I’ve lived in Alabama for my whole life, minus a few days in Florida, but I’m not very good at being Southern.
Football bores me. I’ve never called Dad “sir,” and I don’t think I could do it without laughing. I don’t have any opinions about barbecue. If you don’t eat meat, barbecue is just a sauce. Ketchup, vinegar, and sugar, that’s all. People who get a mouthful of barbecue and shake their heads and lift their hands like they’re getting the Holy Spirit—I’m not saying they’re faking, but if I reacted to barbecue sauce that way, I’d be faking. And if I shook my head and lifted my hands because of the Holy Spirit, that would be fake, too.
I know these are things that Southerners are supposed to do, because I see these posts online all the time. “Twelve Movies All Southern Girls Love.” “Why Southern Girls Have to Get Everything Monogrammed.” “Five Romantic Plantation Houses Any Southern Girl Would Want to Get Married In.” Apparently Instagram knows I’m Southern, and a girl, and white. But there’s a lot it doesn’t know, like the fact that I’ve just now turned thirteen—old enough to officially be on Instagram—even though I’ve been on the app for years. And, apparently, a lot of people on Instagram don’t know what went down on plantations.
But there’s one Southern thing I can reach out and touch, something I know is real. The blues. Not the music so much, but the life the music is about. People on Instagram are always saying that this thing or that thing is a “whole mood,” but the blues is the only mood I know whole.
The blues killed my mom, you know. My mom, who was even worse than me at being Southern. My mom, who was laughed at for wearing a Starfleet uniform to church. My mom, who people whispered about when she walked down the streets of Houmahatchee. My mom, who wrote a brilliant, unpublished book about faster-than-light travel in popular culture.
“The hope at the heart of modern science fiction is based on a technology that, according to physics, will never exist,” she says in the book’s first chapter.
I never really knew my mom, but as I get older, I seem to become more and more like her. I’m someone people whisper about. People recognize me in the aisles of Walmart. That’s her, the dog lawyer girl, they say. I spend all my free time on a big writing project that no one seems to understand. (In my book bag right now: The Alabama Constitution of 1901 and Nonprofit Grant Writing for Beginners.)
There are moments when I’m sure I’m thinking thoughts that my mother thought before. It’s not just a feeling. My mom wrote a lot of papers and articles about science fiction, and whenever I pick one up, I see someone like me staring back.
“Science has not unwoven the rainbow,” she wrote. “The stars are more beautiful because we know what they are. When we look in the sky, we’re seeing into the depth of space and the beginning of Time.”
Like my mom, I get that chilly feeling that comes from knowing the stars are all balls of gas that will one day burn out. All the puppies and kittens and toddlers holding their teddy bears will be gone one day, and the universe won’t care.
It’s not on my mind all the time, but the stars do come out every night, you know.
And I know, too, that if you have a relative who’s committed suicide, you’re more likely to do it yourself. So there’s that, looming over my head.
“I’ll never get out of these blues alive,” I said to Taleesa, my stepmom, one night as we cleaned the kitchen. When depression hits me—that feeling like I’m on a planet with too-strong gravity—it’s usually after dinner.
“That’s the title of a song, you know,” Taleesa told me.
I chuckled darkly. “Sounds like an awful song,” I said. “Someone’s even whinier than me.”
Taleesa shook her head. “No, no, no. A very popular song. John Lee Hooker. A king of the blues, if you like that sort of thing,” she said.
Taleesa’s no blues fan, but her father was. We call him Old Martinez, because my brother Martinez was named after him. He never lived in Houmahatchee, but he’s another one of the ghosts who float over our house. I saw him only once: a proud-looking old man with a shiny lapel pin, lying in a casket in a cold church in Milwaukee.
To me, Old Martinez is like George Washington—familiar and at the same time impossibly ancient and foreign. Taleesa lets only a little bit of his story slip out now and then. How he got arrested in a riot in the 1960s, just because he was there, and because he was Black. The dozens of jobs he worked, driving a bus, sweeping the floor in a factory. How he would shovel snow off the roof of their house in the winter to keep it from collapsing. It’s hard to believe that snow has that much weight. I mean, it’s just little floaty flakes, isn’t it? It’s also kind of hard to believe that Old Martinez is so closely related to my brother Martinez, who loves air conditioning, lives entirely inside video games, and can’t start a lawn mower without help.
“Old Martinez, he loved John Lee Hooker,” Taleesa said. “Well, maybe loved isn’t the right word. He listened to him all the time. Does a smoker love cigarettes, or is it just a habit? I never really understood the appeal. Life is hard enough without singing about how depressed you are.”
That perked me up. “You think Old Martinez had depression, too?”
“No,” Taleesa said matter-of-factly. “He didn’t have the flu, either. Or food poisoning, or any of that. Some people don’t have the money to go to the doctor, so they never have a name for what they’ve got. They’re just sick, and they miss work, and they hope they don’t die. A lot of men would rather die than talk about their feelings, and a lot of them do die.”
Taleesa is tough. She tolerates my moodiness, but only just. Sometimes, I have to admit, I feel like she’s kind of cold about it.
“So Old Martinez didn’t have time to talk about his feelings,” I said. “But he did listen to this guy, John Lee Hooker, who sang about the blues.”
“Only in the car,” Taleesa said. “Always in the car, he had a whole rack of blues tapes. I suppose I still have them, out in the tool shed somewhere.”
After that, I had to hear this song. Out of these blues alive. I guess I could have just looked it up on my phone, but for some reason I wanted to hear the song as he heard it. So I braved the dark and the spiders and went out with a flashlight and dug around in our tool shed. I hit the jackpot: a fake leather case full of old-timey cassette tapes. Some were clear plastic, with the names of the singers almost completely rubbed off. Others were dubbed copies, with john lee written on them in Old Martinez’s surprising handwriting: neat, bubbly-shaped letters. My handwriting is skinny and messy like an old man’s; my step-grandfather wrote neatly the way a girl in middle school is supposed to. I also found an old boom box, without the power cord, and I emptied all the flashlights in the house to get enough batteries to power it.
Alone in my room with the boom box on my lap, I started one of the tapes. At first, I thought the boom box was broken, because for a long time, there was nothing but a tiny sound of tapping on a cymbal. Then there’s the voice of an old man saying never never. Again and again. He’ll never get out of these blues. Not if he lives to a hundred.
That voice sounds a lot like what I imagine Old Martinez would have sounded like. But usually, when old people say stuff, they sound so convinced, like they only talk about things they know for sure. John Lee Hooker sounds different. You can almost hear him shaking his head as he says he doesn’t understand why he has the blues. He genuinely doesn’t know. He just knows that he’s up all night, that the same thing is on the radio every time he turns it on, and that nothing ever seems to change.
There it was. Another person in the world who knew what it was like to be me. I guess it’s not just me who’s up all night, thinking too much. I had to hear more. I listened to John Lee Hooker’s whole story, as told on this tape. His true love died, but he visited her grave every Decoration Day. The Motor City was burning, and he didn’t know what to do.
Where had this music been all my life? I’d heard country and bluegrass and Atlanta rappers who wanted to make it rain. None of it said anything about my life. But this simple tick tick tick of the drum, this one guy growling about being doomed with the blues—was something I could understand.
Toni, my therapist, says she gets mad when she hears people talking about depression as “the blues.” Depression is a disease, she says, and the blues is a mood.
Taleesa says you have to be careful about claiming blues music for yourself. A lot of Black people see it as music that’s full of life, she says. Taleesa says this music is realistic about problems that Black people and poor people and maybe nearly all people face. There’s a difference, she says, between visiting your wife’s grave every Decoration Day and just feeling like you’re in a graveyard on Decoration Day.
But John Lee Hooker says If I live to be a hundred, I never will. Whatever condition it is that he’s got, I’ve got it too, or something like it. There’s something inside of me that no one explains better than John Lee Hooker.
So I stole my brother’s drumsticks. This was the year Martinez got into sixth-grade band. He didn’t seem to have any great passion for music, but as he’s gotten older and taller, grownups have started pestering him about whether he’s going to play ball in high school. One day he asked what he could do to get out of this football thing forever, and that landed him behind a snare drum going rum-pa-pum-pum in the sixth grade Christmas concert. He hardly ever practices his drums at home, so I figured he wouldn’t mind if I snuck into his room and snatched the sticks off his music stand.
I put on headphones and tapped on the frame of my bed, drumming along with John Lee Hooker. Cain’t nobody tell me, just exactly why, John Lee sang. Soon Taleesa had to buy me my own set of drumsticks, because I was drumming on the bed every time I was bored, or down, or worried about things that a lot of other people don’t seem to worry much about.
Things like the fate of the stars and the planets. Things like the idea of living to one hundred and being depressed the entire time. Things like making a presentation to the Strudwick County Commission.
I have a sturdy wooden box that I use whenever I have to give a speech in a public place. It has a warm brown finish to it, and little handles cut out in the sides, to make it easier to carry. If I have something to bring to the podium—a hundred-page report, printed photos of dogs and cats, notes on little cards—I carry them in the box. Then when I’m called up to speak, I carefully place all the items from the box on the podium. Then I turn the box over, put it on the floor, and stand on it so I’m the same height as the grownups I’m talking to.
Sometimes it gets a little laugh from the audience and warms them up. Some people never laugh. Some people just aren’t all that warm. As I looked out on the Strudwick County Commission, I couldn’t see any of the commissioners laughing.
“Before you even start, Miss Peale,” County Commission Chairman Broderick Hegarty said, “let me just say how delighted I am to see a pretty young lady like yourself taking an interest in public policy.”
Pretty. Did you hear that? Almost nobody calls me pretty in real life. But lately, “pretty lady” has started popping up when official-types want to talk down to me. They used to say “little girl,” but over the last school year that started changing.
Lots of things are changing, in fact. Changes nobody asked for, particularly me. I’d gladly skip the teen years and go directly to being a grown lady, even an old lady. But now I’m thirteen and I’m not a girl or an old lady. I’m more like a transporter accident from Star Trek. Or maybe a better example is Manimal, that old TV show that Martinez pulls up sometimes on his phone. Manimal is about a classy British guy in a tux who occasionally turns into a panther or a hawk or some other animal. I guess he fights evil and solves crime, but what the show is really about is the transformation: every episode has these long, gross sequences in which Manimal gets all rubbery-faced and screams in pain while his skin roils and bubbles like soup on a pot. That’s what being a teenager is like. It’s supposed to be a thrilling adventure, but in fact you spend most of the time looking in horror at your bubbling skin while Martinez laughs at your pain.
All these changes are things I don’t like to talk about in detail, even with Toni, my therapist. When something happens to my body that I need to discuss with Taleesa, we typically talk about it in a Popeye voice or pirate-speak, which somehow makes it a little easier.
Still, bubbling skin or not, I have work to do. That’s why I was standing there, in front of the commission. Talking to judges and county commissioners is hard. They’re always sitting down, up on a big platform, and you’re always looking up at them trying to speak clearly into the microphone, with a bunch of people in the audience behind you.
“So, gentlemen,” I said to the commissioners. “It’s clear that Strudwick County has a problem. A stray animal problem. I realize we’re a small town and a lot of people don’t mind letting dogs run free, but as more people and more animals live here, it’s beginning to become an issue. Commissioner Hegarty, I hear that when you took those Korean businessmen for a tour of town, there was a pack of wild dogs wandering around downtown Houmahatchee. We all know about the All-Day-Singing Incident.”
“I’m sorry?” said one of the commissioners. “The singing incident? I don’t know about that.”
Hegarty cleared his throat. “She’s taking about the thing at Emmaus Church. They were having a singing and dinner on the ground, and they left all the covered dishes out on the table outside. A bunch of stray dogs got to them.”
“I have heard about that,” the commissioner said. “And this is our concern how? How’s it on the county’s radar?”
Troy Butler stood up in the back of the room. I keep wanting to call him Deputy Troy Butler, but he’s Sheriff Troy now. Sheriff is a position you have to run for, like mayor, and I imagine it’s easy to get elected to anything when you have a dimple in your chin and arm muscles that are just the right size. A lot of ladies said they’d vote for him twice if they could.
“As you know, gentlemen, just about anything that happens in the county generates a call to the Sheriff’s Office,” Troy said. “In this case, some guns were brought out, there was some talk of running around the neighborhood to get the dogs, which the neighbors didn’t particularly care for, and ultimately a deputy had to kind of talk the church members into a consensus. Nobody got hurt, though we did arrest a deacon on weapons charges.”
“I heard about that,” the commissioner said. “I still don’t understand that arrest. If a church is private property and they don’t object to guns, what’s wrong with a member carrying a concealed pistol? Even if he doesn’t have a permit?”
“It wasn’t a concealed carry arrest,” Butler said. “The deacon’s an ex-felon. He’s served his time but he’s not allowed to own a gun.”
Am I the only person in the room who thinks it’s weird that so many people bring their guns to church? I looked around. In front of me, I saw the five commissioners, looking very bored. Behind me, on wooden pews that were obviously salvaged from a church, sat a handful of other guys, a bit younger and pudgier, in polo shirts, looking at their phones—guys who worked for the county, counting money or running the street department. There was Sheriff Butler standing up in the back, and at a table to my right sat Backsley Graddoch, the county attorney, in his suit and looking, as always, like someone way too rich to live in Strudwick County. All of them had an I-need-coffee glaze over their eyes. Yes, I was the only person in the room who thought it was strange to bring guns to church.
“So,” I said. “As you see, we have a problem. Y’all all probably know I see the problem differently than some of you. Some people say there are too many dogs. I say there are too few families that can adopt a dog. But here’s the thing: as it turns out, the best solution to our problem is one that we can all agree on. With a long-term plan to put animals and families together, we can cut down on our stray population and also cut down, and eventually eliminate, the need to put animals to sleep. Other communities have done this. Not a lot, but some. We’re poor compared to some of those counties, but we can do this. We can be a trailblazer.”
This was the inspiring part of my speech. I don’t talk like that normally, but I’d written it on notecards and practiced it so much I didn’t even need the cards.
I paused for effect, and to look at each of the commissioners to see if they looked inspired. They looked like people who hadn’t been inspired in a long time. I went on.
“I’m not asking you to spend any money,” I said. “At least, not this year. Not much money in the future. Volunteers will do most of the work. What I’m asking is for you to approve this plan. Make it your official plan. That will help us get attention and will help us when we go to people who can give us money.”
Just so you’ll know: as I said this, each of the commissioners sat there with my no-kill-shelter plan in their hands. It’s about a hundred pages of stuff, which I researched and wrote entirely myself. The plan starts with the Strudwick County Animal Shelter announcing its goal to become the first no-kill shelter in a high-poverty area within the next twenty years. With the attention we get from that announcement, we go to big charities and ask them for money to help with our goal. Then we set up partnerships with adoption agencies in other cities so people in, say, Atlanta, can adopt our extra dogs. And we set up something we’ve never had here—a foster care network where people take some dogs and cats home temporarily when the shelter is too full.
I could see, as the commissioners flipped through the plan, that some of them were just looking at it now for the first time. I’d sent it to them a week before. I saw a couple of them looking surprised.
“I’m curious,” said one of the commissioners, a guy named Frank Feeney. “Who wrote this?”
That question kind of surprised me. “Well, like I said, I wrote it,” I said.
Commissioner Feeney looked at me with a kind of glaze in his eye.
“No, I mean, who wrote it originally?” he said.
I put my hands on my hips. It’s one of those things Dad always tells me not to do in a courtroom. Not before a judge. It looks defiant. But I was offended.
“I assure you, I’m small, but I’m plenty capable of writing a 100-page legal document,” I said.
“She’s the real deal, gentlemen,” said Backsley Graddoch, the county attorney. “I don’t agree with her on most things, but I can tell you she’s a real legal draftsman.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Commissioner Feeney said. “I thought all these bills, all these proclamations . . . don’t they all come first from some kind of lobbyist or some kind of activist, and then you rewrite them, Backsley, and then they come to us? I mean, a person can’t just, I mean, write a plan and bring it to us . . . right?”
Everybody was quiet for a moment. A couple of the commissioners looked at each other like they were about to burst out laughing. Finally, Backsley Graddoch spoke up.
“Commissioner, I think that’s exactly where we are right now,” he said. “This young lady is an activist and she’s brought you a plan. I think that’s fair to say, isn’t it, Miss Peale, that you’re an activist?”
“Sure,” I said. “I mean, I’m a citizen. I want my government to do something. So I wrote a plan and brought it to you.”
Commissioner Feeney shook his head.
“But who do you work for?” he said.
“I don’t work for anybody,” I said. I was starting to get worked up a bit. “I live here. I’m a citizen asking something from my government.”
“Frank,” said Commissioner Hegarty, “I think you’re overcomplicating this. Let’s just move on and I’ll explain it to you later.”
I held up my hand. “With all due respect,” I said. “I hope that ‘move on’ includes some kind of motion to adopt the plan.”
Hegarty made a quick frowny-face, just for a second, that let me know he was uncomfortable being put on the spot.
“Here’s what I think we should do,” he said. “Let’s let Mr. Graddoch, our attorney, have a go at this. He’s learned in the law and he knows what our interests are. Miss Peale, how about you and Mr. Graddoch work together and make sure we have a plan we can pass?”
I tried not to show it, but I really wanted to roll my eyes. It’s always ten steps forward and nine steps back. I’ve already written a plan. I know exactly what I want to do. I could explain it if people would just let me. But now I have to sit down with my biggest rival and do all that work again.
“I’m more than happy to work with Miss Peale,” Graddoch said. “But I think I should note from the outset that there may not be a lot we can do. As you know, the Alabama Constitution limits the powers of the County Commission considerably . . .”
“I’ve taken that into consideration, actually,” I said. “If you’d just let me present the plan, you’ll see—”
“I second the motion,” Frank Feeney said. “Let the two of them work together and come back to us.”
And just like that, by a vote of five to zero, I’m back to the drawing board. Rewriting my plan.
So, welcome to my world. I’m Atticus T. Peale, advocate for animals.
I got my start, and got mildly famous, by going to court and trying to save a dog that was set to be put to sleep. I won that case, more or less, which is why when I stand before the county commission I have to pick little bits of white-and-black dog hair off my dress. It’s why, when I go to school, I worry a little about smelling like dog. And it’s why, as I write this right now, I know my dog Easy is making a little warm spot in the front hallway of my house, curled up and watching the front door and waiting for me to come in.
When I come home from school or the animal shelter, I throw my book bag next to the coffee table and plop down on the couch and Easy jumps up on the couch and puts his warm head in my lap, knowing I’ll pet him. And he always lets out a big heavy sigh just then, as if he’d been holding his breath all day waiting for me.
Sometimes I let out a big heavy sigh, too. Because after my first courtroom victory—saving Easy from death—my life as an activist or whatever I am hasn’t gotten any easier. Since then I’ve been snookered by a governor, stalked by online trolls, actually shot at by a murderer, and examined by all kinds of social workers and counselors who seem convinced I’ll explode and spatter them with purple ectoplasm or something if they say something too wrong, or too triggery.
By the way, maybe we should rethink this phrase, “trigger warning.” Did they really think about gunshot victims before they came up with that?
I did help my brother save an innocent man from going to prison, so that was cool. I’ve learned defending a human is a lot harder than defending an animal. Everyone believes you when you say an animal is innocent, but when police accused Jethro Gersham of killing a pawn shop owner in Houmahatchee, most people just shook their heads and said they never knew Jethro had it in him. Everyone in town knew him, and they’d known him for years, but only a few of us questioned whether he really did it. Or maybe they did question the charges, but they reacted the same way they often react to innocent animals being put to sleep: a sad feeling, a shrug, and a sense that they can’t really do anything about it.
Well, Martinez and I did something about it. Martinez was convinced from the beginning that Jethro was set up, and he was right: Gary Dudley, the pawn shop owner’s business partner, committed the murder, and he made it look like Jethro was the shooter. My little brother unwound a mystery that had fooled the cops and almost every grownup in Houmahatchee, but sometimes it’s easy to figure things out if you’re just willing to believe in someone’s innocence. Martinez believed in Jethro more than anybody, and he did most of the work. I got most of the credit, though, because I’m the one Gary Dudley tried to kill after we started raising questions about the crime.
Anyway, that’s the sort of stuff I do in my free time.
I also write the weekly “Shelter Dogs” column in The Houmahatchee Herald, where I post photos and stories about dogs and cats waiting at the shelter, and I do keep a scrapbook of all the animals that were adopted by people who say they read about that animal in the newspaper. So that’s cool, too.
But the bigger picture just hasn’t changed a whole lot. Strudwick County is still home to lots of people who can barely afford to feed themselves and keep the lights on, so adopting a pet from the shelter probably isn’t the best option for them. A lot of people are helping strays the way they know how. They put out some food or some scraps for a passing cat when they can. They buy a puppy for five dollars out of the back of a car in the Walmart parking lot, because they’re worried that someone will simply abandon the puppy if it isn’t sold. I’ve learned that you can’t always judge someone when you see a dog chained in the front yard, drinking from a hubcap, or sleeping in a rusted-out car. People are doing their best.
What we need, though, is a plan to do better. When people have to move, and their landlord won’t allow dogs, sometimes they just set the dog free, because they don’t know there’s another option. Some people would get a cat spayed or neutered if they had the money, but it’s not high on their to-do list and they don’t know where to go for help. That’s why you see strays everywhere in Strudwick County. You see dogs roaming, in packs of four or five, through the Houmahatchee town square or down by the outdoor basketball court at school. You see cats who live in a sewage drain and eat out of the dumpster behind Captain D’s.
When those roaming animals bug people, maybe by messing up the farmer’s market or snapping at kids outside a football game, the county sends someone out to catch them. And when animals don’t have collars or tags, the death count begins for them as soon as they’re caught. I can put a doggy face in the paper and post videos on Facebook and beg and plead for someone to adopt a dog, but if they don’t get adopted, in goes the needle. Put to sleep.
The sad thing is that I’m pretty sure all of these dogs and cats used to be someone’s pet. They just don’t have tags or chips. Why? Because money, I guess. Tags and chips cost money. Farms may also have something to do with it. Strudwick County used to be all farms. Everybody grew peanuts or something called shade tobacco, which is a kind of tobacco you wrap cigars in. Today it’s all pine trees and chicken houses, and all the trees and chickens belong to some big business somewhere. Almost nobody’s a full-on farmer anymore, but a lot of people think farm rules still apply. A tough person, they think, ought to be able to slaughter a hog or pluck a chicken, which most people today have never done. So how can you cry and get all upset when your little dog goes off and doesn’t come back?
I know all this farm stuff because people tell me. They stop me at Walmart and tell me how sweet it is what I’m doing and why it won’t work but I sure am a smart, pretty girl. Twice I’ve argued with substitute teachers who told me my shelter work was a waste of time. One of them told me I should be working to help unborn children. That sounded bizarre to me, so I asked how the heck I’m supposed to help somebody who hasn’t been born yet? Half the class looked at me in horror, like I’d pooped right there on the carpet.
So, anyway, my big plan was to put a stop to all this stray-animal chaos. Or at least put a stop to the last part of the story, where the needle goes in and the dog dies. I wrote a plan for how in twenty years—I’ll be an old lady of thirty-three by then—we can have an animal shelter where not a single animal has to be put to sleep. It’s not just my plan, it’s our plan. I worked with Miss Megg, the director of the animal shelter, every step of the way.
In the first year, the plan was to start offering free spaying and neutering for people who can’t afford to get their pets fixed. By year three, we wanted to have a partnership with Auburn University’s veterinary school, where we pick up stray cats, get them fixed so they can’t have babies, and just release them back into the wild if we can’t find homes for them. By year five, we’d have a new set of county regulations to make sure people keep their dogs behind fences and their cats in the house. And all along, we’ll keep up our work to attract rich folks from Atlanta and Mobile and Montgomery to come and adopt our pets.
Starting all that would take some money. I thought we should ask the county for money, but Miss Megg said you can’t get blood from a turnip. She said we should ask big charities and the federal government for money instead. And to boost our chances of getting those grants, we should get Strudwick County and the City of Houmahatchee to sign off on our plans.
And that’s all I was asking the county commission to do—just read our plan and approve it. But they can’t do that, or claim they can’t, because of the Alabama Constitution. It’s true that Alabama has some strange rules. County governments run jails and animal shelters and things like that, but they’re not allowed to do a lot of new things without permission from the state. If you want to set up something like a recycling program, you have to get the Alabama Constitution changed, which usually means the whole state gets to vote on it. The Alabama Constitution is about eight hundred pages long at this point, and we don’t do a lot of recycling.
“I suspect we’ll be adding another amendment before all this master-plan stuff of yours is through,” Backsley Graddoch said to me as we left the commission chamber. “You’ll be the first teenager to amend the state Constitution, I suspect.”
“Bleah,” I said.
“It would look good on a resume,” Graddoch said. “There are young people in college right now, future law students, who’d kill to have the resume you have already.”
“Double bleah,” I said.
Graddoch shook his head. “I just don’t understand you, Atty,” he said. “We’re very different people, I think. Why do you think it’s so bad to claim some honor for yourself? It’s okay to make a dollar as a lawyer. It’s okay to become a senator or judge in the future if you work for it. I don’t know why you’re so allergic to . . . I don’t know, whatever you’re allergic to.”
“To being a big shot?” I said. “I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you what I hear in what you’re saying. When you say people would kill for a good resume, I hear you talking about people who would kill. I hear you talking about people who want to look good. That’s not what I’m about. I’m about helping animals. I want to be a normal person in a better world, not an important person in the world we have now.”
But maybe I would like to look good, really.
Not that I’d kill. But maybe I’d do some desperate things to look, well, better than I do.
Ever notice how people treat folks who are really good-looking? A big, burly guy works behind the counter at an auto-parts shop, but when a pretty lady comes in, he turns almost girly, with a bright, gentle smile. Or when Troy Butler comes around, and every woman’s voice has a lilt in it. When you’re good-looking, I think, life is like a musical. Everything is singsong. If you’re dancing on a table, and you fall backward without even looking behind you, a bunch of handsome sailors will appear and gracefully catch you.
I’m not ugly, but I’m not dancing-on-the-table beautiful either. This is what I know in my brain. What you know in your heart is different. Sometimes I look in the mirror and it’s just sad, sad the way it’s sad when I hear my voice on tape. When I was ten, I was sure I’d grow up to look and sound like a British lady in a movie with a long slinky dress and a British accent and a cigarette on a long black stick, held in delicate gloved hands. But in the mirror I’m a troll doll with a toothbrush. In recordings I sound like a smart-alecky eight-year-old boy who likes to fish and hunt. One time I told a grownup that Dad is not from Houmahatchee but in fact grew up in northern Alabama, almost in Tennessee. And she told me she could tell because I have an “Appalachian face.” I don’t even know what an Appalachian face is, but I know she didn’t mean it as a compliment, and that hurts me more than anything any creepy old guy has said to me on the internet.
So in my heart, I feel ugly. But my brain has a different idea. Taleesa tells me I’m good-looking enough for her to worry about me and boys, and Taleesa doesn’t tell lies. My bio-mom looks great in all her photos, even toward the end when she wasn’t okay, and I think my Dad is reasonably handsome, too. Generally I think reasonably good-looking people have reasonably good-looking kids. And when I asked Reagan Royall which one of us was the hot friend, she didn’t even pause for a second.
“Me of course,” she said. “But it’s not a fair comparison. I’m Elvis hot. Comely and dangerous. A moody musician from the backwoods with a crooked grin. But in any normal pair, you’d be the hot friend. You’re wholesome hot. Well, hottish and wholesome.”
Coming from Reagan, that’s a compliment. I know how to read her. She’s determined to get through her teen years undamaged, like a boy in movies who steals cars and plays with switchblades. If she feels insecure, she boasts like a rapper: lots of stuff about how powerful she is and how rich she’ll be.
Sometimes she lays it on so thick that people think everything she says is a joke, but there are also things she never jokes about. Last year, when we were assigned a personal essay, our English teacher gave this beautiful, impassioned speech about how a writing class was a perfect place to share our worries and shame and grief. Reagan responded that she shares those things only with her lord and savior Jesus Christ. She got sent to the office for being disrespectful to people of faith. It didn’t take long for Mrs. St. Stephens to realize that Reagan was dead born-again serious, and the teacher had to apologize in front of the whole class.
Reagan is right about her level of hotness. She only wishes her smile was crooked like Elvis. But with her asymmetrical haircuts and vampire-biker wardrobe, she keeps getting looks from guys who are old enough to drive. On the rare times we go to football games, seniors from the visiting side always try to chat her up. She claims she strings them along just so she can watch the horrified looks on their faces when she springs the “I’m thirteen” thing.
“Look at them running back to the little bleachers,” she’ll say. “I’m just doing my part for the team. We’re here to humiliate the other side. That’s what football is all about, for us spectators, right?”
Reagan doesn’t spare feelings, so if she says I’m somewhat hot, it stands to reason that I’m some kind of minor planet in the solar system of hotness. Maybe not an obvious planet like Jupiter but at least some sort of trans-Neptunian object that scientists will investigate one day. I shared this notion, in exactly those words, with Reagan one day.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re the Pluto of hotness,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a very good metaphor. Pluto, the coldest planety-thing.”
I’m discovering that there are lots of problems with being the Pluto of hotness. My eccentric orbit brings me close to other bodies only once every 238 years. I’m small enough to be a moon of Jupiter. And I’m starting to think that those are the only choices I have. To be captured by Reagan’s gravity, forever the nerdy wingman, or to swing way out into the dark, unclassifiable and alone—an awkward valentine sailing through space, wearing a giant pink heart that nobody sees.
So I guess it’s happening. I guess I’m finally getting interested in . . . you know. Not boys. Still not interested in boys. They’re not hairy enough, and they’re too hairy, all at the same time. For me, it’s still grown men and grown women. When we’re out at a restaurant and I see a couple, her and him, and he’s got his muscular arm around her and their faces are close, I’ll admit that it’s hard for me not to stare. I don’t know if it’s him or her I like, but I’d like to be one of them, just then. But I can put it out of my mind most of the time. I’m still a late bloomer, but sometimes I wake up early in the morning with a weird yearning that I can’t quite attach to anything, and I know that blooming may happen whether I want it or not.
I guess I’m a late bloomer in a lot of other ways. I was later than other girls in getting my period. And I guess I was lucky in that it happened in the summer, while I was working at the animal shelter, surrounded by women. As far as I know, Martinez was the only boy working at the shelter that summer, and I’d say he showed up only about half as often as he did the year before, when we were both there under court order.
So when I came out of the bathroom at the shelter and told Miss Megg what had happened, she and all the other girls at the shelter made a big deal out of it. Megg gave me an unopened box of maxipads she bought for herself, which was weird, and everybody started telling painful, embarrassing stories about how they got their period the first time. They kind of made me feel guilty that it didn’t happen while I was standing at the whiteboard doing an algebra problem in front of the whole class.
Miss Megg sat me down with a glimmer in her eye and gave me a very heartfelt speech about how I was now a woman with the greatest power in the world, the power to bring life into the world.
You know, it did feel kind of powerful. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I’d still have to get a guy to help me make a baby if I wanted one, which didn’t seem powerful at all. I hate asking people for help.
At the time, I couldn’t off the top of my head think of a guy I’d like to have a baby with. Premsyl Svoboda seemed like the best option, even though I kind of hated him. He was the best option because he was smart and always talked in full sentences in an indoor voice, instead of shouting dumb stuff like “PURPLE DEVILS RULE!” the way every other boy (and man) in Houmahatchee did from time to time. But even having Premsyl’s baby didn’t seem all that appealing.
I mean, it’s powerful to be able to make a baby, but then after that, you’ve got a baby. You have to take care of it, instead of doing other stuff that you need to do.
And I can’t help but think of my mom. They say some women get really depressed after giving birth. I know my mom struggled with depression for years before I was born, but I can’t help but wonder if it was childbirth that pushed her over the edge. I don’t want to go there myself.
“There’s a thing called survivor’s guilt,” Toni told me when I brought this up in therapy. “You feel bad for surviving something, even though it’s not your fault. Keep in mind that your mother made her own decisions, and you certainly aren’t at fault for her death.”
“That’s not it,” I told her. “I didn’t even really know her. I don’t feel any guilt at all. I want to know what landmine she stepped on, so I don’t step on it too.”
I hate talking to people about my mother. Not with Toni so much, but with other people. People don’t know what to say, so they say stupid things, like that they don’t understand how she could have done it or that she had so much to live for. Sure she did. But that question, what was she depressed about? It really gets me.
Let’s face it. There’s a lot of sadness in the world if you’re brave enough to look. You and I will wink out and exist no more. Our fondest memories will vanish, like an erased videotape in the landfill. The sun will die eventually and maybe there won’t be a human left after that to think human thoughts and have human feelings. That’s pretty sad. I didn’t make this world and my mom didn’t either. I think that we should be proud that we hope and work as much as we do, instead of being ashamed that we get crushed by despair sometimes.
I know most people in Houmahatchee think God will save them, and maybe he will, but I don’t see a lot of evidence he exists. Seems like a coin toss to me. And even if God saves your tape in his video library, what about all the animals? I’ve heard that the Pope said you can bring your dog to Heaven. But what about the others? What about the innocent bunny and the eagle that innocently ate the bunny? I want a massive Heaven teeming with every critter that ever lived on this planet or any other. When I find a religion that promises me that, maybe I’ll believe the world isn’t a sad place.
I think my mom killed herself because when you’re sad in Houmahatchee, you have to be sad in secret. If you’re sad and you don’t know why, nobody here wants to hear it. They’ll say you just need Jesus, which has to be tough to hear if you already have Jesus, if you’re already going to church and doing the best you can to get right with God. Or they’ll tell you that you don’t have anything to be sad about, which may be true, but there you are, still sad. Or if you tell them you’re sad about all the animals who are going to die or about the fact that we’ll never travel faster than light, they’ll just laugh at you and say “bless her heart.”
But if you’re sad about something, you have to talk about it. You have to have someone to talk to, someone who takes it seriously. One thing I’ve learned from therapy: the way people heal your trauma is by making a big deal out of it with some kind of ritual that’s even weirder than the trauma itself. Like all the picture-taking and hand-holding I got from the cops after Gary Dudley tried to kill me. Or the way Miss Megg made such an event after my first period. Or the psychotherapy that I’m still in today.
“You’ve told me all about how Miss Megg reacted to your period,” Toni told me in our next session. “But you didn’t tell me how you felt.”
Honestly, I didn’t feel anything, much. It felt like my yearly nosebleed. I really do get a bloody nose exactly once a year, always on a beautiful day in spring. The doctor says it’s because of an allergy to pollen. I never feel any pain. Usually I’m sitting there reading and blood starts dropping onto the page. It’s strange, but what am I supposed to feel about that? Shaving my legs for the first time was a much bigger deal than getting my period. Here I am with a razor, like a grown lady who could be in a swimsuit ad, but I’m still just a kid who plays Crossy Paws and talks to a toy squirrel.
When I came out of the bathroom after that first shave, I guess I did feel like a grownup for just a minute. Adulting can give you a little thrill for a minute, but I still feel like it’s a raw deal in the end, because you aren’t allowed to go back. My whole life I’ve heard Taleesa talking about how nice it is to get home and take your bra off. The first time I wore one myself, I totally got what she was talking about. So that night, when we were all in the living room, I was the one who said the bra thing first, and it made me feel really grown up—until Martinez started making puking noises and ruined the whole moment.
That’s what growing up is like. You have one moment of pride, the first time you do something. And then you’ve got to wear this dumb thing your whole life.