“Would you like to talk now?” Glenys said. “I have some time.”
I toed at the wet leaves. Underneath, a trio of mushrooms had sprung up, pale white, crusted with dirt. I wondered if they were the poisonous kind. I was a city girl, though, unable to tell the difference between an edible mushroom and one that killed you.
“It was a complicated situation,” I heard myself saying. “What happened at the ranch. I was a child, and I didn’t know what I was doing . . . what I had done, until it was too late.”
Chapter Twelve
After a couple of days at the girls’ ranch, it became clear that Chantal had decided she was my own personal earthquake.
My third day there, I’d satisfied my itch to explore every inch of our house and yard. We were the last house at the end of a long dirt road, backed up against the woods, and I’d grown curious about the other houses and the rest of the place. Sunday, after church, Mrs. Bobbie said Chantal could show me around the expansive sixty acres.
The girl took me behind the house and through the woods, looping back around to the entrance, where the ranch’s mile-long red-clay drive turned off the state road. A hand-carved wooden sign swung on the branch of a gumball tree, and even though I’d seen it before, I smiled.
“Welcome to Piney Woods Girls’ Ranch,” Chantal announced in a tour-guide voice and then took off, jogging down the drive. I followed her, panting and struggling to keep up in the sticky south-Georgia September heat, until she slowed at the main offices. The buildings were designed to look like an Old West town, ramshackle and shingled and hung with old-timey signs that said “Office” and “Library” and “General Store.” A boardwalk connected them, and our feet made satisfying clomping sounds as we walked over it.
The building on the end was where the director, Mr. Cleve, and his staff worked. I’d met him that first night—he was a jovial man with a white beard. There was a sparse library with homemade bookshelves, a game room with a Ping-Pong table and board games in cabinets, and one other building, for group activities and meetings. From the Old West town we walked down a hill past two large vegetable gardens, to an open-air pavilion where Chantal said everybody from each house gathered together on Sunday evening for something called Vespers. Past the pavilion, we started back down the dirt road where all the houses, including ours, sat in two untidy rows. We dawdled for a minute in our front yard, which was mostly dirt and crabgrass.
“If we go in, we’ll have to finish our Sunday-school lesson,” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather go to the lake? And maybe somewhere else, a place I haven’t showed you?”
We’d been to church that morning. And Sunday school after that, where a lady had handed out worksheets on a parable that Jesus told about a woman who swept her house. The teacher had kept staring at me while she put paper cutouts of the characters in the story onto a flannel board, as if it was a lesson she thought that I, in particular, could learn from. A few times, her gaze dropped down to my clothes, and I thought I saw her nose wrinkle the slightest bit. I hadn’t had a chance to check the cast-off-clothes box in the hall closet, so I was wearing the old, stained yellow pants with the hems ripped out that I’d brought from home.
And now that I thought of it, why hadn’t Chantal shown me the lake in the first place, on our tour? It was just like her, keeping something back. Trying to show me who was boss.
I told Chantal I wanted to go to the lake.
It was a pond, actually, a murky man-made thing crusted over with green algae and rimmed by thick, sharp-edged grass. A cloud of gnats swarmed over it, and I made up my mind that I would never dip a toe in its disgusting depths. There was a short, wobbly dock of splintered wood, booby-trapped with nail heads that snagged at our shoes when we walked to the end of it. In the summer, Chantal said, the girls were allowed to swim or fish with poles they kept up at the ranch house. Onshore, a cobwebbed canoe lay flipped upside down. When I asked about it, she looked at it blankly for a second, like she’d never noticed it until now.
“We don’t use it. No oars.”
I pushed at one end with the toe of my sneaker, but she grabbed my arm. “Don’t. There are probably snakes under there.”
Something buzzed in my head—not so much a warning bell as just an indication of the presence of new information. The upside-down canoe was important to Chantal, and I could imagine several reasons why that might be so, mainly because I had immediately recognized it as a prime hiding place.
“You want to see a secret place?” Chantal said quickly.
“Okay.”
“Swear on your mother’s grave that you won’t tell anyone.”
“How come?”
“Just swear.”
“All right. I swear,” I said, not bothering to mention my mother wasn’t dead. Besides, there probably wasn’t really a secret place, so who even cared?
Chantal and I set off, following the curve of the lake until we reached the woods. About a half mile in, we arrived at our destination—a moldy plywood structure that looked like a cross between a tree house and a fort. It was built by some girls who’d lived at the ranch long ago, maybe even in our same brown brick house. They’d filched the wood from somewhere—probably from Mr. Al, who, since I’d arrived, had spent every afternoon in the driveway, surrounded by stacks of lumber and tools. He was building a doghouse for Bitsy, the ranch hound who wandered from house to house, begging scraps and pooping in everybody’s front yards. I thought that was sweet of him.
Inside the clubhouse was another world—a distant planet strung with old Christmas garlands and grimy cast-off pillows, and filled with an impressive stash of snacks, magazines, and tattered paperbacks. It reminded me of what the inside of a genie bottle must have looked like, and smelled like it too—that same scent of sweet cologne that clung to Omega and Shellie and Tré. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.
“These woods don’t belong to the ranch,” Chantal said. “They’re a national forest. So we can do anything we want here—smoke, drink beer, or read dirty books. Even if we get caught, there’s not a damn thing Mrs. Bobbie can do about it.”
I nodded, truly and legitimately enthralled.
“You ever read a porno book? They have them here. And Omega and them bring boys out here and have sex sometimes too. But you’re just eleven, so I can’t say anything else about that.” She ticked a lock over her mouth. I was relieved.
That night, after we all sat down to dinner and Mr. Al said the blessing, Mrs. Bobbie pointed to a large orange pill sitting in the upper-right corner of my place mat. I scanned the table. All the other girls had identical pills sitting on their mats as well. Chantal had two—one orange and one small blue.
“Vitamins first,” Mrs. Bobbie said.
I swallowed the pill with one big gulp of cherry Kool-Aid, then noticed the other girls only sipped theirs. I wondered why.
Mrs. Bobbie watched me with a gimlet eye. “It’s a multi.” She said it like mult-eye. “Because I can’t afford to be driving you gals into town for this, that, and the other. Around here, if you get a fever, we call the preacher ’cause he lays on hands for free.”
“He sure does,” one of the Super Tramps muttered.
One of the girls giggled, then all of us got to laughing; even Mr. Al cracked a grin and shook his head. Mrs. Bobbie hushed everyone. She declared she had something else to say, and all at once everything got really quiet. My stomach flipped—the way it used to every time I came home to find our apartment door locked even though it was too early for my mom to have gotten home from work for the day. That stomach-flip feeling meant she was inside and up to no good, and I would have to find a place to wait until dark. It meant I’d have to figure out a way to stay out of sight of the older boys who hung around the parking lot.