Piedmonters

I’m trying to walk myself to sleep when someone stumbles out from the dumpsters behind our apartment and scares the melatonin out of me.

“Mothersucker,” she says: Jaylin.

I check my reflection in the tint of a Hummer to make sure I still have a face.

“I’ll come to you,” she tells me.

She’s about twice as tall as last time I saw her, swallowed in an orange 80’s-looking windbreaker that feels like the product of an unidentifiable phase. But still runs like her limbs are trying to tear free from her torso. You get older, you grow, but you move the same way.

She steps into the blanch of the streetlight I’ve backed into. Her cheeks look like the skin on your stomach, if that makes sense. When we were younger, I used to think that was what was wrong with her: she had all the right parts of a person, but the order was off.

“Spooked me,” I tell her.

“Just wait.” She fishes out a photo folded longways.

I know what it shows before she opens it. “You saved them?”

“I found them. The real people.”

Who’d haunted our fort half a decade ago. They smirk right through my shut eyelids: the bald guy and steeply-eyebrowed wife and their weirdly trapezoidal offspring.

“Behind the Exxon off of Monkey Junction.” Jaylin’s saying. “Come lay eyes on them.”

I open mine. She’s bouncing on her toes like a bantamweight. Three hydrangea leaves are pinched in the zipper of her windbreaker.

“It’s witching hour.”

“You’re awake.” Jaylin nabs my wrist and drags me to the dumpsters at the edge of the parking lot. Her Mom’s doorless Jeep rusts behind them, like she’d meant to hide her presence. “Just let me know I’m not crazy,” she says. “Please.”

 

 

#

 

 

We’d been friends in the mindless way that happens when you’re eleven and neighbors. This was the summer my parents moved to Wilmington. They’d liquidated the flower shop and cashed in their savings to flip a brick two-bedroom in Hidden Valley.

The valley was definitely hidden. You could fire an aerosoft gun from the pond dead-ending the street and hit the wooden entrance sign announcing the neighborhood.

Jaylin had pocket-knifed her name into the back of that sign. How we met was I found her chiseling mine beside it: Bailey Elizabeth Cross, birth certificate style. Said she’d heard my parents chewing me out by it that morning. (I’d just been banished outside, Gameboy confiscated.)

“You’re entrenched in the annals.” She nodded solemnly to the carving.

I remember thinking she’d mispronounced ‘anal’ and picturing some sphincter-dwelling caveperson, laughing at a joke she hadn’t made.

“Dead-ass,” Jaylin said. She pointed the knife at the splintery heap in my yard. “You got designs on those leftovers?”

Yesterday, Mom had found a nest of threadbare pillows in our toolshed and blamed vagrants. That building’s demolitioned remnants now rotted in our yard, the first casualty of an aggressive renovation.

My parents had moved on to drywall that morning. They boomboxed a mixtape of soft rock from before their engagement and swung three-pound hammers in cheerful sync, fusing the kitchen with the living room. The move to Wilmington had fused them into one unit. That summer I just gagged at their single-mindedness, but I’m old enough now to see how they were confusing forgiveness with agreement.

When Jaylin explained about the fort she was visualizing, they dropped their hammers and planted their hands on their hips identically.

“I have this mothersucking vision in my head,” Jaylin said. “I want to get it in my eyes. Actualize it.”

My mom and dad fished their mouths open and shut at each other. I pictured them blowing bubbles of cartoon-text in a language I couldn’t read.

“Just be careful about nails,” my mom said.

Jaylin promised she had her tetanus booster.

Dad scavenged us two pairs of garden gloves and told me he was glad to see me doing something.

Jaylin led me into the garage next door. A couch leaked stuffing onto the subfloor. A barbell rusted into the uprights of a crooked weight bench. I rubbed the jagged knurling. My dad had Goodwilled his dumbbells before we’d left Raleigh, saying he was done compensating.

“Don’t risk tetanus.” Jaylin dropped a toolbox into a fat-tired wagon, the kind with wheels designed to tackle heavy sand.

We crammed it full of two-by-fours from my parents’ pile of ex-shed. She kept stuffing her face in the crook of her elbow and coughing something.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Asthma. Man the handle,” she told me.

I followed her around the retention pond at the end of the street, dragging the wagon over sandy dirt and crabgrass. The brown-black water looked solid. Jaylin said there were mammoth bones on the bottom. When the rainstorms let up in September and the water level dropped, we could wade out and examine them.

I was too busy wheezing to call bullshit. I went a few yards holding the wagon’s handle against my tailbone, then turned and backwards-dragged it. This was the highest my heart rate had gotten since Gracie Gutierrez pantsed me in the first quarter of my last-ever soccer game. It was an effort with a comfort. My veins felt snug around my racing blood.

Jaylin led me into a clot of woods behind the pond, cough-muttering intermittently. Narrow pines jutted up. Scrub oaks hunched like their trunks had stomachaches.

Fifty yards in, the scrub thinned around a thicker, older tree. Its branches bouqueted out like a photo of a firework exploding. White flowers ladened its limbs. The air thickened with this richly musty scent.

“That’s not cum.” Jaylin petted the trunk. “This is a Bradford. It’s a mothersucking invasive species.”

Five years later, I’d do something to Wilson Partridge that would fill the camper shell of his Toyota Tundra with an odor just like this one. He’d ask why I was crying, what he’d done, and I’d tell him I was thinking of a tree. Of course, it would really be Jaylin I was thinking of—wondering why an eleven-year-old girl had known the smell of semen.

But that summer, I didn’t know what Jaylin meant. We leaned eight two-by-fours around the base of the tree. She climbed into the wagon to nail them to the trunk, but the nails were too short to pass through the planks.

“They look stable enough,” I said.

Jaylin’s left eyebrow jumped higher than the other. “Ever heard of a hurricane?”

“We’re from Raleigh.”

“Piedmonter.” Her whisper held a grudge, the same way Mom had muttered vagrants.

“Most teepees are covered in animal skins,” I said, just for something.

“Insensitive.” Jaylin’s left eyebrow got abducted by her bangs. She hopped off the wagon and made for the retention pond. “You manning the handle or what?”

I wouldn’t get my Gameboy back until sunset, and dragging the wagon was fun in a tiring way. I pretended I was a peasant peddling wares. My wares were mammoth bones, or dumbbells, or soft rock cassettes.

We hauled out three more loads of planks. Jaylin had me hold horizontal two-by-fours while she nailed them to the vertical ones. Her cough-muttering grew quieter, but more frequent. Sounded like she was saying Kim Eyes Up.

We fenceposted a circle around the perimeter of the Bradford tree.

Jaylin nailed some spare planks into crosses and staked them behind it. “A graveyard for my ambitions,” she said, her stare glazing.

I wasn’t sure whether she meant for the fort or for me.

I crawled into our insensitive teepee. Jaylin sat with her back against the trunk, reached up, and touched the junction where the two-by-fours met the bark. My fingers fell an inch shy when I tried the same thing.

“It’s too short,” she said.

“Let’s dig out the floor.”

Her sigh sounded a decade older than us. “Tomorrow. I’m out of gumption.”

We sat in tired silence, chests-to-knees. Jaylin coughed Kim Eyes Up seven times—someone’s Twitter handle, I decided. I was looking at the sand-wagon’s huge tires, picturing Jaylin inviting me to the beach. My dad got physically ill at the feeling of sand between his toes; my mom would adopt the same phobia, judging by how things were going.

“You surf much?” I asked Jaylin.

She snorted. “I’ve never sniffed ocean.”

We were twenty minutes away from the Atlantic.

Jaylin turned her mouth into her elbow to cough.

“Kim Eyes Up,” I said.

She leaned around the tree with a look like what? “Let’s rehydrate.”

I manned the wagon through the woods. Turtles bobbed in the retention pond, their shells giving the surface the illusion of boiling. My parents’ hammering carried over the water.

“Which one philandered?” Jaylin asked.

I dropped the wagon’s handle. “Excuse me?”

“Your parentals are dividing.”

I imagined my stare shoving her back, sending her tumbling down the bank to impale on sunken mammoth tusks.

“Learn to take a mothersucking joke,” Jaylin said. “You want Capris Sun or what?”

I’d’ve listened to her talk another hour of shit for a sugar rush; corn syrup triggered Mom’s phobia. I dragged the wagon back onto the street, the back of my mouth going sour with longing.

Jaylin led me past the garage that we’d gotten the wagon from, to the house on the other side of mine. A doorless green Jeep rusted in the driveway. Crystals were superglued to its dashboard. She spanked its driver’s side taillight with the thoughtless force of a compulsion. “Man that wagon around back.”

I’d dropped the handle like it was hot. Jaylin picked it up and dragged it around the yard. A brick missing from the back step propped the door. A Thanksgiving smell wafted out.

Jaylin slid around me. “Plea the fifth,” she whispered.

Her house’s layout matched the one that my parents were ruining. The hall led us past a bathroom and laundry closet and a parallel pair of doors that I guessed led to bedrooms. I socked up the hall into a furnitureless, televisionless living room. A nest of pillows and insulated blankets was heaped on the hardwood. Sage burned in abalone shell incense holders. The air was smeary with blue smoke, but its scent was getting smothering by casserole.

Jaylin knocked on the kitchen door. “Miss Lady?” she said, then led me in.

The woman at the sink jumped like Jaylin hadn’t announced us.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

She braced her hands on either side of the sink basin. She was braless under overalls, with sharp shoulder blades like Jaylin’s. Her hair was lumped up in a samurai’s bun. Her knuckles looked polished. The kitchen hummed with the faucet’s hard-running.

“Kim Eyes Up,” Jaylin coughed, but those words sounded wrong.

“There’s pecan pie.” The lady pointed to the fridge, then the oven. “There’s broccoli casserole coming.”

Jaylin grabbed two Capris Suns from the cupboard and shoved me into the living room.

I stayed put while she fled down the hall. “That’s your mom?”

“Want to trade?” Jaylin flapped the back door. “Come on.”

I followed her out, wondering what I’d just walked into.

The Capris Sun tasted like singing. I sucked it down so fast it started skipping my tastebuds.

Jaylin sipped and swished. “Who’s Kim Eyes Up?”

The packet shriveled around my straw. I panted my breath back. “You tell me.”

I sort of meant about everything.

My parents’ singing trickled over from next door. I was pretty certain only husbands could be philanderers. I said, “You’ve really never been to the beach?”

Jaylin gave me that grown-up sigh. “Tomorrow. Shovels. Sunrise.”

I glanced back at my house—not really mine, but the one my parents were trying to make feel that way. If I went home this early, I’d have a three-pound hammer of my own waiting. “What are you going to do?”

Jaylin tucked my drained Capris Sun under the loose brick. “Ruminate.”

 

 

#

 

 

My parents were tenting it in the living room. They sent me up a ladder with glow-in-the-dark adhesive stars for the ceiling. The lights worked fine, but we used a battery lamp that night, eating takeout and staring up at my interpretation of constellations. Mom and Dad kept touching each others’ non-eating hands. I had a sick hunch that this would be our new homeostasis.

Every restaurant around here seemed to be fusion. That night was—serious—Greek Hibachi. I drenched my gyro in the teriyaki-tzatziki until Mom got afraid it was sugar-laced.

“You’ve got a friend,” she said, confiscating it.

“A mother-something friend,” Dad said.

“Mothersucking,” Mom said.

They touched hands for six seconds.

I ditched my food and crawled into the tent. My Gameboy sat on my pillow like a diamond. I zipped the tent shut, but could still hear them touching. Miss Lady’s shoulder blades  simmered behind my eyes like the sun’s afterimage. I believed Jaylin had never been to the ocean, even if they did own a Jeep.

 

 

#

 

 

Jaylin was waiting at my front door the next morning. She wielded two green folding shovels, the army surplus kind. I didn’t hoot which garage she’d raided them from. There were bigger mysteries.

Our fort seemed straighter. I sat with my back against the trunk, reached up and brushed the slanted ceiling. “Do I look taller?”

Jaylin scrunched down her neck. “Only if I do this. Man your shovel.”

It’s hard to dig from a sitting position. I left the shovel’s shaft folded, churning like Miss Lady applying a mixing spoon to gravy. I heaped dirt in front of the fort and tried to push out my shoulder blades.

Jaylin’s shovel pinged off of something. “Mothersucker.”

I crawled around the tree trunk, hoping she’d struck mammoth tusk, but she was shaking out her hands and staring at a tin lid.

We chiseled it out of the ground with our shovels. A lunchbox-sized case with clasps sealing it.

“Is this yours?” Jaylin asked. “Is it drugs?”

“Don’t open it.”

She snapped the clasps back and creaked up its lid.

Inside were toppling stacks of photos. The same family grinned in a series of Christmas card poses: a swoopy-haired lady, a tall-bald guy with hips wider than his shoulders, and two boys whose torsos had the same trapezoid shape as his. The boys were fourteen and seven, maybe. They all wore matching knit sweaters and jeans, standing in front of a mossy live oak.

“Do they live here?” I hoped the older boy’d seen me.

Jaylin shook her head. “Trespassers.”

“Maybe they were already buried,” I said. “The dirt seemed loose yesterday.”

“What in suck does that mean?”

We shuffled through the pictures like Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I felt more like the trespasser, but not guilty. Older bro had these James Franco cheekbones. “Guy’s cute.”

“His hairline’s already receding.”

That didn’t look true.

“Cringe.” Jaylin held one up to me. The family stood single-file with their hands on each others’ shoulders, faces stacked perfectly: the oldest exactly a head taller than his brother, Mom a head taller than him, Dad tilting his chin into her scalp like he was sniffing.

There were about twenty photos, a dozen or so copies of each. The empty box below was disappointing, but I didn’t know what I’d else been hoping for—or even when I’d started hoping.

Jaylin dropped her stack. “I don’t give a shit. Keep them.”

She hadn’t coughed since she’d opened it.

I tucked the pictures into the box. She snapped the lid shut and shoved it out of the fort. We dug until roots started stubbing our shovels. The displaced dirt was heaped halfway up the entrance, barricading us in. It reminded me of the Edgar Allen Poe story where the guy bricks his friend into the basement, only both of us were stuck behind the wall. It was still too shallow in there to stand up.

“I could go for a Capris Sun,” I said.

Jaylin crawled out, kicking sandy dirt at me.

I followed and found her hefting the picture box. “You’re keeping it?”

She lugged it back to the bank of the retention pond, spun and chucked it with a valiant two-handed toss. The box plunked into the water. Looked less like it was sinking than getting swallowed.

“Insensitive,” I said.

She rubbed her hands on my t-shirt. “Those were cursed.”

That summer would’ve gone better if I’d believed her.

 

 

#

 

 

 

We didn’t go back to the fort that week. Jaylin was waiting on my doorstep a little earlier every morning, blowing her breaths like she was expecting steam.

Miss Lady’s Jeep would already be missing. She maided in Landfall Sundays through Fridays, gone before six and back after eight. I couldn’t picture anyone wanting their houses cleaned before sunrise. I couldn’t picture Miss Lady doing anything besides baking. Their hardwood was scratched up from sand in the halls. Flour grouted the cracks between their kitchen tiles. The tiles were the little hexagonal ones that you’d expect in a public pool bathroom. I swabbed them with a Brillo pad while Jaylin sipped Capris Sun between trespassings.

By the following Friday, I’d followed her into every garage on that street. We wrote cusses in the dust on car windows and rearranged fridge magnets into our idea of sex positions. Jaylin would swig a can of Coors while I blushed. Neither one of us mentioned the fort or the pictures until a garage door groaned up on us markering smiley faces on the underweared bulges in a stack of Mandate magazines.

We bolted out the side door with the homeowner laying on the horn. Jaylin hurdled the flowerbed in the side yard, already four full strides ahead. I chased her down to the dead-end. She’d vanished through the pines before I rounded the retention pond, still squeezing my Sharpie. I ran until I was wheezing the musty scent of the Bradford tree.

Jaylin was already on all fours in the fort, hunching over something. I heard the clasps snap before I ducked in and saw.

The tin box was back, cushioned on a rumpled blanket.

“Told you,” she said. “Haunted.”

The same photos of that family grinned up at us.

I shuffled through them. Bald dad. Swoopy-haired wife. Son with the cheekbones and totally intact hairline and the younger one, who looked like he hadn’t figured out smiling.

“Curses don’t get in through your mouth,” Jaylin said.

I only realized I’d been holding my breath when she said it. The back of my throat got that pressurized feeling. The photos seemed suddenly radioactive. I dumped them back in the box and slammed the lid, feeling like my fingertips had extra electrons.

“You’re sure you don’t know them?” Jaylin said.

Now I felt like I did. The blanket the box sat on had crumbs on it. “Someone’s living here.”

“No shit.” Jaylin crawled out with the box. “Come on.”

I pressed my nose into the blanket. Smelled like sweet potato pie and spicy incense.

“You gonna roll in it?” Jaylin said.

I followed her back to the pond, trying to figure out how to ask what I wanted her to admit. “We should tell someone.”

“And spread the curse?”

“There’s no curse.”

“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”

It sounded like something Gracie Gutierrez would’ve said. I hitched up my daisy dukes.

Jaylin shoved the box at me. I backpedaled through the crabgrass.

“That’s what I thought.” She chucked it into the water with another clumsy shot putter’s spin. “We need mothersucking sage.”

Back to Jaylin’s. The blanket pile in the living room did look smaller. A lighter laid on the hardwood like it had been dropped. I followed a whiff of sweet potatoes to the kitchen.

“She’s not in there,” Jaylin said.

I peeked into the fridge. Every shelf was loaded with pie trays and casserole dishes. I grabbed a loaf of banana-looking bread from the door-side shelf where my parents would’ve stored non-canola salad dressing. Miss Lady had cooked enough to feed a dozen, but none of the dishes seemed touched.

“Have it!” Jaylin called.

I peeled off the saran wrap. I was only an hour out from breakfast, but felt like it had been a week. I ate that whole loaf with the fridge open, basking in the square of cool and bright that fell out.

Jaylin coughed words in the living room. Maybe she’d forgotten I was there; maybe she hadn’t, and was reminding me. Either way, she spoke slow and loud enough to make out.

Kill myself. That was what she’d been chanting.

I shoved out of the kitchen. She knelt on the blankets, cupping an abalone shell both-handedly—a posture like praying, or offering.

“Why’d you say that?” I asked.

“Takes the pressure off.”

The banana bread went cement in my stomach. “Why don’t you sleep here?”

Her shoulder blades sharpened through the back of her t-shirt. “Go.”

I was still young-dumb enough to listen to what she said instead of her tone.

The hammering had stopped at my house. The front door was locked. I went around back instead of knocking. Al Stewart baritoned through the paint-stained boombox. Something else was rustling, or whispering. I got this sneaky instinct and tiptoed up the hall.

My parents had hammered out all the drywall between the kitchen and living room, islanding the countertop with the stove and dishwasher. LOAD BEARING was Sharpied vertically down a marooned ceiling beam in a capitalized column. A hammer-shaped dent pocked the spot between the ‘D’ and the ‘B’.

For the first time in my life, I realized my parents didn’t know what they were doing.

The tent was zipped, the back of it bulging rhythmically. The nylon blistered and drained with a head-shape.

“Kill myself,” I whispered—just testing.

The tent stilled.

“What’s that?” Dad’s voice seemed deeper.

“Nothing.”

Zipping and rustling.

“Pete,” Mom said, “I locked it.”

“Bailey?” Dad called in a pitch back to his.

“You don’t need an excuse,” Mom said.

I sprinted into the bathroom and locked it.

 

 

#

 

 

The next dawn, Jaylin yelled me awake.

I sat up with Dad unzipping the tent. He leaned in from outside. The top half of his sleeping bag hung from his waist like a partially shed snakeskin. I looked from that to the empty space across Mom, who seemed bigger without him spooning her in.

“You slept out there?” I said.

“Bailey Elizabeth Cross!” Jaylin hollered.

“Deal with her,” Dad said.

She bounced on our doorstep like a boxer. It was the kind of light that comes right before sunrise, the air brightening like cooking egg whites. She tilted her head like vamos and took off for the pond.

If I’d gone inside, she’d’ve yelled me back out again. I stomped my shoes on and followed her around the retention pond. The pines and oaks seemed farther apart, like the woods had been stretched. Seemed like it took twenty minutes to reach the Bradford tree.

Jaylin pointed to our fort. “Look.”

“Nope,” I said, but felt like a treadmill was pulling me—like if I didn’t walk forward I’d fall off of something. I ducked into the fort.

Another tin box was propped open. The same photos of the same family. Maybe the low light tricked my eyes; maybe I didn’t look long enough for the image to stabilize, but I swore they were smirking instead of smiling.

I bolted. Jaylin wrapped me in both arms and tackled me. We smacked the sandy dirt and rolled over flower pedals and pine cones.

I pummeled her with knees and elbows. “Let go!”

She pinned my wrists under her palms and straddled me. “I’m the curse.” Her voice more than her weight was what stopped me: her grip had grownup strength, but she spoke with the flat sadness of an adult. A month later, Mom would tell me Dad had gone back to Raleigh in the same monotone.

I slumped limp.

“Ready?” Jaylin said.

I thought she was going to kiss me.

She told me how she’d drowned her sister instead.

Jaylin was four; Maura was two years younger. Maura had torn the best picture out of Happy as a Tapir, where the blob-people crawl out of their animal suits. Miss Lady left them soaking in the bathtub to triple-check that she’d pulled the green bean casserole out of the oven. (Jaylin said she remembered what food because she still threw up from the smell of it.) Maura had gone under, and Jaylin had just not let her come up. She held her laced palms out in front of her stomach to show me how she’d put them on the back of Maura’s head.

When Miss Lady came back from the kitchen, Jaylin was shaking her sister’s shoulders and sobbing.

“The shrink told me I was too young to know better, but how come I was crying?” Jaylin sounded like it was breaking her ribs to talk. She rolled off of me. “I knew what I was doing.”

I must’ve responded, but all I remember is walking out of those woods alone.

Jaylin had to have planted those photos. I couldn’t think of any other reason for her to go out to our fort before dawn.

That following fall, I’d start my own nighttime walks. My mom and I were sharing a box-spring in our studio apartment, but I swore I heard echoes when I tossed. So I’d stomp my shoes on and pace laps around the complex, thinking this was how Jaylin must’ve felt in that furnitureless house. Those had been her pillows my Mom found in the shed. Our fort had been her new nest.

But I was months from such insight that morning. All I wanted to do was crawl down the front of Miss Lady’s overalls. I’d’ve let her call me Maura, but her Jeep was gone. The front door was locked.

A picture was pinned under the loose brick on the back step. I pulled it out.

Jaylin and I hunched under the teepeed two-by-fours of our fort, staring at the picture box. I folded the photo into my pocket.

Jaylin was moping up the street. I ran home before she got to me.

Dad’s hammering filled the house, but I didn’t see him.

Mom was folding tent poles. She gave me a look like she was choking. “How about the beach?”

 

 

#

 

 

The sand squeaked like a bitten animal when you walked on it. Mom dove past the breakers and bobbed for three hours. I squirmed on my towel, feeling myself sunburning, still wearing my daisy dukes with the picture of the fort in the pocket. When she waded back to the beach, I showed it to her.

That ended the renovation. No crime to investigate. No suspect to pursue. Police’s sole appeasement was a nightly squad car coasting down our street. Dad hosted open houses while Mom dragged me to the beach. We stayed until the whitewater silvered under the moon, getting home even later than Miss Lady. Her protection felt like a punishment. I couldn’t’ve seen Jaylin if I’d wanted to.

I did try. I was going to tell her about the beach and Dad’s hammer, that the curse hadn’t stopped me from talking to her. But I’d gotten this smothered feeling walking into her yard. I’d left an index card with our new address under the loose brick on the stoop. Moving was my excuse.

Our house had sold for a loss. Dad moved back to Raleigh and Mom and I moved into a furnished efficiency by UNCW. Our furniture never made it out of the storage unit.

 

 

#

 

 

The crystals are missing from Jaylin’s Jeep, but the dashboard’s corrugated with dried Superglue. A Pizza Hut hat hangs by its snapback from the rearview.

The passenger’s seat releases a yeasty, cheesy smell under me. “How’s Miss Lady?”

“She stopped driving.” Jaylin nods to the wiry hole where the radio should be. “That was her.”

She speeds us across town in solid silence, the wind wrongly muted. Night pools like an oil spill beyond the headlights. I put in fingers in the negative space of the radio. The wires feel like they’re reaching for me.

We speed past the turn lane for Hidden Valley. First time in five years I’ve been over here. We’d really only moved up the road, but this neighborhood felt farther away than Dad’s condo in Raleigh. I’d been confusing distance with remoteness—a hereditary mistake.

Jaylin brakes into the turn lane in front of the Monkey Junction Exxon, takes a trailer park’s first lefthand side-street. Azaleas overflow from shell-studded mulch beds.

She stops two mailboxes shy of the yard with the Bradford tree.

A naval-vessel level of flags jut from the doublewide behind it. The trailer looks moored to its wooden porch. Its windows are lightless.

“It really wasn’t you,” I say.

She nods to the trailer like, see. “I had to keep living there. You got to move.”

“I didn’t ask to.”

“You weren’t mad about it, either.”

Half a decade she’d stayed in that neighborhood, growing up without knowing who was watching.

Jaylin drops out of the driver’s side, leaves the engine rumbling.

“Where you going?”

“We need to establish a sightline.”

She folds into this hunching, anime-looking run, arms outstretched behind her. I can picture her cutting class to vape in a dugout, and I’m glad we wound up at different schools. She slams her back against the Bradford and air-traffics her arms at me.

I cram both hands into the dashboard’s radio hole. Whoever took our picture could be in that trailer with their nuclear family. Jaylin and I were daughters from homes that had lost isotopes; we should’ve been the ones eavesdropping. But I’d rather look into other windows.

I crawl behind the wheel and reverse the Jeep.

“Mothersucker!” Jaylin shouts. Light yellows the doublewide’s corner window.

I floor it up the road. In the rearview, Jaylin darkens and shrinks.

Two lefts get me back to Hidden Valley. I pull into Jaylin’s driveway. Seven cars are parked in the yard of my old house. Four undergraduate types smoke cigars on a porch-length couch, legs fused to one clump under a blanket. Laughter prickles down. Two of the girls up-nod like they know me. I walk past without waving.

A fountain spews in the retention pond. The woods are younger than I remember. A hundred yards back, a sandy clearing opens out of the saplings. Chewed-looking two-by-fours are strewn through the weeds. A charred stump shrivels in the middle. The air’s still sour with the Bradford tree’s must. I hold its scent’s ghost in my lungs.

If I hadn’t shown Mom the picture, my parents might’ve finished renovating. Maybe they’d’ve worked each other out and I’d’ve wound up vaping in the dugout with Jaylin. It’s not always good to keep trying. I hold my breath until my lungs buck, then release.

Mason Boyles is a podcaster, author, and strength historian. His novel Bark On is available through Driftwood Press. He is currently seeking representation for a fantasy Western and a dystopian cyberpunk trilogy. You can find out more about his fiction and teaching at masonboylesauthor.com; you can access his podcast and strength content on Youtube at Storied Strength. He holds his M.F.A. from UC-Irvine and his Ph.D. from Florida State University.