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."
"But… I don't want it to be like that," I whispered.
"You think that matters, what you want?" she said. "Where'd you get that fool idea?"
Though her words stung, she wasn't trying to be cruel.
"No one ever said the world's an easy place, 'specially for a girl," she went on. "'Specially for a pretty girl, and that's just the way of it, too. If you're a pretty girl, you're gonna get…"
She pressed her lips together. She couldn't say it, not without scraping off a layer of fresh paint.
"Some things ain't worth dwelling on," she said crisply. "Now help me get the laundry off the line before the rain comes on."
Today, there wasn't a rain cloud in sight. Today, all I saw was an endless blue sky shimmering above the trees at the edge of Patrick's yard. I pressed the back of my head against the house. My fingers found the grass, and at its roots, the cool soil. I would have been content to sit here for hours, but I needed to get up. I needed to bike on over to church, where Aunt Tildy would be waiting, saving me a seat in a pew and craning her neck to look for me.
Not yet, my body said, heavy with the desire for things to be like they once were.
But that was impossible.
I was sixteen now, no longer that girl full of light and life. No longer Patrick's kindred spirit. If I was like anyone, it was my aunt Tildy with her dogged blindness, because eventually I had adopted her approach to dealing with all things ugly. Blindness, at the time, seemed like my best chance at survival.
So I'd stabbed needles into my eyes and pretended not to see certain things. Bad things. Only by turning my back on certain bad things, I ended up turning my back on my dearest friend, a betrayal I never intended.
Or so I told myself. That was a problem with lying to yourself. Sometimes you got too good at it.
A chill moved down me as I realized how stupid I'd been. By turning a blind eye to the badness, I allowed it to grow. And when it needed more to feed on-Oh Jesus-it spread to Patrick.
I should have seen it coming. I would have, if only I'd had my eyes open.
So open them, I commanded myself. I did, literally, and black spots swam across my vision, making me feel as dizzy as if I was swaying at the edge of a cliff. I'd never been good with heights. I blinked, and the sensation faded. I blinked again, and the trees bordering Patrick's yard faded as well. I looked past them and squarely into Patrick's pain.
I pictured him alone at the Come 'n' Go, my onetime best friend who didn't care for the dark. It would have been pitch-black outside. No one would have been around for miles except pitiful, messed-up Ridings McAllister, who lived in a trailer on the side of the highway. But Ridings would have been asleep, and even if he wasn't, he couldn't save himself from danger, much less someone else. Patrick would have known that. He would have known exactly how helpless he was when whoever attacked him roared into the dirt pull-off outside the store.
Except most likely Patrick didn't feel helpless, not at first. He wouldn't have seen the wolf in redneck's clothing.
I wasn't there that night, but I could imagine how things played out. The shadowed woods surrounding the store. The flickering bulb by the single gas pump. The too-bright lighting within the store, illuminating Patrick as he went about his work.
Then what? A truck engine abruptly cut off? The slamming of doors layered over boisterous, drunk laughter? A male voice-one Patrick knew, if my suspicions were correct-calling, "Patrick. Bro. Get your butt out here!"
And Patrick would have shaken his head and grinned as he pushed through the store's door. He wouldn't have realized how wrong things were until he spotted the baseball bat bouncing against someone's palm.
Then the fear would have kicked in. Too late, he would have grasped what he was up against: a predator, or a pack of predators, there to do what predators do.
Angrily, I curled my hand into a fist and slammed it backward against Patrick's house. The pain helped, but not enough.
I leaned over, flipped the hook-and-eye latch on the door to the crawl space, and jerked it open. I squinted into the gaping hole. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, but then I made out the milk crates, the candles, the tufts of pink insulation drooping from the floor joists.
It was a postcard from our childhood, and it made me ache. Because Patrick wasn't a child anymore, but he wasn't yet a man. Because someone beat him up and jammed a gas nozzle down his throat. Because on top of everything he'd already lost, he was seventeen years old and more alone than I'd ever been, trapped in the deep sleep of a coma.
It enraged me.
But I'd lost out, too, and the realization fed my rage. I lost the strength to face the world head on. I lost my friends, I lost my brother, and I lost Patrick, which was like dying, since losing Patrick was nearly the same as losing myself. And what if Patrick never woke up? What if I'd lost him for good?
My fury sizzled and popped until I wasn't just mad, but crazy mad, as if I'd struck a match and lit myself on fire. What happened to Patrick was wrong. What happened to me was wrong. Every single thing was wrong, and when that great blaze of wrongness reached my core, my heart swelled and roared and cast it back out, leaving behind a white-hot clarity like nothing I'd ever experienced.
What I knew was this: Once upon a time, everything changed. Now things had to change again. Someone needed to track down whoever went after Patrick, and that someone was me.
It had been a week since Patrick was attacked, and Sheriff Doyle hadn't done squat. He claimed he was looking into every lead, but I felt certain he'd buried those leads instead. Slogging around in the muck of our godforsaken town would only bring Sheriff Doyle trouble, especially if I was right about what happened that night.
He would draw out the investigation a little longer for show, but eventually he'd pin the crime on drunk college boys from out of town. That was my guess. "We might never find out who done it," he'd say, shaking his head. "I can tell you this, though. Nobody from Black Creek woulda stooped so low."
But I'd seen things in the week since Patrick's attack that didn't add up, like my brother talking urgently to Beef, only to go dead silent when I approached. Like Bailee-Ann sitting by herself at the sandwich shop, her expression troubled as she chewed on a strand of her hair. Like cocky Tommy Lawson straddling his piss yellow motorcycle at the intersection of Main Street and Shields, thinking so hard on something that he didn't notice the light turn green. Normally, he'd accelerate hard and fast, showing off the power of his BMW's engine, but on that day, an old lady had to tap the horn of her Buick to rouse him from his trance.
I closed the crawl space door. I got to my feet and brushed myself off. My chest was tight, but I looked at the blue sky, clear and pale above the tree line, and said out loud, "Fine, I'll do it." I would speak for Patrick. I'd look straight into the ugliness and find out who hurt him, and when I did, I'd yell it from the mountaintop.
"Do you hear that, God?" I said. "Do you see me now?"
A moment passed. Sweat trickled down the base of my spine. Then, out of nowhere, a breeze lifted my hair and jangled Mama Sweetie's wind chimes, which she'd made by hanging mismatched forks and spoons from the lid of a tin can.
It scared me, to tell the truth. It also fanned the flames of my rage.
I lifted my chin and said, "Good."