AT LUNCH, LAWRENCE CRAW ASKS, “So what was that all about anyway? Are you okay?”
I tell him I’m fine, that the police were just covering every base.
He motions to a table. “Want to eat with us?”
“Sure.”
I sit across from Travis Dodson and Dave Pfeiffer, varsity jacket heifers with unhinged mouths and stiff shoulders, workhorses on the front line who’ve had too many concussions. “Hey, Chevy,” they say simultaneously. Then Travis says, “You a criminal?”
“Nope,” I say. “I passed the polygraph.”
“Right on, girl.”
“You don’t seem like the killing type,” Lawrence says.
I stab a piece of beef with a plastic fork, pop it in my mouth, and chew fat, suck out stroganoff juice like marrow.
Amanda Forsythe isn’t here. But at the next table her friends make it a point to glare at me. They nibble soggy sandwiches, furtive little movements of jaw and eye, not sure what to think of this fat girl they’ve now noticed for the first time. Does she look strong, dangerous? Does she look capable as hell? Is this what evil looks like?
Sadie’s mom once told me, “You can be fat and well-liked, but not fat and disliked.” She told me that when I came over to their house crying. The substitute in our science class had shared a picture of a beached whale, said it was caused by the global warming of the oceans. The whale split open in the heat. Thousands of pounds of fat bubbled over the sand. Tiffany Warrington said, “Look, it’s Amy Wirkner.” The whole class laughed, loud and long.
Sadie never mentioned my weight, our differences always unspoken.
Soon the boys talk about Call of Duty, brag about their statistics and kills. Boys play at war, and these video games, I suspect, are secretly conditioning them to actually kill in one. It really is the ultimate game, Uncle Tom says, where all life can truly be won or lost.
I take a delicate sip of milk and then brush a self-conscious finger over my lip. I pretend to listen to their talk, to the human noise surrounding me, until it bleeds into one senseless din.
I smile at those girls, a somber little gesture of sisterhood. What a sad fucking world we live in, ladies. Shall we braid each other’s hair? Do each other’s makeup? Talk about our hurt feelings? Because I am like you. I promise. I am just like you.
Sadie’s letter scrapes against my breast. My pulse tears into my eyes like hooked thumbs.
Immediately after school I pull down Harmony Road. This is where the other half lives, Mom says. Outside these large, identical vinyl homes, clean children play with pampered dogs. Men in unbuttoned dress shirts wrap gardening hoses neatly into plastic spools. Expensive cars freshly washed and waxed. Decorative glass hangs in bay windows as clear as air. The grass is level, each lawn uniformly cropped, as if there were a meeting to decide requisite height. My rusted tailpipe vibrates exhaust as I ascend the hill to her house.
The circular driveway is smooth stone, matching a front porch with Doric columns.
Her mom answers. When she sees it’s me, she stops, keeps half her body hidden behind the oak door, and studies me with disinterested appraisal, the look of a bitter woman who’s worked hard to tailor herself into the mechanizations of a man’s world. There’s a hatefulness to her that has always discomforted me, both a model and a warning to all us ambitious girls.
“I have to talk to her, Mrs. Schafer.”
“Not now. Did those men do this to you, too?”
“Yes.”
“Unbelievable. Amy, you need to talk to your lawyer. This is wrong as hell.” She picks at something along the frame, a crushed bug. I once overheard her tell her husband that I was bad company for Sadie, a bad influence.
“I don’t have a lawyer. Neither do my parents. I’d just like to talk to her now. Please.”
“I don’t think so. She’s not feeling well. You need to leave.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, and that’s how she’ll stay.”
“Mrs. Schafer, I don’t understand why I can’t talk to her. Why can’t I talk to her?”
“Because our lawyer advises against it.”
That word hits me, just enough to crack. “What do you mean? What did I do?”
“I don’t know. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Then you have nothing to worry about, but you need to protect yourself. Your parents need to help you. This is serious. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
“I need to talk to Sadie. She said she needed to talk to me.”
“I don’t have anything else to say to you. Not now. We can’t.”
I stand like a beggar, pitiful and lost. I know that whatever I say won’t work.
“Take care, Amy.”
She shuts the door in my face. The windows are empty, not even a parted curtain in Sadie’s bedroom. I coast downhill, head to Main Street on fumes.
At the gas station I add four dollars’ worth, loose change scavenged along the mat. Others pay with swiped cards, numbers on a screen, imaginary money in a computer database. At no point is gasoline actually seen, let alone where it comes from. Same goes for an electrical outlet, a propane tank. The surface detached from reality, magic, unlimited resources and time. Going to a grocery store is a bit more honest, but not much.
Bloodless meat in plastic wrap.
I reach in my bra and free the note, damp with sweat. Her beautiful, practiced signature: Love, Sadie. I crush it into a ball and toss it in the trash.
Fuck you, Mrs. Schafer, and everyone who looks like you.
In the library a few pale ladies stamp flaps and direct people down aisles. George Jackson, the head librarian, is a goliath of refined muscle, always dressed in blue jeans and a black sports coat that conceals his size, his head a flaxen dome. The tiniest silver glasses on the edge of his nose. Behind the desk he reads some ancient tome, brushes the cracked leather binding with oil. My mom always hugs him, calls him her big bear. A history I don’t know. She won’t tell. As a kid she brought me here every week. It was important that I read, not watch television. She’d put her hair in braids, pick out her nicest black dress, and visit with him. She left smiling but also sad, quiet. I left with zoology popup books and illustrated fairy tales, animals with human names.
Mr. Jackson notices me slip down the hall, a cold stare before he smiles bright.
I enter the ancestry room, burgundy leather chairs and mahogany bookcases, rich maple cabinets, files brittle as papyrus, a brass Rolodex. Two computers sit at opposite ends of a long table, database access to birth records and genetic testing websites. Sepia photographs on the walls, Barnesville through the ages. In the corner, the object that brought me here, an antique rotary phone, the numbers to various municipal departments printed beneath a green desk lamp.
The room is empty and still. I dial his number, know it by heart, from a time before cell phones, when it was just my landline to his, our parents granting permission.
The line rings. Then his mom answers, a groggy hello. I hang up, grind my teeth. I don’t know his cell phone. After a couple of minutes, I call again. This time Paul answers.
“Are you alright?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you leave school? It makes you look guilty as fuck.”
“Seemed like a good idea. I’m sick.”
“Are we okay?”
“I don’t think so. Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
I run my finger along the cord, eye the door. “You can’t talk. Can you?”
“Right.”
“I need to see you. Can I come to you?”
“Nah, man. Now’s not the best time. I’ve had a long day.” He pauses; the line hums.
“Is someone listening to us? Or is it just your mom, on your end?”
“No. It’s just me. I feel like hammered dog shit, dude.”
I wait, consider. I have to take this risk. “Listen. We need to meet tomorrow before school. Not at your place or mine. Our place, our hiking place. Can you do that? Tomorrow morning at seven? We got to get ahead of whatever’s happening. I need to know what you told them. Sadie wants to talk to me, but her mom won’t let her. They asked about tires. Did they ask you that? You got to change those fucking tires, Paul.”
A long pause. “Yeah, that all sounds good. I’ll talk to you then. But I gotta go now.”
“Goddamnit. God fucking damnit.”
“It’s cool. It’s cool.”
“Do you know the place?”
“Yes, I do.”
Voices in the background, his parents. He is still keeping up appearances, deceiving someone, and it’s not me. He’s still with me in this.
“I can’t wait to see you.” I hate my voice, its softness, a delicate fear, like it comes from a thing that must be cuddled and pet, a fragile thing that needs protection. “I miss you.”
“Me too. I’ll see you around, man.”
He hangs up.
I close my eyes and rest my head against the wall.
He didn’t kill anyone. Thirty thousand dollars, safety, the relief of confession.
He doesn’t love me that much.
I know where to go. I need someone I can trust, confide in without judgment.
On the radio I flip through country and rock, then breaking news from Europe, a terror bombing, thirty-seven dead. Stateside, a police shooting of an unarmed black teen in Detroit. Along the border, Mexican cartels behead journalists. The opium epidemic kills an entire generation in the Rust Belt. I turn off the radio, easy enough. Then I roll down the window and let my hair fly. No houses, no cars, a passage of trees.
A charcoal cat runs into the road. No time, I hit it, a dull thump. I stare forward and shake and let that moment sink in. Then I pull over, reverse alongside the ditch, park in the leaves. I step out and call for it. The road is empty, smeared. I follow the bloody trail.
The cat wails pitifully, crawls into a cage of briars, a boy. I reach my hand through the bracken and gently pet his quivering chin. I speak to him as if he were a child. I tell him I’m sorry. I promise him I can help. I know how. When I cup his head and pull him forward, he growls, and then his lids flutter shut. My fingers wet, sticky. Wads of intestine uncoil down my wrist. I scream and drop him, entangled against the thorns, peeling open red. Soon he stops breathing, drains in empty patters like rain.
I fling my hand against the grass, swat at the leaves, and beat my fist against the ground; then I fall back and cry, sit there in the dirt, crying.
It takes me a long time to get myself together, but I do. Of course I do.
Then I leave. The body steams in the cold. Something will eat it.