“It wasn’t fair! We were supposed to say whether we thought it was a horror novel or a romance, right? And I said both, because it is, and she took off five points.”
I offer to TP Miss Hudson’s house, which Jasper feels would not affect his GPA favorably, so we compromise by calling her bad names until both of us feel better. Afterward he sinks into his amateur-filmmaker forums. （I used to worry about how much time he spent online. Last year I tried to bully him into joining the high school movie club until Jasper explained, patiently, that he’d been a member up until Ronnie Hopkins asked him to write the Spanish lines for a character in his screenplay listed as “CARTEL THUG #3.” I said, defensively, that I was just trying to help, and Jasper said that would be the title of his next horror short. I surrendered.）
Now he scrolls contentedly while I open three packs of store-brand Pop-Tarts （dinner） and microwave tap water for hot chocolate （dessert）。
For some reason I feel like singing, so I do, one of Mom’s old sweet songs about apples in the summertime and peaches in the fall. I don’t know where she was from originally—one of my earliest memories is watching the telephone lines lope alongside the car while Mom drove us from nowhere to nowhere—but her accent was green and southern, just like mine. Her voice was better, though: low, smoke-bitten.
Jasper slides me a look, but his mouth is too full to say anything.
We spend the evening cocooned in our sleeping bags, headachey and sticky-fingered from sugar. It’s cold enough that frost spangles the window and the heater rattles, so I cave and let the hellcat inside, an act of generosity which she repays by slinking under the bed and hissing every time the mattress creaks. I plug in the Christmas lights and the room goes hazy gold, and I wonder what a stranger would see if they cupped their hands against the glass: the two of us huddled in our hideout like Lost Boys or Boxcar Children, a couple of homeless kids playing a defiant game of house.
Sometime after midnight Jasper switches to a playlist called “peaceful beach waves.” It sounds like static to me, but Jasper’s always wanted to see the ocean. And he will, I swear he will. Maybe I’ll even go with him.
I try to picture it: shoving my clothes in a backpack and driving across the county line, leaving room 12 empty and anonymous behind me. It feels fantastical, unnatural, like a tree dreaming of ripping up its roots and walking down the highway.
Which is stupid because I don’t have roots; I was born in the backseat of Mom’s ’94 Corvette. I remember bugging her when I was little, asking if we were going to stay in the motel forever, if Eden was our new home. I remember the brittle sound of her laugh, the hard line of her jaw when she stopped. Home is just wherever you get stuck.
I wait until Jasper’s breathing rasps into snores before sliding the laptop off his bed. The hellcat gives a perfunctory hiss.
I click in aimless patterns for a while, as if there’s someone watching over my shoulder and I have to prove how little I care. After the third game of Minesweeper I open a private tab and type two words into the search bar: starling house.
The image results are the same as always: mostly birds, vast murmurations hanging in the sky like desaturated auroras, with one or two grainy photos of the Starling House gates, or the historical plaque on the side of the road. Those pictures lead me to a haunted house blog that rates Starling House eight out of ten ghost emojis but doesn’t seem to have much actual information, and the Kentucky State Historical Society, whose website is listed as “coming soon” as of four years ago.
Lower down in the search results there’s an amber daguerreotype of a not-very-pretty girl wearing an old-fashioned wedding dress. A middle-aged man stands beside her with his hand on her shoulder, his hair a colorless gray that might be blond or red. It’s hard to tell, but I think the girl might be leaning very slightly away from him.
My copy of The Underland doesn’t have author photos, but I know who she is even before I click the link. It’s the wild, abyssal look in her eyes that gives her away, and the ink-stained tips of her fingers.
The photo takes me to the Wiki page for Eden, Kentucky. I scroll through the history section, which gives me the story everybody already knows: the opening of the first mines; the founding of Gravely Power; the Ajax 3850-B, biggest power shovel in the whole world, called “Big Jack” by locals; seventy thousand acres dug up and wrung dry; that one Prine song that everybody still hates;7 a few pictures of Big Jack digging its own grave in the eighties, with a huddle of smaller shovels gathered around it like pallbearers.