By the time I get back to room 12, Jasper is passed out in a gangly diagonal across his bed, headphones mashed sideways, the nape of his neck soft and exposed. He must have finished his homework, because his favorite off-brand editing app is up on his screen.
He’s always taking little videos—tree limbs crisscrossing in the wind, tadpoles wriggling in a drying puddle, his own feet running on cracked pavement. Standard moody-teen art, basically, but the angles are odd and unsettling, and he layers so many filters over the images that they acquire a spectral unreality. Lately he’s been stitching them together, weaving them into tiny, strange narratives.
In one of them, a giggling white girl is carving a heart into the trunk of a tree. Dark liquid wells up from the wood, but she ignores it, carving until her hands are slicked red to the wrist. The final shot is her turning to the camera, mouthing I love you.
In the latest one, you see a pair of brown hands lowering a dead bird into the river. The footage does a funny little skip, and then a hand reaches back out of the water, covered in wet black feathers. The hands clasp tight; with passion or violence, it’s impossible to say.
Jasper had red welts all over the backs of his hands for days, where the superglue had taken off bits of skin.
He won’t show me this new one yet. The frames on his screen now are just a series of empty white squares, like fogged-up windows.
I hold the doorknob to muffle the latch behind me, but Jasper stirs, squinting up at me with his curls squashed flat on one side. “You just now getting home?” I flinch a little; room 12 isn’t a home so much as a place we happen to be, like a bus stop or a gas station.
“Frank kept us late.”
Actually I’d spent an extra hour shivering on the old railroad bridge, watching the oily rainbow sheen of the water and wondering if I’d just done something incredibly stupid. In the end I decided I probably had, but that was hardly a first, and at least this time it might be worth it.
I flop beside him on the bed. “Did Miss Hudson get your book report back?”
“Yeah, I got an A.” Jasper appears to struggle with himself before adding, “Minus.”
“I assume you’re trying to signal some sort of hostage situation. Blink twice if you’re being blackmailed.”
“It wasn’t fair! We were supposed to say whether we thought it was a horror novel or a romance, right? And I said both, because it is, and she took off five points.”
I offer to TP Miss Hudson’s house, which Jasper feels would not affect his GPA favorably, so we compromise by calling her bad names until both of us feel better. Afterward he sinks into his amateur-filmmaker forums. (I used to worry about how much time he spent online. Last year I tried to bully him into joining the high school movie club until Jasper explained, patiently, that he’d been a member up until Ronnie Hopkins asked him to write the Spanish lines for a character in his screenplay listed as “CARTEL THUG #3.” I said, defensively, that I was just trying to help, and Jasper said that would be the title of his next horror short. I surrendered.)
Now he scrolls contentedly while I open three packs of store-brand Pop-Tarts (dinner) and microwave tap water for hot chocolate (dessert).
For some reason I feel like singing, so I do, one of Mom’s old sweet songs about apples in the summertime and peaches in the fall. I don’t know where she was from originally—one of my earliest memories is watching the telephone lines lope alongside the car while Mom drove us from nowhere to nowhere—but her accent was green and southern, just like mine. Her voice was better, though: low, smoke-bitten.
Jasper slides me a look, but his mouth is too full to say anything.
We spend the evening cocooned in our sleeping bags, headachey and sticky-fingered from sugar. It’s cold enough that frost spangles the window and the heater rattles, so I cave and let the hellcat inside, an act of generosity which she repays by slinking under the bed and hissing every time the mattress creaks. I plug in the Christmas lights and the room goes hazy gold, and I wonder what a stranger would see if they cupped their hands against the glass: the two of us huddled in our hideout like Lost Boys or Boxcar Children, a couple of homeless kids playing a defiant game of house.
Sometime after midnight Jasper switches to a playlist called “peaceful beach waves.” It sounds like static to me, but Jasper’s always wanted to see the ocean. And he will, I swear he will. Maybe I’ll even go with him.
I try to picture it: shoving my clothes in a backpack and driving across the county line, leaving room 12 empty and anonymous behind me. It feels fantastical, unnatural, like a tree dreaming of ripping up its roots and walking down the highway.
Which is stupid because I don’t have roots; I was born in the backseat of Mom’s ’94 Corvette. I remember bugging her when I was little, asking if we were going to stay in the motel forever, if Eden was our new home. I remember the brittle sound of her laugh, the hard line of her jaw when she stopped. Home is just wherever you get stuck.
I wait until Jasper’s breathing rasps into snores before sliding the laptop off his bed. The hellcat gives a perfunctory hiss.
I click in aimless patterns for a while, as if there’s someone watching over my shoulder and I have to prove how little I care. After the third game of Minesweeper I open a private tab and type two words into the search bar: starling house.
The image results are the same as always: mostly birds, vast murmurations hanging in the sky like desaturated auroras, with one or two grainy photos of the Starling House gates, or the historical plaque on the side of the road. Those pictures lead me to a haunted house blog that rates Starling House eight out of ten ghost emojis but doesn’t seem to have much actual information, and the Kentucky State Historical Society, whose website is listed as “coming soon” as of four years ago.
Lower down in the search results there’s an amber daguerreotype of a not-very-pretty girl wearing an old-fashioned wedding dress. A middle-aged man stands beside her with his hand on her shoulder, his hair a colorless gray that might be blond or red. It’s hard to tell, but I think the girl might be leaning very slightly away from him.
My copy of The Underland doesn’t have author photos, but I know who she is even before I click the link. It’s the wild, abyssal look in her eyes that gives her away, and the ink-stained tips of her fingers.
The photo takes me to the Wiki page for Eden, Kentucky. I scroll through the history section, which gives me the story everybody already knows: the opening of the first mines; the founding of Gravely Power; the Ajax 3850-B, biggest power shovel in the whole world, called “Big Jack” by locals; seventy thousand acres dug up and wrung dry; that one Prine song that everybody still hates;7 a few pictures of Big Jack digging its own grave in the eighties, with a huddle of smaller shovels gathered around it like pallbearers.
I remember once when I was hanging around the motel office as a kid, Bev told me about the time her daddy took her up to the top of Big Jack. She said you could see miles and miles in every direction, the whole county laid out like a patchwork quilt. Her face was soft and handsome for a minute, remembering, before she told me to go get the Windex and a roll of paper towels if I didn’t have anything better to do.
E. Starling’s name is linked only once, in the “Notable people” section.