“Wait for Graham,” Viv said, catching my wrist, trying to keep me next to her. She was wearing one of her long bohemian skirts and the gold, pink, and blue of her slippers poked out from its drape.
“Can’t. I’m too curious,” I told her, twirling her under my arm, slipping my hand from hers while her skirt caught air. I scaled my way up the rock’s face. At the top, the stench was crawling up my nostrils, making my eyes swell with water. A stiff, hot wind in my face intensified it.
I blinked three times before I believed the body was there.
“What is it?” Viv called. I glanced down at her. The flower crown looked like snowflakes in her chestnut waves.
“Stay there and call Graham,” I said. She cocked a hand on her popped hip. Waved her brand-new cell phone at me. All mock attitude. “Please, Vivy.”
I didn’t tell Viv to call 9-1-1. I was twelve. My brain didn’t have a setting for an emergency too big for Graham. Not then. Not at first.
Viv called him. “You’re late. Why walking? Couldn’t you strap the melon to your scooter?” Pause. “Weirdness on the rock.”
From the angle and the distance, I made out the body, tatter of clothing, naked skin. A big, shaggy vulture hunched over it. I inched closer. Long brown hair. Arms open.
My breath grew shallow.
A bruise as livid as her purple bra ran from her chest to the waistband of her buttoned jean shorts. A second bruise like a choker around her neck. A girl. On her back. And those arms, they were thrown open as if she were midflight. The girl’s T-shirt had been slashed down her sternum, its halves peeled back to expose her bruised rib cage and tucked under her arms as if she had wings. There were rocks, too, at the bottom of the wings like feathers. They pinned the fabric in place.
Wings. Like those of the vulture worrying her bellybutton into a larger hole with its beak. A cloud tapered across the sky with the look of a white fissure in the blue. The sky was cracking. It would fall soon.
The vulture looked reluctantly away from its meal, a patch of soft tissue hanging out of its hooked beak. There were holes in her thighs, too, just under the hem of her cutoffs. Channels cut into the muscles; the white gleam of bone.
She was dead. Not bleeding. Not moving. No blood that I could see on the rock.
“Oh my God,” Viv whispered. I hadn’t heard her crawl up. She stood with the back of a hand to her mouth, the other clutched her stomach. She lurched to the side and dry heaved.
I returned to the girl. Not a woman. Not old enough. But older than me. She wore a real bra, not a tiny one with padding like I did. Her breasts were like hills as she lay on her back. Death made her look caught, trapped. I wanted to swat the flies from her brown hair. Knock the rocks and her wings away. Help her up so she could run.
My stomach churned, tears stung, arms lost feeling at my sides. She was not so different from me and Viv. Except she had wings.
The vulture had swallowed by then and it cawed shrilly. Its head bowed for another bite. I rushed forward, shouting. It hobbled to the edge of the rock, faking indifference, but kept one gleaming eye my way.
I was directly over her. Gravel decorated one side of her face. Her knees were dirty and cut. The single white sneaker she wore was stained, the rubber sole partially detached and wilting from her foot.
“What happened to her?” Viv whispered.
“A nightmare,” I said.
“Why is her shirt open like that?”
“Like wings,” I said and then shook my head.
We called 9-1-1 before Graham hiked up, the watermelon braced on his shoulder. Then we called my house, where my dad answered, and he called Mom because she wasn’t home. Viv’s dad was away on business and we left her mom for last because she was in recovery after surgery to remove a tumor from her chest a few weeks earlier. Viv and I sat in the dirt, waiting for the grown-ups. Graham stood by the girl on the rock, keeping the vulture at bay.
The rest of that afternoon was superimposed horror on our familiar kingdom. Where we played and pretended and dreamed and dared. Viv had to wait inside with her mom for the police because Ina had buckled against an apple tree, too weak from surgery. Dad steadied Ina and walked them back through the orchard. I sat with Graham and the watermelon as the EMTs and firemen checked the girl. I knew she couldn’t be saved. My legs stopped being legs. Graham kept muttering stuff like, How could our rock be involved in this? We’d just been there two Saturdays before. Sleeping bags. Flashlights. Liter of root beer over ice cream in Ina’s giant lobster pot. The rock was just an extension of the orchard and the orchard an extension of our barn. Ours.
Police cruisers parked along the weed-dotted access road connecting the street with the orchard. A few neighbors hiked up to watch. A boy our age came the nearest and froze, a scarecrow in between trees. I watched him pull a notebook from his back pocket and take notes. Graham walked in his direction. My mom had arrived by then; Dad had returned from helping Ina.
My parents told me to pay attention to the plainclothes officer talking to me. He asked if I recognized the girl, and suddenly I wasn’t sure. “Maybe,” I said.
I closed my eyes and saw my face instead of hers. The officer asked if I could take another look. It was important. I wanted to give her a name. Help her. My parents and the officer crawled back up the rock with me.
She was a stranger. The wind became a dusty, battering force, snatching sheets of paper from a clipboard, skimming them across the dirt until they netted in the weeds. Graham was alone with the melon. The new boy and his notebook were gone.
As my parents guided me away, I turned to glimpse the girl’s face between the officer’s legs.
“She’s like me,” I said to my mom. A girl.
It was the officer who replied. “Nah, hon, nothing like you, just a runaway asking for it.” He licked his thumb and brushed away a fleck of dirt on his otherwise shiny boots. “These girls leave their nothing towns and head west or south to Los Angeles and they end up hitchhiking on the interstate. Get into the wrong truck. Get hooked up with the wrong people. Drugs—” Mom’s hands pressed over my ears. Too late.
When we were home Mom made chai and put my iPod on in my bedroom. Dad brought out an old nightlight that projected stars on the ceiling; its white constellations hardly registered in the summer evening light. A tear leaked from his eye when he kissed me on the forehead. After they left me, I sat in my desk chair at my window staring out at the gray ocean. Nah, hon, she’s nothing like you, just a runaway. I couldn’t get the officer’s voice out of my head. She was a girl. Untied sneaker. Temporary tattoo of a heart on her ankle that had faded with washing. Ordinary. I was ordinary. How had she asked to be hurt?
She looked like one of the girls who were sometimes on the beach. Viv and I had seen them once or twice. Viv had radar for girls just above high school age. Free girls. Those who didn’t live here. Dramatic lives full of shrieking and chasing one another around their circle and falling into the laps of boys with them. Viv tore a slit up her Free People dress after we watched them. Stretched the neckline so it hung off her shoulders. For a while she talked about hanging out with them, in the same dreamy tone she used when speaking about Luke McHale. She heard from a classmate, who heard from their older sister, who bought pot from a girl on the beach once, that there were teenagers who came to Seven Hills for its fabled beach and waves. Word had spread that you could camp at night in the Ghost Tunnel, officially the Golden Hills Tunnel, that there were plenty of orchards to steal fruit from, and that the police wouldn’t bother you unless you drew too much attention.