If You Find Me(60)

“Jesus!”

“Sorry!” My eyes water. I wipe my face with the napkins she shoves at me.

“You practically barfed all over me. You better have nothing contagious.”

I don’t tell her how me and Nessa got our shots two weeks before starting school, like we were Shorty or something. I also don’t tell her about the itchy, pearly pinworms wriggling in the toilet bowl. We’d taken medicine for that, too.

The girl stares me down as she picks up her punch cup and throws back the contents in one gulp. She slams the cup down on the table.

“Ahhhh.”

“What is it?”

“It’s grain alcohol. What’d you expect?”

“Moonshine?”

“Yep. I almost saved up enough for the ‘quipment and the ingredients.”

“Moonshine.”

“I could sell it and make a profit. You, of all people, should be glad of that, girl.”

My body will buy the still and the ingredients:

7 pounds baker’s yeast





42 pounds brown sugar


4 pounds treacle (a thick, dark syrup produced durin’ raw sugarcane refinin’)





1 pound hops




“Where’ll we get treacle, Mama?”

“You let me worry about that, girl.”

The dormouse talked treacle at the Mad Tea Party.

Why not. The woods are their own sort of Wonderland.

“What if I had to drive a vehicle home?”

“Then you’d better hope it’s a beater, and you’d chew this.”

The girl flips a few foil-wrapped sticks at me.

I unwrap one and fold the gum into my mouth. “Thanks.”

“Hey—aren’t you Fiddle Girl?”

Before I know what I’m doing, I shake my head no.

“Sure you are. FYI, the kiddie drinks are in the cooler in the kitchen. Pop and juice, the G-rated kind.”

I pick my way through a jungle of bodies, slowing down to listen to a shaggy-haired guy in the corner play guitar for two girls. Not bad.

Back in the great room, I notice the massive staircase winding to the second floor. The bodies thin out as I ascend. On the landing, I hesitate before a dark hallway of closed doors.

I rap on the first one.

“Pixie?”

No answer.

“Pixie, are you in there? It’s time.”

“Go away!” a male voice growls, startling me, and I almost trample a cat with a pushed-in face. It hunches its back and hisses at me before skittering off.

What if something happened to Pixie? I’m in charge.

I never should have left her alone.

I knock on the next few doors, but there’s no answer. I feel along the wall for a light switch, but I can’t find one.

Would any of the guys hurt a little girl? What if they were drunk?

“Pixie!” I yell above the music. “Pixie!”

I have no choice but to go back to the first room, where I hear rustling, then silence.

Gently, I try the knob, surprised when it turns. Ever so slightly, I push the door open, my eyes adjusting to the light. There must be thirty candles burning, at least.

“What the hell are you doing in here, freak?”

I see much more than I want to—a guy’s bare buttocks rising and falling over a girl, also naked, her breasts exposed as she twists out from under him.

The guy looks over his shoulder, eyes narrowed. “Didn’t you hear her? GET OUT.”

“Get the f*ck OUT!” Delaney yells, half-hysterical.

I slam the door behind me, falling to my knees in my haste. Her shrill voice penetrates the wood.

“Shit, Derek! She knows!” Her voice quivers, on the brink of tears. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

I fly down the stairs, knocking into Marie at the bottom. She glares at me like Delaney does as she works to steady a silver platter of small sandwiches.

“Watch where you’re going. And for your information, the second floor is off-limits.”

I’m so not in the mood. “I reckon someone should’ve told Delaney that,” I snap.

She looks nervously from me to the upstairs landing.

I take one of the sandwiches. “Thanks.”

She rushes up the stairs.

“There you are! Where’d you get the food?”

I whip around, Pixie stands with her hands on her hips, cheeks flushed, the hairs framing her face curly with perspiration.

“Marie has a platter. Wait a minute—there I am? Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“You have any more gum?” she asks, watching me chew.

I’m still new to gum. I tend to chew it like cud.

I hand Pixie the sandwich, instead, which she inhales, her words garbled.

“I wish it were bigger. They call these finger sandwiches. I’m thinking of home and a honking big PB&J on pumpernickel—you know, the thick slices?”

I’m so relieved to have found her, I almost forget what I saw upstairs. Almost. I imagine my father’s face on fire as he shouts at Delaney. I imagine Melissa’s eyes, black as marbles, her arms locked across her chest, and I get it: It’s the same out here as it is in the woods—the silent shame of young girls having babies. Even Mama didn’t want that for me.