Over the previous year, Polly had begun spending more time with Rosebush Lincoln and the other girls from school. She never excluded me, and I made a concerted effort to join together with all the girls when they sunbathed by the lake or got a ride into the next town to go shopping at the thrift stores. But Rosebush always made it clear that I was only to be tolerated because I was allied with Polly, that my visa into the world of Rosebush Lincoln was temporary and most definitely revocable. I was put on notice.
When there’s nothing else to do, you can always watch the birds. The finches, their twitchy and mechanical little bodies—they go where they want to go, driven by impulse and instinct. The finch does not dwell in consideration of its nature or the nature of the world. It is brazen and unapologetic. It hammers its little bird heart against the blustering wind, and its death is as beautiful as its life.
*
It was that year, that summer, that I followed the other girls to the abandoned mine. What did they used to mine there? I want to say gypsum, because gypsum is a lovely word and a gypsum mine is a pretty thought to have. It was on a different end of the woods from the lake, and the entrance to it was at the base of a small overgrown quarry. The parents of our town instructed us to stay away from the quarry because of lurking dangers, but it was always beautiful and peaceful to me. In certain seasons there was rivulet of melted snow that came out of the mountains and trickled irregularly down the stony sides of the quarry and ran finally into the mouth of the mine. If you went there alone, you could just listen to that plink-plonk of water and be tranquil. You could lie in nests of leaves, all those dying oranges and reds, all those deep browns that come from what green used to be, shaded by the old-growth trees that leaned over the lip of the quarry, and you could be nothing at all.
The mouth of the mine itself was weeded over with sumac and creeper vine, and there were two sets of mine-cart rails that emerged from the opening like tongues and ended abruptly on the floor of the quarry. You could wonder for hours about where those tracks went. Miles of underground passages beneath the town, maybe a whole underground city, with tunnels that opened in your basement! I explored our basement once, looking for an opening into hidden Atlantis—but all I found were forgotten mousetraps with hunks of dried-up cheese.
It was almost exactly a year after my conversation with Polly under the sprinklers, and her sister, Shell, was still breaching.
“I don’t think she’s ever going to stop,” Polly said miserably. “What if she doesn’t stop before I start?”
“You? But we’re only fourteen.”
“It’s not unheard of. My parents said it’s not unheard of. It’s different for different people. Plus I’m developing early in other ways.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen yet.”
“It better not. My parents are going to throw a big party for her when she’s done. That’s how relieved they’ll be. They said I’m not going to be half as bad as her.”
It seemed as though this were a source of disappointment for Polly.
So when she came to my house on a weekday morning in July, telling me that everyone was going to the quarry and that we should hurry to join them, I followed her. If I didn’t follow her, I reasoned, I might be left behind forever—a child who simply misses the chance to grow up.
So we took our bikes, pedaling hard and purposefully. On other days we might have been leisurely about our pace, weaving in lazy arcs back and forth across the empty roads. But that day was different.
Arriving at the quarry, we saw four girls already there—Adelaide Warren, Sue Foxworth, and Idabel McCarron with her little sister, Florabel, in tow. We scrambled down into the quarry, bringing tiny avalanches of white silt pebbles after us.
“Where’s Rosebush?” was the first thing Polly said as a greeting to the other girls.
“I don’t know,” said Adelaide. “Look what we found.”
We all gathered in a circle around the thing on the ground. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was—a wispy thing like smoke or frayed burlap, it moved with the breeze. Hair. It was a long skein of mousy brown girl hair.
“It was ripped out,” Sue said.
“How can you tell?”
“Look.”
She reached down, gathered its tips into a bunch, and picked it up. Dangling from the base of the lock was a scabby little flake that I quickly understood to be scalp skin.
Florabel shrieked and started running in circles.
“Shut it,” her sister said.
“Whose is it?” Polly asked.
“I don’t know,” Sue said. “Better be a local girl.”
A fierce territoriality is the by-product of uncommon local practices. Whatever happened in our town was manageable as long as it stayed in our town. We were not encouraged to socialize with people from elsewhere. We were taught to smile at them as they passed through. Every now and then some teenager from a neighboring town would get stuck here during a full moon—and the next day that outsider would usually go home goried up and trembling. That’s when trouble came down on us—authorities from other places going from door to door, kneeling down in front of us kids trying to get us to reveal something. But for the most part, people left us alone. Ours was a cursed town to outsiders.
Just then there was a sound in the trees above, and we gazed up to find Rosebush Lincoln standing next to her bike on the lip of the quarry.
“I’m here, creeps,” she said and let her bike fall to the ground. Strapped to her back was a pink teddy-bear backpack whose contents seemed heavy enough to make it an awkward process to climb down to the floor of the quarry. Once at the bottom, though, she sloughed off the pack and came over to where we stood.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the hair that Sue still held in her fingers.
“Hair.”
“Uh-huh,” Rosebush said. “I know where that came from. Mindy Kleinholt. My brother says she’s been going around all week with a new hairstyle to cover the empty spot. Happens.”
Rosebush shrugged with a casual world-weariness that made her seem thirty-three rather than fourteen.