PAUL MCCORMICK BRINGS PIZZA FROM the gas station out on Route 800. He slides past our classmates and passes out greasy wedges steaming from heat lamps and dormant radiation. The rum and Sprite he hands me smells like disinfectant. We must start our senior year right, he says. I set the drink on my knee and think about my above-average SAT score. I’m simply not good enough for Oberlin. Hopefully Ohio State will take me and give me money. Can’t do it without money.
Meanwhile, skinnier girls than me are dancing.
“Let’s see how many slices we can put away, Chevy.” Paul joins me on the couch and leans against my shoulder. “You like nice hearty sausage, don’t you?”
They call me Chevy because I have a wide backside. The name stuck in middle school. Rural boys are very clever and very sweet.
“Sure. I like gnawing apart the skin and spitting out the gristle.”
He laughs, tosses crust on an oriental carpet. “You dirty dog. That’s messed up.”
“You wouldn’t have me any other way.”
“No, sweetheart. I just won’t have you.”
My face is the only attractive thing about me, or so I’ve been told. Wavy auburn hair like Renaissance paintings, my mom says, amber eyes and faint freckles, pale skin. I am wide in all the wrong places, fat thighs and hips, small breasts disproportional to my sagging stomach. A girl you take to drunken parties but never home.
“Well that just breaks my chubby heart,” I tell him.
It’s Sadie Schafer’s house, a mansion to me, and there’s about thirty of us in this dim great room drinking and dancing to a playlist alternating between country and classic rock. Sadie’s mom is in Bermuda with her boyfriend, and Sadie is in the basement with Bobby Pierce and his two cousins, the skinnier of which is twentysomething and brought a keg in a cargo van that doubles as his bedroom. I imagine he’s getting payment downstairs with the rest of them.
Paul stretches beside me with one leg crossed over the other. He spits snuff juice into a Mountain Dew bottle and picks dried mud from his boots. “That cathedral ceiling’s twenty feet high.”
“Hard to heat,” I say. Greek pillars along the stairway, vases with exotic flowers. The kitchen is almost the size of our double-wide trailer. Her mom has made a small fortune in real estate development and selling land to Demont for fracking pads.
“That application for Ohio State done yet?” Paul says.
“Got to get the recommendation letters. Finish the essay. Then we’ll see what happens.”
He won’t be going to college. He once spoke of mechanical engineering, but when he reached high school, he stopped dreaming, trying. No point in preparing for an education he could never afford. The realization settles in early around here. The only chance I have is through an Appalachian Scholarship, maybe some money through our church.
“Well, you just promise to come back and visit. My ass’ll probably be underground like the old man.” He spits into the bottle. “Look like a coon with all that coal dust on me.”
His father’s dying from black lung, from the mines. The pain in his voice makes me want to hold him, but like always, I don’t. “No. You’ll shine like a glowworm down there.”
“It’s an Irish thing, hon.”
As kids, every time Paul saw me, he gave me a huge hug, just rushed up and threw his arms around my waist, pressed his bony little body into my softness. He’d always smile and say he loved that squishy feeling. No other boys were ever eager to be near me. My family has fair skin, but Paul’s is almost translucent. Sharp blue veins match his eyes. Bright orange hair combed back in a slick wave. He was the first redheaded boy I’d ever seen, cute and small for his age, a sweet tenderness. He never touches me like that anymore.
He’s been acting different, distant. His eyes unsettle me now, the kind of vibrant angry blue that gathers and reflects all light, a common feature in these hills.
“I’m really going to miss you. But you’re heading on to better things, girl. I got a feeling about it.” He pats my hand. “My grandma was a witch, a clairvoyant. I see things.”
“So why am I here?” I say. “Doesn’t this all seem stupid to you?”
“Try to stay positive.” He stumbles up to get more beer from the kitchen. “I want good memories before you ditch us.”
Sadie has a gray cat named Nibbles, who slinks behind the sofa, hides along the vents. I try to pet her and be her friend, but she’s as uncomfortable here as I am.
Seth Geiger passes around an expired bottle of his dad’s OxyContin. There are a few curious takers, white pills in white palms. Lawrence Craw reclines on the porch swing outside and smokes a glass pipe clouded with meth.
I came here to be close to Paul, to escape my trailer, and to see Sadie, most of all to see Sadie. As children we were closer than sisters. Long summers when she came to my house, we dipped our legs into the creek and swam in the thin current. She tanned to a honey brown, and her yellow hair shined. Her body tightened into a nimble pillar of bronze. But mine transformed into a red welt, as if I’d been boiled. My skin peeled for days. Blisters formed on my shoulders and chest. They are freckles now, scars. Compared to her I feel like some ugly creature that dwells deep in the earth and crawls out only at night.
Her dad and brother died in a car crash three years ago. At their funeral Sadie was silent, stared through me and everyone. She stood poised and strong, refused hugs, and ignored any affirmation. Like a pretty statue, she did not cry. Sadness darkened her face, carried her somewhere else. And she never came back. I watched her become a Disney princess. She let her mom dress her. No more braided hair like a Viking weave. Straightened every morning now, flat and wispy. No more stone necklaces. She wore diamonds. Heirlooms, she explained. Her blues were blackened with mascara. She painted makeup on her cheeks to soften her harsh features. She smiled all the time, teeth delicately clenched. She’d even cock her hip and set her hand on it, toss her hair over her shoulder like she was performing a fashion shoot for the boys.
I never wanted their attention. I knew they’d never give it to me.
Sadie comes up from the basement, her angular face flushed to an intense heat, lips swollen and smeared red. Laughter rises up the stairs. Smack of fists, cheers, shouts, jackal sounds. Somebody calls for Melvin, asks if anybody’s seen Melvin. She shuts the door, then pulls back her hair and scrubs her jaw and chest in the kitchen sink before taking a shot of whiskey and gargling. She spits and stares into the drain.
With her mom’s encouragement, Sadie wants to save sex for marriage. It is a woman’s most powerful bargaining chip, she once explained to us. Sadie always told me she would be a virgin until her wedding night. She’s kept that promise, technically. Her underpants are as tight as an iron chastity belt, but just about everyone has seen her pink breasts, flashed at parties, at bonfires, before she goes off into dark corners with boys. To my face, people call me Chevy. Behind Sadie’s back everyone calls her The Barnesville Cum Dumpster. I’ve seen photos, traded from phone to phone. One video even made it to an amateur porn site on Tumblr. I watched all ten minutes of it. My best friend covered in their slop. Her mouth wet, slippery chest bared like a limestone offering. She looked almost vampiric as her back arched. Sharp ribs caged her breath. Her eyes possessed by an infernal, sultry hate as her throat extended and swallowed them.
I’m a virgin, whatever that means.
Sadie stands as if haunted. She wears a loose red dress that ripples like a crimson lake over her bare feet. An introvert at heart, she asks if everyone is having fun.
So unlike her now, I wear knee-high leather boots, worn and faded black, no identifiable maker or size, found them for five dollars at the thrift store. Shit kickers, Dad says. Probably an Amish boot, a man’s boot, but they fit me. My jeans are my mom’s old work pants. They’re faded with holes in the knees that appear chewed apart, as if they’ve been chained to the back of a truck and keelhauled over dirt and gravel. And as always, I wear my black hooded sweatshirt.
Sadie sits with me, hooks her arm in mine, and taps the whiskey bottle against my cup. “Drink up, Amy.” She’s one of the only people who says my actual name.
“You ignoring my calls, stranger?”
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I just hate talking on the phone, hearing voices without faces. Makes me uncomfortable.”
“Well, I miss you.”
“I miss me, too, sometimes.” She glances at a photo on the wall, her mother with a manufactured smile. A Celtic cross hangs above the kitchen table. A calligraphic copy of the Lord’s Prayer is framed beside the china cabinet.
“How’s that basement?” I say.
She shrugs. “I’m well-liked.”
“You’re better than this, Sadie. And you know it.”
She groans and tips the bottle up. “Stop worrying about what I do at night.”
When Mom was pregnant with Stonewall, Sadie said that nurturing life was the most precious thing.
“At least you won’t get pregnant,” I say. “Doing what you do.”
“That’s right. You see. I’m not the whore you think I am.”
I squeeze her hand. “I just care about you. I’m your friend no matter who you are.”
Blond bangs curtain her eyes. She glares at the bodies occupying her house. “Dad called me his angel. You remember that. Made me feel safe, special.” Her voice tightens. “I don’t want to be an angel. Can’t be in this world without being hurt by it. These boys… they think they’re so tough. But they don’t know. This is a place where things eat other things.”
Paul returns, balancing three cans under his chin. “These bitches weren’t easy to come by. Getting nasty around that cooler.”
Sadie makes room for him, drapes her arms around our necks, and kisses Paul’s cheek.
“Be careful,” Paul says. “Amy’s grouchy tonight, too good for us.”
He’s never had a girlfriend, and his attempts to find one are weak-hearted. Sadie and I have always been like surrogates. I sip delicately and lick my stinging lips, venom.
“This just isn’t my thing,” I say. “But it’s better than home.”
“Stonewall still sick?” Sadie says.
“Yeah. But he’s tough.”
“They know what’s causing the seizures yet?”
“Not really. Think they’re waiting for him to grow out of it.”
“Ah yes…” Sadie sighs. “Doctors, the high priests of health.”
“He gets these ear infections, too. For some babies, it’s just part of their development. There’s no known reason. Then it goes away.”
She watches me carefully. Soon she and Paul just look at each other and shake their heads. I love them both because they know I’m lying.
“It’s terrible when a child suffers,” Paul says.
“Yeah,” I say. “But that doesn’t change anything.”
“Nope. It doesn’t.” Sadie swirls the whiskey, takes a long drink.
Paul whispers, “What if we could hit them back?”
“Hit who back?” Sadie says.
He leans closer to her. “I got to tell you guys something, something important.”
Glass shatters in the dining room, falls like hail from the ceiling. A cracked chandelier spins kaleidoscopic light against the hallway. Some girl laughs for help, a cackling scream. Sadie says she’ll be back, that she hopes we’ll stay the night and not drive home.
After she’s gone, I set my hand on his and say, “What do you need to tell us?” But he pulls away, ignores me.
High heels tap. Jessica Smithburger walks by with bracelets rattling like bones. She says to me, “Hey, Fat Ass,” and then scissors away on spindly legs. Her insult is concise and stale, yet I still imagine throwing her to the ground and stabbing her in the eye with her shoe.
Paul says nothing. Like my dad, he pretends not to hear.
“I want to leave,” I say.
“You’re staying. Just ignore that ugly, hateful bitch.”
Jessica stands with Tiffany Warrington and Megan McManus, a trio of bleached twits. They dress in bright clothes from GAP and Old Navy, keep themselves thin, and have been graced with C cups. They come from wealthy families and have bullied me my entire life. I hate that verb, to bully. It can never explain the hurt, and it makes me feel like some helpless victim.
It wasn’t just these bitches. Ever since I was six, getting up and going to school was an act of strength, resilience. They made fun of me because I was fat, because I was poor. They never got bored of tearing me down. I knew they all laughed behind my back, the object of everyone’s joke. How I waddled in stained clothes that didn’t fit me. How my hair fell in tangles. This was not what a girl should look like, how a girl should be.
“I don’t want to be here,” I say. “I need to finish my application. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Fuck me.” Paul sighs. “You’re smarter than us, Chevy, but you aren’t fucking better than us. Just finish your drink and show us your tits, get fatty happy.”
Suddenly the power flops. The walls shake, and the lights flicker dark. The music dies.
Beyond the bay windows the sky is red, the distant ridge clouded in glowing smoke, flaming tendrils licking dim stars. A few gather and watch wondrously, their foreheads smearing the cold glass, their eyes captured by fire.
“Did something crash?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Roswell, motherfuckers! Roswell!”
“It’s along Sandy Ridge.”
“Didn’t see nothing.”
Paul spits on the rug, rubs it clean with his steel-toed boot. He shares a glance with Sadie, smiles softly at her. Flames flicker against the trees, our darkened white faces.
“It’s a new rig,” Sadie says. “They’re just getting started.”
She lights candles, stacks logs in the fireplace. Seth brings a can of lighter fluid and a box of matches. Soon our own fire cracks and pops against stone, masks the living room window’s obsidian reflection. Lawrence props up his smartphone on the mantel, plays a mix that starts with heavy drums and screaming strings.
They all fall into rhythm. Hips gain momentum, arms curl upward to the music. Hair is tossed. Our shadows stencil the walls. Grinning boys latch on to hips of their choice.
“I’m sorry,” Paul tells me. “That was a mean thing to say. I’m drinking. I’m drunk.”
My childhood hardened me into a lone wolf. Eighteen years old, and I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve never been asked out. No love letters. I’ve always felt ugly and unlovable. But I no longer feel resentment toward any of them, even as they smile at me now, call me, in a friendly, endearing way, Chevy. I’ve learned to laugh with them, hide behind shyness and a studious resolve. And on the inside, deep down, a dark red ball of anger keeps me warm.
“It’s okay,” I say.
He shuffles up to dance with Sadie, who stands waiting for him. He says to me, “You’ll make a great vet, Chevy. But don’t be a bitch. And don’t be boring. Don’t be so sensitive.” He pulls at my hand, tells me to come on, smiles with crooked teeth. “Just dance until you can’t.”