The Sweetness of Salt(21)

Mom came after me. “Honey? Don’t bother Sophie right now, okay? She’s not feeling that great. You can show her your trophy later. Don’t bug her now.”

“I won’t bug her.” Insulted that Mom would even suggest such a thing, I sat in my room for a while, staring at the little prize in my hands.

Little drops of rain began to pelt my bedroom window. I put my trophy down and went over to the chair behind my desk. I drew a fat pear with arms, legs, a hat, and a skirt. Then I drew a pair of cherries, connected by a single stem, holding hands. All of them wore striped socks, bows in their hair, and had little red cheeks. I put my colored pencils down. Sophie had to see my trophy. She just had to. If anything could make her feel better right now, it would be this. I knew it.

I tapped very gently on her door. “Sophie?”

“Go away.”

I paused, pressing my forehead against the door, and squeezed the trophy in my hand. “Sophie, I just want to show…”

The door flung open and I stepped back, surprised. Sophie’s hair hung around her face, as if she had turned her head upside down and shaken it. Black eyeliner had been drawn thickly around the bottoms of her eyes, and her lips were painted a garish red color. “What do you want?” she screamed. Even her voice, hoarse and shrill, sounded as if it didn’t belong to her. But it was not until I looked down and saw the hair—a large, massive clump of it—clutched in her right hand, that I began to cry.

I took another step back and bumped into the wall. The sound of Mom’s footsteps running up the stairs echoed somewhere faintly in the background, but she was not fast enough. Sophie had already snatched the trophy out of my hands and was glaring at it. “This?” she yelled. “This is what you wanted to show me?” I tried to flatten myself even more against the wall as Sophie leaned down. Her weird eyes leveled with mine. The red lipstick had begun to smudge around her bottom lip, and her breath, hot and metallic smelling, made me wince. “You think getting first place all the time will make them like you a little more?” she hissed. She held the trophy to my face, as if I might forget what it looked like, and then threw it down the hallway. I stared, horrified, as it scuttled noisily against the hardwood floor, and then spun into a corner. Suddenly, Sophie’s hot breath was in my ear. “Well guess what? Being perfect won’t change anything. Believe me. I’ve already tried.”

Mom burst out from the steps, racing toward us. “Don’t touch her!” she screamed, arms waving out in front. “Don’t you touch her, Sophie!”

Sophie straightened up. She stepped back as Mom grabbed me and held me against the front of her. Mom’s breath was coming in little spurts, as if she couldn’t catch it fast enough, and behind me I could feel her legs shaking.

“Don’t worry,” Sophie said in a strange voice. “I’m not going to hurt her.”

I could hear her behind me as she turned and walked back into her room.

And then, inside the safety of Mom’s arms, the slam of her door.





chapter


15


I got lost in Albany after stopping at a Burger King for dinner. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I thought, driving aimlessly along a mile-long street before realizing I was probably going in the wrong direction. It was almost two in the morning. A few street lights here and there broke up the darkness, but it was hard to make out much of anything. Finally I pulled over at a twenty-four-hour gas station. It was empty except for a lone gas attendant, an older man with a graying beard. I locked my doors as he approached and then rolled down the window just an inch as I asked for directions. “Oh, you ain’t too far off.” The man scratched his head with diesel-stained fingers. “You gotta go back down this road…”

“Can you hold on a second?” I dug around in my purse for a pen. “I want to write this down.” The man slowed his speech as I wrote and when I went over it, repeating his words back slowly to him, he grinned and nodded his head. “You’ll be fine,” he said, tapping the side of the car. “Just drive it like I said it.”

He was right. Twenty minutes later, much to my relief, I was back on course.

The sun was just starting to rise, dismissing the moon with a slow bleed of horizontal light, when I finally spotted the sign for Poultney. I pulled the car off to the side of the road, put my head down in the middle of the steering wheel, and took my first real breath since the trip had begun. It was 4:47 a.m.—eleven hours and forty-seven minutes after I had left Silver Springs.

Sophie hadn’t told me where on Main Street her place was, but since the street itself was no longer than a football field, I drove up and down several times, looking for some kind of clue. It was a sweet, sleepy stretch of road, scattered with black lampposts and neat lawns. Green Mountain College sat at the north end of it, a tiny campus dotted with brick buildings, paved pathways, and a multitude of maple trees. I slowed the car down as I passed a Mobil station, Perry’s Family Eatery, the Poultney House of Pizza, something called the Red Brick Café, Tot’s Diner, a redbrick church, and finally, around a slight curve, Poultney High School.

Interspersed between the business establishments were regular houses, all in various states of duress. Most of them were neatly maintained, with picture-perfect lawns and pristine front porches. One or two of them, however, looked as if they had been forgotten about entirely. I passed by them with my heart in my throat, hoping that I wouldn’t find some semblance of Sophie behind the peeling paint and rickety frames.