When Evangeline left for that first day at Port Furlong High, she hadn’t decided to go. She hadn’t decided not to go either. Her feet started out the right way, but halfway there they detoured up a trail, wound her around the lake, and planted her on a viewpoint overlooking the school.
She shrugged off her pack and perched on a rock. She’d fled here dozens of times the past spring when she wanted to escape her mother. Back then, nearly everything about the woman nauseated Evangeline—her skin-peeling gaze, the writhing disgust of her lips, her jiggling flab in too-tight tees. Evangeline had sat in this very spot and chiseled all that disdain into a sharp stone she lodged beneath her heart, enjoying how it rubbed her raw and angry with each rhythmic beat. And now, if she could find its jagged edge, lean into its lacerating power, she might again believe in the joy of a motherless existence, she might be able to stand and move toward a new life. But the stone was gone. All that was left was a boggy tender spot, a deep and permanent bruise.
The bell rang below. Last-minute dashes were made. How strange that her legs refused to take her. She had begged to go to school, fought with her mother, threatened to register on her own. Viv said she knew what happened in parking lots during lunch hours and after school, said she wasn’t going to have “a whore for a daughter.” Viv would leave if it came down to that. Evangeline had obeyed, and what good had it done? Her mother took off anyway. As for having a whore for a daughter, perhaps her mother had created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The sun continued to rise in a cold, empty sky. Why was returning to school so hard? Her mother had moved every couple of years, and Evangeline had always managed to fit in before. Maybe it had to do with hiding these past months, cowering out of sight as if she were something obscene. But it was deeper than that, a sense of floundering, as if she’d lost the anchoring that a mother—no matter how lousy—provides, that allowed a girl to swim into new territory without worry of being washed out to sea.
She told herself she had the man, Isaac. He acted more like a mother than Viv ever had. He’d been plenty pissed when she snuck out those first nights. But even that third time, when he lectured her about the need for simple courtesy—whatever that meant—he assembled a plate of mashed potatoes and baked chicken. He shoved it at her as if angry, but when she dug in like the famished girl she was, she could see he was pleased.
And every morning he was in the kitchen with his fruit and oatmeal, or eggs and toast, his insistence she add extra layers of warmth, as if she were a delicate girl who needed care. She liked that, being thought of as delicate. Not that she was. Not that she wanted to be. Hell no. But to have someone worry about her, suspect she had been and could be hurt, to think it mattered . . . well, it felt like someone wrapping a coat around her shoulders when she hadn’t known she was cold.
Still, Isaac’s kindness was a mystery whose cost she couldn’t figure. If life had taught her anything, it was that nothing came for free. She refused to think of the two boys and the guilt she had buried, what it would mean if Isaac found out. But it lived in her, burrowed deep into her bones, so cold it nearly rattled her teeth.
Everything these days made her afraid: people who might have seen her, kids she didn’t yet know, classes and tests and projects she’d missed. The totality of time seemed a danger, whether the secrets of her past or the threats of the future. Mostly she was afraid of Isaac, of all she had recently received and that could now be lost.
It was seeing herself this way—as a quivering puddle of fear—that made her command herself to stand and get her ass to school, tell her body she would be in charge of it from then on. And finally her body obeyed, taking her down the hill, around the lake, through the parking lot, and right through the old building’s front doors.
To hell with being afraid. That would be her motto from now on.