Every Single Secret(23)
You have boogers in your eyes, and you smell like an asshole.
You better never, ever fucking look at me. You got that?
The Pinkeys are coming—tomorrow, probably—to adopt you.
The Pinkeys, I learned, were a family of hillbilly cannibals with bear traps for teeth who lived in the national forest behind the ranch. I was told they came around every couple of years to select a young girl to take home with them for housekeeping duties and, if things didn’t pan out, possible ritual child sacrifice.
While Mrs. Bobbie kept the daily routine of the brown brick house humming—meals served at six a.m. and p.m. on the dot, a rotation of chores for us girls when we got home from school, and mandatory family Bible study each night before bed—the Super Tramps actually ran the place. Omega, the leader, was seventeen—fiercely beautiful, with a Cleopatra haircut and pillowy woman-lips that, when coated with cheap drugstore lipstick in fuchsia, made her look like she’d just blown out of a photo shoot for one of the copies of Glamour Mrs. Bobbie hid in her bathroom cabinet. You wouldn’t want to be assigned kitchen cleanup with her, though. She talked to the knives while she washed them, like they were actual people.
“You ever stabbed someone?” she would croon to a blade, then cut her eyes at me.
Tré and Shellie were sixteen, juniors at Mount Olive Christian Academy, where the ranch girls were given scholarships to attend. Shellie was pretty but pale, with a headful of peroxided straw and a perpetual spray of acne across her jaw. Tré was a freckled wraith who wore a pair of men’s Carhartt coveralls that Mr. Al had handed down to her; muddy, oxblood-red Doc Martens (that I never figured out how she obtained); and a stack of rainbow-colored hair bands as bracelets. She told everyone she was a Wiccan high priestess, except Mrs. Bobbie and Mr. Al, who were Baptists and wouldn’t have appreciated it. I was eleven and had no idea what Wiccan was, but I was duly terrified by my new sisters.
Which was what Mrs. Bobbie said they were. Along with Chantal, they were my new big sisters.
That first night at the ranch, the hot night in September that the social worker dropped me at the brown brick house, I was overwhelmed, although at the time I couldn’t have said why. Part of it was that I was used to a small apartment, with a tiny cramped living room and bedrooms the size of closets. This house had walls, but to me, it felt boundaryless. It was the biggest house I’d ever been in, and I had the sensation of standing on an open field, unprotected, my flanks exposed to an unseen, lurking enemy.
Where did everyone belong?
As I stood in the tidy, Lemon Pledge–scented living room, my secondhand backpack of meager belongings hanging off my rounded shoulders, I pictured the pantry—its dimensions and how much food must be kept there and what kind. It was weighing on me, making me feel nervous, the thought that there might not be enough food for me to eat in the morning. Had they known I was coming? Where would I find breakfast way out here in the country? Hunger gnawed at my stomach. In the rush to get me to the ranch, the social worker had forgotten I hadn’t had supper.
I trembled in the center of the vast unknown as it expanded around me, and my stomach growled. After Mrs. Bobbie told me there were three older girls upstairs (sisters, she called them), she introduced Chantal, who was standing by the plaid sofa, digging her finger in a hole in the fabric. Mrs. Bobbie said Chantal was fourteen, even though she was not much bigger than me. She had long, frizzy hair, blonde with a sickly green tint to it, and when Mrs. Bobbie dragged her closer, I saw that she had different-colored eyes—one green and one blue—that reminded me of a dog that used to wander around our apartment. It was a mean, spindly mutt, and I always tried to feed it scraps when it would let me get close enough.
“Chantal,” Mrs. Bobbie said. “Daphne’s come to stay with us because her mother’s not feeling well.”
It was true, to a point. On a regular basis, my mother—jonesing for whatever it was that made her feel better—would disappear for days from our apartment complex, leaving me to fend for myself. This had been going on since I was five or six, and the neighbors had always been kind. Every time I knocked on their doors, they let me in. I didn’t blame Mr. Tully. After a while, you were bound to get tired of a hungry, smelly kid eating all your cereal and chips and using up your toilet paper.
Chantal seemed inordinately interested in me, watching me with her strange eyes.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was deep and raspy. It made her sound worldly, older than her years.
“Hi,” I replied.
“Why do you squint your eyes like that?” she asked, which I thought was a strange thing for her to notice, considering she had the freakiest-looking eyes I’d ever seen on a person.
“Maybe Daphne needs glasses, Chantal,” Mrs. Bobbie said in a singsong voice like I was a kindergarten baby. “Your mama ever take you to an eye doctor, Daphne?”
I shook my head no. Just then, a hulking man in an embroidered button-up shirt passed by the room. He stopped, lifted a hand, and beamed at me.
“Greetings, princess.” Two dimples slashed his pudgy, whiskery cheeks. I smiled back. I couldn’t help it.
“Mr. Al, come say hey to Daphne,” Mrs. Bobbie said.
The man bounded up to me and shook my hand with one of those long complicated secret handshakes. I tried to keep up. “Daphne-Doodle-Do, how do you do?”
“Fine.” I giggled softly.