Sycamore by Bryn Chancellor
You Are Here
January 1991
Her first night in Sycamore, the girl snuck out of the house. Wearing frayed purple canvas shoes and a new puffy vinyl winter coat the red-orange of an ocotillo bloom, the girl paused on her tiptoes on the threshold when the front door hinges creaked. Her mother, deaf in her left ear, didn’t stir, and the girl shut the door with a click. This wasn’t the girl’s first time to slip out the door late at night, and it wouldn’t be her last. (There would be a last time, but not tonight.) For now she had this night, her first in a small northern Arizona town where her mother had dragged her. She shoved her notebook inside her coat and hurried down the driveway. Her breath smoked in the desert winter air.
At the end of the driveway, beyond the porch light’s bowled halo, she stopped. No Phoenix streetlights. No swish of tires from nearby Seventh Avenue, no shouts echoing from the bus stops and bars, no jet engines from red-eyes at Sky Harbor. She stared into a cold, silent darkness so vast she grew dizzy. An eerie quiet. Unquiet. Sweat pricked her armpits, and she widened her eyes, thinking about the owls that roosted in their neighbor’s ash tree back home, that prizefighter bob-and-weave as they gauged what lay before them.
She looked up, and the silence stopped. The carbonized sky howled as the Milky Way cracked its sternum, exposing its galactic heart. She clenched her eyes shut as if she’d stared into a klieg light. Back in central Phoenix, in a neighborhood blanketed by the grapefruit haze of streetlights, the night sky never sank into black. Even out in the desert, beyond the city’s glow, stars and planets hung back like shy children. Her nostrils flared at the sudden smell of mint, and she shivered with the sensation she had tumbled down a hole. She thought, Oh my god, I’m Baby Jessica! I’m in a well! Help! It’s dark in here! She laughed with a hard exhale, and the sound surprised her. She opened her eyes. That was her father’s laugh, a caw that veered into honk.
Her eyes began to adjust. The shapes of trees and shrubs and rooftops sharpened, and neighbors’ lights emerged as pushpin dots along the edges. Her new street stretched before her, a single stripe down its center. Roadrunner Lane. Beep beep, she thought, picturing childhood cartoons, and as if on cue, coyotes began to yip in the distance. The silhouette of the Black Hills loomed—to the west, she knew, because the sun set over the hills—salted with the lights of Jerome. Her nose, ears, and feet growing numb, she hopped up and down for warmth, trying to decide if she should go inside for a hat and thicker socks. Instead, she began to jog the mile east toward town.
Though she was tall and long-legged—she’d hit five-ten that year—she was not a graceful runner. Arms flailing and feet dragging, she felt more like a branch caught in a rushing river, lurching over rocks and roots, tumbled forward by the force of mass and gravity. Sixteen had been the Year of Hips, and she had to cinch the waistbands of her wider pants with belts and safety pins. And look at those feet. Ridiculous. It was a wonder she didn’t trip over them every second of the day. She’d quit ballet last year, self-conscious now of her body in a leotard, of her lumbering leaps and thuds on the studio floor. How had humans evolved into these stupid, unaerodynamic bodies? Still, she was outdoors. She was moving forward, gulping down clean, cold air. In the low end of the foothills, the road swelled and dipped, crossed washes in the depressions. Downhill, she picked up speed. Her puffy red jacket made a pleasing slushy sound as her arms swished against it, her notebook tucked against her heart. Impetuously she leaped, a quick jeté, jeté, jeté, defying gravity for three brief spans.
The impulse to be out—she’d had it since she was young, when she would burst through the door and leap off the steps en route to the playground, the yard, the swimming pool, back when she was young enough to perform along the way, all extended arms and chassés and pas de bourrées. On her recent late-night excursions in Phoenix, she usually went only as far as the backyard; she stretched out on a blanket in the grass with a flashlight and a book, or on irrigation nights splashed through the flooded lot, feeling the earth sink and squish between her toes. Once she had her license, she would sometimes take her father’s pickup, rolling it silently to the end of the drive with the engine off, and after he packed up and left, she did the same with her mother’s brown sedan. She didn’t always go far, mostly up and down the grid streets of her neighborhood, listening to mixtapes on the stereo. She’d park under a streetlight and write in her notebook, scratching out her lousy poems, trying to calm her itchy nerves. Like now, she wasn’t seeking trouble or mischief or clandestine meetups—well, she once had been, when she was with the Boy, but not since they broke up almost six months ago. Instead, she was easing the tightness that grew in her all day as she bumped her way through the school halls with her newly belled hips, as she evaded the Boy and his smirking friends, as she navigated her parents’ arguments, the tense conversations that stopped short when she entered the room. Here in her new town, she didn’t know what she was seeking. Out. Go—that was the impulse.
Breathless, the girl stopped atop a slope from which she could see the center of town. In Phoenix, when she viewed the city from some height, the sprawling city hissed and spit, defiant in its radiant heat. The little town of Sycamore struck her as something out of a fairy tale in its smallness, in its cluster of businesses along Main Street, its small college on one side, her new high school on the other. Though it seemed to emit a gentle sigh, a sleepy breath, she thought not of sweetness but of Frankenstein: “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.” As soon as she thought it, she grinned and rolled her eyes. Such drama. As her mother always said, Lighten up, J-bird. You’re sixteen years old.