Loo did not tell her father what was happening at school. Instead she moved to the corners of classrooms. She did her homework but refused to raise her hand, even when she knew the answers, and eventually her teachers stopped calling on her, as if they, too, had caught the scent of her strangeness. Soon, Loo could go entire days being nearly invisible.
This disappearing began at her wrists. It was the only part of her body that Loo considered delicate, and she could always feel her skin thinning there first. Afterward it spread to her fingers and up her arms, across her shoulders, ran down each leg to her toes and then back through her stomach—a sense of coming loose, of filtering away into nothing, winding around her neck until her head felt light and empty and she could wander the halls of the school and no one would look at her, and she could walk the streets and people would turn away, and she could go down to the beach and wander the dunes and feel not like a person anymore but a ghost.
At night Loo sat in the bathtub and stared at her mother’s pictures. The way she narrowed her sharp green eyes and the way she smiled with her teeth like she was not afraid to use them. The woman who existed in the bathroom wore bright-red lipstick that smelled like candy, wrote her dreams down on the backs of parking tickets and ate peaches straight from the can. Loo’s mother had been dead for years but she had never been invisible. If someone put a tack on her chair, she would take that tack and stuff it up his nose.
—
AND THEN ONE day Marshall Hicks decided it was his turn to steal Loo’s shoes.
He’d been enjoying a brief period of celebrity. Not because he was friends with Jeremy and Pauly, but because his stepfather was on television. An environmentalist, Captain Titus had recently gotten his hands on a decommissioned Coast Guard cutter, and was now using it to ram whaling ships in the Arctic Circle. A documentary crew was filming his escapades. The show was on public television, but still—it was television—and that made Marshall indirectly famous, and made the girls in Loo’s homeroom talk about him in nervous, giggly whispers. The other boys, upon noticing this, got jealous. So they spread rumors that Marshall was secretly boning Loo, and that when this sex happened, the two would pour Marshall’s homemade syrup on each other.
Marshall was so embarrassed that he stopped bringing in his golden bottles of syrup (that he’d been so proud of and tapped himself from local trees), but the more he denied the claims, the more the other boys teased him. And so, finally, to prove that he was not having sex with Loo, Marshall followed her from school, pushed her onto the sand, took her sandals and threw them in the ocean, so far out she had to swim for them before they were swept away. She got pulled under and dragged along the bottom of the sea and swallowed so much sand and salt water she felt it coming out of her eyes. When Loo finally made it back to shore, her clothes were sealed to her skin, just as her father’s were when he had climbed back onto the pier, and after she crawled and coughed and clawed her way free, she was a different person than when she went into the water. She was no longer afraid.
Loo picked up a piece of driftwood and staggered after Marshall Hicks. She knocked the boy unconscious. Then she chose his index finger and bent it backward until it broke. With this snap of bone she sealed her fear away, like sliding a cover over a barrel and nailing the lid shut.
Before she left the beach, Loo took a large, heavy stone, carried it to her house and slipped it into one of her father’s socks. She brought it to school the next day in her backpack. She expected some kind of revenge from Marshall, or at the very least to be suspended, but instead he told everyone he’d fallen from a tree. His finger was wrapped tightly in a splint, and a bewildered look crossed his face each time they passed each other in the halls.
At the army-navy store, Loo changed her sandals for a pair of steel-toed boots. On her hands she slid rings with the stones pried out, the sharp metal prongs raised to cut. Loo remembered everything everyone had done to her, wrote each name down on a list. At the top were Jeremy Strand and Pauly Fisk, Jr.
She kept the rock-in-a-sock close and waited for the right moment. When it came, Loo snuck into the boys’ bathroom and hid in a stall. Once she heard Jeremy and Pauly junior’s voices at the urinals and knew their hands were busy, she came out swinging the rock and cracked both of them in the face and broke their noses, splattering blood across the mirrors. The boys writhed on the white tile, screaming and cursing, and she propped open the door so everyone passing by could see, and then she went back in and kicked them both in the ass with her steel-toed boots, over and over, just to make sure they were really hurting.
After the incident was broken up, they were dragged to Principal Gunderson’s office, where he gave the boys ice packs and then called everyone’s parents. Soon the fathers were in the room: Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk, Sr., and also Samuel Hawley. It had been months since the men had fought, but Strand’s jaw had never healed properly. He’d recently had a second surgery, and his mouth was wired shut. But Fisk had plenty to say.
“It’s the principle of the thing!” Fisk pounded the table. “There’s a principle to life and this girl doesn’t give a damn about principles. It’s like she never heard the word! Principles mean not busting people’s noses for no reason. Principles mean not trying to kill somebody just because he borrowed your waders.”
“Mr. Fisk,” said Principal Gunderson. “The girl is not the only one at fault here. Your boys confessed to wrongdoing as well. I’m sure we can come to some understanding.”
Strand opened his lips and moaned behind clenched teeth. He pointed at the wires in his chin, then gestured at Hawley.
“Exactly,” said Fisk. “Principles mean paying for somebody’s doctor bill when you break their jaws.”
Strand moaned again. He pantomimed pouring something into an invisible glass and raised the glass to the ceiling.
“What’s he saying now?” Gunderson asked.
“Principles mean you at least buy them a drink.”
Hawley ignored Fisk’s lecture and Strand’s grunts. But when Gunderson showed him the rock-in-a-sock that Loo had used, covered in blood, his face grew troubled. And when Jeremy and Pauly junior were finally led to the nurse’s office, their nostrils filled with toilet paper, Hawley picked up Loo’s rock in one hand and placed the other on her shoulder. He pushed her out the door and into one of the chairs lining the hall.
“You would have done the same thing,” said Loo.
“Not like that,” said Hawley. “It was sloppy. You got caught.”
“Yeah,” said Loo. “But now they’ll remember.”
Her father rubbed his beard.
“Let’s move,” said Loo. “Somewhere else. Then none of this will matter anymore.”