For the first two months of her life as a citizen of the East Tennessee Children’s Home, Murphy belonged to the fort and to us. If anyone else was trying to get her attention, hoping she’d turn around and look in their direction, they were just so many tree branches clicking against the window on a windy afternoon.
And then one day, this began to change.
The first time I noticed it was at lunch a few weeks after we’d finished building the fort. It was me, Murphy, and Logan, all of us poking at our Tuna Melt Delights with our forks because there was a rumor going around that instead of tuna, the lunch ladies had chopped up gerbils and melted cheddar cheese over them. We didn’t really believe it, but for a few minutes it was fun to pretend.
As we were busy poking and prodding our sandwiches, an eraser flew across the cafeteria and hit Murphy in the head. It was the kind of eraser that you stick on the end of your pencil, and the person who threw it was Brandon Sparks, the star soccer player of the sixth grade.
Murphy rubbed her head where she’d been hit, then picked up the eraser and examined it. “I’ve been bombed,” she told us, then looked over at Brandon. “I think you lost this,” she yelled at him.
I waited for Brandon to say something low-down and rude, but instead he called, “Then I guess I better come find it.” The next thing we knew, he was standing next to Murphy with his hand stuck out. “Give it over, thank you very much.”
Murphy folded her fingers over the eraser. “No way,” she said. “Finders keepers. Besides, I have a lot of things I need to erase today.”
They continued joking around like that for a few minutes, ending with Brandon’s grand gesture of making a gift of the eraser to Murphy. The whole time he didn’t say a word to me or Logan, or even act like we were alive.
Over the next few days I began to hear Murphy’s name everywhere. I heard it as I was walking through the hallways or dressing out for gym, like it was part of a song everyone all the sudden knew the words to. “Her parents died in a car crash,” kids told each other, their voices quiet and dramatic. “She’s waiting for her aunt to come rescue her,” they reported, “but she probably won’t.”
One day Olivia Woods picked Murphy for her team in PE. Olivia Woods was always a team captain, but she only picked three or four people for her team. After the special few were chosen, Olivia stepped back and let one of her followers, Jaycee Laws or Katha Coleman, pick out the rest. When Olivia called out Murphy’s name, somebody actually gasped. Murphy walked over to Olivia’s side like it was no big deal at all, like maybe she could fly and who cared what Olivia Woods thought. I knew this would make Olivia Woods like her even more. That was how the Olivia Woodses of the world operated, as far as I could tell.
“Olivia Woods keeps talking to me,” Murphy told me one Monday afternoon when we were working at Potter’s Used Auto Parts and Misc. Supplies. We were going through shoe boxes filled with nuts and bolts and screws, sorting them out and storing them in plastic containers. Mr. Potter was up front, talking to a man about carburetors.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked, sifting through a pile of medium-sized bolts. “What about?”
“How I should come over to her house and eat dinner,” Murphy said. “How her mother collects oriental carpets so you can’t wear shoes inside. How she has a window in her ceiling and counts stars at night until she falls asleep.”
“When does she tell you all this stuff?”
Murphy shrugged. “In math class. Between lunch and PE. On the way to the buses in the afternoon. She keeps slipping in conversations when I’m not looking.”
I scraped at the rusty head of a screw with my fingernail. I hated Olivia Woods and wanted to be Olivia Woods’ best friend all at the same time. I wanted her to leave Murphy alone. I wanted her to call me up and invite me over to eat pizza on her mama’s fancy rugs.
“So what does it all mean, do you think?” I asked. “You think she wants to be friends with you?”
“Who knows?” Murphy said. “We’re going to be partners for a math project. I’d rather do it with Logan, though. Sometimes Olivia acts like she’s a pretty big ball of cheese.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said, and left it at that, even though my brain had already started buzzing with worries, like what if Olivia Woods stole Murphy away?
Mr. Potter walked into the back room, his hat on his head. “Just got a call about some parts from an old junker a man wants to sell me over near Hampton. It’s on the other side of town, but I thought you children might like to ride along for a change of scenery. Don’t know how much chance you got to get out and about, what with school and all your activities.”
I glanced at Murphy, and she nodded. “Driving is one of my favorite pastimes,” she told Mr. Potter as she started putting the lids back on boxes. That made Mr. Potter smile.
“Didn’t know they let children your age drive, little gal,” he said, returning a box of nuts and bolts to its place on the shelf. “You sure you can see all the way over the wheel?”
Murphy tossed her head. “Oh, you know what I mean. But watch out, I’m the worst backseat driver you ever met. I’m the sort of person who likes to give directions.”
The inside of Mr. Potter’s truck smelled like a mix of gasoline and peppermint. It made me think of Mr. Willis’s truck, how it used to carry a whiff of wintergreen from the tobacco he liked to chew and spit into a plastic cup on the floorboard. “I swear, Virgil, that right there is the nastiest habit a man can have,” Granny Lane would complain every time Mr. Willis spit out another brown stream into that cup. “It’s worse than smoking, belching, and the public passing of gas all wrapped up together.”
“And still all them women are crazy about me,” Mr. Willis always said right back. “I got to spit tobacco just to get some peace and quiet.”
“When I lived up on Roan Mountain, I rode around in a truck like this all the time,” I told Mr. Potter as we drove down Elk Street on the way to Highway 19E to Hampton.
“Is that so? Well, for my money, you can’t beat a Ford truck. Now my brother, Clinton, he had the misfortune of marrying a woman who couldn’t abide a Ford truck. No sir, she came from a family of folk who didn’t drive nothing if it didn’t have the word Chevrolet on it in ten different places. Clinton was so in love, he traded in his Ford for a Chevy, and I can’t tell you how many times over the years I had to go bail him out from some mess or another, that truck of his broken down on the side of the road.”
“My father drove a Chevy truck to work,” Murphy said. She said it like this was a fact she’d just remembered after a long time of forgetting. “A red one. He said that red trucks just rode better.”
Mr. Potter shook his head. “Good thing I already like you as much as I do, little gal. Don’t know about them Chevy trucks, now. But I do like the color red.”
We pulled out onto 19E. I turned my head this way and that, catching sight of things I hadn’t seen since I was eight years old. 19E is the road that goes from Elizabethton to Roan Mountain and back again, and I can’t tell you how many times me and Granny Lane and Mr. Willis rode down it to get to the Elizabethton Wal-Mart. Saturdays and Sundays, you could be sure there’d be a caravan of shiny pickup trucks and rusty clunkers headed down from Roan Mountain, and on your way you’d pass cars from Boone and Cranberry, Mountain City and Stony Creek, all on their way to the Wal-Mart, just like you.
I snuggled down in my seat between Mr. Potter and Murphy, remembering. I used to get so excited smelling that popcorn smell that hit your nose the minute you walked in the store’s front doors. And driving home we’d sing songs and cut up, and at Christmas time Mr. Willis would always buy all three of us Santa Claus hats and foot-long candy canes, and he’d sing “Deck the Halls” at the top of his lungs all the way back up the mountain.
“I always did like this road,” I said out loud to Mr. Potter and Murphy. “I always liked where it took me.”
Mr. Potter nodded. “I suspect that’s the highest compliment you can give a road.”
“That’s the only road worth driving on,” Murphy agreed.