Sunny kneaded at her leg, bucking his head under Bridget’s chin. She ran her nails down the cat’s back, scratching just above his tail. She popped the last bite of gluey mashed potatoes into her mouth, took a deep drink of wine, and reached across the sofa cushions for the journal.
It was black; many of them were. They could pick their own, a request they’d all initially groaned at. But later they’d come in with leather-bound notebooks that reflected their personalities, handing them in shyly as if a glitter-pink cover or gilded pages revealed something otherwise unknown about their souls. They were teenagers; black and angsty was their jam. The class, creative writing, held both juniors and seniors as an elective. The seniors were edging toward college, the sweet lick of freedom bittersweet on their lips, so they weren’t as moody as the juniors who were stuck in Mt. Oanoke for another eighteen months. The seniors were coming full bloom, all the things that had seemed so confining starting to take on the rosy glow of nostalgia. High school was in their rearview mirror.
She flipped the pages. Lucia’s journal was erratic, with changing handwriting, drawings, and block letters filled in with pen. She didn’t read all the entries in anyone’s diary. The exercise was more for the idea of journaling, writing down their brainy, brilliant thoughts, just to get them on paper. She didn’t care about the content, just if they were done on time. They’d ask her, did you read mine? For all their complaining, they seemed to crave the approval.
I’m not a virgin. That’s a joke, right? No one thinks that. I’m a slut. A skank. A witch. A fetish. Never a real person. Except to you. And maybe Taylor, although she’s been flaky. Cares more about Kelsey and Riana and, depending on the day, Andrew.
I couldn’t care less about any of them. I care about you, though, so there’s that.
Bridget closed the journal. She’d never heard anyone call Lucia a whore, a slut. Most of the girls steered clear of her with her sharp, red mouth and sharper tongue. She was more likely to be the one flinging names around. The boys mostly avoided her, but some hung around a bit, too. She clung to the edge of the right crowd—Andrew Evans and Josh Tempest—Taylor clicking up behind them, double step to keep up, and Lucia hanging back. Andrew always watching her, his eyes sliding around, his mouth with that sideways smirk that the girls fell all over themselves for.
A lesson from science class: in nature, the prettiest things are poisonous.
Bridget was tired. It was only seven thirty, but she was always tired. Sleep was both an escape from the everyday weight on her chest and a possible chance to see him again. Touch his soft stubbled cheek, if only in a dream. It was worth the crushing moment in the morning when she realized none of it was real. Maybe it was worth it.
The old house brayed and whistled in the wind. She’d moved in hating this house—an inheritance from Holden’s great-aunt—everything it represented, the cold, unforgiving north, the life she’d left behind. They moved, ostensibly to fix it up, sell it. Move back south. Give it one year. If you want to leave in one year, we’ll go. I promise, back to the swamps and the bogs and the heat and the y’all. We’ll go. Then she’d gotten a job as a teacher and they stayed. They met Nate and Alecia and she made the house her own and the year came and went with hardly a whisper. That was almost eight years ago.
The house sat back from the road, the original farmhouse for the land that had since been developed. Three-acre lots with three-thousand-square-foot McMansion developments on either side. Commuter families, driving to North Jersey or New York City, coming in late in the evening but with hefty paychecks. Unlike when they’d first moved in, when the town was still reeling from the closure of the paper mill. Now they had neighborhoods with kids and bikes and winding cul-de-sacs and neighborhood barbecues. Mommy nights out and golf games and Super Bowl parties and first birthdays.
There Bridget sat, high above them all. Keeping vigilant watch over a life that wasn’t hers to have.
CHAPTER 4
Alecia, Saturday, April 25, 2015
School was canceled for the rest of the week. The EPA vans came, testing air and water. The Pennsylvania Department of Health collected little black birds in Ziploc bags all over town, mostly from around the baseball diamond—437 at the field alone. People stayed inside, not in any official way—there was no curfew, no police or health official directive—but the eeriness of it all kept people peeking through their curtains rather than sitting on their front porches. The bikes lay in empty lawns, their wheels spinning in the wind.
Alecia’s phone rang like crazy. Libby Locking, whom she’d met briefly when Gabe attempted preschool and who’d stuck to her like a bur ever since, wanted to know what Nate thought killed the birds.
“Libby, how would Nate know?” Alecia asked, pushing her hair off her forehead with the back of her dry hand. She was cutting chicken, her fingertips coated slick, and she kept the phone pressed between her cheek and her shoulder as she sliced.
“Because he’s smart. Ask Nate.”
“Nate, what killed the birds?” Alecia called into the living room, where Nate was easily on his third hour of SportsCenter.
“How would I know?” His eyes never left the television.
“He doesn’t know, Libby.”
“You know the Marshalls? Earl put plastic on their windows. They think it’s the mill. That the air is poisoned. Isn’t that nuts?”
“That’s crazy. But Earl’s crazy.” Alecia, distracted, scooped the chicken into a pan of oil and watched it sizzle. She washed her hands, the water burning, turning her knuckles red and pulsing.
“This whole town is crazy.” Libby clucked her tongue, a soft click across the line.
After they hung up, Alecia tucked the phone into her back pocket with the ringer turned down.
She should have been glad Nate was home. On paper, it seemed easier. She had another set of hands, someone to occupy Gabe, and Gabe’s hero to boot. She could have had a nap, maybe a long shower, gotten a manicure. Except half the town was closed, so forget the manicure.
But Nate was stressed. School being closed for a week, the first week of baseball, made him batty, pacing around like a caged animal. His phone rang off the hook, and Alecia could hear the panicked squeal of parents through the speaker. With games being rescheduled, even outright canceled, Marnie Evans called almost daily.
“He can throw eighty-five as a goddamn junior, Alecia. This kid, I’ve never had one like him.”
She could swear Nate loved Andrew Evans more than Gabe most days.