He must think I sneak off to party, to drink, to kiss boys. Normal stuff.
The light changes, thank the Lord.
“I just don’t want to see you end up like your mother,” says the pastor. “You’re nearly the age she was when she went bad.”
The car is starting to lurch forward, but before it can pick up speed I slam the door open and jump out. The pastor shouts, but I’m already on the sidewalk, already running as fast as I can, as fast as I run at night.
He doesn’t know Mama, never met her, doesn’t know a thing beyond what everyone knows: that she was fifteen when she had me, that she disappeared right after, that she was almost definitely murdered, and how dare he even mention her, how dare he say she went bad as if she was a piece of fruit left to rot, how dare he act as if he knows a thing about her, as if he knows a thing about me.
My legs ache, but I don’t stop until the front doors of the school are shut behind me and I am slumped, back against the lockers, breathing hard, full of hate.
CHAPTER TWO
The high school I go to is bigger than the old abandoned one I run past, with the spray-painted shadow girl. It serves not just Lester but also Needle, the next town over, because Lester is too small to have a whole high school itself. I’m only two months or so into my freshman year but I already hate it.
I barely stay awake in first period. Mr. Blackburn is droning on about World War I, but all I can think about is what the pastor said in the car.
Has he told Aggie that I’m sneaking out? She didn’t seem angry at breakfast, which gives me hope. She’d be angry if she found out, but more than that, I know she’d be hurt. Devastated, even, that I’d been lying to her, and I feel like shit about that. I know she does her best. I know how badly she wants a better life for me. Better than Mama’s, though she would never say that out loud. When we moved out of Grandma Margaret’s house, Aggie claimed it was for her, so she could be closer to the bar, so she could finally get out of her childhood home. But I know that’s only half true. It was also for me, to get me away from Margaret. To keep me from being raised the same way Aggie and Mama were.
I was going to stop sneaking out so much anyway. Yesterday, I’d fallen asleep in the middle of chorus, which is usually the only class I actually enjoy. After Savannah poked me awake, I’d made a vow: I will stop going out to run at night, except on Saturdays. I will stop cutting class. I will sleep through the night, like a normal girl.
Maybe it’s unfair, to leave my sister alone for so long during the week, but she managed all right before this summer. I’ve told her she just needs to wait. In three years, I’ll be eighteen. I won’t need to go to school or sneak out anymore.
I’ve been helping out at the bar after school and over the last few summers, but Aggie doesn’t pay me. She considers it chores. I get an allowance of a dollar a week because that’s what Aggie got from Grandpa Joe back in the day and she refuses to adjust for inflation. I know that some months we’re only just scraping by, so I shouldn’t complain. But once I’m out of high school, Aggie will have to pay me for real and I’ll save up for a car so I can get a job in Delphi, where they have more than one bar that hasn’t gone out of business, and then I can buy a house far out in the forest, like Grandma Margaret’s, though smaller probably. Maybe just a trailer. Or a tent even, while I save up, but a fancy one, the kind with multiple rooms. My sister and I can live there, the two of us, and no one will be able to tell me what to do.
But that’s a long way off. Right now all I have is fifty dollars (saved up from my meagre allowance and a few small tips from friendly regulars) in an envelope under my mattress, so I’ve got to compromise. I’ve got to play by the rules for a while to survive.
Of course, if I stop sneaking out now, the stupid pastor is going to think it’s because of him. He’s going to think he won. The thought of giving him that satisfaction makes me almost as miserable as the prospect of having to repeat ninth grade.
Mr. Blackburn has found a way to segue from trench warfare to his most recent weekend fishing trip. Henry, who sits two desks up and one to the right of me, turns around and draws a finger across his throat, sticks his tongue out, rolls his eyes back until there’s nothing but white. I grin. Maisie, who sits at the desk next to me, notices and scowls. She and I used to be friends, but we drifted apart around the end of eighth grade when she started hanging out with a different group of girls. Cooler ones. She and Henry dated for most of last year, then broke up this summer.
Henry turns around and I stare at the back of his neck. It’s got this dusting of pale hairs like the secret fur of a leaf. When the sunlight hits them, they glow.
He died once when he was younger. His mother found him flat on his back on the front porch with his heart stopped. The EMTs shocked him back to life. Afterward everybody wanted to know what it was like, if he’d seen God. Henry said he didn’t remember, but people kept asking, so eventually he said he had seen a brilliant blue light in the shape of a lion. He said the lion padded toward him and opened its mouth wide and fitted its jaws around his head. It held him there, teeth pressing against his skin, until he woke.
He made that up, though. I know because he told me so himself. Told me he didn’t see a thing. Just darkness.
Henry and I used to be friends, too. When we were all younger, he’d hang out with me and Savannah. I mean, basically every kid hung out with every other kid back then. Lester is small. I liked Henry particularly, though. He was quiet and good at playing along with games. Didn’t try to ruin things the way some of the other boys did.
It’s all different now. Has been since some invisible line got crossed back at the start of seventh grade and suddenly nobody wanted to play games anymore because it didn’t look cool and boys couldn’t hang out with girls anymore or else they were dating.
So I don’t really talk to Henry anymore except in school. Savannah says she thinks he has a crush on me, but I’m not sure.
Sometimes when I’m sitting in history class I will take whatever Mr. Blackburn is going on about and put Henry and me in it. Henry marching off to war, and me, hair shorn and disguised in men’s clothing, marching off beside him. Henry mustard-gassed and shrapnelled, and me nursing him slowly back to health, cradling his bandaged head in my lap, gently sponging his wounds. It’s always very tragic, whatever I imagine. I don’t know if that’s the fault of history, or if there’s something wrong with me, that I like to imagine Henry broken and bleeding, helpless, in need of rescue. Henry and I shot at, captured, tortured. Henry and I fugitives, persecuted, living in the woods, sleeping under the stars. Henry warming his frostbitten fingers by the fire, and me catching rabbits for us to eat, breaking their necks swift as my sister does. But cooking them because I am not like my sister, not really.