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The sun is shining through my window and there are low rumblings from the rest of the house. I’ve been awake for some time, listening. The smoke from the fire last night still hangs in the air, heavy and stale, waiting for a stout wind to drive it off. Three weeks have passed since our first Friday Fire, and I suspect there will be no more to follow. The rumblings between Mom and Mitch have been on a progressive upswing over the last few weeks. She knows about Mitch and Theresa, and I wonder if she knew before I saw them sneaking off together. She flat-out called Theresa a whore last night. We were all there, just hanging out by the fire. Jud was tuning his guitar and Mitch had just gone inside to get another beer. Mom was talking to Tabby Johnson and didn’t seem to notice him going.
Then Theresa slid herself upright, a snake gaining legs, and made a stealthy step to pass by my mother toward the trailer. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it, but my mother’s arm snapped out and grabbed a hunk of Theresa’s hair, yanking her clean off her feet. She fell on her butt with a loud “oomph,” the wind completely knocked out of her. My mom said, “Look, you stupid whore, if you think you’re going into my home to make time with my man, you better think again.”
Theresa sat for a second, rubbing her head and then her ass before standing up. “You are a fucking crazy bitch.”
“Maybe so, but at least I don’t have to fuck my friends’ men.”
I have to admit, I was pretty impressed. Don’t play with my mother. She’ll mess you up.
None of that went over well with the Calverson boys, and it wasn’t long after Theresa left that the boys packed up their instruments and went as well, passing dirty looks back at my mother and then at Mitch as he saw them leaving down the drive.
I spend several hours listening to them screaming after that, waiting to hear something physical, worthy of my involvement. Mitch calls my mother crazy, proclaiming his innocence with the intensity that only a true liar can muster. Finally, the front door slams—Mitch has left the arena, which is generally what he does when she is being “insane,” or when he realizes she isn’t buying his bullshit. The door opens again, and my mother yells something through it, but I can’t make out her words. Mitch’s truck sputters to life, and he backs down the driveway, throwing white rock as he goes. There is an absence of sound, until the floor creaks again as she moves from living room to kitchen, words growling loose on her tongue, clipped.
The next step is more booze, probably switching to vodka, her preferred “pitiful me” drink, maybe some vomit at some point, maybe not. I hear the clink of metal on glass, and then she is moving through living room and into her bedroom. Her door closes, and the TV in her room begins to hum.
At some point she goes dark, and the world is silent. I crawl into my own bed, grateful she didn’t come to me to hash out her emotions, her anger, which she sometimes does, complaining about her sorry lot in life and how nobody loves her. Why isn’t she ever enough? Thank God we didn’t have to have that conversation again. I don’t think I could have handled it.
***
This morning she is grumbling through the house again. I hear her stomping, opening the medicine cabinet, and I’m sure she feels like shit. Every few minutes I hear her say something—inaudible, half-mumbled words, talking to herself, saying what she should have said last night. What she should have said to Mitch, what she would say to Mitch when he grew balls enough to come home. I’ve heard similar rumblings often enough to know the gist. I listen long enough to know the general topic. I wonder if he has finally had enough and will be gone for good.
A couple of years ago he’d been seeing some woman and actually left us to live with his “whore.” When he was gone for about a month, my mom ended up in the psych ward after a drunk dial to her friend Faye, who called the police saying that my mom threatened to kill herself. Three days in the psych ward turned into a stint in the halfway house and three months of me getting by as best I could on my own. Hence my double time in sixth grade.
By the time she got out of the halfway house, Mitch had been visiting her there for a month, and when she came home, he came with her. Things were better for a while after that. We even ate dinners together, mealtime events. Mitch said there would be no other women, and my mother stopped drinking. For a while.
I leave my bed and go into the bathroom. Something thumps against the wall, and my mother lets out another yell. She is out of vodka. Thoughts of my life drip through my mind while the water dribbles from the lime-encrusted showerhead, falling weakly into the tub. It’s a frustrating shower, not enough water pressure to fully rinse off the soap, and by the time I get out, the water has run cold. I dry, dress, and wrap my long, uncombed hair in the towel to squeeze the water out. I lean over the basin and study myself in the mirror, looking for breakouts and imperfections. I look like my mother, sad to say. My green eyes are her green eyes. My cheekbones are hers; my chin is hers. Only my lips are my own, though maybe they came from my father, whomever he may be. My hair comes from her, too, and no matter how much I hate it, I look like mom did when she was young. I hope I don’t look like her when I am old, but I suspect I probably will. Life sucks.
I take the towel from my hair and toss it over the shower rod, shaking my hair to untangle it. I grab my backpack from beside the bed and load it with my sketchpad, charcoals, and pencils before stepping softly back into the hall and out the back door, closing it with a quiet click. When I pass under her window, I can hear her TV. I wonder if he’s going to come back this time. I push my mother and her problems out of my mind as I escape into the early morning sunshine.
Our trailer sits on about an acre of land, and behind it, the woods go all the way to the back side of the Winthrop pastures. Ed bought our land and put the trailer here as a consolation for walking out of our lives, or maybe for something else, I’ve always wondered if it was for the something else. My mom and I were going to build a house, a real stick-and-stone house, because we were going to make a better life than the one that had left us behind. Our plans got delayed until they ended up in the scrap pile. We talked about “the House” a lot those first couple of months, and one Saturday, we even staked out the perimeter. Those months—before there was a new man—when we tried to be “just us girls” felt strange, almost pretend. Mom has never been very good without a man, or with one either, for that matter. Through the months, through the men, and as the months slipped to years, the stakes grew weathered and eventually got turned under by the lawnmower. Eventually “The House” disappeared from our imaginations, and the trailer rattled more and grew more sorely used as the seasons of east central Illinois marched past.
I shoulder the backpack, stepping over one of the few remaining stakes, and head into the woods, dew from the grass seeping into my shoes, soaking my socks. Summer has come with open skies, and the shadows from the canopy above dance through the woods. The green gloom of the underbrush is peaceful, solitary, melancholy. It is my favorite place. Monday and Tuesday are finals, and then it will officially be summer. The heat has already settled, and the farmers have put their crops out. Little green shoots are already sprouting from the black soil.
Not far into the underbrush there is a wire fence that separates our yard from what we call “the woods.” We didn’t put the fence up—it was here when we came—and it was rusty and loose even then. I climb through the barbs and manage my way through the dense growth until I find the path, one of many that run all through the woods, radiating from one main trail. Dylan told me the main trail was once a railroad bed that they stopped using after a series of train wrecks down in the gully around the turn of the century. There are no rails now, no remnants from those rails; in fact, it seems unlikely a rail ever ran here. I can’t imagine where it was coming from and going to. Regardless of its origin, the trail makes for an excellent horseback ride and a pretty good hike.
The series of smaller trails have been worn out from the main. Today I take one of these and climb the hill leading up to Donovan’s Ridge. From the ridge, you can look down into the gully and, through the trees, watch deer as they come to the creek to water. I settle myself on a ledge just below the top of Donovan’s Ridge and dangle my feet. It’s a steep drop, almost a cliff, and the ledge juts out slightly from the side of the hill. I watch for the longest time as birds flit through the trees, and the longer I sit, the more birds appear, growing comfortable with my presence, my silence. I feel my blood slowing in my veins. My breath slows, too, and the echoing of their words and of my thoughts slip away. When the trailer is small in my mind and my mother is very far away, I pull out my drawings and open to one that I’ve been working on for my final art project. It’s of three horses running in a storm. This is what I do, to get away from everything: I draw. Someday I’m going to have a studio with my prints mounted for display. That’s my dream anyway.
Voices echo along the gully and come to me through the trees. I lift my eyes and search the sun-dappled paths for the intruders. The voices continue for a few minutes before I spot them. Two people, a boy and a girl on horseback. I know the boy is Dylan, because I recognize Pride. The other horse is Chessa, I can tell by the pudge around her middle and the blaze on her face. I can’t quite make out the person riding. She’s wearing a baseball cap, and at this distance, I wouldn’t be able to see her face anyway. For a second I think it might be Vaude, but then the laughter rolls up, and I recognize the pretty voice of Kelci Bancroft.
My throat tightens, and I close my sketchpad, watching through the trees. They’re at the base of the gully now, just coming up to the creek. For a few minutes I can’t hear anything from them, but I have a perfect view. Dylan leads, and although I’m sure Kelci hasn’t spent much time on a horse in her life, she looks pretty comfortable. Of course, Chessa’s about the calmest thing ever; anybody could look comfortable on her. I am jealous she is riding Chessa, my horse. There was a time when a Saturday morning meant we were riding—Dylan and me. They cross over the creek, and Dylan turns Pride toward the slope that leads up to the back side of Donovan’s Ridge, the very path I took not even an hour before. The path itself wraps around the base of the ridge and then begins to zigzag up the slope. It’s the only way up and the only way down. I’m trapped here on my ledge, and unless I hide, I’m going to have to speak to them. I glance around anyway, just in case some portal to another dimension has opened to allow my escape, knowing that hiding behind a tree would be no use and would make me look incredibly stupid if they happened upon me. I take a deep breath and keep my seat. I force my eyes back to my sketch, not working on it, just studying it, waiting for the inevitable.
Since the Spring Dance, it seems I always see Kelci and Dylan together. In big bold letters, TOGETHER. I walk into the lunchroom at school, and there they sit. I walk down the hall and see him at his locker, with her a step away. I bet they did have sex after the dance. I bet they are having sex now. I’ve managed to avoid them, mostly, turning the other way or walking a different route to classes when I know my path will cross one of theirs. I feel the same anger that I remember when Kelci came to spend the night and promptly toppled off the fence into the land of the upper echelon. I’ve avoided them. There won’t be any of the questions this time. I remember, with a sick sense of shame, the day I caught Kelci outside our math class shortly before we finished the sixth grade, and I asked her why she was mad at me, wanting to make peace, amends, and go back to the easy comfort of being friends. “I’m not mad at you, Alison. It’s just things are different now. I’m going to junior high next year.” As if that explained everything, and I guess it did in a way, because I wasn’t. The writing was well on the wall by then. I had missed too much school; my performance was not satisfactory. That was the end of it, while her new group of friends pressed past me, taking her with them into class. I remember sitting there, as class poked by, trying to follow my math equations through puddled tears that I couldn’t repress. I remember hearing whispers behind me, clearly the word “dirty,” and knowing they were talking about me. Every giggle for days seemed to be at my expense.
Finally, after what seems to be hours, the underbrush begins to crackle as they move closer to the top of the ridge. The birds stop twittering and hunker down on their branches. The two of them will be on me in a few minutes. I can’t very well pretend I didn’t know they were there, with all the noise and bits of their conversation coming at me. I don’t want them to think I was eavesdropping, even as I’ve been spying. I should have known that they would be heading to the ridge, and I should have left as soon as I’d heard their voices coming from the trail. After all, that’s how I came to know about Donovan’s Ridge, riding with Dylan. He comes up here a lot, to think or just to sit and watch the world. If I’m honest, when I came here this morning I was probably hoping to run into him, especially after avoiding him for so long. I wanted to hear his voice and touch base again, to know that everything was going to be okay. So, I wanted to see him, but not like this, not with her.
I put my sketchpad into my pack and shoulder it. I should have already done this, been ready to go. I should have circled around and down and found a way to pass by them without being seen. Instead I just sat here dumbly until they are almost here. Idiot. I scramble off my ledge and up onto the actual ridge just as they come around the last bend. I am straightening up as Dylan tells Kelci to watch out for a low-hanging limb. How nice it would have been to see her knocked off. That would have been worth the humiliation of being caught. She tilts in her saddle and maneuvers past the obstacle. Damn.
She spies me and is the first to speak. “Hi.” Her face breaks into her cheerleader smile, and you would think we were still the best of friends. Her eyes rake from my face to my men’s t-shirt to my cut off blue jeans, stained yellow from being washed too often in the well water at the trailer. Dirty. The word washes through my mind. I wish for a split second that I had actually taken the time to brush my hair, to have done something to make myself less of a ragamuffin. But here I stand, ragamuffin to a tee. I smile and nod, unable to make words, which frustrates me. I should have been ready to seem okay, but I wasn’t. Idiot. In the same split second she assessed me, I assessed her, in her blingy Jordache jeans and teal polo shirt with the collar flipped up, so cool, so hip. These are the girls Dylan dates—Shelby Dycus with her huge, perky boobs, and Kelci Bancroft with her gorgeous hair and clothes. Dylan doesn’t date people like me.
Dylan turns and sees me then, too. His smile is easy and comfortable, so familiar, and for that split second, I hate him for his good looks and easy fucking life. He looks like he’s been enjoying his ride. He has color in his cheeks, just below the surface of his tan, from the heat of the morning.
“Hey, Ali. Surprised to see you up here this morning.” Which of course really means that he has not thought of me until now, so of course he couldn’t have expected me. It’s almost a sucker punch to my stomach, understanding so suddenly that I am less to him than he is to me. I’m just the poor kid from down the street. The poor kid he tries to be nice to. He thinks I am young. Much younger than he, even though I am not. He thinks of me like he would a poor cousin. I am that person, and Kelci is the girlfriend.
I finally find a voice, although it sounds like someone else’s. “Yeah, well, you know. It’s a pretty morning.” I move from one foot to the other, tugging at the fringe on my shorts, which suddenly seems too high up my leg for decent, as he slips down from the saddle. He loops Pride’s reins over a limb and steps back to help Kelci down, and then we are all standing eye to eye to eye.
“Sure is. I thought Kelci’d like to see the view.”
“It’s amazing,” Kelci breaks in, showing the appropriate enthusiasm. “I’ve lived here my whole life, and this is the first time I’ve ever been out here.”
“Really?” I don’t know what else to say, but it’s slowly dawning on me that they were planning on sticking around up here for a while, and they were planning on it without me here. They are probably going to have sex up here. God. “Well, hey, enjoy. I’ve got to get on back home. So, I guess I’ll see you all at school.” But, again, my functions fail, and I am unable to move.
“You want to hang out a bit, then I’ll give you a ride back down?” Dylan asks, but he feels it, too—the something awkward in the three of us standing here looking at each other. I give him credit, though, for trying to be the nice guy.
“No, that’s okay. But thanks. I have to go.”
“That’s too bad,” Kelci says, smiling again, not really meaning it, her cheerleader smile. For a split second I imagine shoving her over the ledge, but as soon as the satisfaction of seeing her start to fall enters my head, the image is gone. I meet her eyes, set just above those three cute little freckles that dot across the bridge of her nose. I wonder if I hate her more for not liking me as much as I liked her or for the fact that she and Dylan seem a matched set. There is something dark and wrong inside of me, I know it. Something hateful. Something evil. Something dirty.
“Well, see ya.” I shoulder past them and hope they don’t turn to watch my somewhat clumsy descent down the zigzagging trail. I glance up once and can see them silhouetted into the sky, his arm draped across her shoulder, hip to hip, her tinkling little girl laugh bouncing down the hill to chase me on my way. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. By the time I reach the bottom of the slope, tears are stinging my eyes, making the path difficult to see. I wipe my eyes and make my way across the gully, breaking from the trails and setting off through the underbrush, so as not to have them overtake me on their return ride.