Drew heard Wendy’s breath spill out of her mouth, the delicate sound of glass falling through air. He would have stepped in to save almost any other girl. But Wendy was different. She was a smoker, so she didn’t flinch when she was close to fire.
Sampler took a little bottle of purple fluid out of his coat pocket and began to pour the fluid over her jeans. “Want me to light it?” he asked Wendy, who was twisting a long blue ribbon into her braid while holding a lit cigarette expertly in her teeth.
“Loser,” she said, “go on.”
“Want me to set your jeans on fire?” Sampler asked.
“Do it!” said Drew.
Sampler poured more fluid onto her jeans and set them on fire. Wendy screamed as the long flame flared. But the fire died quickly as the fluid ran out, and her jeans didn’t burn. There were no ashes, holes, or evidence that the fire had ever been lit, yet she was crazed with anger, taking a big bite out of her cigarette and chewing as if it were food.
Drew spat on the ground near Sampler’s shoes. Even outside of Mr. Loamer’s class, Sampler used chemistry to trick people’s eyes. Sampler was a waste of everybody’s time, Drew thought: hell to look at, slouching shoulders and a crummy black hat made of felt-covered cardboard. His voice screeching like crickets, all Sampler ever talked about was his experiments. He was a scrawny kid, always twirling the long chain dangling off his belt loop.
“Don’t you get it?” Sampler asked Wendy, laughing. “I bet you were scared. I bet you thought I was going to burn your legs, hey Wendy?”
“I wish you had,” she said, putting her finger over the dark spot behind her chipped tooth.
Sampler let go of the little bottle. It shattered at Drew’s feet.
“Watch the shoes,” Drew said.
Even though it was the middle of August, Sampler wore a trench coat full of tiny moth-holes. As he tried to scurry away, the coat blew open behind him, the slit in the back separating into two dusty wings. Hoping that Wendy was watching, Drew pretended to strike Sampler across the forehead. Sampler’s black hat flew off, and he moaned, reaching out as it was swept away. Close up, his spiked hair skittered over his forehead. Drew imagined punching Sampler’s face, but shuddered at the thought of chattering teeth, gashes, and shut eyes.
At home, Drew saw a black and yellow spider bouncing on its web outside his front door. He thought about stomping it, but he had never seen one that size or that color. He decided to leave it for a while.
When his hands came closer to the web, the spider bounced faster. He figured he had enough trouble that day, so he reached out to tear the spider down.
He jumped back, startled by his sister’s eyes on the other side of the window. He realized now Carlie had been watching all this time. Almost twenty years old, she was too old to be living in their parents’ house, but their mother had let her turn the upstairs room into a studio. Carlie spent her days sculpting figures that weren’t really human but old children that crawled out of fountains, wings sharper than teeth, eyes as vacant as the darkness behind their gaping mouths.
Drew opened the front door, careful not to dislodge the spider testing its web. He wanted to say something nice to Carlie, but the longer he looked at her the more he wondered what the hell had gone wrong. Wendy, he thought, had changed Carlie for the worst. He rarely saw Carlie except when she was whispering to Wendy across her tiny studio with wind through the open window blowing the dry pulp of shredded newspaper into their hair.
Carlie’s hands started shaking whenever she had trouble finding buyers for her sculptures. She ate less, grew thin, and worked harder than ever. The palms of her hands were always inky with newsprint. As she shredded the papers, she occasionally tucked a scrap into the back of her cheek, let it grow soft and gummy in there.
Still chewing the paper, she pointed to the spider, calming down now that Drew was on the other side of the window. “You like it,” she said. “I saw you.”
“Hell, no.”
“I watched what you were doing. You were about to stroke it.”
That evening Drew saw Sampler standing outside the front door, examining the spider with a magnifying glass. Clinching his fists, he wanted to teach Sampler a lesson, but first he had to get Carlie away from the window. She was tapping on the glass, trying to get the spider to move.
“Who is that boy out there?” she asked.
“Just a jerk I’ve got to take care of.”
“One of your friends from school?”
“He’s not a friend,” said Drew.
“You know what it is?” Sampler asked, his voice muffled behind the windowpane.
“Yeah.”
“A banana spider. Can I have it?”
“No,” Carlie said, “it’s mine.”
Before she could open the door, Drew hammered the glass with his fists.
Sampler ran away, laughing.
Since his project was due the next day, Drew decided he had better start working. The experiment he chose was the simplest one, a miniature volcano hollowed out and filled with vinegar and baking soda to mimic an eruption. He figured he could just sit back, counting on Carlie to make the volcano.
“I need your help,” Drew said.
Carlie started squeezing her hands together like she had just burnt her fingers and wanted to cover them up so no one would know how badly she was hurt. He thought how easy it would be to pull her hands apart to see if she was hiding something. Instead, he told her about the project, and she began to talk in an excited tone, looking out the window as if she could already see the volcano looming.
“I’ll do it in a second,” she said, “but promise me something first.”
Drew thought about plucking the clots of newspaper out of her tangled hair. He wanted to help her in some way but didn’t know how. He put one hand over her mouth to quiet her. “I know someone’s up there,” he said, taking the hand down and wiping his palm on his jeans. “I won’t tell.”
Wendy was smoking a twisted cigarette in his sister’s studio, her huge eyes doctored in bright makeup, the brown mascara caked up like dusty fiddlebacks dancing on her lashes. He hated seeing Wendy in Carlie’s room. Wendy belonged at school, he thought, not in the house he came home to. The longer she stayed in his house, the more she reminded him of his problems.
It seemed to Drew that everything Wendy collected accumulated in the upstairs: tattered jeans, spaghetti jars full of cigarettes, glittering shards of ruined jewelry.
She was the perfect artist’s model and a great help to his sister in her work. Wendy could hold a position for hours, barely blinking her eyes. She made a game of trying to scare Drew, but he wasn’t playing. Whenever she was posing for Carlie, Drew tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t breathe. He hated the way she could just sit there staring, asleep with her eyes open. He thought she was laughing behind her calm face. When she looked up at him like that, her gaze imperceptibly shifting as he moved, he had to smile, realizing how easily he could shake her awake.
Some of the sculptures of her were as small as dolls. Some were larger than women. The large ones scared Drew’s mother. She wouldn’t go into Carlie’s studio anymore. The room had gone claustrophobic with the shape of Wendy’s body from all angles stretching out in perfect proportion. The walls were a dusty white. The painted sculptures loomed red and gold. Shadows cascaded dull over every solid form. The narrow shapes of women, long and hideous, stretched over the walls and ceiling, the brittle fabric of their dresses leaping like flames, bracelets of chain dangling off their naked arms. Even the sleepers reached for each other, their hands open on the air. Their hair was treated grass Carlie had uprooted from neglected fields. Their teeth, the ivory chipped off old piano keys.
At traveling arts festivals, Carlie had tried to sell her sculptures only to find out she couldn’t give them away. She claimed people spent their money on photos of children blooming from giant flowers. Buyers weren’t interested in taking home life-size figures celebrating human suffering and the postures of impending doom.
Drew noticed the longer Carlie sculpted, the more she shaped faces like Wendy’s and her own: wild, thick-lashed eyes hollowed out by hunger, filth, and shadow. She often forgot to eat, sculpting emaciated figures crouching low or opening their thin skin like long coats to show the brittle bones and shriveled organs the flesh could not hide.
Inside the sunlit studio, Wendy sat on the bare floor tearing newspapers into long strips. She stopped for a moment to move the paper away from Drew. As she stood up, he heard the wooden panels give, then realized it was the creaking of her bones. She stretched her arms, her fingers rustling a sculpture’s dusty hair.
Carlie smiled at Wendy then got right to work, slapping some pulp of glue and shredded paper down onto a wooden base. She worked her hands in a succession of frenzied blows. Her palms pounded the soft mixture into a solid, mounded form. Her dainty fingers probed the volcano’s surface for imperfections.
“I need a hole for the vinegar,” he said.
“Is this big enough?” Carlie asked, scraping out a place in the center with her filthy fingernails.
“What is this?” He pointed to a figure of a child wearing a black, paper hat.
“Now we’ve just got to let it dry.” She stood back to survey her work.
“Looks great,” Drew said, making his way past the sculptures. On his way out, he reached for the black hat resting precariously on the sculpture’s tilted head.
“Not so fast,” Carlie said, taking the hat away from him. “Now we’ve got to paint it.”
“No. This is good enough.”
“We could gather some sticks, leaves, and grass to make a village scene,” Carlie said, touching the wooden base.
“What about your project?” Drew asked Wendy.
“What makes you think I’m doing one?” she asked, the cigarette bobbing from the hole in her tooth.
“Go ahead and fail the class. You think I care?”
Even though it was dark outside, Wendy climbed out onto the balcony and down a white ladder into the backyard. The rails crackled under her slight weight like paper on fire. The ladder held, the wood splintering. The wind picked up, cluttering Wendy’s hair. Drew wondered how long it would take for her to reach the ground. On her way back up, she climbed slowly. The twigs were tucked into her shirt.
Carlie slumped over the little village, her hands arranging pine needles, sticks, and wild flowers on the wooden stand. Her sculptures’ perfect forms towered over her scrawny, hunched body. Seeing her like that made Drew think something terrible was going to happen to her.
In the corner, Wendy fell asleep, coiled into a tight ball, her arms hugging her knees. Drew pretended to give her a single kick, just to see if she would move.
That night Carlie took a lamp from her studio and shone the light on the spider crouching outside the downstairs window. She tried to attract moths, the light luring insects into the sprawling web. The glare made the shadow bounce in frenzied motions.
A fat, dusty moth tangled its wings in the gauzy light. The spider pounced low. The wings flailed for just an instant before the spider’s legs, like agile fingers, twirled the moth into a tightly spun sack dangling on the web.
Until then, Drew never knew how pretty it was to watch something die. Another moth touched down, this one as green as a new leaf. The spider didn’t bother to wrap it up but held the second moth down, clutching the whole nervous body as it relaxed in the lamplight. The bright green of the wings faded into the dullest gray he could remember.
Outside the window, Drew saw a figure in a long coat ride by on a bicycle. He cursed, imagining Sampler capturing the spider in a jar and studying it under the glass. But the spider was still safe in its web.
Drew heard the balcony wood shifting, Wendy in the rocking chair lulling the night away. A single cricket leapt, then landed near Carlie, rubbing its legs together. Drew stomped it with his bare foot, smearing it into the tile. His parents were getting ready for bed, but Carlie was still mesmerized by the spider jumping in the light she shone through the window.
In the morning, Drew’s mother drove him to school early so he could take his project to science class before first bell. He held the huge, sculpted volcano dwarfing the tiny village on the wooden plank.
Standing outside the building, he pounded on the glass of the locked doors. Teachers walked by on the inside. Mrs. Raleigh opened the door.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I need to take my project in,” he said, feeling himself towering over her.
“Well, Mr. Loamer hasn’t informed me of this.”
“Can I just come in?” he asked.
“I could get in trouble for this,” she said, her small body blocking the way.
He thought how easy it would be to shove her aside. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got this big thing to carry. I’m not doing this for my health.”
“I don’t have the authorization,” she said as she closed the door on his shoe.
From behind the glass, he watched her walk away. Then Wendy Walker slipped out from the other side of the vending machines and ran to open the door.
“Carlie does nice work,” she said.
Her hair was a jumbled mess of curly and straight, a bunch of lousy colors mixed together. She held a pencil in her mouth. Reaching into her hip pocket, she pulled out a small, painted leaf. She handed it to Drew, but he didn’t want to take it. He nodded down at the volcano in his hands. She put the gold leaf into the center hole where all the vinegar was going to be.
“Give that to Carlie,” Wendy said. “Tell her I found it.”
As she slipped away down the hall, he saw her bending over, picking up little scraps of colored paper. She found trash on the ground, broken sticks, torn flowers, green glass, tiny, glinting pieces of copper. All of this, he imagined, she would offer Carlie. He planned to crush it into a powder before tossing it out the window of Carlie’s studio when no one else was looking.
Drew carried the volcano into the classroom where Wendy was pretending to smoke her gnawed-off pencil like she would a long cigarette. He put the volcano down on the project table: fish tanks full of marbles and colored water, tiny plants bright green and just beginning to sprout inside egg cartons, a toy car made of four records, a mouse trap on wheels, and some string.
“Know what I think?” she asked, the pencil clacking against her chipped teeth.
“No.”
“Not too many people understand smoking the way I do.”
“You should know.”
“I’m serious. Five or six minutes and then it’s gone. You watch it disappear. You see in the ashes the disappearance of time, and it has nothing to do with days or hours. It’s just the minutes, the seconds, you know?” The tardy bell rang, and she jumped like the kids who ran into the classroom were running after her. The pencil snapped on her broken teeth. “Damn,” she said, “I really need a cigarette.”
By the time Mr. Loamer walked into the classroom, Wendy was making a bracelet out of locks of her hair knotted with colored string. Her ring-jeweled fingers reflected the window light more flinty and mysterious than the green glass she had slipped into her pocket.
Loamer began lecturing on chapter nine. Drew reached into his backpack and noticed his book wasn’t there. He raised his hand.
“What is it?” Loamer asked, pointing his good ear in Drew’s direction.
Mr. Loamer was completely deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. When Loamer wasn’t looking, Drew and the rest of the football team pounded their fists into the plaster. With one kick, their big shoes went right through. Repairmen had to keep coming to fix holes in the classroom walls.
Drew screamed until he felt the veins popping out on his neck, “Someone stole my book.”
“Again?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Loamer said, putting his hands on the back of his head, “I was afraid that was what you were saying. Come here, boy.” He started to whisper. “I didn’t want to embarrass anyone, but I heard what you were saying all along. Why don’t you go and ask that girl over there?” He motioned to Wendy Walker with one nod of his bald head, the bones of his skull making the bare skin shine as they surfaced, the white light pooling over his cranium.
Wendy flipped through the pages as if she had never seen the pictures before, men riding bicycles, vials of purple fluid, airplanes taking off over water, helium balloons lost in the clouds, a cartoon of a human body with all the skin peeled off.
“Whose book is that?” Drew asked her. He reached out and grabbed one of the corners.
“I was just reading it,” she said, pulling the book away.
“Don’t you have a book of your own?”
“Lost it. Can we share?”
He put his hands on the cover. “I want my chemistry book back.”
“I’m going to tell,” Wendy said. She grabbed the book and stumbled to Loamer’s desk where she started crying. Loamer called to Drew after Wendy ran out into the hallway.
“Why did you do it?” Loamer whispered.
“I didn’t do anything,” Drew said.
“She claims you threatened to kill her if she didn’t hand it over. You could be suspended or expelled for this, or worse, Etcher. Much, much worse.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Drew said.
“How?”
While Mr. Loamer was turned away, Drew slipped past the project table. He wanted to find Wendy and bring her back to class before he presented his volcano. She was hiding behind the school building and smoking a real cigarette.
“You can have the book if you want it,” Drew said, thinking how sharp a chipped tooth could be and how easy it would be to close her open smile.
She put out the cigarette and leaned against the brick wall, absently weaving hair and string.
“What’s the deal with my sister, anyhow?” Drew asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Wendy said, handing him the tightly knotted bracelet too small for his wrist.
Soon after Drew and Wendy went back to class, Allen Sampler walked in, his trench coat a dirty mess of tangled strings. For the first time since Drew had known him, Sampler’s shoulders weren’t slouching over. Even while setting the huge wooden box on the project table, Sampler kept himself in good posture.
“Ready for me?” Sampler asked, a terrible smell filling the room as he twirled his silver chain.
He took the lid off the box. Inside was the duck experiment, twenty dead baby ducks at different stages of hatching. He had killed them by sticking straight pins into their skulls, the black and yellow down brittle with dry yolk.
“Well,” Mr. Loamer said, “twenty million babies are killed every year by their own mothers.”
“This experiment demonstrates the various stages of infantile development,” Sampler said, starting in on his project speech. “You’ll see here the dissected egg just before hatching.”
Shifting in his chair, Drew leaned away from the black, wooden box. “Why did you do it, Sampler?”
“They didn’t do anything to you,” Wendy said.
“You little shit,” Drew said.
“Now if everyone will please just calm down,” Sampler said, staring at the box as if the ducks were about to hatch. “I’ll be happy to answer any questions to put your minds at ease.”
“Did it hurt?” Wendy asked, raising her left hand from the front row. She covered her nose with her right.
“No. I poked the needle through to the brain. But most weren’t even at that stage where they could feel pain yet. See this one is still an embryo,” he said, pointing to a speck of dried blood.
“You cruel, worthless bastard!” Drew kept shouting.
“Everybody, please. Just listen.” Sampler wiped his hands on his trench coat. “All I ask is ten minutes of your time, ten minutes like everybody else got.”
“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size?”
“Just five minutes. Just two.” A cigarette slipped through a hole in Sampler’s coat pocket. Watching it fall, he touched the tips of his spiked hair as if he had forgotten the black hat was no longer there. “This took me a long time, a whole month in the garage. I had to find good eggs. I had to rent an incubator.”
“I hope somebody sticks a pin through your skull, Sampler.”
Sampler reached for the hat, letting one hand linger over his forehead. “You’re not likely to see something like this again,” he said, straightening his collar. “We all know you’ve never seen it before.”
“No one should have to see this shit,” said Drew.
“You don’t understand. I stopped them at just the right stages. I had to keep a journal,” he said, taking out a rumpled lab manual from his coat flap.
“Thank you, Allen,” Mr. Loamer said, putting the lid on the box. “You can sit down now.”
Sampler kept touching his head as if he hadn’t been there to watch the hat blow away. Even when Drew went up to present his project, the gold leaf on the inside bubbling over, Sampler was still standing there looking at the box.
In the halls by the lockers, Sampler got away, but Drew held on to the trench coat. The material was so brittle with filth that it fell apart like old paper. Drew stayed long enough to watch Sampler come crouching back, the chain gliding through his fingers as he let go to pick up the disintegrating heap. Sampler threw the trench coat back over his shoulders even though by now it wasn’t really a coat anymore.
After examining the torn coat, Mr. Loamer gave Drew a choice of twenty days of two-hour detentions or the task of planting trees in front of the school. What Loamer didn’t tell him was that each tree weighed over seventy pounds and was supposed to take two people to lift. It took Drew only thirty minutes to plant eight trees.
When Carlie and Wendy pulled the convertible up to the school lawn and started honking, the trees were swooping, leaning against each other in precarious tepees. The afternoon sunlight through the leaves cast odd shadows on the center. The wind moved the leaves. The yard was full of loose dirt and chunks of dislodged grass broken on the sidewalk.
Carlie kept honking so Drew had to get into the car. He felt his friends watching him as Carlie drove off. The car was full of newspapers he and Wendy had to lie on just to keep the papers from flying away.
The next morning before the first bell rang, the whole school was gathered in the front yard. The trees were wobbling, still leaning on each other. They would have to be replanted before the limbs began to snap off. Mr. Loamer paced the yard with both of his hands clutching his bald head.
Wendy crawled out from inside one of the tepees just before the trees collapsed. She looked up at Drew as she stood, holding a long strand of tangled ribbon. As she moved closer to him, he tried to look at anyone but her. Sampler was examining the leaves of a fallen tree. Wendy was holding the ribbon high over her hair. Drew didn’t want her to give it to him, not when everybody else was watching to see what he would do.
“Let me come over to your house after school,” Sampler said, smiling.
“What for?” asked Drew.
Wendy was looking right at him, her lips barely moving.
“I’ve got something important to tell your sister about her spider,” Sampler said.
“You stay away from her.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Sampler said, scratching a place behind his ear.
That night the lamp began to shake in Carlie’s hands, causing the light to ricochet off the inside walls. Drew couldn’t stand the circle of light leaping off the house like it was following a spider on the inside, so he took Carlie’s hands into his own. He steadied her just enough so together they could shine the lamp outside the window.
She was scrawny but pretty in her own way, he thought. She just didn’t like to leave her sculptures, her spider, Wendy, or whatever project she was working on. He heard the distant rumble of the highway behind the house and for an instant felt a little glimmer of hope flare like a winged insect picking up the headlights before splattering on a windshield.
“I want to hold her,” she said, tapping on the glass. “Could you get her down for me?”
“Why do I have to be the one to do it?”
“You’re the only one who’s not afraid to touch her.”
He went out the front door, leaving Carlie on the inside. The spider bounced on its web every time he reached out. He knew it wouldn’t be easy to preserve the way Carlie wanted. The spider had already lost one long, yellow leg trying to get away but began first to creep and then to crawl into his open hand. She was smaller than she looked up in the web. In the high corner, one perfectly spherical, cream-colored ball of eggs dangled. The bright spots on her began to fade away until she was as gray as the moths she had sucked dry. He reached out to tear down the eggs, but then thought better of it. His sister was still shining the light in the window, trying to get the moths to fly into the dusty web even though the eggs had already been laid and she had to know the spider was going to die anyway.
Inside the house, he opened his cupped hands.
“Is that all she was?” Carlie asked.
As Carlie stroked the spider’s legs with her delicate fingers, he wanted to get away from her. He couldn’t stand the way she kept looking at the wilted spider in his hands, so he brushed the crumpled body into her inky palm and left her beside the window.
Climbing the stairs, he imagined the shadow of the leaves in the wind skittering over the moonlight on Wendy’s scrawny arms. He heard the wood on the studio balcony let out a long, creaking sigh. Outside the glass door, an empty chair rocked in the wind. Wendy was walking the balcony rail, her hair blowing into a tangled frenzy, the tips of her fingers just touching the trees. He was going to tell her to be careful but thought better of it. Even calling her name could startle her and make her fall. He was tired of watching her, tired of standing in silence in the dark room.
When he turned on the lamp, he saw only the huge reflection of himself in the glass. He was standing over his sister’s sculptures as the shadows fell from ceiling to floor. Smelling the dry grass, tapping the chipped piano keys, he thought about how brittle their newspaper bodies were. Even the wind could harm them. Suddenly, he felt powerful and alone. He never knew he could be both thrilled and sorry that everyone around him was fragile. Gently, he reached out to touch the wrist of one of the sculptures. Except for her long blue legs and green hair made of wispy synthetic feathers, she was like all the others. He could break any one of them into little bits, and no one could do anything about it.