1982

Mum and Alison stood side-by-side, knives in syncopation, carrots and onions scattered on the cutting boards beneath. Outside, freshly blooming daffodils bent in the breeze.

Dad bounded in, early. Mum and Alison turned, paused.

“Another promotion!” He bounced, ever so slightly. “To the head office!”

He made for the decanters on the sideboard.

Mum and Alison, frozen: knives raised, mouths open.

“Come on then,” Dad said. “Alison’s old enough for a wee dram.”

Alison set down her knife, came along obediently, took her glass, held it aloft.

She and Dad turned, found Mum still standing, knife in the air.

“To a new life,” Dad toasted.

Mum held still. There had been no discussion, not a hint that this might be coming, this promotion, this transfer to the head office. In America.

“To a new life,” Dad said again. He extended a glass towards Mum.

A moment passed, then another. And then she lowered the knife, set it carefully on the cutting board, reached for the glass.

The trickle of whisky ran, like a tiny rivulet of fire, down Alison’s throat and into her center. Outside, the sunset scattered purple and pink over familiar terrain.

Alison didn’t even understand what America meant. Of course, she knew the geographic fact of it; she could name several states and their capitals and the president. She knew she was meant to want to go there. She did not. No matter what goodness might wait there, she was being taken from the land on which, somewhere, her Beautiful Girl walked. She was being taken to a place where there would be no Vic. Dad might as well have brought home space suits and said they were going to the moon.

~

The house sold in three weeks. Even Dad couldn’t believe their luck. Alison had one last day with Vic. She wanted her favorite person in her favorite place: Vic, Tursa.

With barely two quid between them for ferry and fags, and neither compass nor walking sticks, they set off: Vic, with safety pins dangling from her ears and tartan-rimmed jeans’ pockets; Alison, like the boring wee sister with pale blue corduroy trousers and her favorite Clarks shoes, which were brown leather lace-ups made for boys.

Off the ferry, they went the opposite way from everyone else, taking a barely visible path. Alison led the way past the crumbled ruins of the castle, then up the hill. Around a corner near the top, they came to the circle of stones with its fire pit at the center. They nestled between the nubs of rock and the fire pit, lying on their backs and smoking. Under the wide sky, watching the clouds roll past, Alison noticed the places where her body connected with ground she loved, where it connected to a girl she loved.

Vic sat up, dug in her back, produced a small, silver flask, not at all like the tea flask Papa shared with Alison.

“Belonged to Da,” she said, rubbing it against her sweater, as though that would remove the tarnish. “Mam’ll never miss it. Or the dram.” She grinned. “She hasn’t yet, anyway.” Vic held it out.

Alison shivered, thinking of Mum and her gin. Vic read her, as she always did. “Yer not yet mam. Sure, I’m not my mam and we’re blood.”

She meant this in a kind way. She’d said she wouldn’t mind thinking she wasn’t related to anyone in her house. She was the kind of person who would have imagined her Dad was Mick Jagger or David Bowie—that they’d shagged some brainy girl in the fields behind the secondary school and she was the result. She’d have been proud of it.

She raised the flask, sipped, held it out again. Alison took it.

“Let’s make a pact,” Vic said.

She dug a rumpled fragment of paper and a pen from her bag, and they wrote the words so they could say them together, each of them taking a sip of whisky at the pauses. It felt part promise, part prayer.

I, Vic, and I, Alison, swear to keep this friend with me forever …

They weren’t promising to visit, or even to write. More than that, they were swearing each to come to the other in time of need, each to somehow know, even if they lost contact.

… to send our love through the moon, or on the wings of a swan, or in whatever manner it might find us.

It felt at once silly, like something younger children do, or something from a fairy tale, and at the same time bold, as though they could be larger than the adults who seemed to move them on their whim. Alison wondered, briefly, if Vic had made such a pact with another girl before leaving her father. She didn’t ask. And then Vic leaned in, took Alison’s face in her hands. “This okay?”

“Yes.”

Vic leaned closer. Their breath mingled. Alison’s heart raced. Lip to lip, warm and perfect.

“To seal the promise.”

They parted under the streetlamp in town, each going their separate ways home. Alison turned to watch Vic. Vic, too turned. A wave, a smile. Alison held within her the tears and terror that rose every time they parted. From some wordless, primal place within her, the fear that this person she loved would somehow disappear forever.

~

Papa waved them off in forty-eight degrees and drizzle. Up and away they soared, above the clouds, away from Vic, from the story of belonging that had barely begun to sprout within her, its roots shallow and tender.

They breathed in the stale air, this little family: Dad in his suit, Mum and Alison in their Sunday best.

Prestwick to New York, New York to Atlanta, Atlanta to Terra Pines, the planes shrinking each time they changed to the next leg.

The steps lowered, they descended to the tarmac—named after Macadam, invented by a Scot, Papa had reminded Alison at Prestwick—into air that was hot and thick with humidity and that seemed unwilling to be inhaled. April, 1982: eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Alison had never felt such a stillness. It was as though the world itself had ceased turning. Mum paused in front of her. A heave of the shoulders, and then she turned and took Alison’s hand, seeking support as much as offering it. Dad strode ahead. At the entrance to the airport, he turned, like a tour guide waiting for his lollygagging group. It neither occurred to him that the sudden slap of sun and heat stunned them and slowed their progress, nor that they lacked his enthusiasm for this journey, this place, this promotion.

~

Out onto the expanse of interstate, Alison swayed in the back seat as the car floated along. She leaned her head against the window, looking skyward, fascinated by its seamlessness. The swoop of the exit, followed by the narrowing of the road.

Hills rose on either side of them on the two-lane road, higher than Alison had ever seen. Trees covered them. There was no bare shoulder of the earth rising, no space to see. Everything seemed hidden.

After the turn into the subdivision, the newly built Oak Hollow, Dad slowed as they passed the tennis courts and pool, drained and in the process of being scrubbed to a state of readiness for the coming season. Tidy brick ranch houses, flat and long, stood next to clapboard colonials, not the prime real estate on the lake Dad had told them was nearby, but a better deal, halfway between there and the nearby city, which was not even quarter the size of Glasgow. They had no understanding of this clustering of houses miles from the nearest shop or pub or restaurant.

In the driveway of one of the ranches, Dad stepped out of the car, opened Alison’s door, then Mum’s, and held his arms wide. “Here we are. Home sweet home.” He beamed. A boy who had just won the biggest of races or scored the winning goal. A man who had been making arrangements for this move long before he mentioned it to his wife and daughter.

Mum sat, car door open, one foot on the driveway. She looked at Alison, at the house, at Dad. Alison thought she saw a flash of the same look Mum had given him all those Sunday mornings ago when Alison had handed her a doll. At least she had nothing to throw now. When Alison turned to Mum again, her face was a flawless, flat visage.

Inside, their transplanted furniture filled half the house. They had two extra bedrooms as well as formal living and dining rooms, as though they had suddenly become aristocracy. Dad explained that this was how people like them lived here. Alison wondered what sort of people he thought they were now. She felt the old, familiar tightening, the return of the doubt that she belonged there at all, the sureness that she should be with the gypsies or worse, the need to prove her worth.

Through the wood-paneled den and down the long hall, Alison found her new room, painted a hopeful yellow. When she returned to the kitchen, Dad sipped tea at the kitchen table.

“Aren’t we lucky?” he said.

A constriction happened within Alison—throat, belly, chest—when she witnessed him focus only on the parts that affirmed his belief that he was lucky: lucky to have survived the war as a boy. Lucky to have a dad and a mum who survived as well. What had he done with the memory of her brother? What was Alison supposed to do with that memory, and, further within, not memory as people typically think of it, but a felt understanding of her natural mother? Alison never asked. Sometimes she thought she must be mad, that she’d imagined Andrew, created the loss. And so, the tightness grew within, a slow, creeping vine, silently strangling her sense of self. This, along with everything else, she accepted quietly.

She stared at Dad, hand on his solid pine table, perfectly centered in the kitchen of this solid brick house in a tidy subdivision on this broad continent.

She nodded. Of course she was. Hadn’t they been telling her that for longer than she could remember?

~

That first night, Alison snuck out to the screened-in porch in the dark. She didn’t understand the notion of a room with screens rather than windows. She soon would, though. Mosquitos were the least of it. Spiders that looked, to her, prehistoric and predatory with their plump bodies and tentacles for legs. Beetles, ants, the occasional June bug, a polite name for an enormous variety of cockroach. The previous owners had left a hammock, which made Alison think of the Caribbean, of sailors and turquoise seas, and of sea breezes. She climbed in and swayed gently, learning the night: in the still air, cricket chirp, owl hoot, bug fizz, scrape of opossum claw over pine straw, all of it loud in comparison to those quiet nights in the flat in Glasgow.

Gently swaying, she wished for a breeze to shift the air, for clouds moving overhead to show that the earth still turned. For clouds at all. For Vic.

In the early morning, she set out for the woods at the edge of the subdivision, a last patch of yet-to-be-developed land. At fifteen, she was meant to have outgrown such things—to be interested in dresses and boys and makeup. The first, she’d never been interested in; boys were for playing football with; the thrill of being transformed wasn’t the same without Vic.

Across the manicured back garden, Alison went, into the shelter of the trees. Bare feet on pine straw, shaggy bark under palm. Nothing with limbs so low as to be able to climb. The burble of water not too far away. She followed.

At the edge of the creek, she sank her hands into smooth, ochre clay, cool below the surface. Not an ocean, but water, at least.

~

Dad drove her to school on the first day. After that she walked to the bus, though most of the students her age already had licenses and drove their parents’ cars or had their own. The school made no sense, with its wide, crowded hallways and students pell-mell, in contrast to the tidy, single-file lines she’d left behind. Hair spray in the bathrooms, a boy being shoved into a locker. She didn’t understand the girls with their tall hair and heavily painted eyelids, lashes like long spider legs batting beneath frosted fringes. Her clothes—pale blue corduroys, brown Clarks lace-ups and t-shirts featuring bands like the Boomtown Rats—were all wrong. She held her books close to her chest. Her fresh breasts tried to squeeze over the top. She had noticed that Dad noticed. His eyes lowered and lifted. She felt flushed most of the time. She didn’t own a handbag. She’d never worn makeup to school. Hundreds of miles inland, what good was her knowledge of the tides?

Dad told her to say yes to anyone who asked her to join anything. “That’s how you make friends,” he said.

He had no idea what school was like, though. A random girl ran up to her in the hall on the first day. “Are you the girl from Scotland? Saaay something.”

Another girl sidled up to her in the cafeteria line after English. “You speak English good.”

A boy took her tray, without asking. “You accent sure is cute.”

He told her he thought Scottish people had red hair, asked where her freckles were and whether her father wore, ‘one of them skirt things.’

“Aren’t ya’ll supposed to wear plaid?” he said, still holding both their trays. “My Momma’s family’s Scotch.”

“Where from?” A brief lift of excitement.

“Glasgow.” Only he pronounced it glass-cow.

“When did they move here?”

“1782. To Pennsylvania. My great granddaddy headed them down the wagon trail. Mixed with Indians along the way. See?” He held his arm up.

“Could I have my tray back?”

“We might be kin,” he said, holding his arm next to hers. He laughed, and turned to set their trays down next to each other.

The next day, she saw him first and tried to angle away from him, as though she had someone she’d planned to eat with.

“Hey,” he said as he caught up with her.

She turned, looking for an escape, locked eyes with a blonde girl, with long, dark lashes and tall hair. The girl stood. “She’s eating with me,” she said.

“Sorry,” Alison said.

“He’s a jerk. Hits on everyone,” the girl said. “I’m Kelly. This is Chuck. You don’t have to sit with us if you don’t want to.”

She could hear her dad telling her to say yes, so she sat, feeling awkward and grateful.

~

They seemed to settle in. Dad continued his habit of arriving at the office at 6:00 a.m., when he was in town. Alison had and would continue to imagine him in so many places as he travelled around the world, arriving at whatever office he’d be working in before anyone else, carrying his briefcase full of tidy folders, a bar of chocolate, diligence, a sense of gratitude.

Mum took up tennis. Her normally fair skin bronzed, glistened. She developed a reputation for winning, swearing, turning men’s heads.

The pressure in the air increased with the temperatures and humidity. Alison’s head ached. Thunderstorms brewed. Her hair grew wilder. Her hips began to curve out even more. She squeezed herself into tight jeans, trying to make herself smaller, like Mum.

They were hardly there before Dad left on his first long trip: six weeks, to China.

Mum’s energy began to jangle. Alison found her up at midnight, full moon high in the sky, cleaning the kitchen windows. Mum sponged soapy water on the wood frame, scrubbing frantically, then sprayed the glass. The paper towel whispered into the night.

Alison turned away, quietly.

After school the next day, Alison found Mum ferociously ironing in the dark of the wood-paneled den, not even a lamp on.

“Mum?”

The iron hissed.

“Mum?”

She paused, iron aloft.

Alison feared she might throw it. She hurried to the hall. The spray of steam swished behind her. The whole cycle began again, the angry taunts that Alison owed Mum, that she’d be in an orphanage, the pulling back of the shower curtain to enumerate Alison’s flaws. She was supposed to be grateful, to be the Lucky Baby living this Happily Ever After. This was better than wherever she’d come from. She needed to remember that.

Each time, Alison froze, not sure what was coming next. She felt locked out of herself, unable to move, aching for someone to rescue her, to feed her, an open-beaked chick who had been pushed from the nest, failed to find her wings, who did not even dream of flying.

~

Summer arrived quickly, and, despite the increased heat and humidity, Alison found relief there, from the swirl of school and from repeating herself several times when she had a question or comment in class. No one seemed to be able to understand her hard ‘r’s or vowels that slanted in a different direction than southern ones.

She wanted to wander in the woods, read books in the screened porch, draw in her room, but Dad had paid for a membership at the pool, and she couldn’t yet predict when she might need to escape from Mum, so she went, walking in the searing heat that bore down from the sun and up from the pavement, the humid air like clingfilm around her.

There was an order to be learned at the pool: clusters of slick teenaged bodies took up the section of the deck behind the diving boards. Mothers with small children occupied the southwest corner by the baby pool. A handful of older men and women relegated themselves to the southeast corner. They didn’t stay long, usually timing their entry to coincide with the once-hourly adult swim. The elders slid in. The men slowly front-crawled. The women stood in the water and chatted, bouncing a little, or else swam, side by side, careful to keep hair and face above the water (this, at least, was familiar). Alison found a place between the elders and the young mothers, hoping to go unnoticed.

She’d written to Vic about it:

The pool: you’d think it was holy water the way Dad goes on about it, as though the one wee sprinkle of it will transform me into one of those glistening American girls. The Baptists here aren’t content with a sprinkle. They have these miniature pools in their churches. Clothes and all, in they go. So I’m told. When they come up for air, they’re ‘Saved’. The rest of us, they claim, are going to hell. They call out to Jesus and confess their sins in the middle of church, in front of everyone.

Alison imagined Vic imitating their mums spluttering under and coming up saved, confessing the lot of it. Oh, Vic.

She contented herself with whatever book she was reading, and would likely have spent the entire summer like that had Kelly not come over to tell her that one of the boys with whom Kelly was sitting thought Alison was cute.

“Thanks,” Alison said, standing. It seemed the polite thing to do.

Kelly lifted Alison’s towel. “I’ll help you,” she said.

Alison wasn’t sure what Kelly was helping her do, but she grabbed her things and followed. A few hellos, an awkward smile, and then she took a chair amongst the teens.

She might have skipped the next day had Kelly not called and invited her to join them again. Each day unfolded similarly: the girls coated themselves in a sheen of baby oil, the boys cannonballed from the high dive, the girls squealed. Sometimes the girls sat on the edge of the pool and dangled their feet. Kelly explained that only boys could cannonball.

“I wouldn’t want to even if I could,” Kelly said. “I like working on my tan.” She paused. “Plus, it would mess up my hair.” She glanced at Alison’s. “I could do yours,” she said. This seemed physiologically unlikely. Alison didn’t think her hair could ever be as controlled as Kelly’s high bangs. She did feel certain that there was nothing in her physiology that would prevent her from jumping upward from the diving board, tucking knees to chest, wrapping her arms around and waiting for gravity to do its work.

Vic would have done it. Alison wanted to. More than that, she wanted to belong.

~

At some point, one of the guys would say he was hungry or suggest that they drive around. This seemed to be what teens did to fill time during an eleven-week summer in the suburban South. They’d pile into Chuck’s Camaro and drive, girls on the boys’ laps. Since everyone else was already coupled, Alison ended up on Dwayne’s lap.

In the front seats, Kelly and Chuck kissed before they pulled off. In the back, Angie and Parker kissed, too. It did not take long for Dwayne to stretch his neck towards Alison.

Lips on lips. Heat in the air. His tongue like a lizard. Blue-tailed skink—the first lizard she’d ever seen, and the only lizard name she knew, the first new creature she’d learned to identify here. She liked them. This helped with the kiss. His hand at her waistband, inching up, loosening her t-shirt. She pushed his hand away, again, again, again. It felt as though it was on a spring, the way it kept jumping back up.

Kelly called her the next day. Apparently, Dwayne had said something to Chuck who had said something to Kelly, asking her to say something to Alison.

“Why didn’t you let Dwayne …”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Why? Don’t you think he’s cute? He thinks you’re super cute.”

Alison didn’t understand. She supposed he was cute. That didn’t mean she wanted his hands under her shirt. They hardly knew each other. Vic was the only person she’d kissed until then. She didn’t mind the comfort of a hand to hold, though. She kept going to the pool.

The next week, dark clouds rolled overhead and began pelting them with fat, fast raindrops.

In the car, they giggled, the windows steaming.

“Let’s go to my house,” Chuck said. His parents were out-of-town; Chuck’s elder brother, home from college, was in charge.

Inside Chuck’s house, dark wood paneling lined the den, a threadbare sofa slouched against one wall, and a half-eaten pizza drooped on the ottoman in front of it. They flopped down on the sofas and floors. Chuck got beer from the fridge, a Coors, which, apparently, was a thrill since it had not long made its way east. Alison gathered this from Kelly’s excited squeals, which seemed to be in a slightly higher register than her normal squeals. Dwayne and Chuck high-fived each other as though they, and not Chuck’s brother, had acquired the beers. The pale, ice-cold liquid slid down Alison’s throat, not at all like what Papa had let her sip in The Sheiling, or the thick, dark ale she and Vic had secreted on the train and into Glasgow. Her lips pursed, involuntarily, as though she had sucked a lemon. The boys laughed.

“What? Don’t they drink in Ireland?”

“It’s just,” she started, but they had already turned their attention to the TV. They downed the beers and went for another, and then another.

She had a vague sense of unease but didn’t want to ask to be driven home. A large, older boy appeared and flopped himself down on the sofa.

“That’s my brother,” Chuck said. “He’s a linebacker at Clingman.”

Chuck’s brother sat a minute, then went to the fridge. The door opened, then slammed shut.

“Dude,” he stood in the doorway to the den, all 6’7” of him, thick-necked and high-shouldered, filling it. He held the empty twelve-pack container. “Go get more.”

“I’m not old enough.” Chuck stood, not as tall and definitely not as broad.

“You were old enough to take the last beer.”

They stared at each other. The room seemed to heat. No one else lifted their gaze from MTV.

Chuck’s brother opened his wallet, pulled out his ID and tossed it in Chuck’s face. “Go. Get. More.”

“Come on, Chuck.” Kelly jumped up.

Chuck and Dwayne had downed at least four beers. Chuck’s driving wasn’t the best in the first place.

“We could walk,” Alison said.

They all turned.

Her neck and face flushed. “We walk to lots of places in Scotland.”

She stood.

“You’re cool to stay here.” Chuck’s brother, still in the doorway.

“Seriously, Alison, it’s cool.” Chuck said. “Me and Kelly will go. They turned for the door. Alison sat. As the screen door thwacked shut behind them, Chuck’s brother turned to Dwayne. “You should go with them. Make sure he doesn’t fuck it up.”

Dwayne didn’t hesitate. Alison bent to put on her shoes, but by the time she had one on, the engine rumbled, followed by the scrape of metal as Chuck pulled out of the driveway too fast.

“Might as well take that shoe off,” the linebacker said. “They’ll be a while.”

Martha Quinn on MTV, and then a beer pulled out from under the sofa.

“Want to see my trophies?” he asked.

Dad’s voice in her head: say yes.

His trophies were in the basement, converted to one huge room for Chuck’s brother, the linebacker at Clingman. Full ride, he said.

Alison sat on the bed, facing the trophies. He sat next to her, the mattress sinking under his weight. Hand on shoulders, pressing. Lips on her neck.

She pressed back against him, turned her head to the side. “No.”

And then she was on her back, with his huge body above her.

“It’ll feel good. Give it a minute.” Hand on zipper, hand against her skin. “Feels good now, doesn’t it?” She pushed against him again. He did not seem to notice.

“No. No. No” Quieter and quieter, and then absolute stillness. Eyes closed. Ceiling fan shifting the air above. The heat of his thighs on hers. In in in in. Huge, broad chest pushing against hers.

Weight, lifting. The sound of bare feet in shag-carpet. Billy Idol, “With A Rebel Yell,” drifting down. The pop of a can.

He hadn’t even undone her pink, Oxford cloth button-down shirt. Her bra was still hooked. Shorts and underpants tangled just below her knees. She pulled them up. She stood, Bambi-legged. The room swirled. She tried to orient herself: trophy case to the north, door to the hall at the east, stairs (and him at the top) beyond that, bed to the south, window due west. She slid it open.

Pine straw on the flower bed underfoot, then grass, in need of being cut, tickling the ankles. Pavement still holding some of the day’s heat but having released enough to be safe for skin. Left right left right. No Papa. No walking stick. No compass. Left right left right. No Vic. No fags. No flask. A left turn. A right. A sign at the edge of the neighborhood. Pine woods across the street. Curved road. Half an hour. The swirl of air as each car passed. Clunk of beer can on the road ahead, a whoop, arms out the window of a brown Pinto. No one slowed or stopped. Grateful for that. An hour, bare feet beginning to bleed. She paused, looked skyward, there on the corner with woods on all sides. Above, a bird circled, wings outstretched, then a flap, movement forward. She followed until she saw a gas station ahead, the one they passed on the way to school.

Feet on the grass in front of her house, she paused. The only light on was in Mum’s bathroom. Alison imagined her in the bath with her usual cigarette in one hand, drink in the other. Safe to come in.

She’d have showered had she not been afraid that Mum would enter, pull back the curtain, somehow know what had happened. Why hadn’t Alison done something different, gone with the others, not gone out with them at all? So many small things she could have done differently to make things add up to a different series of events.

Alison climbed into bed as she was, unbuttoning the blouse, unhooking the bra, lowering her shorts and the purple underpants with the butterfly, feeling her own skin. Too much. She pulled on her pajamas, curled into herself.

In the morning, just as the sun was rising, when she felt sure Mum would still be asleep for several hours, she slid out from under the covers and climbed out the window. She could have walked out the front door, into the clear, early light of day. Sneaking this way felt right.

She crouched at the edge of the creek, sunk her hands into the soil. At first, her fingers dug in aimlessly, and then she began to scoop out the clay, piling it beside her, as though she were five again, there on the shore beside the rocks, Papa beside her with his dark shoes, shirt loose at the neck.

The form came, a head. A twig fallen from a hickory became the tool to shape eyes, nose, lips, to carve hair. Alison lifted the bust and set her in a shaft of sun. Orange earth masked her hands and forearms. She crouched again, digging in, wiping the clay compulsively further up her arms, then on her face, covering every piece of exposed skin. The sun, rising, heating, began to dry the clay. Delicate cracks formed, as though she was watching herself age.

She wrapped her crinkly arms around her waist, the closest she could get to the arms of an old woman. She was crone come to hold herself.

She rocked, dry-eyed, eventually scooting down the bank until she was in the stream. She lay herself down, finding a twisted space between rocks. Submerged.

What would it be like to hold myself here? To return to the place before, or after, or to nothing? She imagined it dark and silent and beautiful.

Her eyes opened first: she could not do it. She could not die. Neither did she particularly want to live.

She struggled up into the sunlight and air, began to rub off the clay: scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing until she was clean, on the outside, at least.

She dripped her way towards the house, through the woods and across the back lawn, leaving a wet, slug-like trail on the window ledge when she slid back in. Though she felt as though she never wanted to be naked again, she stripped off, pulled on her heavy blue sweatpants and pep-rally shirt, gathered her soaked pajamas and last night’s clothes and stuffed them in the washing machine.

Later, Mum cornered her in the laundry room. “What are you hiding?” Sunlight through the window illuminated the crow’s feet around Mum’s eyes.

“Nothing,” Alison said. She pulled the bundle of clothes from the dryer, turned for her room.

That night she said Hail Marys until she slept, asking Mary to petition God to not make her pregnant. She wondered if her mother, her Beautiful Girl, had done the same. She wondered if she’d been beautiful at all and if there had been love, or if she, Alison, had come from a few minutes in a basement in front of a wall of trophies.

In the morning, Alison started a letter to Vic. She scrawled the date in the upper right of the page, day first, then month, a small rebellion against America. ‘Dear Vic,’ she stared at it. What words would she write? What she wanted was to sit on the rock wall with Vic, or across from her on the train, or any-fucking-where. Vic would see, know, feel the whole thing in an instant. They could burrow down together, hold each other.

Instead, Alison gave up on the letter, tiptoed through to the den, lifted three long cigarette ends—they looked as though Mum had taken one puff and given up—and made her way to the woods. When she returned, hours later, Mum told her that Kelly had called. Alison didn’t call her back that day, or the next or the next. The day after that, she didn’t see the Camaro in time to leave. Mum answered the door. Kelly’s voice chirped.

In the back seat, four of them scrunched. Alison sat on Dwayne’s lap. Journey belted out from the speakers; Dwayne’s face pressed against her ear.

“Why’d you sleep with Chuck’s brother?”

Apparently, the linebacker-at-Clingman told Chuck, who told Dwayne. No one else seemed to know.

Her face heated. Her throat constricted. She feared she may vomit there in the back seat of the car while everyone sang along to “Don’t Stop Believing.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“That’s not what he said.”

“I told him no.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” A tiny parting like the sliver of morning light that came through the blackout curtains in Papa’s bedroom. Dwayne wasn’t Vic, but maybe he would do if he understood.

“That’s not what he said.”

She swallowed the bile in her mouth. The car swayed around the curves. The music seemed to get louder. Her stomach rolled and clenched. She turned to Kelly.

“I don’t feel good.” She felt clammy. A cold sweat erupted on her face and neck.

“You don’t look so good,” Kelly said. She made Chuck stop the car, and Alison clambered over everyone to the still air beyond.

“I can walk home.” She felt it miraculous that she managed to let the words out and hold everything else in.

Her head swam as she stood there, still, on the sidewalk, while Kelly tried to tell Dwayne he should walk with Alison and Dwayne said Alison didn’t want him to and, though Alison won’t recall it, she nodded and Dwayne told Chuck to just go, and then, at last, Kelly’s, “I’ll call you,” wafted out the window as they pulled away.

Almost as soon as they left, Alison’s stomach began to settle. Her head steadied itself. Safe. Alone. One foot in front of the other. One breath after the other.

The next morning, she began a new routine. She left at the same time every day, pool bag in hand, and walked until she was out of the sightline of the house. She looped back to the woods, a sketchbook, a book, stolen cigarette ends and matches under her towel. She found a shaded place to lie beneath the sheltering branches of a water oak. She embraced the nicotine rush, imagined Vic at her side. She thought of their pact. How silly they’d been, thinking they could somehow reach each other across the miles.

Kelly called a few days later, saying she was sorry they’d left Alison. Alison stood in the dark den; Mum lounged outside on the deck, her belly nearly black already. It was as though she was absorbing all the sun she’d missed over the past forty years.

“I told Chuck to go back but he wouldn’t,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

“After we dropped Dwayne off, Chuck told me you were a slut.”

Alison’s stomach churned.

“I told him you weren’t. He says that about lots of girls.”

Alison wanted to hang up, to run away into the woods; she was rooted in, unable to speak or move.

“I told Mama, and she told me that if Chuck is the kind of boy who says that about girls, I shouldn’t be with him, no matter how much I like him.” Kelly hardly took a breath. “She said he probably says that about me, too. I don’t know if she’s right, but I broke up with him anyway.”

Though Alison was grateful that Kelly didn’t ask for details, she stuck to the woods during the day. In the evenings, she lied her way through the superficial questions her parents asked: how was the pool and Kelly and so on. “Fine, and fine, and fine.”

Gradually, Dwayne and the linebacker sunk to the riverbed of Alison’s core, resting beside Andrew and the gypsies, with her always, though not consciously present.

~

Fall rolled in: crisp air and stadium lights in the darkness. A sense of being part of something, there in the stands, even though she didn’t fully understand the game. Homecoming: a king and queen would be crowned, American royalty. Neither Kelly nor Alison had dates for the dance. They headed for Pizza Hut. The parking lot was even more crowded than usual. Apparently not that many people needed to go to the dance to see the royal couple crowned. Kelly and Alison squeezed into a booth with a boy Kelly liked, Anthony, and his friend Les. They settled into pepperoni pizza and cokes and Morris Day on the jukebox.

“Let’s ride around,” Les said, swallowing the last of the pizza.

“We could just stay here,” Alison said.

“Come on, Alison.” Kelly swatted her hand across the table. “It’s too crowded. Plus look at that line for tables. We’d be mean to stay.”

They would. “Okay,” Alison said.

Breeze through the windows. Four lanes, bright streetlights, Chaka Khan on the radio. Kelly sang along, loudly, off-key. Alison joined her as Les turned off Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and then off the side road, bumping onto grass, towards the woods.

“Where are we going?” Alison asked, hand squeezing her own leg.

“To see the stars,” Les said.

They spilled out and Alison stood with her head cocked back, looking up, while Les opened the hatch. When she turned around, he’d put down the back seat, and the four of them sat, side by side.

The Big Dipper, Orion. Alison let him point, did not say that she knew all of the constellations, did not mention that she’d even seen the Aurora Borealis, or that on black winter nights away from the city, the sky sometimes became so crowded that the constellations were hard to distinguish in the busy, starlit sky.

“Bet they’re not this good in Ireland.”

“Probably not,” she said. She thought of Vic.

He kissed her. Gently. Like Vic. The car rose a little as Kelly and Anthony slid out and away into the woods. Les’s hands began to move up her stomach and on, and when he tried to ease her onto her back, though she was rigid, she neither fought nor spoke.

She closed her eyes. Lay perfectly still, frozen. This was wrong; she was bad to be letting it happen. Deep within, a stronger drive insisted that she must give this boy what he wanted. It was how she had survived this long, not with boys, but with Mum. Just do what she wants. This was the only way she knew to keep her fragile sense of belonging.

In the distance, an owl hooted. Whisper of wind in pine. Up and up and up she travelled, away from this boy breathing hard, from the prickly sweat on her arms, from this tight, tight throat. It was as though this was a continuation of her body being handed, person to person: baby, child, girl-woman, her life one long crowd surf.

Les, there, over her physical body. She let go, became separate to herself, aloft in the night sky. Andromeda. Orion, the hunter, arrow poised.

When he finished, lifted his weight from her, kissed her gently on the cheek. Alison opened her eyes: white cloud over the moon, cool beads of mist. Stars. Stardust. Vic’s oldest sister once said that her science teacher had told them that they were all made of stardust—glitter and sparkle since the beginning of time. Vic had scoffed at the notion. Alison had secretly loved it even if she couldn’t believe it. Now, though, she wished to be like an exploding star, to shatter into a billion pieces, become dust, fall to earth, sink in.

“That was great,” he said.

“Thanks.” She hung her head, buttoned her pants, and when Kelly and Anthony came back, Alison and Les sat precisely where they’d been left, with Les talking about being in a deer stand as though it was part of the mythology of the heavens.

In bed, she Hail Mary’d herself to sleep again, though she wasn’t sure she had faith in anything that might be called God. Each morning, she pulled on her clothes as though she was stepping into a costume for a character in someone else’s story.