Girl in Snow(21)

We went to Hangman’s on a dare. The summer before high school started. Louis Travelli had called Zap a pussy, so he had to go, had to light three candles and say some chant. I knew he didn’t want to do it alone. I was better than Zap at things like this: horror movies, going places we weren’t supposed to.

Hangman’s Hut is only half a house. The right side is burned down—a mess of fallen rafters and bare concrete beams. The house was built in the early 1900s. The Hangman family probably lived there during the 1930s. They based this estimate on the bones: the entire family’s bones are now in the downtown science museum, where you can look at replicas in a special room if you ask.

I went in first, but only to prove I was brave. Zap glanced over his shoulder and hiked up his backpack straps. He wore a blue shirt that read “I LOVE BACON.” I told him it was dumb, it wasn’t even funny, but secretly I liked the way it made his brown skin look even darker. Already, the girls at school liked him. He had such light-blue eyes. His eyes looked French; I always thought so, even though French isn’t really a way to look.

“God, this is creepy,” Zap said from the splintered doorway of Hangman’s Hut. He kicked aside a pile of crumpled brown leaves. They’d fallen from the tree in the yard and blown into the house through the nonexistent roof.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

“My mom says that’s a derogatory word,” he said.

“Are you telling me not to say it?”

“No. I don’t give a shit.”

“Don’t say ‘shit.’?”

He smiled, this huge grin. Zap’s teeth overlap each other in the front, leaving a hole the shape of a sesame seed. Everyone’s always telling him he’s got something between his teeth.

“Come on,” I said.

He followed me hesitantly into the ruins. We walked beneath collapsing beams, until we were in the remnants of a kitchen. Broken bits of china lay in the rubble, so small you could only make out a fraction of a blue floral design. A flash of gold enamel. We ventured farther, the September sky unfolding above us. The corners of the room were filled with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts. Sun-faded bags of potato chips.

“So where’d they die?” Zap asked.

“The part of the house that burned down,” I said. “Idiot.”

Zap crossed his legs and sat in the middle of the floor, opening his backpack and pulling out the candles.

“You know, you’re pretty funny, Jay,” he said. I sat across from him, and we lined the candles up in a straight line. “Like, you act all mean and brave, marching in here like you don’t even care, when I know that’s not how you actually are.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“See what I mean?” he said. “Lucky I know you so well, or I would probably hate you.”

He chuckled. I tried to laugh along, but something had stuck behind my throat. Lodged there. Expanded.

Zap used a stick to draw a penis in the dirt, complete with hanging balls. We both cracked up, and the tension fizzled away. Bright afternoon light poured down on us. Dry Colorado wind rippled. We were too childish to be starting high school, but we had no desire to deal with the fact.

This was around the time Zap started noticing everything with Ma: the bruises blossoming across my thighs, the cracked lips. The way my hands trembled constantly, searching for something to grasp. Zap had started watching me carefully, thinking I didn’t notice. I tried to tell him that I always provoked her, and this was just how things went. My fault; it was always my fault. I didn’t need pity. Still, he watched me like you’d watch a wild animal.

“We should have come here at night,” Zap said.

“For the stars?”

“Nah, the moon. It’s a waning gibbous tonight. A little vertical development in the clouds.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” I said.

“It’s supposed to be a nice night. We could see a lot, way out here.”

“Do you talk to everyone like that?” I asked. “Like, ‘vertical development’?”

“No,” he said. “Just you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a freak, too,” he said. “One day we’ll move away together, me and you. We’ll find a colony of more freaks and we’ll never come back to this town. New York, maybe. We’ll go to New York.”

And that was it. I don’t remember the rest of the afternoon. We set up the candles and read the chant and nothing happened. We crushed a bunch of beer cans. Lit a pile of leaves on fire. I remember the rest in bits and pieces—how the smoke twirled up into that incessant Colorado blue.

But I can tell you that this was one of the best days of my life. There’s no one reason. It was just so free. I could exist in that house with Zap, no matter how haunted. I could be as rude as I wanted, as angry as I wanted, and he could be geeky, and it was all fine because we knew each other, we wanted to spend our days with each other. We were boundless, radiating.

A constellation, taking form.





Russ





Of Lee Whitley’s defining traits, Russ remembers his eyebrows most accurately. Arched little worms, resting prudently on the ridge of Lee’s forehead. Manicured. Russ asked Lee about this once—Do you pluck every morning? There’s not a single stray—and Lee didn’t speak to him for hours. They drove in muted hostility, so tense that Russ went home and took three shots of tequila just to rid himself of the abandonment. Those eyebrows, sharp and careful.