You Will Know Me(55)

For a very brief moment, she tried to sit still.



Devon’s room was hot, always hot. All that energy, it stayed there.

Katie hovered in the doorway a long minute, taking in all the symmetry and order. The organization so precise it felt mysterious. To Katie, her life always brim-high with chaos and distraction, Devon’s order was a mystery. And, for the first time, it felt suspect.

Will it still be there? she wondered. In the same cramped spot she’d found it the first time, two years ago, and again in February, the day after Devon got her first period.

On all fours on the bed, she reached down into the wood-swollen crevice between bookshelf and mattress in the upper left corner.

Feeling for the diary, fat and weighty. Its felt fabric cover. I Heart Everything.

But her hand hit only cardboard. A box, and another. She lifted them out. Four of them. Four cardboard boxes of tampons, one for every month. Katie had bought them all for her. And now they were wedged between her mattress and the wall, unopened except the first box, all its tampons lined up like soldiers save one empty spot for the tampon she’d handed her daughter.

Katie felt herself grow dizzy, collapsing slightly on the bed.

But what about the diary entry she’d read? She tried to remember it; something about becoming a woman and that it hadn’t hurt and—had she said it had been beautiful?

Pieces hurtling into place, it now seemed so clear: Devon hadn’t been writing about her first period. She’d never even had her period. She was writing about Ryan. Her first time with Ryan, scarlet marking the spot on the leotard Katie found in the wash.

No one ever tells you there’ll be so much blood, Devon had said to Katie as they lay together on Katie’s bed. Her daughter deceiving her, lies upon lies.

I made it happen, she’d said. And now it’s forever.

And, too, Don’t tell Dad. Mom, don’t tell Dad.

Katie tripped down the hall to the bathroom. Leaning over the toilet, sure she’d be sick, she waited. Then stood again.

Staring into the vanity mirror, her hand over her mouth.





Chapter Fourteen



Face fretted from sun and years and fishing and puttering in his widower’s yard, he was the only neighbor still there since they first moved in. He’d been there for Devon’s accident, for Devon’s earliest backyard tumbling efforts (That trampoline sure looks fun, he’d said, watching Eric install it, but you might want to put some shock absorbers over those springs), for the time the Gazette came to take pictures of Devon swinging from the walnut tree’s branch.

“Mr. Watts,” she asked, glancing at her watch, “can you keep an eye on Drew for a little while?”

He straightened, looking at Drew.

“I swear, he stopped being contagious two days ago.”

“Had scarlatina when I was a kid, back in the fifties,” he said. “Out of school for a month. Read all the Hardy Boys stories. My favorite was The Melted Coins. A crazy sailor tries to tattoo Joe. That seemed much worse than hives.”



What is it I plan to do? she asked herself over and over on the forty-five-minute drive.

Where do I even begin?

She wondered what Hailey knew. Had she found out about Ryan and Devon and then, with that same spike-rattling jealousy that had sent her to Devon’s muscled throat, done something appalling?

An old country road, her purple bug of a car, a luscious grape, darting from the darkness and straight into her cheating lover.

*



A red swarm of tracksuits were gathering at the gym’s double doors, a few girls peering in the windows, the rest squirming and bouncing.

Seeing them all in the brightness of the afternoon, out there in the wild, free from the carapace of glass and insulation and mats and padding and foam, Katie was struck. Everything looked vivid and strange.

They were massing, half of them as brawny as footballers, their necks and waists thickened by muscle, the other half as delicate as sylphs, girls who seemed to consume only air, chalk dust. Chestless chests and the round behinds, the few with breasts seemed to treat them as vestigial burdens, their arms folded across them, their zippers pulled high above them.

It was as if Katie were wearing glasses for the first time in her life, the world suddenly brought into sharp focus.

The eleven-and twelve-year-olds bundled at the windows. Jaws locked, veins roped across temples, corded up the neck, they reminded her of baby birds, their heads tilted back, gullets unhinged, open, cries shrill and hungry for anything.

Then there were the older ones, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. They were looking at their phones, or their moms, these hardened vets, biceps fist-thick, straight lines down to thighs powerful enough to anchor the world. None of them topping five feet three.

See what it does to them. A comment Katie overheard once, a parent at Devon’s school, watching Devon walk across the parking lot.

Check out Popeye, Katie had heard a man say at the mall, winking at his friend. Too bad those are pecs not tits.

Devon, whose toes pointed out as she slept.

Whose ankles cracked as she walked up the stairs.

Who, before she performed, would, one by one, crack all her joints, fingers, knuckles, neck, toes, hips, and ankles. Pulling her thumbs so far back they rested on her wrists, like tongues.

Once, she had to take Devon for an EKG and the nurse kept telling her, Relax all your muscles, and Devon kept saying, I am, I am. She’d looked down at Devon’s pointed toes, hard as screws. Like a ballerina, like a Chinese princess.