She smiles and shrugs like it doesn’t count, gathering her tools. “I’m smart with makeup.”
“You’re smart with lots of things. Don’t run yourself down,” Mags says, setting the yearbook on the pile of novels on her nightstand.
I’m still thinking about Kenyon, picturing his fist slowly meeting the heavy bag, the tightness of his jaw, the focus of his gaze when I asked if Rhiannon knew he was crushing on her. Wasn’t gonna happen, he’d said, not like somebody feeling sorry for himself, but like he knew for sure, like it was a fact. “You think he was lying to me the other night?”
Nell glances at me, then down at her packet of brushes. “He lied to everybody for a year.”
“All he had to do was tell his parents,” Mags says. “You know they would’ve smoothed everything out for him, like they did when he got caught with weed at school. Everybody knows they’ve got more money than God.”
“Gimme the laptop,” I say. Mags raises her eyebrows at me and doesn’t move. “Please. Please gimme the laptop, Your Highness.”
I private message Kenyon, and keep it simple: Y r u lying?
The next morning, I oversleep and wake up to Mags’s big foot kicking my door. No time to see if Kenyon’s messaged me back. But at least I poked him. He knows I suspect something.
The last day of the harvest is probably the most beautiful day of the whole summer. Hot but dry, the blue sky full of those big, rolling clouds that really do make animal shapes. We’ll be outta here by noon and everybody knows it, so the attitude’s pretty relaxed, people calling back and forth between rows, laughing. We girls work close by, not talking much, just feeling the sun and making our last few hours count.
Mr. Wardwell blasts his truck horn three times when the field is cleared, and everybody walks up to headquarters and stands around in a loose knot. Mrs. Wardwell gets to her feet. “You all know we give something away at the end of harvest to whoever raked the most. This year’s a first. We never had a lady up here before. Therese Bankowski, come up and get your check.”
I watch a hard-faced, freckled woman break away from the group. It’s the woman from the fire, the one whose family lost their stuff. She’s rangy and strong, shaking hands with Mrs. Wardwell—the tendons stand out in her forearms like baling wire—and taking the check for seven hundred dollars with no more change in her expression than if she was being handed a grocery store receipt. My gaze meets Jesse’s through the crowd. It’s a long look, neither of us wanting to be the first to break it.
“Awright, people. We brought in some good berries this year.” Mrs. Wardwell drops back into her chair, massaging one foot through her moccasin. “Last checks are in the mail.”
“And don’t let the door hit ya ass,” Mags whispers. I smile on reflex, watching Jesse step back, move away with Mason. Mason, I’ll see at school on Monday. Jesse, I don’t know when I’ll see again.
Locals move toward the line of parked cars, heading home to houses and trailers. Migrants move toward the cabins; starting tomorrow, they’ll be heading north to potato country, or the next under-the-table construction or food service job. Wonder if they’ll come this way again next blueberry season. If I were them, I wouldn’t.
As we walk downhill toward Mags’s car, I hear a whoop. Bankowski’s spinning her little boy around by his hands as he giggles crazily at the sky.
The barrens really deserve their name without us rakers. Nothing left out there but the flatbed loaded with the last day’s haul, some pickups, and the toilets to prove we were here at all. I stop, squinting against the sunlight as I watch Jesse’s pickup pull onto 15 with the rest of the locals streaming back toward town.
Mags stops with her hand on her door. “Forget something?”
I take off my hat, toss it into the car, and climb in after it. “Not a thing.”
TWENTY-TWO
IT TAKES ME a second to recognize the gold SUV when it pulls into our driveway later that afternoon. We’re on the porch playing I Doubt It, and I stand, leaning against a column as Kenyon gets out of his mom’s car. Didn’t take long to flush him out of the weeds.
He looks up at our house for a second. He’s never been here before, and the place does look kind of sketchy right now, scraped bare except for fresh butter-yellow paint up to the top of the first-floor windows. He stops at the steps. “Hey.” He sees my bruises but doesn’t ask; knowing the Sasanoa grapevine, he’s already heard the whole story.
I nod. Nell’s curled up like a cat on the swing, studying him openly while working her fingers through an old afghan Libby knitted that we keep thrown over the backrest. Mags sits on the floor, watching him over her cards with absolutely no expression, her foolproof trick to make somebody feel unwanted. Kenyon checks out our setup—table with cards, change, and a bag of cheese puffs—then says to me, “Can I talk to you?”
Mom’s at work, but we go up to my room for privacy anyway. It isn’t too messy except for a pair of dirty underwear that I kick under the bed. He goes over to the window and looks out at the road. “I got your message.” He reaches up and flicks the bunch of dried buttercups distractedly, making them sway. “So I’m a liar, huh?”
“I think you’re bullshitting, yeah.”
When he turns around, he has a hunted look. “Don’t go around saying that.”
“Why not?” I keep my face hard. “You threw me under. Why shouldn’t I do it to you? Why shouldn’t I go right to the cops?” Bluffing, but he might not know that.
“Darcy, seriously. Just leave it alone.”
“What’s the deal, Kenyon? The truth. You owe me.”
He curses softly. He looks skinnier than usual, his Bob Marley T-shirt and skater jeans hanging off him. His jawline’s so sharp it almost looks delicate, the sun turning the fine blond stubble transparent. “I told you. She asked me to take her car.”
“You said you borrowed it.”
His voice is so quiet that I strain to catch his words. “She had to get away.”
I sink slowly onto my bed, hands curled in my lap. My room seems very still now in the afternoon quiet, almost like one of those shadow boxes we made in elementary school: tiny bed, tiny bureau, miniature people. Whatever I’m feeling, you can’t call it relief, exactly, but it’s heavy, stealing my strength and voice for a long time. When I finally speak again, it’s in a whisper. “From what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what. She couldn’t tell me. Not wouldn’t, but like, couldn’t, you know. Like it hurt too much.” He shrugs and sniffs. “She was messed up bad that last year. We kind of talked around it a bunch of times, but the night of the party, she started crying. Saying she couldn’t stay here anymore.”