Her very first babysitting-money purchase was a bright red hooded sweatshirt with a zip up the front, and she earned that sweatshirt because the deLuccis had four boys between the ages of two and eight and that job was as awful as it sounds.
Once her dad saw her in it he said she looked just like Red Riding Hood. She’d been looking for an excuse to ditch her name for at least a year (it’s not easy being a Cordelia in a classroom full of Ashleys and Jessicas and Madisons—she always lamented that if Mama wanted to give her a Shakespearean name, why couldn’t her mother have named her something beautiful, like Juliet?), and she’d never been without a red sweatshirt since. Cordelia was her name, but Red was who she was.
Mama always wrinkled her nose when anyone called her Red (the same way she wrinkled her nose at Red’s reading material and scary movies). She tried for a long time to get Red to acknowledge the name she had chosen, but there is no one more stubborn than a teenage girl, so after a while her mother decided it wasn’t her hill to die on.
If Mama was talking to someone else—like, say, her father—she would always refer to her as Delia, though. This was her mother’s way of showing Red that she hadn’t one hundred percent won the battle. Red was sure Mama hoped she would grow out of it. But she never did. At least, not before her mother died.
* * *
• • •
Grandma—Dad’s mother—lived about three-hundred-odd miles away. Those were road miles, miles on smooth pavement with rest stops, and the only conflict was what they would listen to on the radio (NPR, always, which was probably inevitable when your parents were college professors, and that made Red eternally grateful for the existence of personal headphones). When it was pretty clear that a lot of people were dead or dying, and that if they didn’t move along they were going to get scooped up in a government net and sent to one of the quarantine camps, they had a family conference.
“Let’s go to Grandma’s house,” Red said. “She’s alone in the woods, her cabin is far away from everything, and we can go through state or federal land for a good part of the trip, which means we can avoid the roads.”
“I’ve never seen anyone so paranoid about roads,” Adam said. “What do you think is going to happen if we go on the roads? We’ll get chased by Ringwraiths?”
Adam hadn’t actually read The Lord of the Rings, just watched the movies, so this reference irritated Red because she hated it when he pretended to know things he didn’t know anything about.
“Ever heard of roadblocks? If you want everyone in a certain area to go to a central location like oh, say, a camp, then you set up personnel on all the roads and catch people when they drive up to you,” Red said. “Or how about traffic jams? Have you ever watched the news when there’s a hurricane or something and a bunch of people are trying to leave a city? The roads get backed up. There are accidents.”
“We don’t live in a city,” Adam pointed out. “We live in a backwater college town where seventy-five percent of the population is only present during the school year, and the school year never started. Last time we were in town half the stores were closed, which means most people have either left or they’re sick already. I doubt the roads are going to be backed up.”
“Right, because no road we travel on will ever cross with another road or meet up with a large population center,” Red said, rolling her eyes.
“That’s enough,” Dad said, rapping his knuckles on the table.
Dad was tall and thin all over, from his long bony legs to the blond hair slowly disappearing from the top of his head. He had greenish-blue eyes, just like Red, and he didn’t seem like the authoritative type, but when he said stop, Red and Adam stopped, and it didn’t matter that they weren’t little kids anymore. “We are going to have to walk. I think that’s pretty clear.”
Adam huffed. “Really? You’re going to believe all the nonsense she reads in her books?”
“No,” Dad said. “I’m going to believe the evidence of my own eyes. We’ve already seen those traffic jams on the news. And lots of people probably abandoned their cars when they got sick. If anything, we want to stay as far away as possible from people—dead or alive—who might be infected. There won’t be a lot of folks heading into the woods, and Red’s right about one thing—there is a lot of state land between here and Mom’s cabin. If we plan carefully enough we can stay well away from roads and populated areas.”
“But that will take forever!” Adam said.
“Quit whining,” Red said. Adam acted younger than she did most of the time. She had read somewhere that it took longer for boys’ brains to mature than girls’ brains, which explained a lot. Still, knowing why he acted that way didn’t mean it was any easier to tolerate him.
“But, Frank,” Mama said. “What about Delia’s leg? How long can she really walk? It’s hundreds of miles.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room, Mama,” Red said. “Anyway, I can make the walk better than you can, probably. I’ve been training.”
“But perhaps we should take the car part of the way—don’t interrupt me, Delia—so that you don’t have to go as far on your leg. Yes, I know you’ve been training and walking around with that crazy backpack for weeks, but you just don’t know what kind of effect all that exertion will have on you.”
“It’s my leg,” Red said. “It’s attached to my body and I know better than you what I’m capable of.”
“Don’t be rude to your mother,” Dad said.
Red wasn’t trying to be rude, but this was the worst part of being an amputee. She could deal with the fatigue and the swelling and the stares and the unbelievably rude questions from strangers. What she couldn’t deal with was people who were not amputees acting like they knew what was best for her, and yes, that included her family.
Even though she’d lost part of her leg years and years ago, her mother would still sometimes look at the prosthetic leg with big welling eyes and wipe away a tear.
Red didn’t cry over her lost leg. What was the point? But Mama did, like crying might magically make her daughter whole.
The second worst thing was when people said dumb shit like, “You’re so brave.” Red didn’t think getting hit by an idiot who was looking at his cell phone instead of the road while he was driving made her more brave than anyone else.
Besides, what else was she supposed to do? Refuse her fake leg?
She’d chosen the leg because she thought (even at the age of eight) it gave her the most mobility, and the lowest possibility of sympathetic glances (when she wore pants the prosthesis was covered, and only her limp gave her away). Sympathy made her back teeth grind.