Page 67 of People Like Us

Imove through the pines where the old moss swings,

green as corn husk, heavy with rain.

The woods know my name in the hush of their limbs;

they taught me the language of forgiveness in vain.

Behind me, something follows

a crack of twig, a breath not my own.

The crows lift black from the cypress knees

like scraps of a burned-up hymn.

Mama is gone, beyond the creek’s dark bend.

The evening hangs low and bruised.

Father’s praying for tools they wont use,

and the mud keeps the print of my hooves.

I run.

Through briar and sweetgum, through curtains of moss,

while the forest watches with a hundred blind eyes.

Then thunder blooms sudden inside my ribs,

and the earth rushes up to the sky.

I lie where the red clay drinks me slow.

The pines lean close as mourners.

Above, the steeple on a house of sin rises pale as a graveyard flower,

and the crows settle back in the branches.

The woods know my name in the hush of their limbs.

They take it softly from my mouth.

By morning I’ll be only moss and bone,

another prayer the forest swallowed down.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Lunch hour always felt vaguely lawless at Woodland High. The teachers stationed around the cafeteria had long since given up trying to control anything beyond actual fistfights, so the room swelled with the kind of noise that made your skull ache if you tried to focus on anything other than the conversation right in front of you.

I sat straight backed on the tiny round chair beside Emily, peeling the skin from grapes one by one while Lindsey complained dramatically about her chemistry grade across the table. Andy sat on my other side with one thick arm slung over the back of my shoulders, his knee nudging mine every so often beneath the table as he argued with Morgan about whether raccoons or opossums would survive longer during an apocalypse.

“Raccoons are very intelligent,” Morgan insisted, pointing the same fry she’d been holding for ten minutes at him accusingly. “That alone puts them above most men.” I noticed she did this any time food was involved—work up the people around her so no one would look directly at her untouched plate. I’d been eating her lunches in sneaking bites for the past week, and not a single person at our table seemed to notice.

Andy snorted. “Opossums literally play dead. That’s survival instinct.”