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It’s the deepest part of who I am, a fundamental part of myself that has been shared with no one, the essence of who I am, the core of understanding me—and I’m the only one who knows.
If Mom has guessed, she is neither proud nor disgusted. With Anna gone we listen for footfalls, each of us avoiding the other with an intense concentration. Occasionally we cross paths by accident, our bubbles of personal space like a Venn diagram, becoming darker where they overlap.
Dad left.
Anna is gone.
I have never been here.
22. PEEKAY
When Alex walks into the church with me it gets still so fast it’s like there’s been a trachea rapture.
This is not a quiet kind of church, so the little bubble of silence that surrounds us gains notice as it expands. It turns heads, exposing faces that still at the sight of Alex Craft. Here. In the old church in the woods.
I hadn’t even thought about it when I brought her with me. Alex is within shouting distance of her sister’s last resting place . . . all of them. Alex isn’t Anna’s little sister to me anymore; she’s Alex, my friend. So when she came over and I told her we were going to a party, it never occurred to me I was also dragging her back to the woods where her sister died.
Sara shoves a beer into my hand, the cold glass clinking against one of my rings. “Good to see you in church, Preacher’s Kid,” she says, her breath sugar-laced, lips tinged red with her own drink.
“Cheers,” I say, clinking my bottle against hers.
I step over a piece of the roof that has collapsed since the last party. The conversation starts up again, the anomaly of Alex’s presence fading fast while everyone chases their own goals for the night, whether it’s at the bottom of a bottle or in someone else’s pants. Alex follows me, her eyes combing the crowd of our classmates as I do the same.
It’s already dark, but someone was thinking ahead tonight. Everyone has to raise their voices to be heard over the hum of a generator, loud and persistent, lighting the strings of lights thrown around the walls and feeding the space heaters. There are fires too, made in the places where the stone floor has been torn up, exposing the black earth underneath. The whole place smells like fire and ash, sweat and vomit, rain and rot.
We love it.
I bet our parents loved it too, when they were our age. Once some of us made a game of trying to find them in the graffiti, names and dates mixed in an obscene smear, a town history more colorful and honest than the stories on paper. I found my mom, her name paired with Park’s father, and then I stopped looking. I knew my dad didn’t write on the walls of any church, collapsed and broken or not. But I don’t doubt that he came here.
Sometimes after I’ve had a few beers I think about their parents—our grandparents—and then back further, to people who loved this place for a different reason. People who pulled rocks out of the ground to make the walls, cutting timber for a roof that has now rotted mostly away. The supports still in place are stained black from ashes of the generations that followed, our hands hard at work to tear it back down.
There are only five pews left, the rest cut up for fire over the years. Those that remain are high-value real estate, the only place to sit before you find somebody to sneak into the woods with. Branley has set up court at one, her eyes already artificially bright, her voice loud and brassy while Adam sprawls next to her, one arm thrown possessively around her shoulders. I flinch at the sight and look away to find Jack Fisher coming toward us, a beer in each hand, happier to see me than he’s ever been in his life.
But he walks right past me, gives a bottle to Alex and takes her other hand, leading her over to a pile of rubble where the less fortunate sit once the real seats are taken. I take another swig of beer and my eyes slide back over to Adam. He’s looking at me. I jerk away, following Alex and Jack. I perch next to her on a rock, trying to find a spot to put my ass so that I’m not in pain.
“I bought a phone,” Alex says to Jack. Her words come out smoothly, her voice more accustomed to use from hours of us talking at the shelter, sentences shared over dog shampoos, punctuated by the snip of the nail clipper.
“Here’s my number,” she adds, with a note of confidence she wouldn’t learn even in years of conversation with me.
Jack snatches the piece of paper she hands him like he’s afraid it’ll evaporate, punching the numbers in. He raises his phone to snap a pic of her, then puts it back down, cautious.
“Is it okay if I take your picture?”
She smiles hesitantly, but her arm goes around my shoulders, barely resting on my skin. I lean in, surprised at the contact, and what’s left of my beer sloshes onto my pants. “Shit,” I say, just as Jack takes the pic.
“Oh, nice,” he says, laughing a little as he turns the screen toward us.
I’m staring at my lap, my lips pursed right on the i in shit, mild annoyance stamped on my features like my own crotch offended me somehow. Alex’s arm dangles awkwardly near my neck, as if she’s not quite sure how to touch someone. She’s not smiling, just looking into the camera with the dead stare that makes feral cats reconsider their choices.
“God,” I mutter. “Redo.”
Jack shakes his head. “It’s perfect.” He stands to put his phone in his back pocket and leans toward both of us, his breath heavy with beer in a way that makes me feel relaxed instead of repulsed.
“Park and I tried to chase off a couple of tweakers when we brought in the generator,” he says, head jerking toward a dark corner where there’s a circle of guys I don’t know. “Just be aware of them.”
“I am,” Alex said.
They’re older than us, their features vaguely familiar, like they’re either somebody’s brothers or graduated when we were still puckering our faces at the taste of alcohol. One of them is good-looking in a grungy way, lanky blond hair back in a ponytail, dark circles under his eyes that could be makeup, could be something else. The gauge in one of his ears is connected to his nose ring with a chain. He catches me looking and tips me a wink. I glance back down at my bottle.
