8

I don’t know how it is for you, but in my world, grown-ups are always whining about how we kids don’t play outside enough. What is out there, really, to play with? All the computers and pens and paper and easels and paints are inside. I’m already outside the dollhouse, isn’t that enough?

And when there is cool stuff to do out there, it’s not the kind of stuff our parents would let us do. Dad and Taleesa have these fond childhood memories of stealing shopping carts, rooting around in dumpsters, shooting water moccasins with a shotgun, and barfing after accidentally swallowing chewing tobacco. Like they’d really let us do any of that!

Luckily for Martinez and me, there was always a way out of this playing-outside madness. It had a lot to do with alligators. And a lot to do with the fact that we’re on the Alabama side of the state line.

Twenty miles south of here, in Florida, gators are as common as possums, and are viewed pretty much the same way. Kids in kindergarten get alligator-safety coloring books. (“Never feed an alligator. Don’t swim in swamps. Keep your little dog on a leash.”) Florida people are proud of that. They’re proud that they know enough to avoid gators—and that they know enough not to freak out every time they look out into the water and see little eyes looking back. “Of course you saw a big gator crawl up out of the water,” Florida folks will say. “It’s sunset. That’s what gators do.”

It’s different here. Sure, we don’t have as many big reptiles lying around. But the big thing is that we see gators the way the rest of the non-Florida world sees them. An alligator is a mascot, a zoo animal. It’s like having a tiger in your kiddie pool or finding a dragon on the creek bank.

Strudwick County, in particular, has its own very specific gator legend. In Dead Beaver Swamp, an algae-choked lake north of Houmahatchee, a twenty-foot gator lurked in the water. Or so rumor had it. If you’ve ever seen an alligator, you know they’re sort of like bug-eyed goldfish; the longer they live and the bigger they get, the more strange and bumpy they look. So the Swamp Monster, as some people called it, was a knobby-backed gray-and-black behemoth with fat muscular Jabba arms and brilliant white teeth the size of your fingers. 

Everybody saw the Swamp Monster and nobody saw the Swamp Monster. There were no photos of the thing, yet every time a four-foot gator crawled out of a drainpipe, people would call the cops and report a monster sighting. Once when a little three-footer settled in beside the loading docks for the school cafeteria, they put the whole school on lockdown. Small gators were a sign that the Swamp Monster was near, I guess. Even though he was a male gator in almost all the stories, the Swamp Monster was like a queen bee, churning out thousands of gator eggs in the swamp every night.

A dumb story, but it worked when kids really needed it. If you ever needed a scary tale to tell around the campfire, the Swamp Monster always worked because you could convince people it was real: it happened to a kid I knew who went to Snoad Middle, and now he doesn’t have any legs.

And even smart parents like mine would let you stay inside if you told them thought you saw a gator in the bushes. So I guess I’m a spreader of the legend, too. I’ve never been afraid to mention my gator-fear on hot summer days when Taleesa wants us out of the house so she can write.

I never thought I’d see the Swamp Monster in real life, much less become its lawyer. But life has a way of swimming up and biting you when you least expect it.

It happened one morning when Taleesa was driving us to the animal shelter. I always get the front seat because I’m bigger, and before I started working at the animal shelter, I’d look out the window and watch the landscape roll by. The trailers, the rows of slash pine, then Dead Beaver Swamp, where, if you were lucky, you might see a crane wading around in the shallows. 

But not anymore. After I started writing the column for the Herald, I spent every moment texting. Texting in the car, on the toilet, at the breakfast table. 

HERALD_EDITOR: There are some missing words in Joyful’s profile. I marked them in Google Docs if you have a minute. 

MEGG: I’m speaking at the County Commission this morning. Please work the front desk until I return. 

Princess_P: Your a frak. Your mother was a freak. You don’t belong here.

Princess_P: Freak. 

404-555-5515: We are in Atlanta. If we come down Wednesday to adopt Frida, can we meet Atty the Dog Lawyer?

Atticustpeale: You’re talking to her. We can’t hold any dog if someone else shows up to adopt first, but I’ll be here. 

The car pulled to a stop, and I pocketed my phone. But when I looked up, we weren’t at the shelter. We were on the side of the road, on the banks of Dead Beaver Swamp. A bunch of SUVs with flashing police lights were parked along the bank, and some big, burly guys were backing a flat boat into the water. A bit further up the road, a little aluminum boat lay up on the bank, with mud—and what looked like blood—spattered all over the front. Yuck. 

Taleesa unhitched her seat belt. “I get the feeling there’s a story here.”

I snorted. “What? You’re going to just go up and pester the cops while they’re working?”

“I’m a journalist,” Taleesa said. “It’s very empowering.” She flipped through her pocketbook, looking at business cards for all the magazines she’s written for. “Black Belt Outdoors,” she said, pulling one out. “Freelance correspondent. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“I’m coming,” I said. 

“Nuh-uh,” Taleesa said, putting on a surprisingly good white-guy twang. “You’ll git eat by the Swump Munster.”

“Gators only eat small children,” I said. “I’m twelve. I’m plenty big.”

(“Fat ugly girl,” Princess P had said. “No boy wants a 12-year-old with a muffin top.”)

“Okay, you come,” Taleesa said. “But you stay with me. And Martinez, you stay in the car.”

Martinez fluttered his eyelashes at me, trilled in a girl voice: “Tell Troy Butler I said hi.” 

“Shut up,” I said. “I love you, but sometimes I hate you.”

As it turns out, Butler actually was there, with mud up to the knees of his uniform and a slash of blood across his shirt. He was typing on a laptop propped on the hood of an SUV. He smiled when he saw us. 

“Miss Peale,” he said, nodding. “And this must be . . .”

“Miz Peale, the elder,” Taleesa said. “If it’s not too much of a hassle, we were just driving by and wondered what’s going on.”

Butler sighed. “There was a monster of some sort in the lake last night. Bunch of guys were out hunting, had too many beers, and decided they’d get famous by capturing the Swamp Monster on video. They went out on a boat with flashlights and cell phones, and one of them saw some eyes shining back. Pointed his phone right at those eyes. Well, he doesn’t have that phone anymore. Or his hand.”

“The Monster got him,” I said. “So the Monster is real.”

“Well, a gator got him,” Butler said. “Guy’s lucky to be alive. His drunk friends did an okay job of getting him back in the boat, tying off the arm, and all that. I just happened to be driving by to work, and they flagged me down. Who’s the monster here, and who’s just going about their business, I guess it depends on how you look at it. At any rate, these guys”—he hooked his thumb back at the guys putting their boat in the water—“are going to troll the lake for the gator and kill it.”

Taleesa looked at me. “A hunt for the Swamp Monster. Now that’s a story.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” I said. “Alligator-hunting season doesn’t start until August. It’s against the law to kill gator out of season. It’s in Title Nine of the state code.” They both looked at me like I’d grown an extra head. “Hunting laws, y’all. I was curious, so I read them all.”

Butler shook his head. “This isn’t normal alligator hunting. The state has the power to declare a gator a nuisance alligator. That means it’s a danger to humans. And then it can be killed.”

I looked out at the mists on Dead Beaver Swamp. They called it that because, years ago, somebody wanted to drain it, and they thought all they needed to do was knock down a beaver dam on Clay Creek not far from here. So they went in and slaughtered all the beavers and blew up the dam, but the swamp stayed swampy. 

“I don’t understand how an alligator in a swamp is a nuisance,” I said. “If an alligator’s in my house, that’s a nuisance and a danger. That guy was in the alligator’s house.”

“You’ll have to take it up with the state Department of Conservation,” Butler said. “And about that other thing—”

“Oh, I’ll take it up with the department,” I said, cutting him off on purpose. “Believe me, I will.”

Before my life got filled up with dogs and deputies and alligators, one of my major goals in life was trying to find a way to avoid seventh grade. I’ve researched seventh grade quite thoroughly and I’m sure no good can come of it. 

“Girls enter the middle school years as confident children and often leave as broken, anxiety ridden young women obsessed with pleasing everyone,” writes Rachel McMartin, PhD, author of the book Saving Emmeline Grangerford: A Study in Teen Mopiness Among Girls.

“All the key pathologies of manhood—avoidance of responsibility, anger toward women, obsession with violence—are picked up by boys in early adolescence,” writes Dr. K.V. S. Singh in Hamlet Was Fat: Rescuing Boys from Computer Culture.

I’ve clipped and copied dozens of these quotes. Grown-ups have written, like, a thousand books about how awful sixth and seventh and eighth grades are. They talk about this time in their life like it was a war they barely survived. Yet they’re the ones who keep pushing us into this weird stuff. We’ve organized a school dance, who are you going to bring? No more kickball—now football is for boys and cheerleading is for girls. Here’s a test to determine your career interests. There’s no way to fail, they say.

(There is in fact a way to fail the career interest test. Write “I WANT TO BE QUEEN OF NABOO” on the top of each page. That will land you in the office.)

My solution: cancel the whole middle school/junior high thing. Send everybody home for three years with a reading list. We all return as confident people with deep voices and bras and learner’s permits and we go on with our lives. Before I met Easy, my plan for the summer was to write out a long argument for why I should homeschool the next year. 

But reminders of school kept popping up. “I haven’t heard you practice your flute all summer,” Taleesa said more than once. Three or four times, when I opened my lunch box at the animal shelter, I found a paperback copy of Far Huntress, a book about a girl in a dark future who has to become an assassin for an evil dictator in order to save her professor father from being executed. It’s our summer reading. Sounds like a good book, actually, but I just wasn’t ready to think about school. 

Which is why I was so disappointed to see Peyton Vebelstadt at the animal shelter when we got there. I was late, I had swamp mud on my shoes, and now I have to see a classmate.

It’s not that I don’t like Peyton. I guess I have a tiny crush on her. She’s so tall, the tallest person in our class, and she has this long, long reddish hair that always looks so soft. And here’s the thing: she never talks about her hair the way other long-haired girls do. Teachers used to accuse her of wearing eye makeup because she has these big round eyes that I, at least, think are really beautiful. When they make a movie of my life, I want Peyton to play the role of me. 

(“Fat ugly girl,” Princess_P said in her text.) 

And Peyton is, you know, nice. Not bland and sweet but just chummy with everybody. She never says anything snarky like I do all the time, and I’ve never seen her be mean to anybody. I can’t tell you one thing about what’s inside her head—does she secretly want to be a vampire or to run people over with a car?—but everybody who knows her thinks of her warmly. I’d like to be that kind of person, but I don’t want it enough to actually do it.

So, yeah, I like Peyton. But I don’t ever want to see school people in the summer. You know?

There she was, in the lobby of the animal shelter, cuddling a long-haired, pug-faced cat. I felt that lurch of school dread. Then Peyton turned and smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Pretty smiling girl, grim serious cat.

“That’s Wednesday,” I said. “Her brother’s name is Pugsley. It would be great if you could take both of them.”

“Oh, Atty, I know,” Peyton said. “I saw you and Martinez with them on YouTube. They’re so cute!”

Yes, Martinez got me to present both cats on his YouTube channel. He kept me mostly out of the frame, but you could still hear my voice with its weird twang. 

“Take them home,” I said to Peyton. “Both of them. You’d be a good cat mom.”

“Oh, I will,” she said. “That’s what I came here for.” She stood there staring into Wednesday’s eyes, Peyton in her short shorts and her skinny legs that went on and on like a three-hour movie. It’s not fair how some things, like being tall, are so easy for some people. 

“You know,” I said, “you should volunteer with us. You’d be great in those videos. I can tell you really love cats.”

“Oh, Atty,” she said. “I really admire what you do. Going to court, risking jail and all. But I don’t think I could do it.”

“What? Who says I’m risking jail?”

“Oh, I don’t know, it was on the Internet or something,” she said. “I’m just not—I can’t do what you do. You know, girls at school are so mean. And boys, who knows what they’re thinking? When you do something, don’t you ever worry about what people will think?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said. “Why would a mean girl at school care what I do at the animal shelter? Why would a boy care? Have you heard something?”

Peyton looked at me like I was a kitten, still in the cage. 

“Oh, Atty,” she said. “Look, I just keep hearing that seventh grade is hard. There are girls at my church who are already plotting how they’re going to become popular, and who’s going to be their friend and who’s not. It’s scary. I think it’s a good time to just keep your head down.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Princess P. You know who she is, don’t you?”

“A character from a video game?”

“No, she’s a girl who—oh never mind,” I said. “Look, I guess I do care what people think, a little. I didn’t used to, but I’m starting to. And you know what? So far it completely sucks, caring what people think. How can I control what someone else thinks? How am I supposed to not be a weirdo, in someone else’s eyes? What are the rules for that? Heck, what do you think of me?”

“I think you’re very brave,” she said. “You’re like that girl from Afghanistan. The one who got shot for going to school.”

Wow. Me, like Malala Yousafzai. She was serious, I could see it in her eyes. How could I ever live up to that?

“But what’s her life like?” Peyton continued. “I mean, can you imagine her going out with boys? Shopping? Just hanging around and being a girl? Don’t you want that in life? Before you grow up?”

That Malala compliment made me feel pretty brave. “Maybe I don’t,” I said. “Maybe I don’t have a choice. Maybe I have to do this.”

“Well, everybody has a choice, Atty,” Peyton said. 

“I guess I’ve already made mine,” I said. “I chose to get Wednesday and Pugsley a home, and now they have a home. How can I stop?”

And I decided right then and there. I’d write a legal brief as soon as I got home. A brief about alligators.