Beware the Wild (13 page)

“My favorite.” She snatches a cherry straight from the bag and I thank Fisher for knowing his sister so well.

At home, she puts on an oddly appealing mix of Mumford & Sons, Grateful Dead, and Phish. There's no one else home, so we turn it up until the clock on the wall gives an occasional shiver. And then she's dancing. She twirls on bare feet, her long curls dripping behind her. She gathers the flour and butter, the rolling pin and the pastry cutter, and lays them on the counter. Every step is part of her dance.

I've never been much for dancing. Moving without a specific purpose makes me feel awkward and vulnerable. On a volleyball court, every movement is calculated and predictable. One thing leads to another in this reactive choreography. But dancing is another story entirely, and Lenora May will bounce around to anything without a care in the world. Some small part of me has always envied that about her.

She sings and spins, and I can't help but laugh. Then her eyes are on me and her smile is brilliant. She pulls my arms and twirls me around the way she's done so many times before.

“I dare you not to feel this music in your soul, Sterling.” She two-steps around me, pushing my arms into the appropriate form. “Music is where we sing our hearts for others to hear.”

“I scream more than sing, really,” I say, somewhat satisfied that she doesn't already know this about me.

She counters, “Then scream your heart out, Sterling.”

By the time we've got the dough prepped and rolled flat, the filling mixed and chilling, I'm totally caught up in the dance, singing at the top of my lungs.

Lenora May demonstrates how to cut and fold the pastry. She's deft with the butter knife and forgiving of mistakes in a way that reminds me of the first time I tried waxing her eyebrows. The experiment ended in the phrase “It'll grow back,” but I'd felt horrible for weeks. Luckily, the dough recovers faster and when I hold up my first, perfectly folded pastry, she rewards me with a sprinkle of flour on my hair.

“Now, you're a bona fide pâtissier.” She holds up a defensive hand, but she's laughing too hard to plea for mercy.

“What's the plural of pâtissier?” I ask, tossing flour into her curls.

“Pâtissiers, of course!”

“When is there ever an ‘of course' with French?”

“
Les verbes doivent s'accorder avec leur sujet
,” she cries, invoking Madam and her relentless claim that “verbs must agree with their subjects.”

When the timer buzzes, we load fresh tarts on a tray, swapping them for the baked batch, and prepping more. Slipping the cherry into a tart is almost too easy. There's absolutely no hint of suspicion about her and she doesn't blink when I pinch one tart into the rough shape of a cherry blossom. We work this way, side by side, for a full forty-five minutes. In the end we have fifty-two bite-sized tarts, half filled with peach preserves, half with a bit of semisweet chocolate and fresh cherries.

“This one's for me, right? The May flower?” She repeats the corny joke I told while molding the dough. The tart sits lightly on her palm. It looks more like a sloppy fleur-de-lis than a flower.

This startles me. Before we started, I'd been focused. Tense. Nothing but the embodiment of a plan to expel her from my life. But over the course of the afternoon I relaxed, becoming the Sterling who has a vibrant older sister and begrudgingly loves to dance. The plan—the tart—faded far into the background. I'd nearly forgotten it since putting it in the oven, nearly forgot that she was the enemy.

She brings it to her mouth and blows the steam away, cooing for the cherry to cool quickly and not burn her tongue.

It was that easy: she picked the one I told her was special.

How will it happen?
I wonder.
Will she take one bite and go running into the swamp? Will she wail like a siren? Tear at her hair and transform into something horrid and ugly?
I remember at least one of Old Lady Clary's swamp stories about a woman who roamed the swamp in a white dress, forever looking for small children to lure beyond the fence. Is that what Lenora May will do? Lure others? Am I trading Phin's life for that of the strangers Lenora May will harm next? Or will Fisher be able to help her remember who she was before?

There are so many unknowns and potential consequences. I try to tell myself I'm only responsible for Phin. There's something about that thought that doesn't settle well. I shift on my feet, but the feeling remains, stuck somewhere between my diaphragm and my ribs.

Then the thought I never expected to have:
Should I stop her?

But it's too late.

She bites into the tart. Her reaction is immediate. Her eyes open wide and she drops it to the floor. One hand flies to her mouth, the other reaches for the faucet, for water. She rinses her mouth again and again, spitting into the sink, and when her eyes return to me, they're full of hurt.

“Sterling?” She asks so much with just my name.

I don't have any answers. My guts knot together and I feel sick, sick, sick.

“No,” Lenora May mutters, stooping to collect the tart from the floor. It leaves a dark smear behind. “No, I'm not going back there. I can't. And you, Sterling, you stay away from me.”

She gives me one final look before rushing through the door. The color of her eyes is obscured by tears. The screen door slaps its frame three times, and I hear her heart as she screams at the swamp.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I
KILL THE MUSIC AND
stand in the middle of the living room. Outside, Lenora May's gone quiet. All I hear is the
tick-tick-tick
of the clock on the wall. I wait for her face to reappear so I can understand this feeling in my gut. I think if I saw her, I'd know if it was anger or fear or guilt. But she doesn't return. The Chevelle revs and violently growls away.

My hands shake when I reach for my phone. Without even thinking, I dial Candy's number. She answers on the first ring.

“
Hola
, chéri.”

Now, I'm not sure what I should say, what I
can
say. I should have called Heath. He would understand and it would be so easy to lay this frustrating, emotional quagmire at his feet, but that's not what I need right now.

“Saucier?” she asks when I'm quiet too long.

“Can you come get me?”

“Shit, are you okay? I'm coming.”

She hangs up without waiting for an answer. I barely have time to pull on my boots and leave a note for Mama before Candy's honking her horn.

“What's all over you?” She turns the radio off as I climb into the passenger seat. The AC is set to arctic. “What's happened?”

It's a good question. I'm not entirely sure of the answer. My plan happened. Exquisitely, but something else happened, too, and I'm not comfortable with what that was.

Candy tugs at my hair, dusting the white powder from her fingertips with equal levels of concern and horror. Sunset makes her blonde hair shine orange.

“It's nothing. Flour. I had a fight with Lenora May and she took off. I . . . need to find her.”

She doesn't press, but I have the sense that she gleans more than enough. It's as difficult to hide from her as it is from a military drone. “Lucky for you,” she says, “I've got a good idea where she might be.”

We turn up Candy's road and zip past rows of one-story brick houses on lots too big for a push mower. The Pickens residence is skirted by millions of blooming fuchsia and hot pink azaleas, and stone sculptures of everything from frogs to strange bird-gods peek through bushes. After a few miles, the houses give way to piney woods, and the road gets narrow and dark. There's an old bicycle reflector nailed to a tree, marking the barely-there road that leads to the track. It's only wide enough for one car and thankfully it's only a half mile long. If you meet someone coming the opposite direction, you either practice being pigheaded, or you practice driving in reverse. It's early enough that we don't have to do either. We drive straight to where the track's already buzzing with test
runs.

Thursday night at the racetrack is a typical hangout in Sticks, but it's only special during finals week and Mardi Gras. That's when absolutely everyone goes. Candy actually likes the cars, or so she says, but except for Phin's, I couldn't give a fig about them. I like the track because it's dark and loud and exciting. This is exactly where Phin would be, so there's more than a good chance Candy's right and this is where Lenora May is, too.

A few reconstituted telephone poles surround the track, each supporting powerful floodlights. There's seating in the shape of a short stack of rusty bleachers that barely stretch the length of the track. Cars are parked sporadically around the western bend, all of their noses lit up and pointing inward. Dust and moths float in and out of the streams of light, lazy and frantic.

Candy parks a short distance from the field. She stopped parking with everyone else the day Mitch Lome lost control of his car and slid into the cluster of trucks at the bend.

She asks, “You gonna tell me what the fight was about? Or am I just here for emotional support?”

I pause before answering. She's always been the sort of friend I could call in the middle of the night. No matter what the problem was, I could count on Candy to break things down to their simplest parts and give me a plan of action. She's decisive even if she's not always compassionate. That's why it was my first instinct to call her, and also why I shouldn't have.

“This is about your supposed brother, isn't it?”

She's also not forgetful.

But I can't bring myself to make this easier by lying. “Yes. And my intruder sister. I know it's not your fault that you can't see what's really happening, but think about it, Candy. She and I are nothing alike. I doubt she knows a volleyball from a basketball and the only dresses I own are somewhere in the darkest corner of my closet. She doesn't even look like me!”

Candy's shrug is obstinate. “Not all siblings look alike and it's totally normal for sisters to behave differently. But.” She presses one hand to my shoulder the way people do when they're trying to stop a conversation. “You're my friend and so I support you in having a different view of reality, no matter how strange.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

This is a useless battle. Nothing will shake Candace Pickens away from a truth. Nothing except a charm. I think of Heath's bracelet and where he got it. Next chance I have, I'll get another from Old Lady Clary somehow and force it on Candy's wrist.

The crowd is nearly full when we leave the car, the air charged with growling engines and anticipation. I don't know what the stakes are tonight, but that doesn't really matter. I follow Candy into the stands where most of our friends have gathered. The air smells like cigarettes and beer and exhaust. I don't like it, but there's something comforting about the combination: at least it hasn't changed.

“Do you see the Chevelle?” I say into Candy's ear.

Candy squints over the crowd. “Nope, but I spy Quentin Stokes over there with my cousins. Rumor has it he's planning to make a move tonight.”

The first set of cars moves onto the track and everyone cheers. I recognize Cody's yellow Charger, a green Mustang I think belongs to Jeremiah Rae, and the other two cars are familiar but I can't recall faces to go with them. Only in a place like Sticks are cars more easily recognizable than people.

A skinny blonde with melon boobs walks in front of the cars to catcalls and whistles. Her long legs flash in their headlights as she passes, a not-so-narrow strip of her hips and belly exposed beneath the knot of her shirt. She raises a black-and-white-checkered flag. Engines rev. The air thrums with static and stillness, this sense of waiting and wanting. I feel it echoed in my bones, humming through my blood.

She brings her arm down and everything screams into motion: the cars, the people, the air around. Gradually, the noise settles to something less intense. I scan the crowd again and this time I get lucky.

Lenora May's not in the stands, but in the light of the trucks on the field past the track. She has her arms raised and she spins in a cloud of dust. Her mouth is open and joyful, her head tilting up to the sky, her dark curls swaying behind her. Like earlier in the kitchen except now she moves in a slower, languid way. More eyes than mine have found her there. She doesn't notice. She spins and spins, pretty as a star and just as rare. She's standing not twenty yards away, but she's lost in the sky above.

I don't know that I'll ever be so brave. To stand in front of a crowd and take a moment that's only for me. Lenora May doesn't care that she's in the dirt or that she'll have to wash her dress three times to get rid of the stubborn smells that follow you home from the track, and not caring makes her both vulnerable and beautiful.