After Midnight

by Lynn Viehl

  I didn’t mind my hair so much, even if it was ordinary and boring. Back when my chest started “blossoming” I would pull my hair over my shoulders to hide the embarrassing little bumps. The one time Trick did cut my hair short in elementary school people thought I was a boy. It took three whole years to grow it back out, and now it hung down to my waist. I wanted to grow it so long I could sit on it. Trick didn’t care what I did as long as I kept it clean and neat.

  I went into the bathroom to finish getting ready. I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, so I couldn’t do anything about my face. The pimples I’d gotten in seventh grade had finally cleared up, so my skin looked okay. I didn’t like my straight dark eyebrows, my long nose or my pointed chin, but my ears weren’t too big and my mouth was kind of pretty. I thought my eyes, which were big and almond-shaped, could have been my best feature if they’d been sky blue like Grim’s. Instead mine were hazel, a dark olive green with tiny light brown streaks and spots in them.

  I used some SPF 50 lotion on my face—my skin always burned really easy—and then put on some cherry-flavored lip balm to give my mouth a little more color. There was nothing else I could do but brush out my hair and decide between loose, braid or ponytail.

  If I wore it loose I’d have to take a brush with me, and I usually braided my hair only when I went riding. A braid would make me feel like I was nine years old again; Trick had always kept my hair braided when I was little so he didn’t have to brush out knots, which we both hated.

  Gray’s face appeared in the mirror above mine. “Are you ready yet?”

  “Give me a minute.” I held the elastic band between my teeth as I gathered up my hair, and glanced around for my backpack, which I’d left by the door. I could be really spacey; I constantly misplaced things, and sometimes I completely forgot about them. “You really want to stay here?”

  “I guess.” Gray picked up a white elastic from the counter and used it to pull back his golden locks into an untidy tail. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” I looped the band around my hair twice and ran my brush through the trailing ends. Before he’d turned into the Incredible Brooding Hulk, Gray and I used to tell each other everything. I missed that more than I wanted to admit. “It seems kind of sudden. We don’t know anybody here.”

  “Trick says it’s okay.” That was good enough for my brother. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Two

  When Trick first told us back in May that we would be moving from Chicago to Lost Lake, I went to the library to find out more about the place. The town didn’t appear on any maps of Florida, not even the one in the huge U.S. atlas they kept on a pedestal in the reference section. It also wasn’t listed on Yahoo, Google, or any of the search sites I checked on the library computer. Then I tried to find it in books written about Florida, but the only time it was mentioned was in a book about historic buildings, and only then in a footnote about Freemasons. Tampa was supposed to have the oldest Masonic temple in the state, but the footnote said one might have been built in Lost Lake twenty years before it.

  Might have been? I thought. Couldn’t they call and check?

  I asked the reference librarian if she knew why Lost Lake wasn’t listed anywhere.

  “It’s probably a small town,” she said as she pulled up something on her computer terminal. “Or perhaps they’ve been annexed by a larger community.” She studied her screen. “According to the state’s list of cities and town, Lost Lake, Florida has a current population of seven hundred thirty-one. That’s a very small town.” She smiled up at me. “Are you and your family planning to visit there?”

  “No, ma’am.” Rather than explain I was actually moving to this dinky place, I added, “Would there be any magazine or newspaper articles written about it?”

  “The population report is the only thing showing on my system.” She tapped her lips with one finger as she thought for a moment. “You could write to the state visitor’s bureau and request some information from them. They usually provide free booklets with points of interest and that sort of thing.”

  She printed out an address for me and I wrote to it, but all that came in the mail was a big splashy tourist’s guide to all the big theme parks and attractions in Orlando. It also mentioned some of the cities in the area, like Silver Springs and Ocala, but nothing about my new town.

  Wherever Lost Lake was, it just wasn’t that interesting.

  We packed up and drove to Florida as soon as Gray and I got out of school for summer break. It took a week and a half to make the trip because we brought our stock horses, Sali, Jupiter and Flash, along with us in a rental trailer. Sali, a big Tennessee Walker Trick had bought for me when I turned eleven, was used to traveling and didn’t mind the long hours in the trailer as long as we made regular stops to water, feed and exercise her. Jupiter, Trick’s white stallion, was also pretty good about moving, although he always got cranky about being put back into the trailer after a rest stop.

  Gray’s gelding Flash, a golden palomino who was as quick as his name, was what Trick called our “problem child.”

  Flash hated traveling. On moving day Gray had to put his blinders on before he led him out of the barn, because as soon as Flash saw the trailer he’d rear and run off. It took both my brothers to coax him up the ramp and get him loaded, and then once he was inside he’d really start kicking up a fuss.

  We made the inside of the trailer as comfortable as we could for the horses, and even put some feed in their buckets to keep them occupied when we started out, but Flash didn’t care. He would kick at the sides of the trailer, butt his head against the windows and ceiling, and neigh and tromp around so much you’d have thought he’d gotten a snootful of red ants. Trick put up a steel grate partition between Flash and the other horses to keep him from injuring Sali and Jupe, but Gray usually had to ride in the trailer for the first couple of hours we were on the road to keep Flash from tearing it apart.

  We’d never been to Florida, so I did look through the pictures in the guide the state bureau sent. In between the advertisements for the theme parks there were some nice panorama shots of white-sand beaches, groves of trees studded with huge oranges, tall, exotic palm trees, and flocks of pink flamingoes. All the families in the pictures were in bathing suits or tank tops, shorts and flip-flops, and looked like they were having a blast, too.

  Too bad we didn’t move to that part of Florida.

  I started watching the scenery as soon as we crossed the over the Georgia-Florida state line, but trees or cement walls were all I saw on either side of the interstate. When Trick got off the highway and started driving west, the cement walls disappeared but the trees became clusters of ficus, scrub pine and acres of bushy brush.

  For the next thirty miles all I saw were a couple of dirt roads, miles of wire and post fencing, and thick blankets of kudzu draped over everything. Where the trees ended, huge tracts of cleared land stretched out as far as the horizon. I noticed some cows and goats grazing in a few places, but most of the land sat empty, growing nothing but weeds.

  “This can’t be Florida,” I told my brother. “There aren’t any oranges or palm trees. Are you sure we’re not in Alabama?”

  “Positive.” Trick pointed at my window. “That’s an orange grove right over there.”

  I looked at the thin-branched, scraggly trees, which did not resemble the photo in the guidebook. Weeds had grown up so high around the trunks that you could hardly tell that they had been planted in rows. Some of the trees looked dead. “They don’t have any oranges on them.”

  “You can’t see them yet,” he told me. “This time of year, they’re little and green.”

  “Oh.” We passed another scattering of black cattle. “Why are there cows? This isn’t Texas. There were supposed to be flamingoes.”

  “You can’t milk a flamingo,” Gray said from the back seat. “Or grind it into bird burgers.”

  “Thank you for that visual, Grayson.” Trick glanced at me. “Don’t w
orry, Cat. It’ll be better in the lake country.”

  Trick was wrong; it didn’t get better from there. It just got darker and wetter. The empty weed fields vanished under miles of thick brush surrounding chains of creeks, marshes and ponds. Forests of huge black-trunked oaks with long twisted limbs and impossibly tall, spindly-looking pines started crowding toward the road, until they marched along both sides of it. From practically every branch hung long, pale gray bunches of Spanish moss, like dirty cobwebs or stretched-out dust bunnies.

  Suddenly I knew why they called it “lake country.” No one would come here if they called it “swamp land.”

  When we finally left the road and drove through some hills and rediscovered civilization, I thought Trick had taken a wrong turn. Barely two miles wide, the town we drove through was made up almost entirely of two story wood-frame row houses jammed together and painted pastel candy colors. It looked like the kind of place fussy old ladies would love, with all the fancy white gingerbread stuff hanging from the roofs, tiny balconies surrounded by dainty scrolled wrought iron railings, and hand-painted wooden window boxes filled with bright red geraniums and purple tulips. I didn’t spot a single fast-food place, clothes boutique, or discount shoe store, though.

  I’d never been much of a mall rat, but even I could see this town was in a permanent shopping coma.

  The houses that had been converted into little businesses each had a two-sided sign hanging from an angled bracket beside the entrance. Someone had hand-painted them with cutesy names like Maude’s Porcelain Emporium, Something Old Something New, and Johnson Junktiques. Old stuff crowded the shop windows and sat out beside open doorways: rickety-looking spinning wheels, faded patchwork quilts, rusty dented tins and crackled china vases.

  If it looked like it should have been donated to a thrift store ages ago, some place was selling it.

  Most of the people walking around downtown had silver or white hair and wrinkly faces. A couple were so old they used canes and walkers as they shuffled along, their shoulders stooped and their eyes squinting against the glare of the sun. All of them had on the usual grammywear: loud Hawaiian shirts or pastel polos (the grampas) and tees with dogs, flowers or hearts made of sequins or rhinestones (the grammas). From the waist down everyone looked the same; knee-length baggy shorts, white half-calf socks and clunky sandals. Some of the ladies had on bright purple T-shirts and wore big red hats with lots of frou-frou stuff around the brim, and went from shop to shop in small groups, like girlfriends on a mission.

  Why old people dressed like that, I didn’t know. Maybe after a certain age they got cataracts. Or mirror phobia.

  I didn’t panic until Trick parked the truck on the street in front of a bright yellow and pink realtor’s office. “Why are we stopping here?”

  “This is it.” He gestured toward the center of town, a fountain surrounded by purple azaleas and two red hat ladies with cameras. “Lost Lake.”

  “We can’t live here.” Not in the Village That Fun Forgot. “We’re like fifty years younger than everyone else.”

  “This is the business district, and those people are the tourists.” He nodded toward the north. “Our place is in the farming community outside town, where most of the locals live.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I wasn’t convinced. “Just how old are these locals?”

  Trick smiled. “You’ll meet plenty of kids your age in no time.”

  Since then we’d been pretty busy unpacking, setting up the house and taking care of the horses. Our nearest neighbor was seven miles down the road, so I hadn’t had a chance over the summer to meet any of the local kids.

  To be honest, I hadn’t really tried.

  I wanted to make friends, but I didn’t have the personality—okay, the nerve—to walk up to someone I didn’t know and start talking to them. My brain had its own special on-off switch. When I was alone it stayed on, and I could think of a million clever things to say to a complete stranger. As soon as I met one? The switch flipped off, and I ended up standing there saying Uh-huh and Okay and looking as dumb as I sounded.

  It was just easier to hang out with my brothers, who didn’t care what I said.

  Not like anyone in Lost Lake was in a hurry to be my new best friend, either. We saw people when Trick took us with him when he went into town for groceries and things, but hardly anyone spoke to us. There was only one grocery store, so there were always people shopping there, but while they stared at us, no one said hello or waved or anything. On those trips I saw four or five other farms near our place, and they had cars and trucks parked by the houses and plenty of stock in the pastures, but not one of those neighbors stopped by our place that whole summer.

  Trick said the people in town were just shy, and the farmers were probably too busy with their animals or the summer planting to come visiting. I believed him, mostly. We’d lived in other towns where we’d been treated like outsiders or the locals had kept to themselves. It just seemed a little odd that no one came near our place.

  Now driving through downtown with Gray on the way to our first day at school, I saw a couple of kids walking toward Tanglewood High. Their backpacks were new, but their jeans looked as old and faded as mine. The boys had uniformly short, neat haircuts, which made me glance at my brother’s gilded mane before I checked out the girls. Long loose curls, poufy crowns and uneven, slanted bangs seemed to be in fashion; so did tiny barrettes, polka-dot head bands and what looked like black velvet bows.

  Not one girl wore a ponytail, though. All my doubts came rushing back to me and sat like a boulder on my chest. “What if we don’t like it here?”

  Gray didn’t say anything, but then, he hated everything.

  Since we were playing Silent Jeopardy, I rephrased the question into an answer. “Okay, we’ve already lived here two months and we haven’t met anyone else. Now what if we don’t fit in at school and everyone avoids us like they have all summer and we end up …” I didn’t know what to call what we’d been at every other school we’d gone to.

  “Lepers?”

  “No.” Surely it hadn’t been that bad. “I don’t know. Outsiders. Loners. Friendless.”

  He made a turn into a parking lot filled with small pickups, compact cars and a couple of old, primer-patched heaps, and passed a group of kids hanging out behind a mud-encrusted Jeep and a gleaming metallic gold Impala. Of course they all turned to watch us park.

  I hunched down a little and inspected at the dashboard. I hated the first time kids noticed us; they always stared.

  Gray put the truck in park, shut off the engine, and sat there as if he didn’t want to get out, either. Then he said, “Trick’s tired of moving around, and I think breeding horses has always been his dream. He wants this to work.”

  I glanced to one side and saw the kids had walked from the parking lot across the street and into the school’s main building. Sometimes, like now, I felt bad that our older brother had been stuck with raising us. He should have been off living his own life instead of playing Dad to two teenagers.

  Grayson never said much, but when he did make it usually made more sense than I could with an hour of arguing.

  “All right.” After all Trick had done for us, I could deal with this. How bad could it be? “At least this will be the last time that we’re the new kids.”

  My brother handed me my backpack. “Until college.”

  “Shut up.” I slung one strap over my shoulder and climbed out.

  The first bell rang as Gray and I walked across the street to the big double doors leading into the main building. Tanglewood looked like every other school we’d been to: green lawn strips bordering cement walkways, closed white blinds lining all of the tall, narrow stacked windows, fake rose brick mortared over gray stucco, steel doors painted a boring brown. As I reached out for the handle, both doors flung open and I had to jump back to keep from getting smacked in the face.

  A short, red-faced boy ran between me and Gray, and when I turned my head I saw the backsid
e of his jeans were dark and dripping, as if he’d peed in his pants. He darted around the corner of the building so fast he was gone before I could blink.

  “Maybe they haven’t opened the restrooms yet,” I said to Gray.

  He stared after the boy. “Maybe they have.”

  Inside we walked into the expected first-day chaos: kids going in a dozen different directions and teachers zigzagging around trying (and failing) to herd them along. The air smelled of old floor wax, pencil lead, disinfectant and new sneakers. No locker doors banged—they wouldn’t be assigned until next week—but plenty of doors, desktops, and books did. And all around us, swamping us, was the noise. Voices pressed in on my ears in a wall-to-wall jabber of talking, laughter, yells, whispers and echoes.

  Gray bumped my shoulder to get my attention. “Office is down there.” He nodded toward the end of the front hall.

  My brother walked in front of me, not to be obnoxious but to clear a path. The usual thing happened; everyone took one look and got out of his way. I noticed a couple of girls turning around and stopping to stare after Gray, which was not the usual thing.

  It had to be the long hair. The boys I saw in the halls had the same clean-cut style I’d noticed on the kids walking to school.

  A shriek and the sound of flushing water made me stop at the corner of another hall. I couldn’t see much over the crowd of kids blocking it off, but I heard guys laughing and some wet, slapping sounds before the crowd parted and a boy came running at me. I stepped back against the wall and as he passed me I saw the seat of his pants were soaking wet, just like the other kid who had run out of the school.

  “Where’s the next noob?” a mellow, laughing voice called from inside a restroom, and I saw a couple of older boys dressed in brown and white sport jerseys file out. The kids backed away a little as the jocks went around and checked through the crowd for someone.

  I didn’t know what a noob was, but it was clear no one wanted to be one.