Shine (2 page)

PATRICK’S HOUSE WAS A GHOST. DUST COATED the windows, the petunias in the flower boxes bowed their heads, and spiderwebs clotted the eaves of the porch. Once I might have marveled at the webs—how delicate they were, how intricate—but today I saw ghastly silk ropes. Nooses for sawflies and katydids and anything guileless enough to be ensnared.

Movement drew my attention to the upper corner of the porch, where a large web swayed as if it were alive. I stepped closer, and a sour taste rose in my throat. A mourning cloak was trapped within a mass of threads. One wing was pinned to its body, but the other wing, dark brown rimmed with gold, fluttered feebly.

That golden wing made me think of Mama Sweetie, Patrick’s grandma. It made me think of her Bible, in particular. Its gilt-edged pages were as thin as tissue, and when I ruffled them, the gold shimmered. For Christmas one year, Patrick made Mama Sweetie a wooden stand for her Bible, and I knew if I pressed my face to one of the dirty windows, I’d see both the Bible and the bookstand displayed proudly in the front room.

Well, no, I
didn’t
know that, for the simple reason that just because things used to be a certain way didn’t mean they’d stay that way forever. Patrick could have stuck the Bible in a drawer, or given it away, or burned it. I couldn’t imagine him doing any of those things, but my thoughts on the matter meant nothing.

Sometimes I felt like my entire existence meant nothing.

I went through the motions, however. I showered and generally kept myself clean. I ate at mealtimes, I slept at night, and when it wasn’t summer, I went to school and read a lot of books. When it was summer, I still read a lot of books. But mainly, I moved through the world feeling invisible—and maybe I was. Maybe God was a giant eyeball in the hazy June sky, only there was a burn mark on His pupil in the exact spot of Black Creek, North Carolina, and that was why He didn’t see me.

If He didn’t see me, that meant He didn’t see Patrick, either. Was not seeing us better than seeing and not caring?

I backed away from the porch, my head buzzing. I felt blurry around my edges, like smoke, or the soft
ssssss
of a snuffed
candle, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I’d come to Patrick’s house in the first place. Church started in half an hour, and it would take me almost as long to bike there. What had I been thinking?

The sun pressed down on me, making me sweat. Back when we were kids, Patrick and I escaped the summer heat by worming into the crawl space beneath his house, which was cool and private and, best of all,
ours
. It was our secret hideaway, and we spent countless hours down there with no one to keep tabs on us but blind and sluggish bugs. The sort of bugs that would eat us one day, we used to say for the shiver of it. Coffin bugs.

The entrance to the crawl space was a small access door made from a scrap of plywood painted yellow to match the siding. It was all of two feet tall and two feet wide, and it blended in with the house almost perfectly. The only thing that gave it away was the rusty hook-and-eye latch that kept it shut.

Patrick didn’t much like the dark, so we snuck down candles and matches, which would have given Mama Sweetie a fit if she’d found out. We spread a tarp on the moist soil, and we set up a milk crate for a table. On any given day, we’d toss snacks through the crawl space hole and then wiggle in after them, and once we were settled, we’d just gab away. That was the magic of it, that Patrick and I could just talk and talk.

The crawl space beneath Patrick’s house held happy memories for me, so that’s where I went when I left the front porch with its spiderwebs and dying butterflies. I walked
around the house and found the access door, and the sight of it sent my blood pulsing.

I sat on the overgrown lawn beside the plywood door. Aunt Tildy would kill me if I got grass stains on my church clothes, but I didn’t care. I drew up my legs, tucked my skirt between my thighs, and hugged my shins. Tiny no-see-ums nipped at my ankles. Humidity pasted my hair to my neck.

The last time I was here at the house was three years ago. I was thirteen, and I was so happy I glowed. That’s what Mama Sweetie told me, anyway. She said I was lit from within, and I believed her, because I felt it and knew it to be true.

I haven’t known that feeling for a long time.

But that last day sure was a good one. Patrick and I had biked here after school, our feet kicking up dust when we hopped off in his dirt driveway. Mama Sweetie met us on the porch and hugged first Patrick and then me, saying, “Well, hey there, Cat. Ain’t you as pretty as a picture.” Fresh-squeezed lemonade waited on the small outside table. No garden spiders or mummy-wrapped bugs that day, because though Mama Sweetie wouldn’t kill a spider, she did use her broom to clear their webs away.

I dropped into one of the sagging fold-out chairs and accepted the glass she held out to me. It had a decal of the Tasmanian Devil on it, and it came from the Hardee’s in Toomsboro. Hardee’s was running a special offer: Buy six cinnamon buns and get a free cartoon character drinking glass. Buy a dozen and get not two free glasses, but three.

Mama Sweetie went for the three. She had no need for them, since she had scores of jelly jars that did the job fine. But she couldn’t resist Hardee’s cinnamon buns. She couldn’t resist anything sugary, and she spent half her food stamps on Coke and Twizzlers and fun-size Snickers. She bought cereal and milk for Patrick, and she made him eat tomatoes and squash and crowder peas from their garden, but their house was junk food central.

She was dead now. She died last year from her diabetes. I went to her funeral, but Patrick and I didn’t talk.

Anyway, that Tasmanian Devil. I didn’t know who he was until Mama Sweetie told me. I just liked how he looked, with his wild eyes and his fur fluffed out all crazy like a puppy after a good shake.

“He’s on the show with that Bugs Bunny,” Mama Sweetie explained. She worked at the church preschool, and years ago someone donated a used VCR and a cardboard box of old videos. Some were episodes of
Sesame Street
. Others were cartoons. Mama Sweetie played them for the kids at naptime if they’d been good.

“I don’t know what he’s supposed to be,” she went on. “Just that they call him the Tasmanian Devil.” She reached over and squeezed her grandson’s knee. “You think there’s really such a creature, Patrick?”

“Let’s go to Tasmania and find out,” Patrick suggested. We were in eighth grade, and already he was dreaming up ways to escape.

Mama Sweetie chuckled, patting Patrick’s knee now instead of squeezing it. Patrick’s hand went to hers, and their fingers interlocked.

“There is no such place as
Tasmania
,” I pronounced, knowing no such thing. But good Lord, it sure did sound like a made-up name. I slipped off my flip-flops and poked Patrick with my toe. “Even if there was, how would we get money to get there?”

“We’d get jobs,” Patrick said.

I rolled my eyes. Jobs weren’t easy to come by in Black Creek, not for grown-ups and especially not for kids.

Undaunted, Patrick said, “Well, then we could invent something. Something good, and we’d save every penny and not spend it on junk, because God helps those who help themselves. Right, Mama Sweetie?”

She ruffled his wheat-colored hair. “One day, baby. Ain’t no need to rush.” Her gaze was proud, but tinged with sadness, because she knew that eventually Patrick
would
leave. What she didn’t know—what none of us knew—was that she would go first.

“Yeah, Patrick, stop rushing,” I teased. I captured his foot with both of mine, hooking one behind his ankle and curving the other over the top of his beat-up sneaker. “You’re staying with us forever and ever.”

Mama Sweetie smiled, because she loved me, too. Not like she loved Patrick, but she didn’t love anyone like she loved Patrick. Still, she hugged me every time she saw me, and sometimes
she planted loud, wet smooches on my cheeks, forcing me to complain for the sake of my dignity. “Mama Sweetie!” I’d cry. “You
better
not have left lipstick on my cheek.”

Patrick saw through me. I knew from the way he’d grin. Some people were happiest when others were unhappy, but Patrick was the opposite. Plus, he knew my family as well as I knew Mama Sweetie. He knew my daddy was a drunk, and that my aunt Tildy was a fine and strong woman, but not one to dole out hugs and kisses.

Mama Sweetie nodded at my glass of lemonade, which I’d halfway drained. “Well, that Tasmanian Devil is a rascal, whatever he is. Spins around like a tornado and gets into every little thing he can.” She belly-laughed. “But you wouldn’t know nothing about that, would you, Cat?”

“Naw,” Patrick said, acting shocked. “Cat wouldn’t recognize a whirling dervish if she saw one. Not if she was looking straight in a mirror, even.”

I made a face at him, but I secretly took it as a compliment. Back then I
was
rascally. Why wouldn’t I be? The world was out there waiting to be explored—and not just waiting, but
wanting
to be explored. So why in heaven’s name shouldn’t I investigate every nook and cranny?

Anyway, my lemonade glass was better than his, which was decorated with a cartoon pig named Porky, and he was chubby and pink and wore a blue jacket and a red bowtie.

“Maybe I am a whirling whatever-you-called-me, but that’s better than being Porky the Pig,” I told him.

“Not
the
pig,” Patrick said, annoyingly unruffled. “Just Porky Pig, and I think you’re jealous ’cause I’ve got clothes on”—he lifted his piggy glass to prove it—“while you’re naked as a jaybird.”

“Naked as a
Tasmanian Devil
,” I said. “And I am most definitely not jealous, because I’d sure rather be naked than wearing that getup.” I giggled. “Good Lord, Patrick. Can you imagine if you showed up at school in an outfit like that?”

“Of course,” Patrick said, quirking one eyebrow in a way that drove me nuts. I’d spent hours trying to train my muscles to do that. “I would look
debonair
.”

“Ah,
debonair
,” I repeated, savoring the syllables. Patrick was a few months older than me and had already turned fourteen. He was gangly like a colt, but even so, he
was
debonair.

Not that I noticed, usually. He was
Patrick
. Mama Sweetie said we were kindred spirits. We were different from the rest of the kids in Black Creek, but we were different together, which made it all right. Whenever someone said we were weird, we said, “You just now figured that out?”

We were always getting into stuff. Always asking questions, always wanting to learn everything there was to know. Patrick and I loved reading—we passed our library books back and forth since we were only allowed to check out six at a time—but we also loved being outside.

Sometimes we’d catch bugs and carry them to Mama Sweetie, despite being technically too old for bug hunting. But
Mama Sweetie herself was a little kid when it came to bugs and nature and stuff, so we did it to please her. She taught us to be gentler than gentle, because it was terribly easy to tear a butterfly’s wing or pull a leg off a daddy longlegs, she warned us, even if we didn’t mean to. Life was precious. Life was fragile.

We’d present her with our treasures, and she’d draw our attention to things we might not have noticed on our own, like how a roly-poly curled up into a ball not to entertain us, but to protect itself from danger.

I’d seen roly-polies do their rolling-up trick and, sure, I knew they did it to guard themselves from harm. Who wanted to be poked by some dumb girl with a stick?

Mama Sweetie made me slow down and appreciate the finer points of the equation. She explained that since roly-polies were small and helpless, God evened things out by giving them the sense to curl up tight if something came along wanting to hurt them. There was a reason for everything, she said. God knew what He was doing, even if we were unable to understand.

Her wisdom applied to more than butterflies and roly-polies, because life
was
fragile. Things happened. Things changed. A girl full of light could get that light snuffed out, and when everything around her was dark, she could roll up into a ball and ignore the whole world, starting with her best friend.

But that was where Mama Sweetie’s vision hit a snag, because
why
? What possible reason could God have for letting people treat others like dirt? “Just ’cause we can’t see the
pattern doesn’t mean there ain’t one” didn’t cut it, not when it came to flat-out cruelty.

My aunt Tildy blamed what happened to me on puberty, an explanation about as helpful as blaming it on the moon or drinking bad water or forgetting to throw salt over my shoulder to keep the devil at bay. But that was Aunt Tildy’s way. If there was ugliness to be dealt with, she dealt with it and moved on. If the ugliness left a scar, she brought out her whitewash and got to painting. When the damage was covered, she considered it gone, and it exasperated her to no end that I couldn’t forget the rot beneath the surface.

“You can’t expect gumdrops to fall out of the sky just ’cause you want ’em to,” she scolded me. “No, ma’am. There’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad. That’s just the way of it.”