a tambourine. My heartbeat’s thudding in the roof of my mouth where my sucker’s pressed up and for the first time I am close to Paulie, really close—and with a drop of relief his skinny-jeans legs start struggling under the bicycle. He’s trying to lift his head toward me but his shoulder’s still kinda trapped under the seat. Now that I’ve made sure he’s alive I should scurry back to the house, or just dive into the trees since that’s even faster, but I’m hypnotized, watching him struggle under the ruby-red bicycle. It’s mean, but his flailing reminds me of one of the rats in my glue catchers, before Mom slurps it down. Except he seems a lot more embarrassed about it.
He manages to get a good grip on one of the handlebars and shoves the bicycle off him, just for a second, so he can worm out from under it.
Shit, I should have offered to help him—I’m just standing here like a creep—
He scrambles to his feet, brushing dust off his jeans frantically, and we lock eyes.
A shiver pricks my neck. He’s prettier than I thought he would be, long dark lashes, big beaky nose. Okay, now that I got my fill, I really should go—
Paulie’s eyes flick from me to behind me, beyond the trees. Then his lips move, faintly, chapped: “You live in that house?”
I do the only thing I know how to: I shrug.
He’s got dust matted into the side of his head, but he doesn’t seem to have picked up on it yet. He says, massaging one hand with his other hand, voice coming in stronger: “Didn’t know we had neighbors. Or,” his eyes skim me up and down, so fast you could miss it, “girl neighbors.”
I want to say: What the shit does me being a girl have to do with anything? But it’s like my sucker’s glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Then Paulie says, “And, you’re like, homeschooled.”
My tongue unsticks. I say quickly: “No, no, I’m not.”
Paulie kicks his hair out of his eyes. Then he says, after a beat, “Yeah, right. I know a shut-in when I see one.”
Then I get mad. “And you’re so much better than me just ’cause you go to school?”
Paulie shakes his head, shrugs. Shoves his hands into his jeans pockets. Dust is dislodging from his hair onto his shoulder. “I don’t go to school, I work. I’m cool like that.”
“Yeah, right,” I say.
He shrugs again, those bony shoulders. “Better than just rotting in my house.”
• • • •
We begin hanging out. Never at my house, and never at his: He lets me sit on the back of his bicycle as he pedals us down the dust road, way down, until we turn onto a dirt road and then a crumbling asphalt one and then a better asphalt one where we’re riding on the edge and cars are whizzing past us, all the way to a dinky mom-and-pop store with a big old porch called Lou’s. The first few times I’m rigid, can barely make full sentences until we’re sitting on the porch steps, cool under the porch shade with lemonades he bought for us because I’m thinking about: What if Mom sees, what if Mom comes home early, what if Mom flies over us. But Mom never comes home early, and she doesn’t fly during the daylight, and wherever she is, it’s taken her away from this little store called Lou’s.
I don’t know how to talk to boys, and to be honest, the first time Paulie flew me down that dust road on his bike I was shaking not only ’cause of Mom, but because his shoulders were shifting under my hands and his weird BO was all in my nose and it’d be so easy for him to tip us into the trees and do terrible things to me.
Every time we’re on that bike, I think about it.
I didn’t have these thoughts when I was safe behind the kitchen window.
But then we got to Lou’s, and that old woman working the counter smiled at me, and I felt a lot better. And then Paulie, who told me his real name isn’t Paulie, it’s River, suggested we sit out on the porch steps, and the conversation he made in my stuttering silence wasn’t half-bad. He just bulldozed right through my silence like he didn’t even notice it. And then I started picking up my slack.
The first few Lou’s, all we did was talk about all the past places we’ve lived. Like Philadelphia, New York, Georgia for me, Virginia and North Carolina for him. After moving away from subway cities, Mom began letting me go out less and less (she explained to me about witnesses, crowds) so I find myself mixing the real and fake. I talk about the real way snow would fringe our fire escape outside as Mom and I watched Sunday morning cartoons together (before it became too expensive to rent with a fire escape), and I talk about the real bitches that tugged at their eyes to make fun of me at my old middle school before Mom pulled me out. The fake is all the cool things: I never went to Pokémon club (too many boys, not allowed), I never went snowboarding or sledding no matter how I describe the crunch of ice in this swampy heat. Mom can make herself look like a human if we ever need to go to the emergency, she makes herself look like a human around me anyway, but then they’d ask too many questions, and our façade can fall apart much faster than her human grin.
The good thing is Paulie doesn’t interrogate anything I say. He’s moved around a lot, too, so maybe he gets it. He’ll just listen quietly, taking little sips of lemonade held in his right hand always, since he’s got nerve damage in his left and it doesn’t close all the way. Then, when he talks, sometimes he talks about high school, which he dropped out of so he could work, but mostly he talks about nature.
Is it a boy thing to talk about nature more passionately than Juno talked about rock and roll? Paulie paints the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, it’s the only time his talking speed slows down, really: the muskrats, racoons, snakes, turtles with their shiny little heads bobbing out of the pea-water, the tourists’ absence and the frost gathering on the clovers in the winter. He tells me he’s on a mission to lure an alligator into his backyard, absolutely crazy, that he doesn’t use galoshes, just strings a dead fish on a braided reed and goes barefoot way deep into the swamp behind his house and eventually he comes across enclaves of them, but he wants them to come closer, he makes that dead fish dance, he tells them low how Paulie, human as he is, won’t hurt them.
On our fourth time hanging out, when I ask what he does in his free time nowadays, he tells me he doesn’t have electricity at his house, his dad’s some sort of strict Luddite who hates most things, so they cook food over an open fire at the edge of their backyard. He bikes to the library sometimes but it’s far as hell away, and there he breaks his dad’s strict rules by using the computer.
He watches pirated shows, and lately YouTube for videos of athletes doing extreme mountain biking or people catching catfish with their bare hands or teens doing vlogs about going to high school. I don’t have access to the Internet either, haven’t had it since the last time I went to school, so he promises he’ll take me along sometime. And then, he pops the lemon sucker I brought for him out of his mouth, and he mentions, offhandedly, that his favorite pirating site has a great selection of scary movies, and next time, when he takes me to the library, he’ll show me that, too.
Whoa. Wait. I rock back on my heels, my lemonade sloshing out the bottle and dripping a little down my wrist onto the faded white wooden boards. (Just being out here without Mom makes me feel light-headed with how brimming-with-possibility the world is). “Have you watched Jennifer’s Body, then?”
He says: “No, but that’s like, a cult classic, right?”
I don’t know what a cult classic is, but I say, “Yes, you’ve got to watch it sometime so we can talk about it,” and he grins and bucks the hair out of his eyes.
“I’ll find the ripped version, easy. Then I’ll tell you what’s up. What about Blair Witch Project, then? Have you watched it? Or Friday the 13th? It has comics, too—with Jason Voorhees?”
The answers are no, no, no, but he tells me all about them anyway.
He bikes me back just before sunset, when the sky’s all tender-pink and blazing-orange like a mole rat on fire. Today he bought me a chicken parmesan sandwich too and I didn’t protest about it, I never do, because the fresh stuff is much better than the microwave meals I’ve got in the freezer. I do feel bad, though, that he’s spending his cashier-at-the-bait-and-tackle-shop money on me when it sounds like whatever he’s got going on at home is enough to hold down already.
As soon as I say goodbye to Paulie-River, at the road in front of my house, it’s hustle time. I power walk back into the house, lock the door behind me, double-check that it’s locked, and then I strip off all my clothes. Then I hop in the shower, double time. I scrub at my skin like a motherlover, to quote Paulie, and then when I come out I’ve got no Paulie smell clinging to me, and I’ve triple-washed my clothes with detergent, we hand-wash our clothes in the shower because our washer broke awhile ago, so the only suspicious thing these past two weeks is how diligent I’ve become in washing my things. Then, for good measure, I light an old Christmas candle from the previous owners and run my damp clothes over it so that the smell clings.
As I’m pulling on my pajama pants, Mom’s car crunches in the driveway. I straighten my spine like a Marine, and then remind myself that normally, I slouch, so then: I slouch. Every time Mom comes home the number one objective is pretending everything is normal. It felt impossible at first but becomes easier each time Paulie and I hang out. Everything about me is different now that I have a friend, an actual friend, who’s a boy but who hasn’t hurt me yet, who’ll tell me about the world outside—and everything is different now that I have experience being out there with him, unsupervised. And the thing is, I realized—Mom might not be normal, but I am. So the world isn’t going to try to kill me like it tries to kill her. I hope.
Though, I guess there’s a chance a band of boys could find me and tie me to a tree, no matter how normal I am. Then Mom will just say, I told you so.
Or maybe she’ll cry?
When she comes through the door, she’s in her tattered jeans and an old flannel, tired shoulders, her pretty dark hair all frizzy, Chinese takeout dangling from one hand. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my yellowed old notebook and my hair up in a towel, doodling pregnant Juno shredding rock on the Les Paul.
“Hi, Mom,” I say. I am squeaky-clean. I have never touched a boy in my life.
Mom says, “Hi, Lanie,” in a tired voice, she’s always tired after work, she works all the time. She’s looking away from me, unloading her pockets on the counter, then stringing her purse on the back of her kitchen chair. Her hands are clean this time, and when she turns to set the takeout on the table, her feet drag, making soft sounds against the linoleum. She wrings an instant heat pack off the counter, presses it to her stomach, and says, faintly: “I’ll be taking a quick nap before going out again. Lo mein, your favorite. Enjoy it twice for me.”
And I was gonna show her how I got the shading on Juno’s hair all good, but, I don’t say anything, just watch her disappear into her bedroom, and think of how I should be prepping more rat traps since when she’s exhausted they’re the only thing she eats. And I don’t say anything, because. I can’t be a hassle, and I wasn’t gonna be a hassle anyway, and I wouldn’t be a hassle on any other day.
This is how I hide that there’s anything different about me. Mom’s tired as it is, holding us down, keeping us up, and yet Mom’s sharp as a cleaver when it comes to Noticing Things, this is how she’s stayed alive. So it’s okay that I shouldn’t seem too different, because it helps her, and it helps me. So I just leave my homework on the counter instead of asking her to check it, and I don’t stay up past midnight, ever, even though I want to because the events of when Paulie and I brave the world always revolve in my head for days, and late that night I listen to her ragged breathing in the hallway, wishing that I could just walk out and give her a hug and rest my head on her shoulder, because I feel bigger these days. Big enough to hold her.
• • • •
I ask Paulie about it, the next time. Paulie sticks to his promise: We meet up early to try to bike all the way to the library, but halfway there the sidewalk of the one overpass is blocked off with yellow tape.
Construction.
We dismount. Bike handle gripped tight in his right hand, Paulie looks out over the four lanes of busy highway, thinking. Then he looks back at me, then back across to the far sidewalk, then back at me again.
Then he shakes his head. Mostly to himself, I think.
No library for us, this time.
We walk back next to the busy highway, cars honking as they rush past us. Paulie’s sweat is clinging to the nape of his neck and making his dark curls all wet. He’s pissed off.
“What I wouldn’t do for Lou’s lemonade right now,” I say.
He nods and doesn’t really try to smile.
I was gonna ask at the library but I can’t really wait any longer. Into the silence between us, punctuated by our panting, I try to deliver the question confidently, like I haven’t been thinking about it for three days. It’s not enough to talk around it. I wanna hear him say it.
“So, like . . . how do you feel about, the fact that we live different from how other teens live.”
“I hate it,” Paulie says, immediately. The spokes of his bike tic-tic-tic next to him.
After a beat, he says: “I hate my old man for it, too.”
I lean in a little.
He kicks his hair out of his eyes and starts talking a little faster. “He needs to get his head out of his ass about stupid shit. If he didn’t care about stupid shit I could show you stuff on a real actual laptop instead of biking all this way to the library. He’s been on my ass about work lately, too.
“He hates that I dropped out of school. But he hated that I went to school! Now he keeps warning me that if I’m not careful I’ll turn out like him. But he’s proud of being himself at the same time. Does that make sense? He keeps telling me I’ll understand him one day.” He keeps his bad hand on the bicycle and runs his other hand through his hair, erratically. Beyond us, the overpass ends, sloping down into shrubby lawn bordered by concrete. The wind whistles past us, gasoline stench. “I guess I’m like him already because I ignore his stupid rules.”
Paulie’s eyes have gone sad. I ask, hesitantly: “What rules did he ignore?”
Paulie keeps his voice so nonchalant that it’s got a little quaver in it, and I know I’m in for something bad.
“Basically he used to conserve wetlands. Then developers came in. Then he was too fucking stubborn to leave like they told him, and they started setting traps in our favorite places. We didn’t know until a conibear trap near a beaver dam. That’s what messed up my hand.” He stops speaking for a moment. His nostrils flare, and he swallows. “And Dad already hated everyone, the tourists with their litter, the developers, but now he really hates everyone. And he thinks I should hate everyone too.”
Rush of nausea. Whatever I was gonna say about Mom gets wiped from my mind.
The only thing I can think to say, weakly, is: “Maybe he hates everyone ’cause of that.”
Paulie’s bike squeals, and he smacks his hand on the handlebar. His dark eyebrows are furrowed into a scowl. “Yeah. Also the corpos fucked his body up something major so. That too.”
• • • •
That night, after Mom showed me that scene in Jennifer’s Body, I crouched down in the shower and cried so hard my body hurt. I had my palms mashed into my eyes and I could see it, in the dark, I could see my mom and her mom and all the moms before her and all the moms I didn’t get to meet, like a long chain of hurting, and the despair was so giant. Inescapable, and everywhere. I saw it touch every corner of the Earth, every woman before me, I swear. I understood it. I felt like I understood everything, for the first time. The no-boys rule, the tiredness in Mom’s shoulders, everything. Like I was crouched tiny in a dark ocean.
The day after Paulie tells me all that, I stay up late watching Jennifer’s Body, which Mom never returned from wherever she borrowed it. In the morning, instead of getting up for a rare Saturday breakfast, where Mom sets out leftover takeout and lingers longer to eat with me before going off to do whatever she has to, I sleep in on purpose. I sleep in until I hear the front door fall shut.
In the kitchen, I stare at the two untouched plates of cold noodles. If Mom saw Paulie, would she see a boy, or just a bunch of entrails in a boy casing?
• • • •
The next time I meet Paulie he’s in a mood. We don’t try again for the library like I thought we would, but he doesn’t take me to Lou’s, either. We bike along the dust path and instead of turning onto the slightly better dirt road, he turns us into the tree line, under the cool, green-yellow forest canopy, and down a rough hiking trail.
My heart starts kicking up against my ribs. He must feel my grip on his shoulders tighten. “Where’re we going?”
“Into the swamp, chill out.” He maneuvers us around a couple of big rocks on the path, then halts in front of a fallen tree, insects crawling on it that buzz away with the screech of his brake. Then he nudges for me to dismount and I do, and after he’s off he takes the lead, stepping over the log with an assurance that shows he’s stepped over it a million times before.
I want to ask more questions, but he’s not in a question-answering mood, so I just swallow my tongue and follow.
The canopy thickens above us. The birdsong gets stronger and more vibrant, and the humidity thickens, and the dappled shadows deepen. We’re not walking along a trail anymore, just some kind of route of Paulie’s devising, ducking under branches and side-stepping spiky eruptions of green-and-yellow shrub, his footsteps much quieter than mine, and when I look back I realize I can’t see the tree line anymore, and . . .
My mom once swallowed her tongue and followed some boys deep into the woods . . .
“You don’t have any cord on you, do you?” I blurt.
Leaning forward to avoid brushing a branch, he says, “What? No,” and then: “What, are you afraid of getting lost or something? I don’t need to tie markers, don’t worry.”
I let my bated exhale answer for me.
The trees change appearance, getting fatter and wider, and the sunlight dapples more, and the ground gets damper, and as the shrubs turn into reeds, the distant sound of running water gets closer and closer, until I see, beyond Paulie, a rocky outcropping, and glints of blue.
Paulie stops on the outcropping, takes a look back at me, over his shoulder, and spreads his arms wide.
I smile and jog up to a stop next to him.
The tree line bows away to a wide, sluggish blue river, edges crinkled with the trees’ spindly legs, and the sides cupped by gently waving reeds. I step closer to the edge of the rock to get a better look, and the water is actually clear. More reeds wave gently at the bottom and ebb and flow with the current.
“Mangroves,” Paulie says, and points at the trees with the spindly legs, not just next to us but on the other bank, where there’s more forest. They’re stout, like something out of a fairy-tale book. “They filter the water naturally. Alligators live in mangrove areas, too. I see them here all the time.”
I’m scared as shit of gators, with their very long crooked grins and flat agile bodies, but since I’m with Paulie, who’s somewhat of a freak slash experienced with them, I’m calm. I know somehow that he wouldn’t put me in danger with one.
We stand there for a moment, me, admiring the wet, bitter marshy smell and the cool air on my sweaty arms and the sunlight filtering yellow-green through the upper leaves of the mangroves’ knotty, reaching branches.
Then, I say, “I didn’t think I’d be seeing one of your special spots, what the bunk. Thank you.”
Paulie kicks the hair out of his eyes and jams his hands deeper in the pockets of his hoodie (black, today.) “Yeah, I feel the most collected out here. Like I can breathe and think, you know.”
He’s avoiding my eyes. I’m looking at his face, at the profile of his nice eyes and his beaky old nose, but he’s looking out down the river, where it bends gently and the blue gradually disappears beyond the rushes and the trees.
I say: “Okay.”
He turns toward me, then, and sits down cross-legged. I do the same, and the warm stone feels nice under my jeans butt, but I feel like shivering. I feel it in my legs, my stomach, my jaw. I don’t get why Paulie’s not happy. I don’t get why his eyes keep flicking away from me, like he can’t stand to look at me for too long. I even wore some nice bracelets today.
Then Paulie’s dark eyes lock onto mine, and I feel like I can’t breathe.
Across the river, birds sing.
Paulie says: “Basically, we can’t be friends anymore.”
For a moment, I don’t comprehend. I’m still just kind of staring at his eyes, and the eyelashes fringing them, and the marsh smell’s all in my mouth, and Paulie’s eyes are searching my eyes, and he’s frowning, looking unhappy, and I say: “What.”
He swallows, the shadows of his throat bobbing. “My dad found out. That I was hanging out with you. And I can’t do that. It’s one of his rules. Now he knows I’ve been breaking it and. I needed to tell you. This is the last time we can talk. After this, no more hanging out.”
What? We can’t hang anymore? It doesn’t even sink in. How can we not hang out anymore? We’re hanging out right now? I know that’s not how— I—
“Just don’t tell him.” My nails bite into my palms through stretched fabric. I’ve balled my hands into my shirt. “That’s what I do with my mom! You’ve done it this long, how hard can it possibly be!”
Paulie’s face gets unhappier, his lips set into a thin bloodless line. “Well now that he knows, there’s no hiding it. He’ll be watching me all the time. He’ll be asking around, too.”
My heart’s pounding in my face. “That’s stupid. And his rule’s stupid. Can’t you negotiate with him? I’m not doing anything wrong with you. We’re just having fun. That’s it.” I can’t lose you I can’t go back! I need to talk to you I can’t go back I can’t go back I can’t—
Paulie rakes his hands through his hair. I realize he’s trembling, too. “You don’t get it! It’s not like that. He’s not like that. I know it’s fucked up but I can’t do anything about it! I’m trying my best to grow up already! We just can’t right now, okay? Just trust me! Maybe in a few years or something but for now we’ve got to stop!”
“In a few years I won’t be around anymore!” Mom’s going to move us before then, I know it in my bones, Florida’s been chafing her too much, it’s been chafing me but it’s been chafing her worse, and my eyes burn and my nose starts running in the way back. I make my first friend since going homeschooled and home-jailed and this is what happens?
“Just make it work with him, just make it work,” I say, I’m nearly begging, and Paulie’s face closes off, and his chin crinkles up a little.
“No,” Paulie says. “I can’t. And you just have to accept that.”
“What?” I say, again, and Paulie’s standing up and brushing off his jeans. Tears prick the corners of my eyes. “Pau—River! Come on!”
“Let’s go,” he says, shortly. “Come on. I’ll bike you back but that’s it. And you can mistake my name whenever you like, it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
• • • •
That evening is maybe the worst evening of my life. As soon as I touch down back home I stomp to the shower and make it three seconds in before my chest is burning with sobs. When I looked back down the driveway River had merely waved, his face that vaguely pissed-off it becomes when he’s hiding things in. We barely talked on the ride back. If we’d talked I would have screamed at him. I want to scream at him!
I pound my fists against the wall tile. I can barely see anything through the water and the tears. No, no, no. We were gonna go to the library together. We were gonna drink more lemonade and he was gonna show me Jason Voorhees comics and stupid YouTube videos and take me back to the swamp and I was gonna show him Jennifer’s Body and Juno, all snuggled up next to him on the library computers even though we’d both pretend not to notice, and then I would tell him about Mom, I’d finally talk about the things I never talk about, about the old Christmas mugs and the sadness all the time and the rat traps dim in the corners, and he would know, and he would understand me, he would really understand, and I don’t get it, what does it mean, what does it mean we can’t see each other anymore? What does it mean?
After my shower I can barely think straight. I throw on whatever old clothes and go stomping back out of the front door into the after-sunset gloom, with the cicadas all buzzing fierce and the hoo-hoo of a dove way off, and I’m mad, I’m so fucking mad, but I’m not just mad, my vision is becoming very clear, the leaves of the trees becoming very sharp, things falling into place in my brain very quickly. If his dad won’t budge on this rule then we can just find places that his dad will never know about. River won’t have to bike me places anymore, we’ll leave at different times, we won’t hang out at Lou’s anymore, we’ll just hang out in the forest, or in the swamp, where no one can tell on us. It’s obvious, it’s foolproof, gators can’t snitch like Lou might, and now I’m not even going all the way up to the dust road at the end of the driveway, I’m diving through the forest on the right side of our house. I’ve gotten better at being quiet through the forest, and my heart is very loud, and the orange-pink-indigo sky is deepening beyond the canopy, and I know River’s house is ahead, and even if his dad’s home he won’t even see me ’cause I’ll be in the trees, I can somehow signal to River what I’m thinking, or we can regroup in the swamp because we know each other like that, and then I feel the wind coming in stronger from up ahead and that means the trees are clearing out and then I realize there’s a Paulie smell here, that’s his smell, he smells like the murky leaves decaying here, and then there’s Paulie’s backyard.
Twenty feet away, on a flat concrete deck jutting out from the back of an old beige house and into the wild grasses, stands Paulie. With the plastic lawn chairs abandoned to the side, he’s square in the middle, hoodie off, shoulders skinny and concave, looking strangely small. Too small, fist clenched at his side, mouth moving low, and surrounding him in a perfect circle—like the dark spokes of a bicycle wheel—are—
giant alligators.
Too many of them, wide and rapt and eager, shiny eyes like silver dots—grins like saws, hulking muscle compacted into flat bodies—poised and waiting—waiting—way too close—
I’m way too close, I shouldn’t have—
The air has gone dead and stiff.
Paulie turns just his head toward me, slowly. His eyes lock on to mine.
His mouth opens in a perfect o.
Ten feet ahead of me, an alligator’s back legs twitch.
Paulie screams “GET OUT!”
I’m turning back toward the trees—glint of a pupil—
—an alligator’s head swings my way—
Paulie’s yelling something, behind me, shrill, inhuman, words I don’t understand, words I don’t—
I’m stampeding back through the trees. Trunks whipping past me, branches crashing underfoot—burning chest—and something—something’s slithering behind me.
It’s breathing hard. Wet. Something big—bigger than any alligator. The roar of leaves against underbelly—thick branches splitting behind me—hot, rancid breath on my calves, my burning calves, I’m running too fast, I’m gonna slip on the leaves, no no no no nonono—
Screaming.
Mom, please Mom, am I going the right way where is the house where is the house—
A glimpse of the—my house, up ahead, and then I’m breaking through the tree line, stumbling, sprinting, the thing behind me—still behind me I feel it I hear it the—stomping across the driveway, shaking into me—I’m flinging open the front door—slam it gunshot-loud—
And I stand there, chest heaving, in the kitchen, head half-turned toward the door, waiting for the smash, for the door to cave in.
But the terrible silence stretches.
And stretches.
And—
Stretches, and stretches, and stretches as I stumble to the counter, and I keep one hand dragging on the counter as the silence stretches as I stumble to my room, to close the door, to lock the door, fingers fumbling, loud in the silence and in the silence I’m shaking and in the silence I’m keeping my eyes peeled and my skin peeled for the silence and I’m crawling into bed with my face half-turned toward the window’s silence and the curtain is too gauzy for me to see what’s out there and I can’t hear anything but how it’s too gauzy to hide the stretching silence and my heartbeat’s too loud for me to peep my head from the covers out to see the silence and the silver pupils that may or may not be out there, dancing, waiting, waiting for me to break my silence.
• • • •
My sleep, is deep, deep, of nothing, of nothing–
• • • •
I startle awake in the middle of the night. My eyelashes are thick and sticky. My lips taste like salt. For a moment, I can’t remember anything, think of anything, but.
Something’s off.
What is this—what am I feeling—
Then, I see it. In the corner.
The dim shine of an eye in the dark.
Who upset you like this,
Mom rasps.
• • • •
She can smell—
the woods,
on me.
• • • •
She can smell
the
neighbor
boy.
• • • •
And she is rising from her haunches, tall, taller, too tall, and I am scrambling out of bed—
• • • •
And our front door opens ahead of me with a bang—
• • • •
And I’m running after her, across the lawn, cold wind and my bare feet wet and colder and Mom, MOM, DON’T—
• • • •
No. No. No. And she’s so much faster than me, so much faster, and by the time I pass Paulie’s mailbox, their front door is already splintered open, a gaping dark mouth and I’m screaming I’m just a scream River, Paulie, River, please, Mom, don’t—
And I round the back of the house, to the back deck, and it’s deserted, empty moonlight on empty concrete and I’m banging on the back glass door, just a scream, just a scream, me, and shadows move beyond the glass and Paulie’s eyes are wide, so wide, and I’m just Open the door open the door—
And he’s fumbling with the latch and I fling the door aside and fling my arms around his neck—
“Lane,” he gasps. His face shines with terror. “No, no, there’s something here—”
And I say That’s my mom, that’s my mom, and I grab at his hoodie, and we crouch in the corner, and I hold him close. Only six feet away, Mom stops advancing. Mom. Mom.
I’ve never seen her directly before.
Her long hair is bedraggled, strewn over her face like it’s caught in a struggle. Her limbs are overly long, bruised up, bent odd, bent back, and she’s hunched forward like her stomach’s in pain, and her hands she always holds me with are too big and her fingernails are so so long and her eyes are all white, and swollen, and wet, like she’s been crying, and her mouth is hinged open, a dark void, impossibly big, wide enough to eat us both whole, wide enough to scream through the woods forever.
Mom, I whisper.
Something in her eyes flickers, and her jaw hinges half-closed.
Then there’s a long low noise down the hallway.
Her head whips toward the hallway, toward the something.
She stares, shoulders hunched, and I see the something, something impossibly tall lumbering to block the far end of the hallway. A sour swamp stench fills the room, and its face gradually slides under the dim moonlight beaming from the sliding door behind us.
Skin that doesn’t make sense. Somber eyes. Glints of fishing hooks embedded in its—his—muscled—wetly—gleaming–snout—
And in the corner, I hold Paulie, and Paulie holds me, and I get the sense that we understand, that we will grow to understand many, many things, stemming from tonight. But mostly, here, and now, we watch. We watch our parents watching each other.
