The Scamp (8 page)

As if consent had anything to do with it, ever.

I might have hated him. But it was Henderson who got me on my feet. Who took me out of there, speeding down the highway in a diesel
BMW
, the backseat filled with paperback books,
No Exit
on the shelf by the back window.

He got me to Florida.

Not the actual state, hanging off the bottom of America. But to her. Her face, her legs. Until then I hadn't known what it was I wanted. Till then, I didn't know who I was.

With Henderson, I was trying to be something. I wore my hair long, past my shoulders. I went by Kat Henderson, like I was the little wife, but I was sixteen, and Henderson was twenty-two, a master's student. We lived together in tiny apartments rented to students for little money. He spent all his time on philosophy, all this stupid shit about God and Ps and Qs that in the end was just math, was just numbers, either adding up, or not. Mostly not. All of it, for nothing. The first two years our place was just a hallway with a kitchen and one bedroom and no common area. It was drafty and the water was weak and never hot enough. When he switched schools, he went into psychology, and would talk at me about sociopaths and narcissists.

We moved to Wilmington. Another small city. The university students occupied by their own little world of libraries and conferences. Labs and meetings. Classrooms like giant glass bowls. Outside was the real world. On the edge of town, down a rural route through some pine trees and into open flat expanses of land and miles of tobacco. A dirt road that led to a shack. People still had dirt floors, packed hard and swept clean. There were dogfights in basements and in barns. And cemeteries like mouths of crooked teeth, small as a front
lawn, where everyone was related and no one was over forty.

Those were my people. That was my kind of family.

After a while, I started hustling. Henderson never made enough money, and he was always gone. Our cupboards were stocked with nothing but noodles, coffee, bourbon, and cigarettes. It doesn't take long to figure out who knows who, and who sells what. And it's easy to trust a little long-haired girl in a hippie skirt.

But it wasn't the students who wanted to buy. It was the locals. A man at the farmers' market who sold beeswax candles and scented oils told me about Tess.

Where would I go, I asked him, holding a rough-cut bar of lemongrass soap and pretending to read the label, if I wanted to buy weed?

I'd come to recognize his type. Sixty. Organic cotton or hemp T-shirt. Sandals. His candles and oil, hand-poured in his own workshop in the garage. Some of the soaps with bits of walnut in them to scrub with.

To smoke? he said.

I shrugged my shoulder, then put the soap down. If I was looking to sell, I said.

He wrote down an address for me on the back of a napkin.

Tess, he said.

Tess lived on a dirt road with no phone lines and no cell service. Her house sat between two hills, in a valley of clover and heather. It smelled like the Middle Ages back there, sweet and heavy with flowers and cow shit. I drove
a truck that we'd bought for $200 after the
BMW
quit. It needed rods we couldn't afford yet, and I couldn't drive it over thirty-five. Which on that road was fine. Faster than that, and whole pieces might have fallen off.

Tess's husband had built their house from a kit. I thought I could picture it, living like that, even with Henderson if he wasn't so skittish, wasn't so unsettled in his thinking. He flitted from one thing to another, never finishing a task or, worse, a program. What's your psychological explanation for that, Henderson? What are you so nervous about? He would get hung up on which coffee cup to use. We would never end up like Tess and her husband.

Tess had goats to trim the grass, and free-range chickens that were often scattered in the road. Sometimes she had puppies to sell, terrier mixes from her own dog. There was an A-frame chicken coop, a garage, and a sunny greenhouse where Tess grew her plants. Row after row of tall stalks and beautiful buds, long and red-haired. She packed them into bales of triple-wrapped plastic, like loaves of bread. I'd pick them up and squeeze them, feel their weight in my hand, smell them. I carried them home in canvas grocery bags, back to our kitchen, where Henderson studied. There, we worked across from each other, him from a textbook, and me with tiny zippered bags. Like a woman doing crafts.

I sold them, mostly in one- or two-gram baggies, to vendors at the farmers' market, hippies running organic farms way out of town, to an artist who'd turned his whole yard into an installation of birdbaths and wind
chimes. I'd walk up the path to his front door, and when the wind blew, my hair lifted, the chimes going. It felt like magic.

I was in the country when I saw Florida. Her mother tried to rob me with a kitchen knife, not knowing—how could she—that I carried a small, snub-nosed .38 in the back of my shorts.

I'd traded with the artist for it. I gave him half of one of Tess's bales; he handed over the gun. It was in good working order, small, concealable, and he took me out back to show me how to shoot it.

I know how to shoot a gun, I told him.

Have you ever shot this gun? he said.

I stood on his back porch, looking over an acre lot of lush mowed green, crab apples and cottonwoods to either side, and in the back, tall poplars and oaks. I held the gun steady with two hands and fired, the kick aching all the way up my right arm. I hit a wind chime, the metal clanging and the whole piped piece swaying from the crab apple, jingling away.

Well all right, he said.

When I was delivering, I always assessed the situation first, left the goods in the car, nested the gun in the small of my back. I liked the feel of it there, heavy, an anchor. The woman I would come to know as Florida's mother stood in the doorway with her shoulders squared in a terry tube top and gym shorts, smaller than I was, and when she stepped over the threshold, she pushed a paring knife to my collarbone.

I grabbed her wrist, pressing on the tendons of her thumbs so that she dropped the knife to the porch floor.

You have got to be fucking kidding me, I said.

Give me your cash, she said, twisting. She was itty-bitty, but strong, and I stepped on the knife, pushing her with one hand on her breastbone, back onto the dirt floor inside. I pulled the .38 from my shorts.

Sit down, I said to her, and she backed up onto a brown plaid couch. Behind her, the whisper of bare feet in the kitchen. A girl, young, with hips like a boy and breasts like a little mommy, skittered into the doorway, half hiding.

Here's how this works, I said to the woman. You give me the cash, then I deliver. The only cash I carry is what you're about to give me.

I don't have any cash, she said.

Then you wasted my time. I held the gun, not really pointed at her, but ready. How were you planning to pay me? I asked.

She pointed with a weak hand and the girl giggled.

I thought you were a man, the woman said. How'm I supposed to know.

The girl nibbled a fingernail and looked up from underneath a fringe of heavy bangs, her hair parted deep to one side, long, wavy, down her back. She smiled a little sideways, and then let go of the doorjamb, and disappeared through the kitchen. I heard a screen door slam.

I told her mother to meet me herself, at the gas station, and pay me with cash, not underage pussy.

Outside, I saw the girl, throwing a stick to a brown dog who bounded through the weeds and brought it back to her with such force he somersaulted at her feet. Her cutoffs were so short the pockets hung out. Her shoulders shone in the sun. I stood and watched as long as I could without her knowing. Without me knowing, either, that within a month's time, it would be her in the truck beside me. That once I started, I wouldn't stop touching her, that I would do anything, give up everything and everyone—stealing the truck in the night and rumbling out of town—just to have her with me.

We were two sides of the same coin. Me and Florida. Both of us beyond our years, damaged and outside of ourselves with mourning over what had been done to us.

No one wants a girl who's been touched. We all have ways of hiding it, but the truth is, once they know, they don't want you.

The first boys, boys in seventh grade, with their loping arms and smelly feet, they're grateful that you'll do anything. That you know anything at all about how they work, what they'll like. Your mouth is a goddamn blessing to them.

When the guys get older, they want to know how you got to be who you are. What hardened you down, like cold sweet cream. What whittled away at your soul. And that's when they're about done. When what they want is not you. They want a you that never existed.

In the car once with Henderson, he grabbed my hand and stopped me.

How do you know that? he said. Who taught you that? That's— He stopped himself.

That's what? I asked.

That's something a whore does, he said.

We were in South Lake, on a side street by the water, under the pines, where you could hear the loons. The word hung there between us.
Whore.
I laughed, because it was all I could think to do, the only answer that wasn't a roar, coming from deep in my belly.

Have you been with a whore? I asked him.

No, he said, his chin lowered, his face disgusted.

Then how would you know? I asked.

For girls like us, there's no first time, and there's no only time. There's nothing special, and there's no love. It just goes on forever, like a loop in your brain, one burning infinite fuck that rips you apart so your insides are one big scar.

I would stop Doe sometimes, if only for a moment, with my foot. When I think about that, try to remember any detail, sometimes my foot is small, a tiny kindergarten foot, round and pink and soft on his thigh. And sometimes, it's bigger, harder on the edges, with painted toes.

I'm sick, I'd say. Never enough of a deterrent.

This will make it feel better. Let me kiss it away.

Give me money, was a better one. Uh-uh, I'd say, pressing down like my foot was on the brakes.

You're kidding me, Doe would say.

Fifty dollars, I said.

I can break you in half, he said.

Try it.

I had nothing to lose. He'd broken me so hard it didn't matter what else he tried.

Sometimes, after, sweaty and wrecked, I'd crawl in behind Rayelle, knowing I shouldn't, that I was a contagion, a creeping germ getting into bed with her, going where I had no business going, my hand, a snake inside her shirt, her pants. It was all I knew: how to touch someone, how to make someone do what I wanted them to do, how to make someone want me. How to make them love me.

And then there was Florida, in the weeds behind a house that was shifting on its frame, careening to the left like it would fall over someday. Barefoot on a dirt floor. Sick in her own bed. Our matching wounds immune to each other. Broken and put back together.

By me.

seven

RAYELLE

For weeks after Holly Jasper disappeared, the girls in South Lake were on lockdown. No one walked alone. No one swam. The beach was barricaded and laced with police tape. Along the shoreline, the backhoes and boats they used for dragging. But the middle of the lake was so deep, the divers could go only so far, and the hooks, which were meant to scrape the bottom, just floated in the black depth, feeling blindly for anything.

Beyond the lake, the midway sat empty. None of the normal family activity, the kids running from bumper cars to the scrambler. The teenagers on skateboards or bikes. People with ice cream or cotton candy. At first, the workers would come and sit by the rides, and no one rode them. Every car that came through town was suspect, even the ones that belonged to people we knew.

Normally, June shimmered with sunshine and possibilities, long days at the beach with boys, bike rides, and booze snuck into backpacks. School was ending. It stayed light until nine o'clock. Kids were out, getting popcorn and ice cream, even on a school night, the rides lit up red and yellow, the street a din of motorcycles and loud car radios.

And then she was gone.

The longer it went on, the worse it felt. The first week, the town was a scramble of searching everywhere, in the woods, in the lake, behind buildings, in dumpsters. And as weeks went on, it got quieter, hotter, and nothing felt possible anymore. I was alone the whole summer, home after a doomed road trip with Chuck. Khaki was gone. I sat in the trailer by myself and sulked. Every day on the news they'd begin with search details, and no leads. They put dogs on it. They called the state for help. Volunteers came. No one found anything. And then summer was over. We went back to school, me, in seventh grade, taller than every boy in my class, and bustier than all the girls.

I almost failed that year. I spent most of it staying behind after school, until everyone had left and the building was empty, to drink stolen vodka and fuck Tim Kriczewski, an eighth-grader with a wide Polish back and a chipped front tooth, whose father owned the quarry on the other side of the lake and whose mother never checked her liquor cabinet.

They looked in the quarry. It was one of the first places they looked.

We didn't even really like each other. It just kept me from going home. It kept me from my room, alone on a school night, without even a phone call from Khaki. From biking past their old house, which sat empty and dark, and after a month or so had foreclosure papers posted on the window. The grass got long. In the fall, all the leaves fell and no one raked them up.

So Tim Kriczewski was your first? Couper asks me. He's amused by the story, by the vodka, the sex in the boys' bathroom, or the locker room, outside at the beach, with the spindly shadow of the rickety roller coaster over us. We go on like this, me telling stories full of color that he finds funny or sexy or sad. But what's missing is the hole she left in my heart when she took off. The loneliness of that summer, the years that followed. How I filled it with garbage, with sex and drinking and rough parties. That's what I leave out.