They had lived in Olympus for more than four years now. It had become their home. Each spring Hawley planted a garden in the backyard, and by summer they had beans and tomatoes and corn to set on the grill. They went to the beach and stretched out on towels in the sun and listened to the surf and dug clams on the weekends. They raked fall leaves into giant piles and burned them, and they bought a real Christmas tree each year and set it up in their living room, and used snowshoes to tromp through the woods. They had a garage that Hawley turned into a workshop, full of wires and shovels and tools, and they had shelves lining their walls that Loo filled with books that did not have to be returned to the library. She had spent her life looking at empty closets, and now all the closets in their house were full.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was Loo’s reputation. She had been in ninth grade when she smashed Mary Titus’s head in the bathtub, and now three years later, in her last year of high school, she still could not outrun her rock-in-a-sock. The widow hadn’t pressed charges but she made sure the whole town knew about Samuel Hawley and his crazy daughter. The good news was that the widows stopped coming around. The bad news was that people started avoiding them again, except for Pauly Fisk and Joe Strand, who remained Hawley’s drinking buddies, and Principal Gunderson, who continued to slip Loo passes to get her out of detention. Jeremy and Pauly junior did their best to steer away with their bent noses, encouraging others to do the same, and the only person who would talk to her at school was Marshall Hicks.
Mary Titus had a big mouth, but her son didn’t. He’d never told anyone about Loo breaking his finger. If he had, the air would have gone out of what had happened between them, and the memory would have faded over the years. Instead, his silence had turned the finger into a secret. A secret that he reminded her of whenever he nodded at her as they passed in the hall, or loaned her a pencil when hers broke during a history test, or chose her for a partner in biology, after the long, uncomfortable moment when the teacher said to pair up and Loo sat alone, biting her lip and trying not to notice everyone moving away from her.
“I think it’s going to be worms,” Marshall said, as he placed the wax tray and metal pins in front of her. “They always start the semester with worms.”
“Sea worms or earthworms?”
“Earth.” Marshall pulled out a leather pouch from his backpack, stuffed with colored pens. “I’ll do the worksheet if you do the cutting.”
Two girls at the table across from them raised their eyebrows. And then one of them pretended to pour maple syrup on the other’s chest. Loo picked up the scalpel. “Deal.”
They got worms. Big ones. Loo cut the skin and pinned the edges back against the tray. Marshall identified the clitellum and gizzard but had trouble with the reproductive system.
“Those look like ovaries to me,” said Loo.
“They have male parts and female parts.” Marshall poked the worm with a pin. “Receptacles and vesicles. They’re hermaphrodites. Like Hermaphroditus. He was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. A nymph fell in love with him and so they merged. Became two people inside one person.”
“That sounds kind of amazing,” said Loo. “Like being alone but not being lonely.”
“They still need another worm to reproduce.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“My stepfather’s a marine biologist. He read me science textbooks at bedtime.”
Loo thought of Hawley tucking her underneath a motel bedspread. The two of them sharing a bag of chips from the vending machine and laughing at Godzilla and Frankenstein on TV. Marshall took a pen from his leather pouch. He flipped over Loo’s worksheet and sketched a beautiful woman with flowing hair, standing naked in an open clamshell, surrounded by winged cupids. Then he gave this woman a beard. Underneath he wrote, HermAphrodite, and slid the drawing across the table with his crooked finger.
At the end of class, Loo did not turn in her worksheet. She folded the paper up and took it home instead.
Marshall and Loo spent the next few weeks dissecting frogs together, and then a cricket, and then a fetal pig, and then a starfish. For an hour each day they took turns with the knife and labeled organs on their lab sheets and talked. Loo had no problem with the frog or even the pig, which felt the same as gutting a flounder, but for some reason the giant preserved starfish made her nearly faint as soon as she snipped through its thick skin with a pair of scissors and began scraping out its pyloric cecum. Marshall Hicks took over just as the last bit of color drained from Loo’s face. The girls who sat across from them noticed, and one of them puckered her lips while the other pretended to make herself vomit with her own finger. Loo stared back, her mouth tasting like old metal filings. She counted forward from zero to twenty, then backward from twenty to zero, and it was just enough to keep her from taking the scalpel and stabbing the pretend-vomit girl in the eye.
—
AFTER A LONG, hard winter, the teenagers of Olympus witnessed their first sign of spring: an outdoor kegger. Marshall and his cousin got their hands on a half-barrel of Heineken and rolled it about a mile into the woods to the whale’s jaw—a giant natural rock formation in the center of Dogtown that looked like a humpback breaking the surface, far from any roads or houses so no one would hear and with plenty of places to hide if the cops showed up. Word spread at school that everyone was invited to drain the keg in the forest. Even so, when Marshall handed her a flyer for the party, complete with a hand-drawn map, the whale’s jaw circled in the middle, Loo checked his face to make sure he wasn’t making fun of her. When he smiled she said that she would come.
The night of the party Loo waited at the kitchen table with a book in front of her, pretending to read, while Hawley showered and got ready to meet Fisk down at the Flying Jib. She tilted her head and nodded as he said goodbye, and as soon as his truck pulled out of the driveway she stripped off her clothes and put on the outfit she had spent all week organizing, a practiced combination of nonchalance—jeans and a T-shirt with the neck ripped out and the sleeves rolled over her shoulders, a pair of large hoop earrings she had lifted from the drugstore and her steel-toed boots. Then she went to the bathroom and smeared on her mother’s bright-red lipstick, the texture stale and hard. She pulled back her hair. She was sixteen but in the mirror she looked nearly twenty. She thought, Here I go.
She put Marshall’s map and a flashlight in the pocket of her sweatshirt and then got her bike out of the shed and started across town. It was dusk when she left their house, and by the time she reached the edge of the woods the sky had darkened and cars had turned on their headlights. The side road that led to Dogtown was lined with vehicles of every size and shape, parked one after the other under the trees. The cars were cold and empty and quiet; they had been there for hours.
Loo was sweaty from the ride. She leaned her bike against a tree by the entrance, turned on her flashlight and started down the trail. As soon as she stepped away from the road, the trees closed in, blocking the stars and the moon. All she could hear was her own breathing and the sound of her feet in the leaves. Then her flashlight passed over a giant boulder on the side of the path. The rock looked out of place and time, like an abandoned spaceship from another world. Loo came closer, and saw letters carved into the side. Two words six inches high and perfectly cut, as if for a statue or a grave.