Days, Dani said, “Are you okay? You seem, I don’t know, distant.” And Jess said, “No, just tired,” but she couldn’t meet her eyes—eyes like her father’s.
Days, Jess thought of her own father in California, well into his new life, his cards with their scrawled bleats—Miss you, my beautiful girl. Give me a call sometime—stuffed in her desk drawer. Her father, the great betrayer. She thought of her low moans in the night house as she pictured a forbidden face, her secret thoughts on nights she lay in bed alone, and she wondered if her father had felt that way too: the shame and pleasure fused, hating himself but doing it anyway. Perhaps she was his daughter after all.
Days, she didn’t open her notebook. She didn’t write a word. She chewed rubber bands until her jaw ached.
Days, over dinner, her mother leaned across the table. What’s going on? Tell me, J-bird. Do you need a tutor? What’s the problem? I thought you were doing better. This isn’t you.
No, it wasn’t her. At least, it wasn’t all of her. It was the normal part trying to kill the other part. Two halves, split in two, day and night, night and day. She didn’t know which side she was anymore, or how to fuse herself together.
The end of October brought the start of the shaking season. On weekend days at the orchard, Jess watched Iris and Paul and two hired men haul out the sticks and the three-legged machine with its extended mechanical arm and clamp. The machine’s arm clutched the tree’s trunk and shook. As the ground vibrated and the shells rained down, Jess planted her feet as if she might be knocked off balance and flung to the ground herself.
She helped rake the branches, dried leaves, and nuts into windrows, which they shoveled into small trailers and hauled to the cleaning shed. Jess raked until she had blisters inside her cloth gloves, until she had no strength to grip the handle. She pushed herself to exhaustion—into her body again, again to forget, or maybe to punish, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was she could fall asleep those nights, her fingernails and nostrils crusted with dirt.
In the shed, they separated the nuts with screens and blowers, and then sanitized and dried them. They shelled some, cracking open the burnished brown outer layer and harvesting the nut, and left others intact, before bringing them to the office for packaging. Packaging became Jess’s job. Her hands in plastic gloves, she scooped and tied the sacks, labeled them, and boxed them for shipping. She kept her mind on the monotony of the routine—scoop, scoop, tie, label. But sometimes she stopped and held up a shelled pecan. Here it was, that tiny nut formed, emerging into the world with its strange bumps and ridges. Without its shell, it seemed vulnerable, exposed.
She bit its soft flesh, trying to savor its rich taste, but instead she thought of pencils. She spit it into her palm.
The end of the month was both Dani’s eighteenth birthday and, of course, Halloween. Jess, Dani, Paul, and Warren were going to dress in costumes and go to the town festival. A few days before, Dani stopped Jess at her locker. She grabbed Jess by the elbow, squeezing hard. Jess froze. But then Dani loosened her grip.
“Can you come by the HealthCo after school? It’s important,” she said. Her eyes grew red and watery behind her round frames.
Jess nodded yes, and after school, she waited for Dani at the pharmacy counter behind another customer—Stevie Prentiss, the girl from the Woodchute Motor Lodge. Looking at Stevie’s birthmark, Jess touched her own cheek. Stevie turned and caught Jess doing it.
“It’s not contagious,” Stevie said.
Jess dropped her hand, and her face flamed. “I’m not—” She wanted to say she wasn’t mocking, only curious, but she realized how awful that sounded. Stevie wasn’t a sideshow.
“Sorry,” she said.
Stevie shrugged and turned to the counter.
Dani came out of the back room and called to the pharmacist, “I’m going on break.” She grabbed Jess’s hand without a word and pulled her down the aisle to the HealthCo bathroom.
Inside, the small bathroom held a toilet, a pedestal sink, a metal trash can with rust stains down the side, a mop inside a bucket, and a wire shelf cluttered with boxes and cleaning bottles. The sickly sweet air freshener made Jess think of choking down purple cough syrup.
Dani locked the door, lifted her shirt, and pulled out a box from her waistband. “I’m late,” she said.
Jess stared at the box and then at Dani’s face. “Shit,” she said.
“No kidding. I didn’t want to do this alone.” She pulled out a wrapped stick. “I already read the instructions. Pee on the end and then wait two minutes.”
Jess looked away as Dani stepped to the toilet and unzipped. Dani peed and flushed, holding the stick out with two fingers. She set the stick on the toilet tank and checked her watch before pumping chalky pink soap into her hands. “Two minutes,” she said.
Jess checked hers too. “Got it.”
“Okay,” Dani said. “Okay. Talk to me. Tell me things. Distract me.” She shook her hands dry and paced the room in two steps.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” she said. “Everything.”
Jess couldn’t do either. She couldn’t even come close.
She said, “It’s going to be fine.”
Dani gave a jittery laugh. “But what if it isn’t?”
“Then we deal with it,” she said.
“I can’t have a baby.” She looked at herself in the mirror and slapped her cheeks, hard, twice, three times, until they bloomed red.
“Don’t,” Jess said. “Dani, stop.”
“Time,” Dani said.
“One minute.”
“I feel like I’m going to pass out. It’s stifling in here. God,” she said, pulling at the neck of her T-shirt, stretching it limp. She took off her glasses and wiped the lenses with the hem. “What if it’s positive? My parents are going to freak.”
Jess looked at her tennis shoes, tapped the toes. One of the laces dragged on the linoleum. “It won’t be.”
“I missed a pill a few weeks ago. I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not,” Jess said.
“Wouldn’t everyone love that. Valedictorian gets knocked up, ruins her life.”
“Okay, time,” Jess said.
Dani rubbed her hands on her jeans. “I can’t look. Will you? Please. I can’t.”
“Of course.” Jess leaned over the toilet and looked at the lines. She smiled and gave a thumbs up. “Negative.”
Dani whooped. She launched herself at Jess, hugging her around the waist, her glasses digging into Jess’s collarbone.
“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jess patted Dani’s back, her nostrils flaring as she caught the scent of her hair. The same shampoo as her father.
Dani pulled away, wiping under her eyes. “I better get going. We’ll celebrate this weekend. With a cornball hay maze and the world’s stupidest haunted house. Spaghetti brains and grape eyeballs. Seriously.” She tossed the box and stick into the metal trash can. “Can you stay over this weekend? Please? We haven’t had any time.”
“I’ll ask,” Jess said.
Dani gave her one more quick squeeze. Over Dani’s head, Jess watched the metal trash can lid swing like a broken jaw.