I think about cursed towns and cursed families. I think: Above everyone else, they’ll go after Gravely blood.
I don’t think anything after that.
*
On the third day a fist slams against the room 12 door with an aggression suggesting I am about to be dragged off by men in jackboots.
“Hey kid, you dead?” Bev sounds as if she doesn’t care much either way, but wants to know if she’ll have to rent a steam cleaner. I wonder if she’s already planning to add me to her list of ghost stories—the girl who died of a broken heart and stank up room 12. The meathead who still haunts the motel.
More thumping. “I turned the internet off two hours ago. What’s going on?” There’s a strained note in her voice, perilously close to concern, that sends something white-hot licking up my spine.
I thrash out of bed and whip open the door so fast that Bev says, “Jesus H.—”
“Did you know?” My voice sounds like it’s coming out of a rusted gutter pipe.
She squints at me, hands on her hips. “You look like hot hell. You been eating right? Not that gas station garba—”
“Did you know?”
A flash of wariness, covered by flat irritation. “Did I know what?”
It takes me a second to unwedge the words from the small, dim place I’ve been keeping them. “Did you know her last name? My name?”22
Bev doesn’t answer, but she goes very still. My cheeks sting as if I’ve been slapped. “You did. The whole time, and you never—” I stop speaking before my voice can do anything embarrassing, like crack or wobble.
Bev scrubs her hand hard over her face and says, “Hon, everybody knew.” She sounds almost gentle. I wonder how bad I must look, to squeeze pity out of Bev. “Everybody knew Old Leon Gravely, and everybody knew his little girl. The day she got that Corvette was the last day of peace and quiet in this town.”
I swallow the phrase everybody knew. It ricochets around inside me, bruising bones. “Did Charlotte know?” The question feels desperately important.
Bev shakes her head quickly. “I never said anything, and she didn’t grow up around here.”
A tiny ray of relief, that at least one person in my life wasn’t lying to me. I lick cracked lips. “So then do you know why my mom didn’t—how she wound up here?”
“Your mama had a wild streak a mile wide. Eventually I guess she finally crossed the line and her daddy threw her out. She dropped out of school, left town, and when she came back—there you were. With that Gravely hair.” Bev’s eyes flick up to my greasy red curls.
“And Old Leon.” The man in the mansion, the reason there’s no luna moths or unions in Muhlenberg County. My granddaddy. “He didn’t take her back?”
Bev shakes her head once. “He might have, if she turned respectable, begged a little bit. But your mama was stubborn.”
She says it admiringly, but it sounds to me like Mom was just a rich-kid rebel, one of those spoiled children that break rules out of boredom. And then she wound up with two kids and too much pride to ask for help. Instead, she taught us to scrabble and steal. She raised us in parking lots and motel rooms, hungry and lonely, chased by Beasts we couldn’t see.
And nobody in this whole damn town did anything about it. They turned their backs and looked away, just like they always have and always will.
Even Bev, who could have told me the truth anytime, who I trusted.
She’s not looking at me now, tonguing the tobacco in her jaw. “Listen, I should have—”
“Did Charlotte bring my library holds by?” My voice is cool, serene.
I see Bev flinch a little from whiplash. “Charlotte’s not—” She clears her throat, falls back into her usual aggression. “If you want your smut you’ll have to walk your ass over to the library just like everybody else.”
“Okay,” I say calmly, and then I slam the door in her face.
“Opal, hey, come on.” I hear her feet shuffling on the other side of the door. “Fine, be like that. But I’m not turning the internet back on until you take out the trash.”
Her boots scuff the pavement as she stomps away.
I go all the way under, after that. No longer drifting but diving down, kicking hard toward the riverbed. I lose track of the days and nights, existing in the changeless twilight of deep water. I don’t have to dream because I never sleep; I don’t have to think because I never wake up.
At some point, the door opens. I don’t roll over, but I can smell the warm blacktop of the parking lot, feel the aggrieved tumble of air disturbed after a long stillness. I hear Jasper’s voice. “Hey,” he says, and then, after a while, “Okay, whatever.”