“It’s the medication talking. I’m very grateful,” Katie said, grabbing Drew’s hand. “I won’t bother you again.”
“We don’t see too much of you two here,” Mr. Waltham said, hoisting a smile. “We’d been hoping to recruit Mr. Knox for the PTA, get him—both of you—involved more in school activities. I understand he’s a very successful fund-raiser—”
“Absolutely, Mr. Waltham. I promise.”
She moved with purpose through the musty halls, Drew’s hand, his delicate peeling fingers, in hers past all the classrooms until she found the right one.
Seated in the far corner by the window was Devon. Pencil in hand, her warm-up jacket’s sleeves creeping over her gnarled gymnast hands, as if she wanted to hide them. Hair pulled into a bun hard as a walnut.
It had been a while, more than a while, since she’d seen Devon among so many other girls her age. Non-gym girls. But, whether thick-bodied or willowy, round-shouldered or all elbows and knees, whether with cat’s-eye glasses and braces, or thickly eyelinered and greasy-foreheaded, or donning Day-Glo nail polish and a do-rag, they all looked so much more like one another than like Devon.
None of them looked anything like Devon.
When had they all developed these bodies, whether hard little tennis balls or absurdly luxuriant breasts stretched beneath straining T-shirts? And hips, hips that seemed to sway and undulate even when they shifted in their seats, stretching across revealing ample, fleshy waists and downy hair.
They were women, or close enough.
And a few feet apart from them, in her quiet corner, her pencil moving, her eyes on the teacher, on the whiteboard, on something, sat her tiny, herculean daughter, stallion thighs stretched against the denim of her jeans, her face elfin and small. Her feet, misshapen and scarred, hidden in her softest pair of sneakers. Nearly sixteen. Fearless. Extraordinary. Like no one else. Only like herself. Whoever that was.
Isn’t it a strange day, Helen Beck had said, when you realize you have no idea what’s going on in your kid’s head? One morning, you wake up and there’s this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They’re something else that you don’t know.
The bell rang, the door pushed open, and Katie retreated quickly into the crowd.
Book bag swung over her shoulder, all the boys, most of the girls towering over her, Devon hurried out to her next class.
“Hey, Baby Gap,” one jug-jawed boy called out, “can you carry my bag too?”
“But look at those thighs,” another added, grinning, his teeth monstrous. “Wrap those thighs around my cock, Baby Gap.”
“Watch out for her toes. They look like nutcrackers to me.”
“I’d let her work my beam any day, but what do you hold on to except biceps?”
Devon walking, and walking, never turning her head.
*
Back in the car, Drew didn’t ask what was going on with his dad, what had happened at the Belfours’, why the police had come to the house.
It was as if he knew she wouldn’t be able to answer, the noise in her head so loud.
They were driving on Sparrows Way when she noticed the turnoff, spotted the flutter of yellow tape through the trees. Ash Road.
“That’s the spot,” Drew said, as if reading her mind.
“Yes.” She decided in an instant, turning the wheel hard, the gears gnashing. “It is.”
But the minute her tires landed on Ash Road’s soft asphalt she regretted it.
“Except the picture’s from the other side,” Drew said.
“What picture?” she asked, but something began sliding into place in her head.
“Ryan’s picture.”
Pulling the car onto the road shoulder, she stopped the engine, hand shaking on keys.
“The one on his refrigerator,” she said, realizing it. The snapshot taped to Ryan’s fridge door. A blur of greenery, the swampy colors of a cheap printer. “This is the place.”
“Yeah,” Drew said, almost a sigh.
Looking at him, a revelation felt close, just beyond her grasp.
The yellow tape twisted, held pockets of dew, rain.
“Drew, go back in the car, okay?”
Arrayed on the dirt road, spilling onto the shoulder, were a series of small fluorescent flags, mud-splattered, bending in the wind.
Each flag had a number, marking something. Maybe a gouge in the dirt, glass fragments, a heel print. They looked so festive, like miniature versions of the scoring flags judges flashed at meets, or the parade of flags at the Olympics.
A few cars sped by, jolting her as she walked along the shoulder, the dirt beneath her, dusting up the sides of her shoes. Hairpin turn. That’s what everyone always said, but it was just a sharp one, and not blind at all.