I could’ve gotten a ride from Lacey or her cousin Lance, who works nights at the call center. But Lacey would proselytize at me and Lance would pull over on Cemetery Road and reach for the top button of my jeans, and I would probably let him, because it would feel pretty good and the motel was pretty far out of his way, but later I would catch the scent of him on my hoodie—a generic, acidic smell, like the yellow cakes of soap in gas station bathrooms—and feel an apathy so profound, so perfectly flat, that I would be tempted to pull out that grocery bag beneath the bed just to make sure I could still feel anything at all.
So: I’m walking.
It’s four miles from Tractor Supply to the motel—three and a half if I cut behind the public library and cross the river on the old railroad bridge, which always puts me in a strange, sour mood.
I pass the flea market and the RV park, the second Dollar General and the Mexican place that took over the old Hardee’s building, before I cut off the road and follow the railroad tracks onto Gravely land. At night the power plant is almost pretty, a great golden city lit up so bright it turns the sky yellow and throws a long shadow behind you.
The streetlights are humming. The starlings are murmuring. The river is singing to itself.
They paved the old railroad bridge years ago, but I like to walk on the very edge, where the ties stick out. If you look down you can see the Mud River rushing in the gaps, a black oblivion, so I look up instead. In summer the banks are so knotted with honeysuckle and kudzu you can’t see anything but green, but now you can see the rise and fall of the land, the indentation of an old mine shaft.
I remember it as a wide-open mouth, black and gaping, but the city boarded it up after some kids dared each other past the DANGER signs. People had done it plenty of times before, but the mist rose high that night—the mist in Eden comes dense and fast, so heavy you can almost hear it padding along beside you—and one of them must have gotten lost. They never did find the body. 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