Trey lifts up her shirt. Puts his mouth there. Alien blossoms, Martian fungus, her chest. She watches the top of his head, his hairs boring secret tunnels into his skull. They lie down on the couch and his weight doesn’t crush her. He fits there. He presses through her jeans over and again. Something strange that she likes. She closes her eyes. Up ahead is a gate. Trey knows the way, knows the guards, and they are almost through, but Trey stops. He stills himself, rigid like he’s heard a person calling his name.
The gate slams shut. She’s back in her living room, eyes wide open, fourteen years old.
Their damp skin sticks together. “Here’s to old Kentucky,” he says.
She has no idea what that means. They don’t live anywhere near Kentucky. A car passes on the road and it sounds like everyone who stayed young is out having a good time. Fine. Let them go.
She doesn’t know whether or not Trey and she did it. Her pants are still on. She thinks that means no, but there’s a lot she’s unsure of and would feel foolish to ask, embarrassed to learn she’d left the deed undone, like a little girl. “You want to see something?” she asks.
Trey sits up, releasing her. It takes him a while to answer, staring through the small window over her mother’s chair, wincing. The first stars are coming out and Trey’s communing with them. “Well,” he says, as if making a really tough decision.
“It’s no big deal,” she says. “Hold on.”
“All right.” Trey rakes his fingers across the thighs of his jeans.
For one moment upstairs, hands on the purse, she thinks this might be a bad idea.
She pushes their dinner plates off to the side of the table. “Come here.”
“What have we got?” Trey asks, genuinely surprised.
“Treasure.” She unzips the bag and dumps the contents out onto the kitchen table.
Trey’s eyes move from a hunk of quartz to a pencil nub, from her Mexican postage stamp to a small bead with a peace sign carved into it. “What have we got?” he asks again, barely breaking a whisper. His jaw firm with disbelief. He fingers some of the objects: a few wildflowers pressed between wax paper, a dead bumblebee in a magnifying box. “Treasure?”
“I’ve had it since I was young.”
“Since you were young.” He picks up a tiny, empty bottle of perfume that makes his hands look giant. The night starts to tick. Trey lifts a button of red glass, then puts it down. “I’m going to ask you something and I think I want you to tell me the truth.”
“All right.”
“How old are you?”
She draws her index finger across her neck where a heat is rising. Trey has cracked open. This question makes her angry. “Let me sit on your lap,” she commands.
He presses his thumbs hard into the corners of his eyes before shoving back from the table to make room. She takes a seat on one of his knees, trying to be light. “Shit,” he says. They look at the treasure spread before them.
“I’m fourteen and you already knew that.” A lens cap without a camera. An old retractable pen that says CHAMPION on it. “I found this on Brannah Street.” She’s being nice, trying to stop him from ruining everything. “And this I pulled off a chair my mother was getting rid of.” She passes him a brass upholstery tack.
Trey’s face tightens. He doesn’t deny knowing her age, but the lie he’d told himself about fourteen has dissolved. Fourteen is a girl.
Back in high school things had been going so well for him. She watches him finger a pull-top beer tab, a bit of coal, a scratch-n-sniff sticker, a small golden bell. Then he sees it. He lifts it from the pile. YUMA TRACK, it says on a pink cigarette lighter she’s stolen from him.
“What’s this doing here?”
The miniature head of a Japanese doll. A boll of cotton. And that lighter, because Trey is treasure to her.
“Let me keep it.” She turns her body toward his. “I’ll trade you.”
Trey spins his lighter head over tail, head over tail. “Oh.” He pulls back from what he’d started. “That’d be a very bad trade on your part.” She can hear him breathing, slipping away. “No.” His leg is unforgiving and every bit of strength she had over him vanishes, a switch clicking off.
They sit there a long while in the quiet until she finds the thing she’s looking for: What would happen to him if she called the cops? It’s a funny question, interesting. It makes her smile, so she rubs her face to hide the grin. He’d learn how old fourteen is.
“I’ve got to go.” Trey slides her off his lap like she has cooties. Fine. If she has cooties, she got them from him. What would he do if she called the cops? She studies the kitchen linoleum.
“Bye.” Just on his breath. “See you,” he says.
“When?” Breath sours swiftly. She rolls onto the sides of her feet. The night keeps swinging, Trey to her, Trey to her.
“I don’t know. Sometime. You all right?” he asks.
“Sure.”
And then he tries to hand her two twenties. She can smell him. She doesn’t take the money.
“What?”
She stares a hole in his chest. “This is all I’ve got,” she says, knowing it’s not true. Knowing that when she looks to her treasures, Trey’s lighter will still be there along with his finger bone, maybe his sternum, his kneecap, his lips and lungs, even that lady’s torn-off fingernail, and later, after he’s gone, she’ll pack them all back up into her purse.
Sometimes it can take years and years to say who got the better end of a deal. Who made out like a bandit. Her mother or God. The Europeans or the Indians. Trey or her. The people on that boat or the ocean. Maybe, she thinks, something really, really awful had just been about to happen to those people and they avoided it by drowning instead. Though of course it’s hard to think of something worse than clawing for your life in the middle of the ocean.
The phone is on the wall. It would be so easy to describe his car to the cops. Her mother might see the blue lights flashing all the way up in Winamac Lake. Maybe even her dads would see the lights.
She makes tight fists, hoping to steer the night. Come closer, she thinks, but Trey walks from the room. He swears quietly in the hall. Closer. The cops and the phone wait. The front door latches behind Trey on his way out, and night comes down around her older and colder than it’s ever been before.
THE STORY OF OF
In a coffee shop on Dead Elm Street, Norma rearranges chicken bones on her plate, making an arrow that points at her stomach, where the chicken’s meat now resides. She’d once seen a picture of a hen in a science book. Remember? The hen had been split open down the breast, unzipped like a parka. Inside was a chain of eggs, rubbery as tapioca, small getting smaller. Nothing like the basket of fried chicken Norma has just finished eating, but sickening. Yes, sickening, a ride going round and round. You can’t make it stop.
Norma’s husband’s brother’s wife, Damica, sits across the table bouncing The Baby on her knee. Outside, automobiles are stopping at the stop sign. Some go left, some keep right on going.
Damica’s talking. “If it’s all the same to you I’ll—”
“It’s never all the same,” Norma says, thinking of the chain of eggs. “It changes a tiny bit every time.”
But Damica keeps talking. “—I’ll just get your lunch tomorrow, ’cause all I have is a twenty.”
Dead Elm Street is not a dead-end street. Hand on a butter knife, Norma cuts the street in half. Procreation by division, just like the amoebae.
The waitress stops by the table. “You girls need anything else?”