by Hannah Tinti
Loo watched all this happen from her father’s truck. She opened the door for Hawley as he staggered back across the dock. When he slid into the driver’s seat he was soaked through and dripping, blood in his hair and his knuckles swollen. He gripped the steering wheel, breathing hard. His face had taken on a kind of smoothness, as if all the lines of age had left along with his conscience. It was only after they got home, after Hawley had locked himself up for hours with her mother’s things, after he came out of the bathroom wrapped in towels and Loo brought him a glass of whiskey, that he looked like himself again.
The fishermen left Hawley alone after that. So did everyone else. But no one besides Principal Gunderson would buy his catch, even though he set up a table at the weekend market. Things got worse as the cold weather drove off the last of the tourists and it was only the locals left selling to each other. Throughout the winter and into the following spring Hawley had to travel four or five towns over—even Rockport and Newbury were too close. And he also had to bring Loo with him to get customers. It was a role she knew well from their time on the road together. Softening up strangers. Asking for things her father could not. Loo would spend the day emptying buckets, sharpening her pocketknife and arranging shells into an intricate, cascading pattern that threaded around their stall. Whenever someone stopped to admire her handiwork, she would stand by Hawley while he offered up a price.
By this time Loo was twelve and a half years old and nearly as tall as a grown woman. She carried the rough-and-tumble look of children being raised by men, but she also seemed clean even when her face was dirty. Living in a small town had not made her life normal, or given her a place to belong. Since her father’s outburst, the fishermen had told their kids to stay away from her, and she had grown strange, the way children will when set apart.
It was not long before she became a target.
The sons of Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk started it all. They were both in Loo’s homeroom. Pauly junior had been elected the class treasurer, then spent the collected dues on a new guitar for himself, smashing it onstage during the school talent contest. Jeremy Strand sat by the windows, smelling of sauerkraut. Their greatest joy was jumping off the cliffs surrounding the quarry on the outskirts of town. Their second greatest joy was convincing other kids to jump off those same cliffs. The quarries were full of abandoned construction equipment, lost when the granite miners struck water. Occasionally someone would land in the wrong place, and one day Jeremy Strand did. The police airlifted him out with a brain injury, but as soon as he could walk again, he was back, and, together with Pauly junior, continued shoving other kids off the seventy-foot drop.
The boys threw food at Loo during a class trip to the local whaling museum. It made her hair smell like baloney, and after she went to wash it out in the bathroom, they waited outside and tripped her. The rest of the class all saw this and laughed, and no one helped Loo gather her books from the floor, or helped her when Jeremy and Pauly junior tossed her backpack down the stairwell. Instead the boys and girls turned away and snickered and rolled their eyes so that they would not be next. Then their teacher appeared and clapped her hands and made everyone line up for a tour. Loo hurried down the stairs to collect her bag. By the time she caught up, the other students were gathered around a life-size model of a whale’s heart.
The whale’s heart was made of red and pink plastic, with giant veins and arteries twisting around it like the roots of a tree. The model was as big as a child’s playhouse, big enough to crawl inside. There was a sign encouraging children to do so, and after the rest of the class moved on to the next exhibit, Loo did, shuffling on her hands and knees through the tunnel of the aorta, slipping past a valve into the left ventricle. The space was not designed for someone her size, but it was comfortable enough to move around. Even cozy. Loo pressed her back against the flesh-colored plastic. The sides were rippled and full of shadows and echoed as she shifted her weight.
She was relieved to be out of sight for a few moments. To let go of the face she put on in public. It nearly always felt like she was pretending, as if her insides were only full of locked doors. Loo knocked on the wall of the heart with her fist. Boom. Boom. She imagined the muscles around her alive and churning, a whoosh of blood pushing through two hundred tons. Their teacher had said that the human heart was the size of both fists together. Loo squeezed her hands tight. Compared herself to the whale. If someone ever tried to climb inside her heart, they’d have to shrink down to the size of a chess piece.
There was a thud outside the shell. A knocking that answered her own. Loo poked her head out and found Jeremy and Pauly junior waiting for her again, right by the vena cava. They’d brought a shaggy boy named Marshall Hicks with them, who was best known for bottling homemade maple syrup that he brought to school and tried to sell whenever the cafeteria served pancakes. Marshall was the one knocking on the heart, and when he saw Loo he seemed confused. They stared at each other for a moment, and then Marshall smiled like a dog before it gets sick, and Jeremy and Pauly junior pinned Loo down and stole her shoes. She’d been taught by her father to never be a rat, so she lied to the teacher that she’d lost her shoes, and spent the rest of the trip in mismatched socks full of holes. On the bus ride home Jeremy and Pauly junior smacked Loo in the head with her own sneakers. Everyone saw, and the next day the rest of the kids started in on Loo, too.
She took it all at first, the cutting remarks, the tacks on her chair, the stolen lunches, the worms in her books, even the clods of dirt and stones thrown at her back on the way home, never quite understanding the reasons but feeling the cause must be some personal defect, some missing part of herself that the others recognized, a rotting, empty hole that whistled when she walked, no matter how quiet she tried to be.
Loo did not tell her father what was happening at school. Instead she moved to the corners of classrooms. She did her homework but refused to raise her hand, even when she knew the answers, and eventually her teachers stopped calling on her, as if they, too, had caught the scent of her strangeness. Soon, Loo could go entire days being nearly invisible.
This disappearing began at her wrists. It was the only part of her body that Loo considered delicate, and she could always feel her skin thinning there first. Afterward it spread to her fingers and up her arms, across her shoulders, ran down each leg to her toes and then back through her stomach—a sense of coming loose, of filtering away into nothing, winding around her neck until her head felt light and empty and she could wander the halls of the school and no one would look at her, and she could walk the streets and people would turn away, and she could go down to the beach and wander the dunes and feel not like a person anymore but a ghost.
At night Loo sat in the bathtub and stared at her mother’s pictures. The way she narrowed her sharp green eyes and the way she smiled with her teeth like she was not afraid to use them. The woman who existed in the bathroom wore bright-red lipstick that smelled like candy, wrote her dreams down on the backs of parking tickets and ate peaches straight from the can. Loo’s mother had been dead for years but she had never been invisible. If someone put a tack on her chair, she would take that tack and stuff it up his nose.
—
AND THEN ONE day Marshall Hicks decided it was his turn to steal Loo’s shoes.
He’d been enjoying a brief period of celebrity. Not because he was friends with Jeremy and Pauly, but because his stepfather was on television. An environmentalist, Captain Titus had recently gotten his hands on a decommissioned Coast Guard cutter, and was now using it to ram whaling ships in the Arctic Circle. A documentary crew was filming his escapades. The show was on public television, but still—it was television—and that made Marshall indirectly famous, and made the girls in Loo’s homeroom talk about him in nervous, giggly whispers. The other boys, upon noticing this, got jealous. So they spread rumors that Marshall was secretly boning Loo, and that when this sex happened, the two would pour Marshall’s homemade syrup on each other.
> Marshall was so embarrassed that he stopped bringing in his golden bottles of syrup (that he’d been so proud of and tapped himself from local trees), but the more he denied the claims, the more the other boys teased him. And so, finally, to prove that he was not having sex with Loo, Marshall followed her from school, pushed her onto the sand, took her sandals and threw them in the ocean, so far out she had to swim for them before they were swept away. She got pulled under and dragged along the bottom of the sea and swallowed so much sand and salt water she felt it coming out of her eyes. When Loo finally made it back to shore, her clothes were sealed to her skin, just as her father’s were when he had climbed back onto the pier, and after she crawled and coughed and clawed her way free, she was a different person than when she went into the water. She was no longer afraid.
Loo picked up a piece of driftwood and staggered after Marshall Hicks. She knocked the boy unconscious. Then she chose his index finger and bent it backward until it broke. With this snap of bone she sealed her fear away, like sliding a cover over a barrel and nailing the lid shut.
Before she left the beach, Loo took a large, heavy stone, carried it to her house and slipped it into one of her father’s socks. She brought it to school the next day in her backpack. She expected some kind of revenge from Marshall, or at the very least to be suspended, but instead he told everyone he’d fallen from a tree. His finger was wrapped tightly in a splint, and a bewildered look crossed his face each time they passed each other in the halls.
At the army-navy store, Loo changed her sandals for a pair of steel-toed boots. On her hands she slid rings with the stones pried out, the sharp metal prongs raised to cut. Loo remembered everything everyone had done to her, wrote each name down on a list. At the top were Jeremy Strand and Pauly Fisk, Jr.
She kept the rock-in-a-sock close and waited for the right moment. When it came, Loo snuck into the boys’ bathroom and hid in a stall. Once she heard Jeremy and Pauly junior’s voices at the urinals and knew their hands were busy, she came out swinging the rock and cracked both of them in the face and broke their noses, splattering blood across the mirrors. The boys writhed on the white tile, screaming and cursing, and she propped open the door so everyone passing by could see, and then she went back in and kicked them both in the ass with her steel-toed boots, over and over, just to make sure they were really hurting.
After the incident was broken up, they were dragged to Principal Gunderson’s office, where he gave the boys ice packs and then called everyone’s parents. Soon the fathers were in the room: Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk, Sr., and also Samuel Hawley. It had been months since the men had fought, but Strand’s jaw had never healed properly. He’d recently had a second surgery, and his mouth was wired shut. But Fisk had plenty to say.
“It’s the principle of the thing!” Fisk pounded the table. “There’s a principle to life and this girl doesn’t give a damn about principles. It’s like she never heard the word! Principles mean not busting people’s noses for no reason. Principles mean not trying to kill somebody just because he borrowed your waders.”
“Mr. Fisk,” said Principal Gunderson. “The girl is not the only one at fault here. Your boys confessed to wrongdoing as well. I’m sure we can come to some understanding.”
Strand opened his lips and moaned behind clenched teeth. He pointed at the wires in his chin, then gestured at Hawley.
“Exactly,” said Fisk. “Principles mean paying for somebody’s doctor bill when you break their jaws.”
Strand moaned again. He pantomimed pouring something into an invisible glass and raised the glass to the ceiling.
“What’s he saying now?” Gunderson asked.
“Principles mean you at least buy them a drink.”
Hawley ignored Fisk’s lecture and Strand’s grunts. But when Gunderson showed him the rock-in-a-sock that Loo had used, covered in blood, his face grew troubled. And when Jeremy and Pauly junior were finally led to the nurse’s office, their nostrils filled with toilet paper, Hawley picked up Loo’s rock in one hand and placed the other on her shoulder. He pushed her out the door and into one of the chairs lining the hall.
“You would have done the same thing,” said Loo.
“Not like that,” said Hawley. “It was sloppy. You got caught.”
“Yeah,” said Loo. “But now they’ll remember.”
Her father rubbed his beard.
“Let’s move,” said Loo. “Somewhere else. Then none of this will matter anymore.”
Hawley took in his daughter’s boots and chewed-up hair, the blood splatters on her T-shirt. He hefted the rock in his hands. “It always matters,” he said. Then he went back inside the office and closed the door.
For the next hour Loo sat in the hallway listening to the men’s voices. There was talk about expulsion and suspension and detention and threats and favors, but after a long negotiation, all three teenagers were released with their enrollment and school records intact. The price for this clemency was paid for by their fathers. Strand, Fisk and Hawley were now officially pledged members of Principal Gunderson’s Greasy Pole Team.
—
THE GREASY POLE Contest had been an Olympus tradition for nearly a century. Every June, during the blessing of the fleet, a forty-five-foot wooden mast, planed down from a Scotch pine, was covered with inches of lard and grease and set out over the town pier. At the end of the pole was nailed a tiny red flag. The first team that made it to the end of the pole and captured that flag had bragging rights and drinks at the Flying Jib for a year. Sometimes the contest would take hours. Others it would take days. But they would not stop until the flag was captured. The greasy pole started as a drunken contest between sailors, and was now a serious battleground of old neighborhood rivalries, where generations gathered to watch the men of Olympus receive concussions, twist ankles, break arms and slip off the pole into the ocean.
Loo’s principal had dreamt of winning the Greasy Pole Contest ever since he was a little boy. Each year he inflicted his obsession on his students, lecturing on the history of the contest and his attempts to build a winning team, driven by decades of ribbing by his older brothers, who spent their time out on the water catching swordfish. These brothers had hairy chests and laughed easily and did not have poor vision or fallen arches or wives who had left them. And so each spring Principal Gunderson would attempt to win the flag, and his students and teachers would cheer him on, until he fell, belching, into the sea.
There were three main tactics for winning the contest. The first was slow and steady—the man tried to walk the mast like a balance beam. This usually got him at least halfway to the end, but inevitably ended badly—too much grease would build under his feet and send him flying. The second tactic was the crawl—the man went hands and knees. This nearly always ended with an inverted hug, the man slipping underneath the pole and dangling for a few moments, the crowd joyfully screaming a countdown, before he lost his grip. The last tactic, the most spectacular, was the slide—the man took the pole at a full run and tried to surf the grease to the end. The slide was a crowd favorite, resulting in the most varied wounds, bloody gashes, broken teeth and absurd-looking pitches into the harbor, face-smacks and groin-holds and every kind of belly flop.
On the day of the contest, Principal Gunderson gathered his team on the old wooden pier and went through each of these methods carefully, using a notebook and pen. He had perfected his own style over the years, which involved a combination of balance, crawl and last-ditch slide. Strand and Fisk sat on the plastic cooler they had brought and watched Gunderson diagram all the ways they could fall. The probable injuries to their bodies (and pride) had dampened their spirits, and they were now trying to raise them with beer. Fisk pounded his drinks. Strand sipped his delicately through a straw.
The other men had stripped down to shorts, but Samuel Hawley kept his shirt and jeans on, as if he might back out at any moment. He remained on the pier throughout the day, quietly observing the other contenders, listening to Gu
nderson and even sharing a drink with Strand and Fisk, though he seemed to take no pleasure in the proceedings. It was clear that he was participating in the Greasy Pole Contest for one reason and one reason only: Loo.
Hawley’s daughter was on the beach just below the pier. She sat alone in her steel-toed boots, piling rocks one on top of the other until she had balanced six or seven. Small stone monuments along the shore. Around her the crowd whispered; there was talk at seeing Hawley and his old adversaries together. Some people were hoping for a fight. But that morning Loo’s father had spent nearly an hour in the bathroom, soaking in the tub and looking at his wife’s pictures. He’d watched Loo solemnly as she made breakfast and then pinched her chin before they left, and the girl knew that meant he was not angry—only worried.
By the time Gunderson’s team took their places for the contest, the sun was high and beating down on the crowd, the water far below the pier looking more and more inviting. The grease had turned rancid, mixed with the sweat and disappointment of a hundred fishermen, and the tiny red flag still taunted them all, waving at the tip of the mast in the breeze. The whole town had come out to watch the show—the harbor was full of motorboats and sailboats, rubber rafts and dinghies, all strung together into a massive flotilla of drunken men and women, each armed with a boat horn, which they blew in appreciation and regret as fisherman after fisherman slid off the greasy pole into the churning waves below. The rest of the spectators were on the beach, settled in with their lawn chairs and coolers, enjoying crab cakes and lobster rolls and Italian ices while they waited for a winner.
Even Mabel Ridge had come to watch the men fall. She sat on one of the park benches, her hands working a crochet hook. The early-summer heat was sweltering, but the old woman was dressed for a chill, her jacket collar turned up and a roll of bright-red yarn unspooling in her lap. She wound the yarn around her finger, then stabbed it with the hook, drawing the metal in and out and around and then tugging the knot into place. She made another knot and then another. One for each man on the mast. And as each team failed, she spun the square she was making and started a new row.
