Wherever her mind went as her body lay still, she was interrupted by the sound of the ladder knocking against wood. Then the squeak of someone stepping on the rungs. She sat up, brushing her dress, shaking out her hair. One broad palm appeared on the wood floor, then another, with a brown bottle of beer. Then a face. Hugh Isherwood.
“You up here all alone?”
She got to her feet, nodded, wobbled in her sandals. They were actually Poppy’s old sandals, not real leather. Her feet sweated. Hugh stood and finished the last sip of his beer.
“People are gonna come looking for you,” he said. She hung her head in guilt. He meant Poppy, of course. Maybe he’d been hoping she was Poppy this whole time. She felt a little pity for his single-mindedness. That Easter night, they had all lain in their beds, listening to Poppy explain how Hugh Isherwood was the person she’d miss the least when she left Hogestyn: “Bad enough he thinks I’d want a picture of his dick. I mean, even imagining a guy getting in position to take that kind of photo is just the worst. But that is not the world I’m going to live in, where the best thing a guy thinks he can give you is his stupid boner? Sorry, I don’t care if you’re drunk. You’re still gross and stupid. When I get drunk, I don’t act like that.”
“When do you ever get drunk?” Lilah had murmured, but Poppy ignored this.
“Also, he has the worst name! I can’t stand it. You never realize how much you have to say someone’s name when they’re your boyfriend. His name is so . . . nothing. It’s like exhaling.” She demonstrated: “Hhhhooooooooooooooooooooyoooouuuuuuuu . . .” and they all laughed.
The laugh is what Poppy had been going for; her gift to them was to explain precisely what was terrible about any given thing—eyeliner pencils, their high school, pineapple on pizza, the shameful greed and poor design of fast fashion. That day had been awful—Hugh showing up during the Easter egg hunt at Violet’s church, demanding to talk to Poppy, who screamed she was going to call the police while the little kids and their parents gawked, holding their candy baskets; Violet coming out to smooth things over, walking Hugh to his truck; Carna skipping dinner that night and claiming a migraine—they all wanted nothing more than to laugh it all off.
Later, in bed, Daisy had lain in the dark listening to the softening of her sisters’ breathing and considered all their names. Her own: slippery at the beginning, soft at its end. Lilah: elongated, evaporating like Hugh’s into the air. Poppy’s a vexatious snap that made your jaw work.
“What were you doing up here?” Hugh asked. “Hiding?” His clothes were still damp and he was sweating pit rings. His hair slightly curled around his ears. He set the empty beer bottle behind a rafter.
“No,” she said. She worried he was angry with her, that maybe he’d hoped to find his own solitude up here. She turned toward his house, looking for some explanation or excuse. The trail of Lilah’s orange dress, the shout of Poppy’s wrath. Only a group of men were out in the yard now, tipping their own beer bottles up in the sunshine.
When she turned back, Hugh was right next to her. Two inches away. She stilled, and he came closer. One inch away. He smelled like menthol snuff and pine needles and wet dirt. And beer, too. His blue eyes were watery and red, irritated by the pond water. His hand slid out of his pocket and onto her shoulder. He rubbed her neck and the material of her dress, then the side of her bare arm. He didn’t seem mad. Maybe he would push her away.
But then he leaned down and pressed his mouth on hers. The smoothness of his lips, the sharp poke of stubble on his chin and cheeks. She wanted to tell him he had made a mistake.
He backed away. All her words died. His eyes were open, but they didn’t seem to be looking at her. A crow cawed, and out of the corner of her eye, she swore she saw it streak black past the hayloft door.
He kissed her again. This time, she was very aware of how their noses were touching. It had never occurred to her, the now-inescapable fact that noses would be involved in kissing. The word that kept tumbling through her mind was polite. It was polite, Hugh kissing her. Gentle and kind. Sweet.
Then his mouth opened and so did hers. And though still good, this was not polite and sweet anymore. Bumpy tongues, beer mixed with chew, the ghost of toothpaste she’d used this morning, the whiskers on his chin and cheeks. His hands slid up her body, his thumb tripping over where her dress zipped up the side. His palm wrapped around her back.
This had to be a mistake. Hugh Isherwood was big and important. He had better things to do than this. He was a boy that girls like Poppy were meant for, and he was a man, too (like Poppy, he was nineteen), and he drove tractors and trucks and ATVs and a motocross bike he bought from his cousin’s shop in Hogestyn, and every year once football was done, he worked on his family’s farm and his Ganey relatives’ farms and he was loud and nice and never seemed too studious but didn’t flunk anything, either. Why was he holding her so tight?
She pressed her hands against his chest, against the clammy T-shirt cotton, a place she had not ever imagined touching. She knew she should feel good, but she felt mostly sad. She wasn’t sure if she was doing this with him, or if it was just something happening to her. Like the way Rusty might plod along sniffing a trail only to see a bird and bolt after it. One thing happening, and then another, and another, and another. One moment she sat through a funeral where every hymn seemed heavier and longer than the previous one, the next she was sweaty in the Isherwoods’ barn, the next she was being kissed while feeling Hugh Isherwood’s heart thud under her palm.
He rubbed his face in her neck. This can’t be a mistake, she thought, and his hands slid around her waist, went up over her breasts. Another thing happening, slow and sure, like the time-lapse videos they watched in Science 9: here a glacier was receding or a coral reef bleaching, the oceans were warming, beaching whales and exciting jellyfish, while pollution changed the colors of leaves and the insects that hid on them, and look, moths were just a kind of sad butterfly, born of night cocoons to journey toward the light. She moved her own hands around his shoulders to draw closer to him and she could hear their breathing, out of sync, his coming through his mouth, hers a slight squeak whistling through her nose.
Hugh’s hands by turns crushed her breasts and smoothed over them. There wasn’t a lot beyond what her bra propped up, but he seemed to find it worthwhile. She ringed her hands around his waist, stopping around the belt loops of his jeans. She kept kissing him. Was there something he wanted her to do to him?
But that question got lost. One hand slid down to her hip, beneath her dress, soundlessly, so easy. She could feel his fingers gathering up the hem. A slight movement of her leg and she caught his hand between the fabric and her thigh. He breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes. It was a matter of lifting, his hand smoothing over her underwear, his fingers sneaking beneath the elastic. She gulped as he brushed through her pubic hair—“maiden hair” as Violet tried to get them to call it, instead of the more greasy-sounding “pubes” that Carna complained about women shaving these days. The Reverend Whitsun wanted her daughters so badly to find everything about their bodies, and indeed, the whole of creation, beautiful and poetic, a failed mission she never gave up. Hugh’s finger slid inside her.