I was a chubby eleven-year-old—legs bloodied from mosquito bites, bleary from bad sleep, nerves strung tight, nails bitten raw. It was an early September evening, and for the past week, I’d known something bad was on the verge of happening. My mother had been gone seventeen days this go-round, the longest stretch yet, and I’d finally been turned in to DFCS by Mrs. Tully because, she said, her husband was tired of having me around. She told the caseworker that, by God, she’d done her damnedest, but she couldn’t find one single relative to take me in.
Mrs. Tully had sent me into her shower, but my knees and elbows were still caked with grime. My long dishwater-blonde hair desperately needed a trim, and the few clothes I’d brought were stained and ragged. Nevertheless, I was there at the brown brick house and, on the whole, glad of it. I was scared but also relieved that I wouldn’t have to wait for my mother anymore. I was also more than a little excited about a warm bed, a meal, and maybe a bathtub with bubbles. It did occur to me—in a vague way—that I might have landed myself someplace far worse than my lonely apartment, but nothing in the house seemed amiss, so I tried to ignore the way my stomach constantly went from fluttering to tight.
There were three tormenters in the brown brick house—the Super Tramps, they called themselves, and whenever Mrs. Bobbie scolded them for it (their nickname, not the tormenting, which she seemed oblivious to), they screeched in outrage: “It’s just after the rock band! Mr. Al’s favorite group!” They weren’t wrong about Mr. Al loving Supertramp. He played that album all the time on the huge stereo system he had set up in the living-room built-ins, so much that “The Logical Song” ran maddeningly on a loop through my head anytime things got a little quiet.
Mrs. Bobbie hated that the girls called themselves after the band. I also think she hated that her husband liked that music so much too. She was just that kind of woman. She didn’t appreciate anyone enjoying themselves too much outside of church and school. Which was probably why she was forced to either ignore Mr. Al or be constantly, supremely annoyed with him.
He was a shambling man with a mane of shaggy blond hair and friendly, sleepy eyes. A stoner, even though I didn’t recognize it at the time. A man who did happen to enjoy himself on a daily basis and without one ounce of guilt, earning himself Mrs. Bobbie’s displeasure, fair and square. I didn’t pick up on any of those details at the time. I just knew I liked and trusted the man. He was master of the awkward side-hug, gentle ruffler of hair, bringer of fun. The father we all quietly—unwittingly—yearned for.
Even though the Super Tramps were technically right about the origins of their nickname, Mrs. Bobbie knew they were full of shit and just trying to get her goat, so she usually banished them upstairs. It wasn’t much of a punishment. They’d sashay up to the room they shared, slam the door, and giggle themselves limp on the three twin beds that they’d arranged in the center of the room. I heard everything through the walls, and every bit of it drew me in. I especially liked the sound of that laughter. It was throaty and nasty and knowing. I got the feeling these girls always somehow had the last say with Mrs. Bobbie.
The Super Tramps had been living in the two-story brown brick house at the end of the dirt road along with Chantal, who was fourteen, for a number of years before I got there. I didn’t know exactly how many. I wasn’t allowed that level of security clearance. To me, my new roommates imparted other, more pertinent, information, like:
You have boogers in your eyes, and you smell like an asshole.
You better never, ever fucking look at me. You got that?
The Pinkeys are coming—tomorrow, probably—to adopt you.
The Pinkeys, I learned, were a family of hillbilly cannibals with bear traps for teeth who lived in the national forest behind the ranch. I was told they came around every couple of years to select a young girl to take home with them for housekeeping duties and, if things didn’t pan out, possible ritual child sacrifice.
While Mrs. Bobbie kept the daily routine of the brown brick house humming—meals served at six a.m. and p.m. on the dot, a rotation of chores for us girls when we got home from school, and mandatory family Bible study each night before bed—the Super Tramps actually ran the place. Omega, the leader, was seventeen—fiercely beautiful, with a Cleopatra haircut and pillowy woman-lips that, when coated with cheap drugstore lipstick in fuchsia, made her look like she’d just blown out of a photo shoot for one of the copies of Glamour Mrs. Bobbie hid in her bathroom cabinet. You wouldn’t want to be assigned kitchen cleanup with her, though. She talked to the knives while she washed them, like they were actual people.
“You ever stabbed someone?” she would croon to a blade, then cut her eyes at me.
Tré and Shellie were sixteen, juniors at Mount Olive Christian Academy, where the ranch girls were given scholarships to attend. Shellie was pretty but pale, with a headful of peroxided straw and a perpetual spray of acne across her jaw. Tré was a freckled wraith who wore a pair of men’s Carhartt coveralls that Mr. Al had handed down to her; muddy, oxblood-red Doc Martens (that I never figured out how she obtained); and a stack of rainbow-colored hair bands as bracelets. She told everyone she was a Wiccan high priestess, except Mrs. Bobbie and Mr. Al, who were Baptists and wouldn’t have appreciated it. I was eleven and had no idea what Wiccan was, but I was duly terrified by my new sisters.
Which was what Mrs. Bobbie said they were. Along with Chantal, they were my new big sisters.
That first night at the ranch, the hot night in September that the social worker dropped me at the brown brick house, I was overwhelmed, although at the time I couldn’t have said why. Part of it was that I was used to a small apartment, with a tiny cramped living room and bedrooms the size of closets. This house had walls, but to me, it felt boundaryless. It was the biggest house I’d ever been in, and I had the sensation of standing on an open field, unprotected, my flanks exposed to an unseen, lurking enemy.
Where did everyone belong?
As I stood in the tidy, Lemon Pledge–scented living room, my secondhand backpack of meager belongings hanging off my rounded shoulders, I pictured the pantry—its dimensions and how much food must be kept there and what kind. It was weighing on me, making me feel nervous, the thought that there might not be enough food for me to eat in the morning. Had they known I was coming? Where would I find breakfast way out here in the country? Hunger gnawed at my stomach. In the rush to get me to the ranch, the social worker had forgotten I hadn’t had supper.
I trembled in the center of the vast unknown as it expanded around me, and my stomach growled. After Mrs. Bobbie told me there were three older girls upstairs (sisters, she called them), she introduced Chantal, who was standing by the plaid sofa, digging her finger in a hole in the fabric. Mrs. Bobbie said Chantal was fourteen, even though she was not much bigger than me. She had long, frizzy hair, blonde with a sickly green tint to it, and when Mrs. Bobbie dragged her closer, I saw that she had different-colored eyes—one green and one blue—that reminded me of a dog that used to wander around our apartment. It was a mean, spindly mutt, and I always tried to feed it scraps when it would let me get close enough.
“Chantal,” Mrs. Bobbie said. “Daphne’s come to stay with us because her mother’s not feeling well.”
It was true, to a point. On a regular basis, my mother—jonesing for whatever it was that made her feel better—would disappear for days from our apartment complex, leaving me to fend for myself. This had been going on since I was five or six, and the neighbors had always been kind. Every time I knocked on their doors, they let me in. I didn’t blame Mr. Tully. After a while, you were bound to get tired of a hungry, smelly kid eating all your cereal and chips and using up your toilet paper.
Chantal seemed inordinately interested in me, watching me with her strange eyes.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was deep and raspy. It made her sound worldly, older than her years.
“Hi,” I replied.