3
JUNE, SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD
He was short but handsome, with sandy hair, brown eyes, and deeply tanned skin that told me he worked for one of the construction crews that used to come through Bottom Springs back when Forsythe, the bigger town to our east, was going through a growth spurt. Later this suspicion was confirmed by gossip. Over the course of many Sundays, I learned his name was Renard Michaels and he was seven years my elder at the age of twenty-four. I watched and watched him, but I would have gone my whole life without uttering a word—except one Sunday he turned his head in the middle of my father’s lecture and caught me staring. I yanked my gaze away and stared in silent horror at my Bible for the rest of service. When I finally stepped outside after church, he was lingering with the last of the parishioners on the wide front lawn.
He caught my eye over their shoulders and smiled. One of his front teeth was turned slightly inward, and I must have stared again, because he ambled over. “I’m Renard,” he said, sticking his thumbs in his pockets. He wore tight jeans and work boots with a collared shirt. “What’s your name, Red?”
If he didn’t know my name, he didn’t know I was the preacher’sdaughter. “Ruth,” I said, managing to speak around my shyness. Omitting anything more.
“I got you this.” He pulled a strawberry hard candy from his pocket, its wrapper drawn to mimic the seeds and stem of the fruit. My mother and I placed these candies in little wicker baskets outside the doors to the nave for parishioners to take on their way out. He held it up. “Here.”
I blinked at his hand. “It’s for you.”
That produced another glimpse of his strange tooth as he smiled. “It’s just a candy. Won’t bite.”
We held eyes until it was too much to bear. “Okay,” I said, dropping my gaze to the grass. “Thank you.”
Renard placed the candy in my hand. Before he pulled away, his pointer finger stroked down my palm. Just for a millisecond, a breath’s worth of time, but it froze me in place. Long after he’d ambled away, I stayed rooted there, clutching the small strawberry. I never could bring myself to unwrap it.
After that, he found me every Sunday. His job in Forsythe would take a few months to complete, he said, and then he’d be on to the next town, wherever in Louisiana his company took him. He liked Bottom Springs because it was cheaper than Forsythe and—he said this with a smile that made my cheeks burn—the place was full of pretty girls. He was so easy to talk to that he wore me down. I opened up, little by little, until eventually I wondered if I was really so shy after all.
The three most important things to know about Renard were that, first, he loved his mother, who he called Momma. She lived back in Breaux Bridge, where he was born. He loved her so much he wore a gold chain with the wordMommain script letters around his neck, even though it tangled in his chest hair. Second, he was an avid trapper, working all week with the single aim of getting to the weekend, when he could escape into the swamp and check his traps. And lastly, there was nothinghe was prouder of than his truck, a shiny red behemoth. It was far too expensive for a man who lived in the aging Courtyard apartments and carried one of those prepaid plastic cell phones. He finally told me he’d bought the truck with a payout after he’d gotten injured at a job site, lucking out that the owner was eager to avoid insurance with a chunk of cash.
No one had ever talked to me as much as Renard did. Like I was normal, too. The rush was so intoxicating that he could’ve told me any story and I would’ve found it fascinating. Half of what I heard when he talked was the drumming of my own heartbeat in my ears, anyway.
One ordinary Sunday, so like the others there was nothing to warn me, Renard marched up after the service and asked if I’d like to go parking at Starry Swamp with him. I was surprised he knew about it. The swamp was where my classmates went to drink and make out. At least that’s what I’d heard, listening to gossip at lunch tables. They called it Starry Swamp because at night, the water was so black it turned into a mirror, reflecting the sky above. Wading through it was supposed to be like swimming through the stars. I’d never seen it for myself. I wasn’t allowed outside at night.
So when Renard asked me, biting his lip, I thought,My first date, and I’m going to be kissed in a wild green place, like the meadow where Edward kisses Bella.I’d nodded, unable to speak, and Renard had grinned. “This Friday, then.”
When Friday afternoon came, he picked me up where he instructed, two streets down from my house. He didn’t say why, but I knew it was because he’d discovered I was seventeen and the preacher’s daughter, and we were a secret. But everything in my life worth having was. When we got to the edge of Starry Swamp, he didn’t pull off where everyone else did, at a vast clearing far from the water, where the soil was drier. “Somewhere more private,” he’d explained at my look, and once again I heard the unspoken meaning: somewhere no one would catch us. Hewas twenty-four and I was seventeen; he was a handsome, churchgoing bachelor and I was a wisp. I was lucky to be with him, even hidden in the swamp.
I’d nodded, too nervous thinking about what being kissed would feel like, after all this time imagining it. My palms were so sweaty I had to wipe them against my dress. We drove deeper and deeper in until we came to a small clearing in the trees. Renard parked and cut the engine. The trees ringing us were so thick that all I could see beyond was darkness.
He spread a blanket on the muddy grass and pulled me toward him. I knew what was coming and closed my eyes. With my sight gone, I could hear the buzz saw of the insects and low throat-singing of the frogs and whistle of the wind, all of it intensifying as Renard pressed his lips to mine.
I was being kissed. But it was not like I’d imagined. His lips were rough and calloused and they fumbled over mine, urgent from the start, wanting something I didn’t know how to give. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Somewhere in the distance a bird shrieked—a high, clear burst of warning—and Renard solved the problem of my hands by pulling me tighter against him. His lips kept moving so insistently that it occurred to me I needn’t do anything at all. He wasn’t waiting for my response.
He pressed me down against the blanket and followed the wild pounding of my heart with his mouth, kissing down my neck to my chest, tugging at my dress to taste more skin. I made a noise of surprise, startled by the quickness with which he moved, remembering Bella’s first kiss, the paragraphs devoted to the way Edward had held her, touched her softly. Renard’s scratchy hands were moving under my skirt. I pulled back and said, “Wait,” breathless and urgent, but he didn’t. He only grunted “Relax, Red,” in that thick honey accent, the words curlingwith impatience. Hands and mouth roving, pinning my shoulders with his weight even as I tried to roll free: at first hesitantly, unsure of myself, then frantically, panic kicking in.
It wasn’t likeTwilight. It was everything my father had warned. I beat at Renard, trying to twist free as dusk fell around us, pastel blue. We were alone this deep into the swamp. The frogs kept singing, the bugs kept whirring. Nothing cared that I was trapped in the coffin of his arms, drowning in fear. The earth was as indifferent as Renard was, the man who hadn’t, it turned out, seen anything in me beyond a girl who was naive and desperate, willing to be quieter than the others.
Just as I was breaking in the grass, Renard made a choked sound and heaved off me, struck by something large and dark. I rolled away, sobbing in pure shock—then scrambled to my feet when I saw what saved me. It was Everett Duncan who straddled Renard between his thighs, trying and failing to catch hold of his arms. Everett was dressed in black as always, dark waders and a cheap thrift-store T-shirt full of holes. There was a water bottle dropped nearby, still rolling past the wet corpse of a large, fat nutria, the river rats that thrived ’round here.He’d been hunting. The thought came to me clearly amid the shock.
Renard managed to get a hand free and landed a blow across Everett’s cheek, so hard his head snapped to the side and I got a clear view of his face. Once a year for as long as I could remember, one girl or another would overlook the stink of loneliness and anger surrounding Everett, the bruises blooming around his eyes that caused snickers about bar fights, the accusations that he was a goth and a freak, drawn in by the power of that face. It never mattered which girl tried: everyone was icily rebuffed, one after another, while the rest of the school watched and laughed.
We’d sat next to each other in classrooms for years, Cornier and Duncan, alphabetical destiny. But in all that time he’d only spoken tome once of his own volition, the first year of high school, right after I’d discoveredTwilightand carried it everywhere in my backpack. I’d been walking down the hall when a group of football players, roughhousing and not looking, slammed into me, knocking me off my feet and scattering the contents of my bag. They hadn’t even stopped to apologize, like I was invisible. That was common enough, but that day it had stung.
As I’d scrambled on my hands and knees, searching frantically forTwilight, dark boots had appeared in my line of sight. Everett, of all people, had crouched down and extended the beat-up paperback with a single word: “Here.” In the flash before I looked away, breathing thanks, I saw his lip was busted and scabbing over, an old wound on its way to healing. He wrested me to my feet with one cool hand and then kept walking, expression unchanged. An unrippled pond.
And now here he was, grappling on the grass with the man who wanted to hurt me. As I watched, the tide turned. Renard, who had thirty pounds on Everett easy, managed to flip him over and crush his hands around his throat.
“You weird fuckingkid,” Renard yelled, striking Everett so hard he made a sucking sound, desperate for air. His arms flailed, trying and failing to gain purchase against Renard’s chest, just like mine had.
“Stop it!” I screamed, as Renard hit Everett again, his face nearly purple with rage. Bested by a teenage boy without a weapon, and me escaping, the whole plan shot to hell. In the transparency of his fury, I saw clear to Renard’s soul, to the truth he’d hidden from me every Sunday: deep down, he was rotten.
“You’re going to kill him!” I shouted. Everett was trapped, his arms starting to still, his eerily beautiful face turning blue from lack of oxygen. My heart burst open in my chest, certain he would die. And in my desperation I turned into my own kind of roving creature, dropping to my hands and knees in the grass, fumbling through tree roots and bushes,all the under-places you weren’t supposed to poke. I seized upon a rock as smooth as an egg and as big as a summer melon.
All understanding faded except for one truth: Everett Duncan had tried to save me, and I could not let him be harmed. I ran back to the blanket where Renard loomed over him, squeezing Everett’s neck with both hands, and didn’t think a second more before I brought the rock down over his head. He jerked to the side and it didn’t seem enough, so I brought it down again, letting loose a sob, the impact jarring my wrists. And then I couldn’t stop until I lifted the rock to hit him once more and Renard slumped over on the blanket, blood leaking from his head.
