Through it all, Loo’s father didn’t say a word. Not until he came home one afternoon and found his waders gone and his gear fouled. Then he went straight to the Flying Jib and broke Joe Strand’s jaw. After that he tracked down Fisk, who was hanging out at the wharf wearing Hawley’s waders, and threw him off the pier. The waders filled and dragged the man under. Fisk might have drowned if it wasn’t for Hawley going in after him and cutting the straps.
Loo watched all this happen from her father’s truck. She opened the door for Hawley as he staggered back across the dock. When he slid into the driver’s seat he was soaked through and dripping, blood in his hair and his knuckles swollen. He gripped the steering wheel, breathing hard. His face had taken on a kind of smoothness, as if all the lines of age had left along with his conscience. It was only after they got home, after Hawley had locked himself up for hours with her mother’s things, after he came out of the bathroom wrapped in towels and Loo brought him a glass of whiskey, that he looked like himself again.
The fishermen left Hawley alone after that. So did everyone else. But no one besides Principal Gunderson would buy his catch, even though he set up a table at the weekend market. Things got worse as the cold weather drove off the last of the tourists and it was only the locals left selling to each other. Throughout the winter and into the following spring Hawley had to travel four or five towns over—even Rockport and Newbury were too close. And he also had to bring Loo with him to get customers. It was a role she knew well from their time on the road together. Softening up strangers. Asking for things her father could not. Loo would spend the day emptying buckets, sharpening her pocketknife and arranging shells into an intricate, cascading pattern that threaded around their stall. Whenever someone stopped to admire her handiwork, she would stand by Hawley while he offered up a price.
By this time Loo was twelve and a half years old and nearly as tall as a grown woman. She carried the rough-and-tumble look of children being raised by men, but she also seemed clean even when her face was dirty. Living in a small town had not made her life normal, or given her a place to belong. Since her father’s outburst, the fishermen had told their kids to stay away from her, and she had grown strange, the way children will when set apart.
It was not long before she became a target.
The sons of Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk started it all. They were both in Loo’s homeroom. Pauly junior had been elected the class treasurer, then spent the collected dues on a new guitar for himself, smashing it onstage during the school talent contest. Jeremy Strand sat by the windows, smelling of sauerkraut. Their greatest joy was jumping off the cliffs surrounding the quarry on the outskirts of town. Their second greatest joy was convincing other kids to jump off those same cliffs. The quarries were full of abandoned construction equipment, lost when the granite miners struck water. Occasionally someone would land in the wrong place, and one day Jeremy Strand did. The police airlifted him out with a brain injury, but as soon as he could walk again, he was back, and, together with Pauly junior, continued shoving other kids off the seventy-foot drop.
The boys threw food at Loo during a class trip to the local whaling museum. It made her hair smell like baloney, and after she went to wash it out in the bathroom, they waited outside and tripped her. The rest of the class all saw this and laughed, and no one helped Loo gather her books from the floor, or helped her when Jeremy and Pauly junior tossed her backpack down the stairwell. Instead the boys and girls turned away and snickered and rolled their eyes so that they would not be next. Then their teacher appeared and clapped her hands and made everyone line up for a tour. Loo hurried down the stairs to collect her bag. By the time she caught up, the other students were gathered around a life-size model of a whale’s heart.
The whale’s heart was made of red and pink plastic, with giant veins and arteries twisting around it like the roots of a tree. The model was as big as a child’s playhouse, big enough to crawl inside. There was a sign encouraging children to do so, and after the rest of the class moved on to the next exhibit, Loo did, shuffling on her hands and knees through the tunnel of the aorta, slipping past a valve into the left ventricle. The space was not designed for someone her size, but it was comfortable enough to move around. Even cozy. Loo pressed her back against the flesh-colored plastic. The sides were rippled and full of shadows and echoed as she shifted her weight.
She was relieved to be out of sight for a few moments. To let go of the face she put on in public. It nearly always felt like she was pretending, as if her insides were only full of locked doors. Loo knocked on the wall of the heart with her fist. Boom. Boom. She imagined the muscles around her alive and churning, a whoosh of blood pushing through two hundred tons. Their teacher had said that the human heart was the size of both fists together. Loo squeezed her hands tight. Compared herself to the whale. If someone ever tried to climb inside her heart, they’d have to shrink down to the size of a chess piece.
There was a thud outside the shell. A knocking that answered her own. Loo poked her head out and found Jeremy and Pauly junior waiting for her again, right by the vena cava. They’d brought a shaggy boy named Marshall Hicks with them, who was best known for bottling homemade maple syrup that he brought to school and tried to sell whenever the cafeteria served pancakes. Marshall was the one knocking on the heart, and when he saw Loo he seemed confused. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Marshall smiled like a dog before it gets sick, and Jeremy and Pauly junior pinned Loo down and stole her shoes. She’d been taught by her father to never be a rat, so she lied to the teacher that she’d lost her shoes, and spent the rest of the trip in mismatched socks full of holes. On the bus ride home Jeremy and Pauly junior smacked Loo in the head with her own sneakers. Everyone saw, and the next day the rest of the kids started in on Loo, too.
She took it all at first, the cutting remarks, the tacks on her chair, the stolen lunches, the worms in her books, even the clods of dirt and stones thrown at her back on the way home, never quite understanding the reasons but feeling the cause must be some personal defect, some missing part of herself that the others recognized, a rotting, empty hole that whistled when she walked, no matter how quiet she tried to be.