Sycamore



For weeks, she did not see him again. When she came by Dani’s after work or slept over, she would hear footsteps but see no sign of him. She began to believe she’d dreamed it. Even when she held the pencil dented with her bite marks, she couldn’t be sure. Because how could she believe it? He was Dani’s father. Even if it had happened, it was an accident. He did not feel what she did. That heat, that match-struck feeling—that was her problem, not his. She told herself it was no big deal, but when she saw Mrs. Newell—who seemed always to be dashing from house to college to theater to home, her dark, winged eyebrows pulled low—Jess couldn’t quite meet her eye, her face aflame. Her mother went on more dates with Mr. Juarez, and Jess went on a few dates alone with Warren the Rabbit. When they said good-bye, she kissed and rubbed up against him. Once she got so carried away, she bit his lip and drew blood. He pulled away in surprise. “Ow,” he said, as if she’d hurt his feelings.

She worked at the orchard, the days hot and sluggish, making sure the trees had enough water. Iris called July and August the water stage, a time crucial to the growth of the nut. A hundred and fifty gallons a day. Though the monsoon helped, the storms were not enough. Jess checked and fixed irrigation lines, carried hoses, pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with branches. She cleared weeds and drove the mower for the first time, cutting the grass low to keep it from competing for water with the trees. So much work to protect and nurture those tiny little nuts, and she remembered botany, which she’d circled in Big Red’s pages. The scientific study of plants. From the root botane, “plant.” Throughout the day, Jess, too, needed water, gulping it straight from the hose.

On breaks inside, the A/C cooling her sweaty face, she helped Iris map out plans for Sundown at the Orchard, those fall and winter nights when they’d stay open late and sell nuts to the holiday crowds. Jess suggested lining the driveway with luminarias, winding the posts with twinkle lights. “I can help bake,” she told Iris, and Iris said, “You’ll have school.” But Jess wasn’t thinking about school. She was thinking about the brush of a palm. She was thinking about hands she had no right to think about. She was looking up the meaning of spontaneous combustion.

On her nighttime excursions, she walked into town, up and down through the dips of her unlit road. Once she reached the bottom of the hill, she turned onto Quail Run, passed the swath of the orchard, and then turned onto College Drive, the street that bordered Sycamore College and led to the District. Occasionally she saw people or headlights coming toward her, and she would dive into the shallow drainage ditch and hold her breath, waiting until the footsteps or tires passed. She never went onto campus, even though it was right there, two blocks away from Dani’s, less than a mile from her own house. Something about the iron gates created a sense of a barrier, even though they were open, unlocked, and she could see college students along the lit paths, hear shouts and calls and laughter. She was sure the second she set foot inside, they would know she didn’t belong.

When she reached Main Street and the District, she sat across from the Woodchute Motor Lodge in the shadowed alcove of a vacant building. From there, unseen, she watched the windows of the motel rooms, the cracks of light through the closed curtains, wondering who was inside, what they were doing on the beds. She caught sight of Stevie Prentiss, the girl with the birthmark, through the window of the office. She wondered at the birthmark’s splotchy shape, its visibility even from a distance, and she touched her own face. Birthmark. Marked from birth. What did that mean? Marked for what? She watched her drunken classmates gather across the street at Casa Verde and the Patty Melt and next door at the Circle K gas station, hollering to each other out open car windows. Marked to be assholes, fools, fuck-ups. One night she saw Angie Juarez’s Impala swing into the motel lot and park in front of Room 7. Angie, Stevie’s younger sister Rose, and Beto Navarro hopped out of the car, and Rose ran to the front office. Angie and Beto waited, leaning against the car, until Rose skipped out and unlocked Room 7, and all three headed inside. Jess felt that old twinge of sadness about Angie, their friendship severed for no reason Jess could fathom. She didn’t resent her finding new friends, but the moment reasserted a lingering sense of shame, as if she had done something wrong—as if something was wrong with her. And something was wrong with her, wasn’t it? With Dani, she had finally found friendship, a second family, a welcoming space she wanted to crawl inside and burrow. And now here she was obsessing about a surreal moment with Dani’s father, consumed by a ridiculous heat. She didn’t know how to fix herself, only that she better figure it out before Dani disappeared too.

She walked through the darkened college neighborhood, past the pretty houses with their tidy shrubs and recessed porches, their soft lights and watered grass. She turned onto Pi?on Drive. She passed the Newells, standing in the street to watch the glowing attic window.

In her notebook, with a tooth-gouged yellow No. 2 pencil, she wrote:

The nuts grow in clusters,

oblong and taut,

tender as limes to the touch.

They cling to the branches

afraid of falling

though fall they must

come fall



Summer is too soon

for the shaking season.

So what is this tremble they feel?

What is this hot change

that pushes their skin outward

their seams like scars?

Shaking now, shaking



Come, fall.

Hurry.

They’re losing their grip

They can’t hold on much longer.



Then she erased it, scratched and shaded the page in a fine sheen of carbon.



In August, weeks before her senior year began, in the last-gasp days of summer freedom, Jess stayed over at Dani’s again. They stayed up late watching movies and eating Dusty Roads, bowls of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with malt powder and chocolate syrup. When Dani fell asleep, Jess lay in bed, straining to hear footsteps, but the house was silent aside from the occasional muffled creak or clang. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. A door off the kitchen led to the garage, and a strip of light shone beneath it.

She opened the door. Mr. Newell was inside, leaning into the hood of the Squareback. The door swung shut behind her, hitting her heels, and he turned.

“Hello,” she said. She lifted her hand but then dropped it. The cement was cool under her bare feet.

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