“Or do you want to be with me because I’m cool, and I’ll keep being cool, and you’ll like hanging out with me?” I just kept on going, didn’t even wait for her to respond. “You want to stay here with your shitty grandparents and never get fed and scratch bug bites underneath sheets that haven’t ever been washed? You want that?”
“No, I don’t want that,” Bessie said, not crying but wheezing from anger.
“Or do you want to come with me, and I’ll take care of you and buy you all new clothes, and I’ll feed you whatever you want and play games with you and watch movies with you and swim in the pool with you and rock you to bed and kiss you good night and sing you lullabies and then wake you up and let you watch cartoons?”
“That,” she said, her teeth chattering. “We want that.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “Then you have to trust me that I’m going to take care of you. It’s going to be weird, okay? It’s going to make you angry sometimes. But I’ll take care of you. It’s what I’m going to do.”
By this point, Carl had fished Roland out of the pool and was carrying him over to us; the boy was listening intently.
“Are you our stepmother?” Roland asked.
“No—Jesus Christ—no, I’m not your stepmother. I’m just—”
“She’s like a babysitter that never leaves,” Carl suddenly said.
“Never?” Bessie and Roland said at the same time, and I realized how this could go bad so quickly.
“Never,” I said, smiling. Bessie still had a little trail of my blood running down her chin.
“We catch on fire,” Bessie told me.
“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“We just go with you?” she asked, and I nodded, exhausted.
Bessie looked at Roland, who simply nodded his assent. “We’ll go with you,” they both said at the same time.
“I’ve packed up your belongings,” Carl told them.
Roland shrugged. “We don’t have that much stuff to bring,” the boy informed us. He had stripes buzzed into the sides of his hair, and I was shocked to realize that their hair was unsinged. I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.
Four
“I’ve got Kool-Aid,” Carl said, trying to sound cheery.
The kids smiled, but I shook my head. “No Kool-Aid,” I told him. I didn’t want these kids drugged, didn’t want things to start off any worse than they already had.
Bessie frowned. “You said you’d give us whatever we wanted,” she said. Her face reddened a little, and I was already dealing with some trauma, I think.
“We’ll get you some sodas at a gas station,” I said, and Carl simply nodded; maybe he was as tired as I was.
“That’s good,” Roland said. “Sun Drop, okay?”
“Okay,” I told him.
“Your hand is really messed up,” Roland said.
I finally looked down at it, had forgotten about the pain. It was just a dull throbbing sensation traveling all the way up my arm. There were tooth marks all over my hand, purple and deep, blood bubbling out of the wounds. The worst were on my index and middle fingers. I could barely bend them now.
“I scratched up your face some, too,” Bessie offered sheepishly.
“Sorry about your knee,” I told her, and she just waved me off.
“I’ve got a first aid kit in the van,” Carl said. “You get the kids dressed and I’ll come back with it.”
I led the children past their grandparents. Mr. Cunningham’s steak was now burning and charred on the grill. The kids acted like the grandparents weren’t even there.
In the bathroom, I dried them off with some already damp towels. I was a person without much experience around kids, had always avoided them in the past. Bessie and Roland tore off the burned scraps of clothing, got naked so fast I barely had time to be weirded out. I was like, These are naked kids, and I tried to be mature about it. Eventually, they got into their clothes: cheap souvenir T-shirts of the Smoky Mountains and baggy shorts, slippery flip-flops on their feet.
I looked at my face in the mirror. The worst was around my right eye, which was puffed up and had pretty jagged scratches running diagonally across the side of my face, the top layer of skin stripped away. I looked like a gladiator in some old, bad movie. I found a nearly empty tube of Neosporin in the medicine cabinet and rubbed it all over my face like a beauty treatment.