The summer I turned twelve, we moved to California. At first, I was thrilled. I had spent my life surrounded by soybean fields and windmills, gray skies and muddy snow, and California was a land of palm trees and glamour. In my hometown, a small suburb outside Indianapolis, my friends’ parents worked at Walmart and the Cargill plant. In California, I imagined, my friends’ parents would be celebrities. Or at least paparazzi. My father’s job transfer was my chance for a life upgrade.
And I was more than ready to press the “restart” button on my life. The transition to middle school had been rough—the girls who had been my friends, who just recently had been unironically playing Barbies in my Little Mermaid–wallpapered bedroom, were now wearing tight T-shirts that hugged their newly risen breasts, bra straps visible through the thin fabric like roads on a map. I wore a training bra, made even more embarrassing by the knowledge that I didn’t yet need it. The shallow bra cups hung empty against my ribcage; if you pressed down, they would deflate like sad balloons. One morning, crouched in a school bathroom stall, I reached up through my baggy T-shirt and stuffed wads of toilet paper into each cup, but as the day progressed the toilet paper grew sweat-damp and itchy, and I ended up in the same bathroom stall at lunch, flushing lumps of toilet paper like giant spitballs down the toilet.
The only friend I would really miss was Lindsay, but our sadness at parting was tempered by excitement that, finally, something dramatic was happening in our lives. In the opening chords of that summer, as the damp heat swelled and gathered strength for its full debut in July, I packed the contents of my bedroom into the cardboard boxes my mother had carted home from the back lot of Payless grocery. Lindsay spent many afternoons flung across my bed, leafing through issues of Seventeen and occasionally proclaiming, “I can’t believe you’re moving! I can’t believe this is happening!” I would chime in about how unfair it was, and eventually she would force herself to start crying, and then I would start crying, and finally we would hug fiercely and promise to be best friends forever and to call each other every day. Lindsay and I had been friends since kindergarten, and I knew I would miss her, but secretly I felt a shivery hunger for the newness that awaited me. I imagined a shinier, more sophisticated version of myself strolling down a breezy school hallway in California, and already in my imaginings there was a new version of Lindsay—yes, a brighter, trendier version—linking her arm through mine.
On the flight to California, my parents gave me the window seat so I could watch the collage of Midwest farms grow smaller and smaller and then disappear into a scrim of wispy clouds. I’d been on a plane once before, as a toddler when we flew to Utah for my aunt and uncle’s wedding, but I had no memory of that trip. Apparently, I’d had a mild ear infection and screamed the entire flight. “Hopefully this will be a better experience,” my mother said, flashing me something between a smile and a smirk as we settled into our seats. My father laughed, and my cheeks grew hot.
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t be embarrassed,” my mother said, making matters worse. “We’re just teasing you.” I jammed my headphones into my ears and turned toward the window, hating that my emotions showed so plainly across my face. Midway through the flight my stomach began to hurt. I felt like a brave, scorned character in a novel as I nibbled salt off miniature pretzels and tried to ignore the warm waves of pain below my belly button. Was this what grief felt like? Was this homesickness? I sipped Diet Coke from my small plastic cup and decided that if I had to throw up, only then would I tell my mother.
The flight seemed never-ending until suddenly we were descending into Burbank. I pressed my nose against the window. We had left Indianapolis at ten in the morning, but because of the time change it was not yet noon here. The harsh sunlight made me squint. It seemed brighter than the daylight back home. Never before had I seen so many buildings—miles and miles of buildings crammed together, vast acres of concrete and asphalt. I spotted a few squares of grass—parks? soccer fields?—but mostly, we were landing into a patchwork of brown and gray.
We disembarked via a staircase directly onto the tarmac, which initially seemed glamorous but actually scared me a little. I stepped carefully, gripping the railing, my stomach better but still not quite right. I was already crafting a narrative for Lindsay: In California, everyone exits the plane like a movie star. Later my mother would explain this wasn’t a California thing, just a small-airport thing. There was a bigger airport in LA, but this smaller airport was closer to Port Hueneme, our new town. The sun beat on my shoulders; California was a dry heat, with a breeze that swept strands of hair into my mouth. I would not tell Lindsay that the airport was much smaller than I expected, with fraying carpet and a stale smell.
In the airport bathroom, I yanked down my pants and was horrified. Had I shit myself without knowing? No, no—this was blood. What I’d been waiting for, what my mother had been asking me about for months. “Mom!” I shouted.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong? You have to undo the lock.” So I did, and then my mother was wedging herself into the bathroom stall, the metal clasp of her purse banging loudly against the door. I simultaneously wanted to hide from her and cling to her, like I used to, my little-girl self hugging her legs. “I started,” I mumbled, and the concern on her face shifted to understanding. Still I glimpsed traces of concern underneath, which I thought at the time related to the logistics of getting me a fresh pair of underwear. But I realize now it had more to do with the knowledge that a door had been opened, not just for me but also for her as my mother, and she could see farther through the doorway to the vast, overwhelming potential of worries and heartaches that awaited.
“It’s okay,” she said, stroking my hair. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
But she wasn’t right back. Around me shoes shuffled, suitcases rolled, toilets flushed, sinks turned on and off, doors banged open and shut, and still my mother did not return. I wiped at the blood on my underpants with a fistful of toilet paper, only making the stain worse. By the time an unfamiliar voice called my name, I was crying.
“Madison? You in here, honey? I have something from your mom.”
I raised one arm above the stall. A folded bundle slid under the door—clean underwear and a maxi pad in a bright-green wrapper. I pushed my stained underwear into the tiny trashcan labeled Napkin Disposal, an amenity I’d never paid much attention to before. When I emerged, I saw to my embarrassment that she was waiting for me, a lady in a security uniform with a friendly smile. She walked me to baggage claim, explaining that my mother was not allowed back into the terminal after she’d exited. “It’s like that everywhere,” she said. “National regulation. Where are you from?”
“Indiana.”
“Yep, it’s the rules in Indiana too,” she said, as if I had been arguing.
“There they are.” I pointed to my parents at the luggage carousel. I wanted nothing more than escape. The security woman handed me a Hershey’s bar. “Midol and chocolate really help,” she said. “Welcome to the club, sweetheart.” She winked and disappeared back into the terminal. I was too embarrassed to say thank you; I stuffed the Hershey’s bar into my backpack, where I would discover it weeks later, melted and rehardened into a deformed shape.
The farther we drove from the airport, the more distraught I began to feel. California seemed too much like Indiana. We passed strip malls with the same big-box stores and fast-food chains that beckoned from highways back home. The sky was more gray than blue, and yes, there were palm trees, but they were depressing palm trees, fronds limp and drooping. Some didn’t have fronds at all, like old men gone bald.
Our new house was smaller than our house in Indiana. None of our furniture had arrived, and the empty rooms seemed lonely. We stopped at Walmart to buy air mattresses and toilet paper and a box of maxi pads. “Don’t be embarrassed,” my mother said. “This is something to celebrate.” She put her arm around me and squeezed. I shrugged away. Being irritable kept me from thinking about how unsure and unready I felt for this new life I was standing on the cusp of.
After a dinner of takeout Chinese that we ate straight from the containers, sitting cross-legged picnic-style on the living room carpet, my parents went for a walk along the harbor. It was a chilly, fog-choked night. I stayed home, a decision I immediately regretted but was too proud to remedy by running after them. I thought about calling Lindsay, but I wanted to keep alive the illusion of my enchanted life in California. So I braided and unbraided and rebraided my hair, idly studying the ceiling in my new bedroom. My air mattress had a hole, and I could feel it gradually deflating beneath me. I placed my palms on my bra cups and pressed down; my chest was still flat.
•••••••
The next morning I ventured down to the beach, which is where I met Grace. My parents were busy directing the movers and beginning the tedious process of unpacking boxes, so I yelled that I was going for a walk and slipped out. I wandered up and down a few streets—Shoreline and Seashell and Beachfront. The houses were eerily uniform, the yards small rectangles of too-green grass surrounded by iron fencing; Californians, it seemed, loved fences. Eventually, I discovered a bike path that wound from our neighborhood to the sand dunes.
My first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean featured Grace, a small-silhouetted figure walking along the waves. She had a curious gait, bent slightly forward with her shoulders hunched, but that morning there was a chill in the air, so it’s possible my shoulders were hunched, too. I remember thinking that she looked normal. A girl around my age. A potential friend.
California, I suddenly felt sure, would be my rescue after all. I gazed out at the steel-gray ocean stretching to the blurred horizon. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such magnificent enormity. California was not like Indiana, not at all. I took off my sandals and squeezed my toes into the cold sand. The waves rolled in and broke along the shore with an unending rhythm. Trudging barefoot toward the normal-looking girl, I thought of my ex-friends back home who stormed the school hallways in linked-armed packs of laughter and perfume, and I felt a surge of giddy confidence. Here, in my new life, I would have that too. I would belong.
When I got within shouting distance, I called out a greeting, but Grace did not turn. I jogged clumsily through the sand until I got close enough to reach out and touch her shoulder. She whirled around, her eyes frightened and a little wild, and it was then I realized she was older than me. She looked fourteen, fifteen, maybe even sixteen. My confidence faltered, like an engine stuttering, but I pressed onward. “Hi,” I said, out of breath. “I’m Madison.”
She was silent. The wind twisted her long, dark hair into a tangled mess of curls that she didn’t bother pushing out of her eyes.
“I saw you walking and I, um, thought maybe we could be friends. I don’t know anyone yet. I just moved here yesterday.”
Suddenly a smile spread across her face. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. Perhaps the oddness of her statement should have been a clue, but I was so happy to have found a friend that I barely registered her words.
A wave rushed in and swept across our feet. The shock of cold made me jump. She asked, “Do you want to meet my friend Ezzie?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to downplay my excitement. I could hardly believe my luck. My first full day in California, and I had found two friends already. A long summer of sleepovers and sunbathing and gossip unfurled before me. By the time school started, we’d be a firmly enmeshed threesome.
“This way,” Grace said, taking off in the direction I’d just come. She was tall, with a fast, long-legged stride.
“What’s your name?” I asked, hurrying after her.
“Oh, I’m Grace,” she said, like an afterthought, as if everything between us had been established long before. We crested the sand dunes and headed back along the bike path. Grace, it turned out, lived just down the block from my new house. She walked a few paces ahead of me but kept glancing back over her shoulder, as if to make sure I was still following.
Her house was painted the same shade of gray as mine, and the inside was nearly as sparse. I glimpsed a couch, a small TV, a coffee table, and on the wall a few framed photos and an ornately carved cross. “My room’s upstairs,” Grace said, taking the stairs two at a time.
Her bedroom, like mine, was at the top of the stairs to the right. My first impression was claustrophobia; there was so much stuff. Books crammed two full bookcases and sprung up from the floor in leaning towers. Pencil drawings of dragons and fairies covered each wall in a chaotic notebook-paper collage. Stuffed animals stared, glassy eyed, from a massive pile on the bed. I crossed the room, drawn to the weak sunlight filtering in through the window.
Like mine, Grace’s bedroom window looked out into the backyard. I was surprised to see they had a pool—except it was drained, nothing but a sloped concrete hole carpeted with dead leaves. There was something unsettling about a barren swimming pool in Southern California in the height of summer. I turned away from the window. “When’s your friend coming?”
“Here she is,” Grace said, walking towards me, cradling something alive in her hands—a small creature, a hamster maybe? I stepped back but Grace kept coming, her hands outstretched like an offering. It wasn’t a hamster, I realized—it was a rat. Its long, hairless tail twitched.
“Madison, meet Esmerelda,” Grace said. “Ezzie for short.”
I took another half step backwards. Grace brought the rat to her chest, stroking its black fur. She bent her head close to the rat’s face. “Ezzie,” she said. “This is our new friend Madison.”
The rat trembled, sniffing the air. Its restlessness made me anxious. I expected it to nibble at Grace’s fingers, or leap out of her hands to the floor and scurry up my legs. I imagined its claws pressing into my bare skin and shuddered, wishing I had worn jeans instead of shorts.
“Do you want to hold her?” Grace asked.
“No! Um, thank you, but I’ve never really liked rodents.” This was obviously the wrong thing to say, but Grace didn’t seem offended.
“Ezzie’s really sweet,” Grace said. “Believe me, she never bites or scratches. I’ve had her since she was a little baby. She’s an old girl now. Almost three, huh, Ezzie?” She reached up and set the rat on her shoulder. It immediately grew still, hanging limply from its belly, front and back legs dangling. Its black fur glistened as if oily.
“Maybe next time,” I said, edging towards the bedroom door. “I just remembered, my mom wanted me to come straight home and help unpack. I’ll see you later.” And I fled.
Passing back through the living room, I saw something I hadn’t noticed on my way in—
a giant glass cage, big enough for a dog to sleep in. It was empty. I paused, curious, but then I heard heavy footsteps coming from the kitchen, so I hurried out the front door and into the timid sunshine. The ocean breeze smelled like salt and decay.
•••••••
That night, I called Lindsay. “This girl is so weird,” I told her. “You have no idea. Her best friend is a rat!” Lindsay snorted. Before long, we were both breathless with laughter. I described the strange cage in the living room and the chaos of Grace’s bedroom and the creepy dredged swimming pool, embellishing details as I went along.
“You need to keep hanging out with her,” Lindsay said. “This is, like, so entertaining. I’ve been dying of boredom since you left.” She asked if I’d met any celebrities.
“Not yet,” I said, not explaining that I lived two hours from Hollywood. I let her think that maybe tomorrow I would walk into my neighborhood Starbucks and bump into a camera crew filming a reality show.
Instead, when I went to Starbucks a week later, I bumped into Grace. She was coming out of the pet shop next door. “Madison!” she called, waving, and then she half walked, half ran over and gave me a hug. Her arms around me were surprisingly strong, and she smelled like lavender soap.
“Do you want to come over?” she asked. I was about to make up an excuse, but then I thought of Lindsay and how I didn’t have any cool stories from California yet. All I had was this strange high school girl who wanted to be my friend. So I said, “Okay.”
It was another gray-skied day, and everything looked dirty. We walked mostly in silence until I asked Grace about the plastic bag she was carrying from the pet store.
“Food for Ezzie?”
“No, this is for Lucy,” she said.
“Wait—you have another rat?”
“Lucy isn’t mine; he’s my dad’s. And he’s not a rat. He’s a snake.”
Inwardly, I shuddered. Snakes! The only thing creepier than rats, except maybe spiders. I almost asked Grace if they had spiders as pets, too, but my attention was snagged by something else. He? “If the snake’s male, why does he have a girl’s name?”
“Oh.” Grace smiled, as if I were a little kid who didn’t understand anything. “Lucy is a nickname. It’s short for Lucifer.”
Lucifer? “Like the devil?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. But there’s no need to worry. My dad says that those who have been anointed by God can’t die from a serpent’s venom. You’ve been baptized, right?”
“Yeah.” In Indiana we had gone sporadically to a Lutheran church down the street, mostly for special services like Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. Then, in fifth grade, some of my friends began attending youth group at a Presbyterian Church on Wednesday evenings, so I went along too. We drank cream soda out of plastic cups and ate cookies someone’s mom had baked, and Pastor Rob—the young pastor, younger than any of our parents or schoolteachers, with gelled hair and Converse sneakers—would lead Bible study. Each month was a different theme, patience and charity and humility, and we steadfastly worked our way through the text, reading aloud. It wasn’t quite like school because Pastor Rob never called on anyone who didn’t want to read; he only took volunteers. Too nervous, I never volunteered. In that room, in that church, I felt like an obvious outsider, even as I sat knee-to-knee beside my friends, with the same Preteen Devotional Companion open on my lap, wearing the same brand of jeans and the same style sweater, my hair pulled back by bobby pins instead of barrettes because barrettes had been deemed no longer cool, giggling at the same jokes and whispering together as we washed our hands in the bathroom about how cute Pastor Rob was, because, of course, all the girls, including me, had a crush on him.
But it seemed to me that an invisible barrier set me apart from everyone else. Perhaps because I was only pretending, acting the role I was trying so hard to get. Youth group was more about the frantic ache to belong than it was about religion. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God. But, if honest, I would have admitted that I wasn’t sure I did believe in Him, either. Religion seemed tucked away high on a shelf, out of my reach. If I was uninterested, it was mostly because it did not seem particularly relevant to my life.
We walked in silence for a while, past the Mexican restaurant with three-dollar burritos and homemade tortillas, past N-V-ous Hair Salon and the frozen yogurt shop. A handful of gulls wheeled in the air. I had not yet been pooped on but made sure to always have tissues in my pocket because it could happen at any moment. You couldn’t escape the seagulls. According to Grace, they flocked the campuses at lunchtime, perching on trash cans and fighting over potato chip bags. Grace was probably the type of person who made friends with the seagulls and talked to them. I pictured her standing in the middle of the quad with her arms outstretched, seagulls resting on her shoulders and wrists, one balancing atop her head, like a movie I’d seen once about a woman who raised carrier pigeons. Except seagulls were so much bigger than carrier pigeons. Heavier. Now I pictured Grace with a red face and wobbly arms, desperately trying to hold the seagulls up, and I laughed.
Grace smiled, waiting to be filled in on the joke. She was so trusting. So certain that I wanted to be her friend, too. Why? Was it because I was from the Midwest? Did I exude some hopelessly uncool vibe? I imagined this innate uncoolness, mustard yellow and dense, hovering around me like a cloud of gnats. Grace had recognized it. That was why she had linked us together so swiftly, inviting me to her house moments after we met, cheerfully introducing me to her weird pet rat. The situation made me angry. I didn’t want to be linked with her. I wasn’t like her.
“I thought of an inside joke,” I said dismissively. “With my friends back home. You wouldn’t understand.”
I expected hurt to flash across Grace’s face, but she seemed nonplussed. “Okay,” she said, returning her gaze to the sidewalk. Her dark, tangled hair trailed behind her like a mass of seaweed, tendrils lifting in the breeze.
The street stretched before us, still four or five blocks until we turned off toward our neighborhood. “What do you have in there?” I asked, gesturing to the bag she carried from the pet store.
“Some dead mice. Food for Lucy.”
I imagined them jostling about in the bag between us, their beady eyes and tiny claws and long tails, and I shuddered. In eighth grade, back home, the science classes all had to dissect mice. It was the one thing I was looking forward to missing.
“Wait! So snakes eat rodents?” I asked Grace.
She nodded.
“But what about . . . I mean . . . rats are rodents, right?”
Grace beamed. “Oh, Madison, I knew you liked Ezzie! She thought she didn’t make a good impression, but I keep telling her you liked her. And now you’re worrying about her. I promise, she is perfectly safe up in my room. I always close my door, and Dad keeps Lucy in his cage whenever he’s not practicing. Ever since he escaped last fall, we’ve all been extra careful. Plus, Dad installed that extra latch on the cage.”
“Oh. Um, that’s good.” I remembered the large cage I’d seen in the living room of Grace’s house, and realized it was for the snake. Lucifer must be a very large snake. I didn’t particularly want to go over to Grace’s house anymore, but I needed more to tell Lindsay. I needed to keep her interest. She’d been talking lately about this girl Fiona Cummings, once even abruptly getting off the phone with me because Fiona was calling. I desperately needed Lindsay to stay my friend, at least through the summer. I needed someone to talk to. She was the tether to my old life. Without her, who would I have left? My parents. And, I guess, Grace. Not nearly enough.
“Madison?” Grace said, halting abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk. I stopped, too, feeling tired and annoyed. A blister was forming on my little toe from my new sandals.
“I was going to wait to ask you this,” Grace said. She had a faraway look. “But since you already care so much about Esmerelda, I might as well ask you now.”
Curiosity prickled my scalp. “What?”
“Would you—” She hesitated, bit her lip. “Never mind. It’s too soon.”
Now I needed to know. “What is it? Just tell me.”
Grace pushed a tuft of hair behind her ear. When she spoke, her voice was nearly a whisper. “Would you be able to pet sit?”
My heart sank. Bor-ring. I’d been a pet sitter for lots of neighbors back home. I bent down to loosen the strap on my sandal.
“We’re going on a trip,” Grace continued, “for two weeks, into the wilderness. No contact with the outside world. So, we need someone responsible to care for the animals. Someone trustworthy. Ezzie gets scared of strangers, and sometimes she won’t eat when I’m not around, but I can tell she likes you.”
I glanced up. “Um, I don’t know. How many pets do you have?”
“Just Ezzie and Lucy. And snakes don’t need to eat that often. Ezzie eats twice a day, but she’s really easy to feed. And she’s great company. You can hang out in my room with her as much as you want.” She shifted the plastic bag to her other hand. I tried not to think about the jumbled mice inside. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “Plus, my dad’ll pay you.”
That changed everything. Back home, I was lucky to get paid in cookies or five-dollar Dunkin Donuts gift cards. My mother said that feeding the Donaldsons’ cat or taking Mrs. Hansen’s golden retriever for walks, doing little favors for each other, was part of being a good neighbor. Right before we moved, I spent nearly all my allowance money on a new swimsuit.
“Sure,” I told Grace. I stood up and tried to seem as capable as possible. “I can pet sit for you. No problem.”
Grace looked as if she might burst into tears. She threw her arms around me. The plastic bag jostled against my hip, making me shiver. “I knew you were the one I’d been waiting for,” she said.
“What?” I asked, but Grace didn’t respond.
I patted her awkwardly on the back. In that moment, I didn’t care that Grace was odd, that I was afraid of snakes, that Lindsay was replacing me with Fiona Cummings. Because, for the first time since I had stepped onto the tarmac at the Burbank airport, I had a plan. I would feed Grace’s weird animals while her family was out of town. I would make enough money to do fun things with my new friends. And then, surely, these new friends would sweep into my life, like pieces of driftwood washing onto the shore. It was something my mother had heard on Oprah once and repeated ever since: “You must make room in your life for the future.”
Grace pulled away and clapped her hands. “Ezzie will be so happy when I tell her the news!”
Come on in, future, I thought. My life has plenty of room.
•••••••
Once Grace and her family left on their trip, I ended up spending more time at their house than I had expected to. Actually, I spent a lot of time there. There’s something about another person’s empty house that seems less lonely than your own. My parents were at work for most of the day; at first my mother came home for lunch, but I told her she didn’t need to worry about me. She worked the next town over, and it took at least twenty minutes to get from our house to her office. So, she started working through lunch and coming home an hour earlier. Before she left each morning, she would make a sandwich, seal it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge with a note, Have a good day! Be safe! Usually she drew a smiley face. They looked like fake smiles, too big, trying too hard. I promised her I wouldn’t go swimming in the ocean when I was home alone. Even though I’d been taking swim lessons since I was a baby, my mother worried I would drown. “It’s different than the ponds back home, Maddy,” she said, her tone serious. “Riptides can pull even the strongest swimmer out to sea.”
So instead, I would go over to Grace’s. At first, I wandered around the empty rooms, opening cabinets and closets at random, searching—for what, I didn’t know. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Grace’s family had cereal and spaghetti sauce in the pantry, towels and sheets in the linen closet. No knick-knacks, no clutter. I tried the door to the master bedroom, but it was locked.
I spent most of my time in Grace’s room, hanging out with Esmerelda, just as Grace had predicted. Partly because her room had the most to explore, and partly because I wanted to keep my distance from Lucifer. I dreaded feeding him.
On my fifth day of pet sitting, I found Grace’s journal, a small notebook tied with pink ribbon. She kept it in her top desk drawer—not a very good hiding place. Almost as if she wanted me to find it. At least, that was what I told myself as I undid the ribbon and opened the cover. Doodles of dragons and fairies danced around the margins. Her handwriting was surprisingly neat.
•••••••
Every day, I pray for a human friend. Dad says that all prayers will be answered in time. I am trying to be patient, but sometimes I get so tired of waiting. Dad says that I need to trust in . . .
I closed the journal, my gut aching with recognition. Even before we moved to California, I had tossed all my pennies into fountains and wished to be loved. Trudging down school hallways, fidgeting through youth group meetings, leaning in from the circle’s edge, I had yearned for someone to notice me and understand me. I had yearned to be chosen.
In Grace’s words, I could see myself. And I didn’t want to be anything like Grace. I’m not anything like Grace.
I slid the journal back into the drawer. “Your owner is lame, Esmerelda,” I said. “Praying for a human friend? It’s pitiful. Not worth reading.”
Esmerelda’s whiskers twitched. I slid a baby carrot through the bars of her cage, and she grabbed it with her paws.
It was time, I decided, to feed Lucifer.
Grace had left careful instructions: get the bag of mice from the freezer in the garage, and thaw one mouse at a time in a bowl of warm water. “We don’t cut his food up for him,” she had explained. “Snakes’ jaws aren’t fused together at the front like humans’ are.” I yanked open the freezer door. It smelled bleak and sterile; frost furred the ceiling. Tugging the pet store bag out from under a package of frozen peas, I tried to decide if it would be better to use a tissue or a paper towel to extricate one of the mice—no way was I using my bare hand. I ended up taking the entire bag with me, holding one corner with the tips of my fingers.
When I flicked on the living room light, Lucifer was slithering up the side of his cage, as if trying to escape. His belly was pale, and the rest of his body was dark silver. I had no idea what type of snake he was. Poisonous? No. Surely not. But doubt trickled into my thoughts. What was it Grace had said? “Those who have been anointed by God can’t die from a serpent’s venom.” Not very reassuring. Lucifer could definitely be poisonous.
Suddenly, it was too much. I looked at the door of Lucifer’s cage, at the bag of mice in my hand, and knew I could not open the cage and fling a mouse inside. No way I could watch the snake unhinge his jaw and swallow the mouse whole. I left the bag of mice on the kitchen counter, escaped out the back door, and ran down the winding path to the ocean.
The waves were high, roaring up onto the sand, leaving a narrow strip of beach. I plopped down onto a dune and hugged my legs against my chest, wondering if I had ever felt so lonely. I was turning into Grace, spending all my time with a pet rat, weaving conversations from its scuttling movements and twitching whiskers. Pitiful. Boring. Scared of caged snakes and dead mice. I closed my eyes and fell back into the sand, trying to decide whether crying would make me feel better or worse.
“You’re not supposed to sit there.”
I blinked and sat up. A figure loomed over me, blocking the sun.
“You’re supposed to stay off the sand dunes,” the boy said. He looked older than me—maybe Grace’s age—with shaggy blond hair, orange swim trunks, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off.
“Oh, um, sorry.” I scrambled to stand, wiping sand from my butt. He was a head taller and smelled of sunscreen. We stood there silently, and I felt certain he was going to turn away and head back to his friends, who I could see now were looking at us from farther down the beach, making visors with their hands. But then he grinned, his eyes crinkling nearly closed, and said, “I was just messing with you. Are you new around here or something?”
I nodded. “Yeah, we just moved in down the street. I’m Madison.”
“Connor,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand. He had a nice smile. One of his front teeth was slightly crooked, and it made him seem carefree. As his hand closed around mine, I felt bold. I was nothing like Grace. This place was nothing like Indiana. I let my lips play into a smile and cocked my hip. “This might sound weird, but do you want to help me feed a snake?”
•••••••
“Whoa,” Connor breathed appreciatively at the sight of Lucifer. The snake seemed even more agitated now, writhing back and forth across the cage.
“That is a huge-ass snake,” his friend with the faux-hawk said. I had already forgotten both friends’ names. I went to the kitchen for the package of thawed mice, exhilaration thrumming through my veins. All my senses felt sharper, as if I had slid into some higher plane of reality. The boys did rock-paper-scissors to determine who would get to feed Lucifer after I said we could only give him one mouse. The friend wearing the Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt rifled into the package with his bare hand. I closed my eyes queasily. I didn’t want to see the mouse. “Undo the cage door and toss it in,” I said. “I’m going to put this back in the freezer.”
“I’ll come with you,” a voice announced, and when I glanced back, Connor was following me.
The garage was dark. I flipped on the overhead light; Connor turned it off. I felt a shiver of fear, a new type, a not-quite-scary fear. It was a delicious fear lit with anticipation. I opened the freezer door, shoved the bag inside, shut the door. When I turned around, Connor was standing right there. His face inches from mine.
“You’re pretty,” he said. It was the first time a boy had ever called me that. How many hours had Lindsay and I spent in front of mirrors, poking at our faces, gleaning beauty tips from magazines, wondering what we could do to make ourselves over so boys would think we were pretty? And now, on this ordinary Thursday afternoon, when I was wearing no makeup and my hair was pulled back in a lazy ponytail, a boy had sauntered into my life and blessed me with that magic phrase. The word bloomed inside me—pretty, pretty, pretty.
Before I could think of a response, his mouth was on mine. I tried to tamp down my surprise. I had never been kissed before, unless you counted Timmy Malone, who pecked me on the lips in third grade on a dare. (I did not count Timmy Malone.) Kissing Connor was altogether different. His lips were warm and insistent, and his mouth tasted of peppermint gum. He pressed against me. His hands gripped my face. A tiny voice in the back of my mind urged, Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe we should get back to the others. But listening to that voice felt like trying to swim against a riptide. It was much easier to close my eyes and kiss Connor back, letting myself be pulled out to sea.
•••••••
It felt like we had only been gone a few minutes, but when Connor and I stumbled out of the dark garage into the sunlit house, we could hear the TV blaring. His friends were sprawled on the couch. When they saw us, one raised his eyebrows and the other said, “Dude!” Whether in approval or annoyance, I couldn’t tell. “I’m getting some water,” I mumbled, escaping towards the kitchen. My lips felt swollen, my cheeks hot.
“How was dinner, Lucy?” I asked, pausing at the cage. With a slow, sickening lurch of my heart, I realized that something was off.
The cage was empty.
The cage door was ajar.
Lucifer was nowhere to be seen.
I yelled, “You guys, come here!” They must have heard the panic in my voice, because all three of them shuffled into the living room. “I told you to latch the cage door,” I said.
“What?” Faux-hawk said.
“We did. We latched it,” said Sonic the Hedgehog, but his expression was uncertain.
I gestured behind me. “Well, then the snake was able to unlatch it. Because he’s not in the cage.”
Connor’s eyes widened. “You mean the snake escaped? It’s somewhere in the house?”
I nodded. “We have to find him.” And then I realized—Esmerelda.
I pushed past the boys and raced upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. My heart thudded like a pitiless drum in my ears. I imagined Lucifer coiled around Ezzie’s cage, preparing to strike through the bars. I prayed I had left Ezzie in her cage, where at least she would have some protection. Had I closed Grace’s bedroom door?
“Hey!” a voice called from downstairs. “We gotta go! Sorry about the snake!” The front door slammed shut.
Grace’s bedroom door was closed. I sighed with relief and turned the knob. The door squeaked as I pushed it open.
“Ezzie, I was so worried about you!” I strode across the room to her cage. It took me a few seconds to realize that she was motionless. Usually, she was full of shivery, twitching movement. But now her black fur was eerily still. Peering closer, I saw her eyes were like beads of glass. Lifeless.
I sank down to the floor. Logically, I knew I had not killed her. I remembered Grace saying she was old in rat years. And the bedroom door had been closed; there was no way Lucifer had gotten in. Yet, it felt like my fault. I had rushed forward into the riptide. Because of me, the devil had been let out of his cage. Maybe Ezzie had sensed the looming danger. Maybe that’s why her heart stopped beating.
Eventually, I called my mother, who called animal control, who came and found Lucifer. If you looked hard enough, you could glimpse him in the empty swimming pool, slithering through dead leaves. I asked the animal control lady how he had gotten outside. She shrugged. “You must have missed an open window somewhere, hon. Even a crack these guys can slither through.” She reassured me that the snake snare would not be harmful and that they would put him back in his cage.
I chose not to watch Lucifer’s capture. I went inside, turned off the TV. Plodded upstairs. Curled up on Grace’s bed. I felt much older than I had been that morning.
Later, I wrapped Esmerelda in some pink tissue paper, placed her gently inside a shoebox, and buried her in Grace’s backyard. I wanted to wait until Grace came home but worried about leaving Esmerelda unburied for too long. I almost put her in the freezer. But I didn’t like to think of her shoved in there—frozen, beside the mice, like any other snake food.
•••••••
Before the summer ended, Grace’s family moved away. I never got to talk to her and explain. When they returned from their trip, I decided to wait a few days. That stretched into a week, then two weeks before I finally went over and rang the doorbell. I told myself I was giving things time to blow over. Part of me was scared to face Grace, and ashamed, and part of me was hoping that if I just waited long enough, the whole mess would go away. She would run up to me on the beach or outside of Starbucks, throw her thin arms around me, and say that it didn’t matter, that I was still the one she had been waiting for.
But then one morning a moving van rumbled down our street and stopped in front of their house. I abandoned my cereal and ran over in my pajamas, but it was just the movers there, loading furniture. Grace and her family had already left. The movers said they weren’t allowed to tell me where the truck was headed.
My parents wound up leaving, too. My mother missed the change of seasons, and my father missed the friends he had grown up with. They stayed just long enough for me to graduate high school and qualify for in-state tuition at Cal State Channel Islands. Then they moved back to Indiana. I always thought I would join them eventually. But I graduated college, found a job, met someone, and I’m still here.
Yesterday, Grace’s father was on the local news. They showed a photograph of a stern-looking man with a big gray beard and round glasses. No mention of his family. All they reported was that the former pastor of a Port Hueneme church had died after refusing medical treatment for a snake bite. “Apparently, he conducted snake handling in front of his congregation,” the shiny-haired news anchor said, and the co-anchor raised her perfectly arched eyebrows in surprise. How strange! Then they chuckled together about the next story, which featured video footage of a surfing Jack Russell terrier.
Sometimes, driving to work, I gaze out at the steely waves rolling to shore and try to remember what it was like, the first time I ever saw the ocean. The smudged horizon in the distance. The sheer enormity. I try to recapture the awe I felt, expanding inside my chest, like light flooding a darkened room. But what I remember is my first glimpse of Grace, a small figure silhouetted against the waves. I remember trudging through the sand towards her, brimming with nervous hope. Reaching out my hand to touch her shoulder. Filled with certainty, for just a moment, that all my prayers had been answered.