Your throat constricts. You thought you had him fooled. But if he had been confused, it had only been for a moment. You had been ready to give yourself away when he didn’t know exactly what he was taking. But he knew. He knew the whole time.Crazy.That word sticks to you, a burr. Are you crazy? Is she?
You turn your face away, fumble for the doorhandle.
“See you around, kid,” he says, his mouth around a cigarette before you get out of the car, the silver of his lighter flashing in his palm.
You hoped thatSabrina would be busy, but she’s in the kitchen when you come home, leaning over a bowl of cereal. Your stomach rumbles at the smell of sugar and milk and you realize you must have left your bag of food in his car.
“Where were you?” she asks.
You have no time to fortify yourself. Even if you could come up with a convincing lie, you are worried about the way the story will tell itself in your gestures, will play out on your face. The two of you have always been able to read one another this way, sometimes unwillingly. Twinship a forced sharing of thoughts, moods, pain. When you were girls, Sabrina would wake from across the room if you had a bad dream, climb next to you in bed, and stroke your hair until you fell asleep again. You could always feel Sabrina’s headaches coming on, a change in the atmosphere of the room.
It takes you too long to answer.
“A walk,” you stutter. Whatever decisiveness or boldness that possessed you when you climbed into the man’s car is gone. You are back in your own body, your sore, damp, lonely-feeling body, where the words get caught in your throat.
Sabrina stares at you, unspeaking. It’s in the air between you, the ionic crackle of a secret. Only now, seeing Sabrina in the flesh, do you think about what you have done as a form of betrayal. So little, nearly nothing, has ever belonged to one of you or the other—until the Coyote. You had merely been trying to right the balance, return to your equilibrium.
Sabrina finishes her cereal, clinks her dish into the sink, which is piled high with other bowls and plates, water cups clouded with fingerprints, coffee mugs whose rims are printed with lip gloss.
You run the water, hot, so hot it is nearly steaming. You startto scrub, dish by dish, taking your time, until the countertops are covered with wet, shining plates and slashes of glistening knives and forks. Until your hands are red and raw and no longer look like your own.
ANNABELLE
She knows. You know she knows. She can sense it off you, the alchemy of what he’s opened up, the crosscurrents of shame and desire that now flow through you.
You await your punishment, slinking around the house, penitent and full of dread. A slap that lands hard and fast and aching when you least suspect it. Your bedroom door flung open, a scream like a hawk that has circled patiently before seizing its pray. Or a sly revenge that happens while your back is turned. Sabrina slitting all your clothes with a pocketknife. Tossing your notebooks into the fire.
Instead, she’s quiet. Aloof, all the rest of the day Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday too.
On Wednesday night she walks down to the end of the driveway, her hair swishing loose on her back as she disappears around the crook that leads to the road, where you can just make out headlights—his headlights—through the trees. It’s a heat wave and the oppressive weather makes everything worse, like you can’t take a deep enough breath, a hand pressed against your sternum.
You lie awake that night until you hear the knocker on the front door—the lion with the brass ring clenched in its teeth—jangle. Until you hear her feet on the stairs.
You are relievedthat your long days alone together are broken up by your shifts at the ice cream stand. You walk the mile there, the grip of the heat relentless, humidity thick in your throat. You avert youreyes from the heather blooming along the roadside, a plant your mother loved. Not especially pretty, but she always said she liked Pine Barrens heather because it was hardy and unique to where you lived. She used to cut the longer branches and arrange it in mason jars on the kitchen table.Bright and strong, like my girls.
Most days by the time you get to work your T-shirt—Sundaez and Cones!—is soaked through with sweat and you have to pull at least one tick from your ankles, then stomp bits of ground glass and gravel from the treads of your shoes. You never feel clean.
Work turns time slow and languorous, like the hot fudge sauce you dribble over custard. You often go an hour at a time between customers, without speaking to another soul, so you find small acts to perform to confirm that you still exist. Crumble a sugar cone in your fist until it looks like sand, push it around in piles. Spell your name in M&Ms. Sometimes you spill maraschino cherries on the counter and watch the bees glut themselves on the syrup until their bodies turn red with whatever dyes and chemicals constitute the sugary sludge.
But come Friday you have a day off, and so does Sabrina, which you’ve dreaded all week. In the few moments you’ve been in the same room as your sister you feel something charged between you, like air collecting humidity before a storm. A gathering of energy that will soon demand release.
That morning you eat in silence, you with your bowl of cereal, Sabrina with dry toast she mostly picks at. Out of nerves you pour yourself a second helping, so that you might have an excuse not to speak.
“What should we do?” Sabrina asks suddenly. The old assumption of your girlhood in play again, that you would spend the day together, every minute, a fact you’d taken for granted until she met the Coyote. For a moment, you tell yourself that everything will be okay. You try to keep your smile in check.
“We could play with Hannah and Iris?” Hannah and Iris are the dolls your mother gave you for your seventh birthdays, the few years when money wasn’t tight and your parents could buy you Christmasgifts. You mean the suggestion as a peace offering—it has been years since the two of you played with them, but you think it could feel good. A return to your old selves, to the way things were. Entire afternoons lost to the worlds you created, the dramas unfolding nearly wordlessly between you, because you were so often thinking the same thing.
Sabrina scoffs. “Annabelle, we’re not kids anymore.”
“I was joking,” you say, trying your best to keep the hurt out of your voice.
At Sabrina’s suggestion, the two of you decide to pick mushrooms in the woods behind your house.
Almost as soon as you bend to pick your first mushroom, Sabrina finds hers. She scans the edge of the woods ahead of you and she crouches down low. An unspoken competition blooms, making the air throb. Every few minutes you’ll straighten from picking one and find Sabrina watching you. Measuring something in you.
You find one mushroom, Sabrina finds two. You point out that one of hers looks like a Destroying Angel, which can cause your guts to turn themselves inside out, make your liver shut down, so poisonous that by the time the symptoms set in it’s too late. You’re dead. You warn her that she should probably dump her whole basket. Just to be safe.
“It is definitely not a Destroying Angel,” she says, a hand on her hip.
