Lark

by Tracey Porter

  I pushed off from the side of the pool, swimming underwater as far as I could without taking a breath. I burst through in the deep end, gasping for air. Up the hill, kids called out good-byes and piled into cars. The trees surrounding the club were full of dark green leaves. The sprinklers came on and showered the lawn between the pool and the parking lot. When I was sure everyone was gone, I got out.

  In the dressing room, I peeled off my suit and kicked it out of the way, hating it for being so ugly—the stupid rainbow lettering and the leaping dolphin. All I wanted to do was put on some dry clothes and get home as fast as I could. I patted myself dry, twisted the towel around my hair. That’s when Trevor came in.

  “Hey,” he said. He leaned against the lockers looking at me as if I wasn’t standing there naked, as if he had run into me at the line at the snack bar.

  My stomach sank and my heart started to pound. I grabbed my towel to cover myself. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, god! Sorry!” he laughed, pretending to be startled. He stepped back outside but kept talking to me through the open door. “Hope I wasn’t too harsh on you out there. You know I’m only tough on the people I love. You okay, Eve? Wanna talk?”

  His voice slid across the room, cheerful and menacing. I pulled on my clothes and jumped on the bench, reaching across the top of the lockers to the long, narrow louvered window. If I had to get out that way, I’d need a broom or a pole. I didn’t see one. The only way out was the dressing-room door.

  Someone called out to Trevor, asking him how his dad was and if his brother had given up poker and found a real job instead of cheating old guys like him out of their money. A set of keys jingled, and I edged out the door. Trevor and an old guy freckled with age spots threw back their heads and laughed at the sky. I could feel Trevor try to catch my eye, but his glance rolled off me and broke into a hundred pieces while I ran home.

  Days later I was spending the night with Lark. We were making sugar cookies, decorating them with colored icing and sprinkles, eating them warm, and washing them down with milk.

  “So, you really like Trevor?” I asked.

  “As a guy?” She looked horrified.

  “No, of course not. As a coach.”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “I think he’s awesome. He told me I could win a diving scholarship to UVA. He says I’ve got to carry on the Dolphin legacy. Only I don’t like diving that much.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “You’re so good at it.”

  “It’s too . . . stunted! I mean, you take three steps, jump, flip, and then it’s over. I like to cover more ground.”

  We went on rolling dough and cutting it into shapes. My stomach began to knot up and feel cold.

  “I think he might like me . . . ,” I said.

  “What?” she exclaimed. She held the tube of pink icing in midair. “You’re crazy.”

  I wanted to tell her how he touched me, how he came into the changing room when I was there, but it was obvious he had never done anything like that to her. I tried again.

  “I feel him looking at me sometimes. . . .”

  “It’s your boobs,” she said. “Guys can’t help it. You should get used to it.”

  Finally I told my mother, but she asked the wrong questions.

  “Did he touch you between your legs?”

  “No.”

  “Were his clothes on?”

  “Yes.”

  She leaned back and looked at me for a moment.

  “Were there other people there?”

  “YES!” I yelled. “I told you! The first time was at the meet. Right after my race. Everyone was there. But no one was looking at us, and even if they were, they couldn’t have seen it. And the second time I was alone in the changing room.”

  “Tell me again; what did he do in the changing room?”

  “Nothing! He looked at me! I was in there alone, and he walked in on me. He did it on purpose, and he scared me.”

  I started crying and my mom asked me if I wanted her to do anything, like tell Coach Landis, or take me to a therapist, and I said no. All I wanted to do was quit the team, and she said I could. So I dropped out.

  I didn’t know how to tell Lark that I wouldn’t be going to practice anymore. At first I said I was sick and that the doctor thought I had mono. Then I said that swim team was taking too much time and that what I was really into was art. We were downstairs in her den, the darkest, coolest room in her house. The bookshelves were filled with yellowed paperbacks and old board games. We were looking for something good to watch on TV.

  “But art doesn’t take a lot of time,” she said like I was ridiculous.

  “It does if you want to be good.” I passed her a magazine, pointing at a model with choppy bangs. Lark wanted a haircut.

  “Okay, maybe,” she said while studying the photo. “But it’s not like you have to go to a separate place or do it at only certain times of the day. You can draw before practice, or when you get home. You can draw while you watch TV.”

  “Not if you’re serious.”

  “But, Eve,” she said, “you’re not the serious type.”

  I flinched. It was like being slapped.

  “C’mon,” she pleaded. “Don’t quit. Who am I gonna hang out with? Who’s gonna walk with me to practice?”

  By this time I was standing up. I threw the magazine to the floor. “Get your parents to drive you. They drive you everywhere else.”

  I stomped home, my mind flooding with all the times she broke our plans, how we always had to spend the night at her house, how she chose everything we did, whether it was beading or cutting up gossip magazines or baking cookies. I slammed my front door so hard, the pictures bounced against the wall. Then I opened the door and slammed it again. The pictures bounced and settled even more crookedly. Good, I thought. Every time I saw them, I’d remember how selfish Lark was. I wasn’t going to be her fan anymore.

  Funny. The lie I made up about drawing became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The next week my mom signed me up at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. I took classes in art history, sculpture, painting, and drawing. A curator from the museum gave a lecture on Vincent van Gogh. He projected details of his letters to his brother Theo—flowers, windmills, portraits, and night skies; sketches of windmills and canals; the bare trees and fields he saw on his long walks through the country.

  At home on the shelf where my parents kept the art books, I found a collection of his letters and a huge book of all his drawings and paintings. I copied a woman sewing by a window in a straight-back chair. I drew his stark, brittle trees, rays of light, the garden of the hospital where he went to recover from fits of epilepsy and nerves.

  It was like Van Gogh’s feelings became mine. I stopped feeling my own because of Trevor, so I felt his instead. I read all his letters and copied out passages I liked on one wall of my room. “I want to get to a stage where it is said of my work,” he wrote Theo, “this man feels deeply.” I moved my grandmother’s dresser so no one can read them but me.

  Chapter 15

  Lark

  I was found and buried in a stupid white dress. The woods thawed and filled again with snow. I’m transparent and pale. The dress falls to my ankles and gets in my way. The dead girls blink against the wind. I scrape away the snow to look into their faces.

  I don’t want to be like you, I cry.

  It gets worse, says one. Some will say it’s your fault. For getting in the car. Or being alone. Or wearing a leotard that was cut too low in the back.

  Clouds tear apart. The narrow stream gurgles in the distance, strangled by reeds and rotting leaves. Everything is silver and blank like the back of a mirror. The girls’ arms are forced above their heads, strained into branches in terrible positions.

  I hate this dress, I say, plucking at the hem.

  You’ll hate being a tree more, says the one who almost got away. I can tell by the shape of her branches. It’s like she’s running in air.

  They say I have to f
ind someone who will look at me, someone who is willing to see what happened to me.

  Someone who loves you, says one. Someone brave enough to learn what happened.

  Then you’ll be free, says the youngest. Not trapped like us.

  My parents? I ask.

  You can try, says the one who kept watch. They’re usually not up to it.

  But I try anyway, and when I leave the woods for the first time since I’m transparent and flat, I slide between atoms. Electric charges dance on my skin and let me pass.

  Porch lights glow a weary amber. Dead leaves and grasses are tipped in ice. I edge between a crack in the bricks into my house. My parents don’t see me in the hall. They don’t sense me following them into separate rooms—my father in the study, my mother in my bedroom. She opens drawers and runs her hands over my clothes. She pulls strands of hair from my brush, buries her face deep in my pillows trying to catch my scent. She can’t pick up the clothes I left scattered or wipe away the stain from my last cup of tea. She sleeps on the floor in my room, twisted in blankets, dreaming about finding me before I die. Her own room is silent. Clothes hang in her closet. Her shoes are perfectly arranged.

  At his desk, my father searches the internet for support groups for parents of murdered children. He thinks my mother is the one who needs it most. The computer casts his face in blue light. His posture, as always, is perfect. Nearby are sharp pencils and a pad of yellow paper. He needs duties and goals to list and cross off. I lay my hand on his shoulder and breathe close to his ear, but my breath is an absence, empty as a zero, a spot of nothing in the air.

  Dejected, I tell the girls they were right.

  Think of someone else, says another. A friend, not a relative.

  My mind sorts through faces and names. I didn’t realize how lonely I was in my life. My last true friend was Eve, but then we had a fight and never made up. The girls at gymnastics pretended to be my friends, but I knew they were happy when I injured my knee. At school I maximized my time, working on homework during free periods and at lunch instead of hanging out with friends. I stopped going to games and plays. I quit working on the newspaper.

  Think! says the youngest. Or else you’ll be like us. Who was the last person you enjoyed spending time with? Who was the last person who made you laugh?

  Nyetta, I say.

  Chapter 16

  Nyetta

  Hallie lets her sons watch TV and play video games. They eat processed sugar and drink nonorganic milk. My mom’s afraid I’ll be corrupted. She hates it when I go over to that house. My dad’s waiting for me in the driveway. He doesn’t like to come in because he says my mom always starts a fight.

  “Call me if you want to come home early,” says my mom. She opens the door and watches me leave.

  “Hey, you,” says my dad with a smile. He backs out the driveway and heads to the parkway. He’s in a big hurry. “The boys can’t wait to see you. They’ve challenged us to a Ping-Pong tournament.”

  I sincerely doubt this, but I don’t say anything.

  Hallie’s house is a big white farmhouse near Chain Bridge. It’s one of the oldest houses around, with an attic and a root cellar and a little closet in the kitchen called a larder that’s for things like onions and carrots. Everything is dirty in the right way, like a sprinkle of crumbs on the cutting board and flowers spilling petals from a vase on the windowsill.

  She doesn’t mind if you spill your juice because she only has things that can’t be ruined.

  “After all, I have boys,” she says, “and a hairy old dog.”

  My mom’s house is totally different. We have lots of special things. Most of them are very old. Antiquities, to be exact. My mom started collecting them before I was born. We have mummy beads and urns, coins, oil lamps, a tiny alabaster Venus, and three pomegranates carved from stone. Each one is in a little case because they are so delicate and rare that even the dust shouldn’t touch them.

  Downstairs in the basement, the boys, my father, and I are having the tournament. The boys slam the ball back and forth. They know how to use topspin and make tricky shots. Zeke dashes to the side of the table and taps the ball just over the net so it’s impossible to return. He almost has dreadlocks. Anders’s hair is straight. My dad and I are ahead because he makes the most shots.

  Dad bought them the Ping-Pong table and turned the basement into his office. He has a tiny desk for his computer, a two-drawer file cabinet, and a few shelves of books. He used to work all the time when he lived with us. He stacked books in every room—on the dining table, the floor near his bed, the kitchen counter, and the coffee table. He took a laptop to bed every night. When he moved in with Hallie, he stopped stacking books and gave up his laptop.

  Anders serves me an easy shot, which I return, but of course I miss the next, and the next, and the next. I can’t do anything with a ball, no matter what size it is. The boys pull ahead, and my dad starts missing shots, on purpose, I think. I stop even trying. Anders and Zeke lose interest. They turn on the PlayStation and huddle over the controls. I guess the tournament is over.

  “Can we do something else?” I ask.

  Upstairs in the kitchen, Hallie is making bread. She gives me an apron and shows me how to dust the top of the dough with flour so it doesn’t stick when you knead it. There’s always a project when I come over, like baking, or making jewelry, or sewing tote bags out of old fabric she bought at a flea market. She set up her loom in the guest bedroom, the room where I sleep, and she’s promised to teach me how to weave a blanket.

  “That’s good,” she says as I fold the dough over on itself. She has Zeke’s curly hair—tight blond ringlets that start at her scalp and loosen at the ends. She’s wearing white yoga pants and a white long-sleeve T-shirt. A tiny gold Buddha dangles from a cord around her neck. A bracelet of rose quartz wraps around her wrist. Lark would say she’s too limber from all that yoga.

  “You better strengthen your core,” I tell her.

  “Think so?” she asks.

  Then she jumps into a whole new topic.

  “Your dad says you’re still home from school.”

  I start kneading with more enthusiasm. I sprinkle flour and fold and push and fold. If I do everything right, Hallie might drop the subject.

  She greases two bowls with a stick of butter. “He says you talk to the girl who died.”

  I throw the dough on the breadboard and slap it a few times.

  “Her name was Lark, right?”

  I toss the dough from one hand to the other. It’s smooth and elastic, and I can smell the yeast.

  “I talk to my therapist about Lark,” I tell her.

  “Good,” says Hallie. “It must be awful to know someone who died in such a terrible way.”

  “I try not to think about it,” I lie.

  I watch her divide and smooth the dough into two halves. She puts each one in a buttered bowl and covers them with tea towels.

  “Now what?” I ask.

  “Now we wait. You’ll see. They’ll double in size.”

  I lift the towels for one last look. It’s hard to believe the dough will rise to the towel, but two hours later it has. And then we punch it down and knead it some more, and then it rises again, and then we bake it. I can’t wait for it to cool, so Hallie lets me cut one loaf even though you shouldn’t cut warm bread. The butter melts as soon as I spread it. It runs between my fingers as I take my first bite. The taste is full and rich, a little salty sweet. It’s like I am eating a world of cottages and water mills, wildflowers and deer that come out of the forest to eat from my hand. Hallie watches me and smiles, and for a moment I almost forget where I am.

  Chapter 17

  Eve

  It’s almost seven fifteen, and I’m rushing through breakfast. My parents have been up for hours, as usual, working in their studios. They’re taking a coffee break, but also hanging out in the kitchen to check in with me before I go to school. It’s their new habit—checking my vitals from a distance. My mom
creeps around and stares, then throws in little conversation openers, like

  “The kids at school must be really upset.” (Not really.)

  Or

  “Do you ever get frightened because of what happened to Lark?” (Yes.)

  Or

  “This must be very sad for you.” (It is.)

  “I talked with Lark’s parents last night,” says Dad. He’s sitting at the breakfast table with the paper spread out in front of him. My mother sips her coffee. Her apron is stained with clay fingerprints. “They’ve put the house on the market.”

  “Are you kidding?” I ask.

  “Seems like a good idea,” says my mom.

  “Maybe no one will buy it,” I say. “Who would want to buy the house where a dead girl lived?”

  “We live in a very good neighborhood,” says my father. “Even in this economy, I think it will sell quickly.”

  “I hope not,” I say. “I hope they decide to board it up for a while, then move back.” I can imagine all the furniture covered in white sheets and the shutters closed.

  My mom has something to say, but she’s unsure about how to bring it up. I can feel her trying to take my pulse from her vantage point at the stove. I hurriedly scoop up the last bits of cereal at the bottom of the bowl, hoping she’ll think I’m in too much of a rush to bother. It doesn’t work.

  “Eve, have you thought about taking that women’s self-defense class?”

  “No.”

  “I think it would be good for you.”

  “I think it would freak me out more.”

  She starts to say how the class might “empower” me, but I shush her before she gets it out.

  Last night it dropped below freezing. The last bits of snow froze over again. Tiny icebergs at the corners of driveways glint in the sun. Up ahead, some boys are packing them into hard snowballs and throwing them full force at one another. They’d sting like hell if they hit the neck or the face, but the boys don’t care. They’re aiming and throwing, running and dodging like they’re playing war. One of them isn’t wearing gloves, and his hands are pink with cold. He laughs and takes aim at his friend, who crouches behind a car. The wind has picked up. I tuck in my chin and brace against it.