Starling House(3)

The river sings loud now, siren sweet, and I find myself humming along with it. I’m not truly tempted by the cold black of the water below—suicide is a folded hand and I’m no quitter—but I can remember how it felt down there among the bones and bottom-feeders: so quiet, so far beyond the scrabbling, striving, grinding work of survival.

It’s just that I’m tired.

I’m pretty sure this is what Mr. Cole, the high school guidance counselor, might call a “crisis point” when I ought to “reach out to my support network,” but I don’t have a support network. I have Bev, owner and manager of the Garden of Eden Motel, who is obligated to let us live in room 12 rent-free because of some shady deal she cut with Mom, but isn’t obligated to like it. I have Charlotte, local librarian and founder of the Muhlenberg County Historical Society, who was nice enough not to ban me after I faked a street address to get a library card and sold a stack of DVDs online. Instead she merely asked me to please not do it again and gave me a cup of coffee so sweet it made my cavities ache. Other than them it’s just the hellcat—a vicious calico who lives under the motel dumpster—and my brother.

I wish I could talk to Mom. She gave terrible advice, but I’m almost as old now as she was when she died; I imagine it would be like talking to a friend.

I could tell her about Stonewood Academy. How I transferred Jasper’s transcripts and filled out all the forms, and then sweet-talked them into saving him a spot next term so long as I pay the tuition by the end of May. How I assured them it wouldn’t be a problem, talking bright and easy like she taught me. How I have to quadruple my life savings in the next three months, on the kind of minimum-wage job that carefully keeps you under thirty hours a week so they don’t have to give you health insurance.

But I’ll find a way, because I need to, and I’ll walk barefoot through hell for what I need.

My hands are cold and blue in the light of my phone. hey punk how’s the book report going

great, Jasper writes back, followed by a frankly suspicious number of exclamation points.

oh yeah? what’s your thesis statement? I’m not really worried—my little brother has an earnest, determined brilliance that’s won over every teacher in the public school system, despite their expectations about boys with brown skin and curls—but hassling him makes me feel better. Already the river sings softer in my skull.

my thesis is that I can fit fourteen marshmallows in my mouth at once

and everyone in this book needs a long sitdown with mr cole

I picture Heathcliff hunched in one of the counselor’s undersized plastic chairs, an anger-management brochure crumpled in his hands, and feel a weird twist of sympathy. Mr. Cole is a nice man, but he doesn’t know what to do with people raised on the underside of the rules, where the world turns dark and lawless, where only the canny and cruel survive.

Jasper isn’t canny or cruel, which is only one of the several hundred reasons I have to get him out of here. It ranks right below the air quality and the Confederate flags and the bad luck that slinks behind us like a mean dog, nipping at our heels. (I don’t believe in curses, but if there was such a thing as a cursed family, it would look a lot like us.)

that’s not a thesis. My fingers snag on the cracks that spiderweb across my screen.

i’m sorry what did you get in 10th grade english again??

My laugh hangs in the air, ghostly white. i graduated with a 4.0 from the School of Fuck You

A tiny pause. chill. it’s job fair tomorrow, nobody’s collecting essays

I despised the job fair when I was at school. There aren’t really any jobs around here except breathing particulates at the power plant, so it’s just an AmeriCorps booth and somebody from the Baptist mission group handing out flyers. The main excitement comes at the end, when Don Gravely, CEO of Gravely Power, takes the stage and gives an excruciating speech about hard work and the American spirit, as if he didn’t inherit every cent of his money from his big brother. We all had to shake his hand as we filed out of the gym, and when he got to me he flinched, as if he thought poverty might be contagious. His palm had felt like a fresh-peeled boiled egg.

Imagining Jasper shaking that clammy-ass hand makes my skin feel hot and prickly. Jasper doesn’t need to listen to any bullshit speeches or take home any applications, because Jasper isn’t getting stuck in Eden.

i’ll call miss hudson and say you have a fever, screw the job fair

But he replies: nah I’m good

There’s a lull in our conversation while I leave the river behind and wind uphill. The electric lines swoop overhead and the trees crowd close, blotting out the stars. There are no streetlights in this part of town.

where are you now? im hungry

A wall runs beside the road now, the bricks pocked and sagging with age, the mortar crumbling beneath the wheedling fingers of Virginia creeper and poison ivy. just passing the starling place

Jasper replies with a smiley face shedding a single tear and the letters RIP.

I send him the middle-finger emoji and slide my phone back in my hoodie pocket.

I should hurry back. I should keep my eyes on the painted white stripe of the county road and my mind on Jasper’s savings account.

But I’m tired and cold and weary in some way that’s deeper than muscle and bone. My feet are slowing down. My eyes are drifting up, searching through the twilit woods for a gleam of amber.