Beware the Wild

by Natalie C. Parker

  I must’ve been dreaming of Grandpa because I wake with his song in my ears. But it’s not Grandpa’s voice I hear. It’s Lenora May’s, trilling down the hallway.

  Suddenly, I’m so awake I could split wood. I leap from bed and charge to her room, where she’s zipping a dress that looks curiously like one of Phin’s plaid shirts.

  “You can’t have that!”

  She stops her singing. “The dress? I think the zipper’s broken.” She tugs ineffectually on the little tab. “Can you see?”

  “The song.” I make no move to help her. “You can’t have that song. Don’t sing it. You can live in this house, you can drive Phin’s car, but you can’t have that song.”

  “Oh,” she says, pressing a hand to her heart. “I—I’m so sorry, Sterling. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Sunlight fills her green eyes like tears. “Truly. I won’t sing it again.”

  I don’t know why I say it, but I thank her before locking myself in the bathroom.

  On my way downstairs, there’s a strangled sound coming from her room. Crying? I pause, unsure, but then I catch a hissed “damn zipper,” and continue on my way.

  Mama’s in the laundry room, folding and muttering to herself. She calls good morning, but makes no mention of the night before. I guess Darold still hasn’t reported on my evening activities. That’s a small blessing. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. I hurry on my way.

  I swing by Clary General for coffee, wishing all the good ol’ boys stationed in their rockers a good morning. Something’s got them on the edges of their seats. All brows are furrowed, but they stop their agitating to give me a gruff welcome as I pass. Old Lady Clary’s in her usual position behind the counter. She’s smothering a set of sticky buns in her famous brown sugar glaze humming a little as she rocks back and forth on her feet.

  “Still got that bracelet on?” she calls without looking over her shoulder. The floorboards cackle beneath her feet. “Mmm, child?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Reflexively, I reach for the bracelet and run my fingers around the silver band, over the sharp rise and fall of the petals and leaves. “It helps me remember, doesn’t it? The people everyone else forgets?”

  Old Lady Clary freezes for a second. Then she picks up her tune again and shuffles to the other end of the workstation to rinse her hands. “Yes, shug, that’s one of the things it does.” My mind snags on the word one. “Some would say it’s a curse, remembering,” she says, returning to my end of the counter with the sort of smile on her face I can’t help but reflect. “Just coffee today?”

  The air tastes so good, my mouth waters. I can’t help myself.

  “And a sticky bun. Unless you’d like to tell me about any of the other things the bracelet does.”

  She takes my money and folds it away in her register, pretending she’s not watching me from the corner of her eye. The register chimes and she hands over an extra-sticky sticky bun along with another of her smiles. This smile isn’t as warm as the first. It pushes her eyebrows up, her cheeks out, her chin down. It’s as if she’s saying, I know what you’re up to.

  There’s no more time for questions. The door opens and in tromp all the men from the front porch. They take their time, stomping on the mat and clustering around the doorway. Sheriff Felder is the first to break away.

  “Miss Ida,” he says, setting his coffee mug on the warped countertop. His expression is grim. “Mind if I take a look at the property line? We’ve had a few reports of vandalism at different points along the fence and I’d like to have a look around before I get going.”

  Old Lady Clary waves him through the back door. “Always welcome, Sheriff.”

  By the front, the men are grumbling. All of them wear similar expressions of concern and stand with hands on hips. Among them, I spot Darold. He’s dressed in business casual: a gray polo shirt embroidered with the logo of the STICKS POLICE, and dark blue jeans tucked inside brown cowboy boots.

  “Any word from the schools? How’s the fence there?” one man asks. I can’t tell which mustache moved the most, so there are about four possible speakers.

  Darold stands tall among them. It’s always strange to see him in town, to see who he is when he’s not grinning at Mama or lounging in his recliner with a beer in hand. He doesn’t slouch or study the ground. He keeps his shoulders back and his eyes steady on whatever’s coming at him. But I guess he has to. There’s more than one of those boys always looking for him to slip up.

  “Nothing from the school yet,” he says. All grumbling comes to a halt to make room for him. “But there was some damage along the fence at the side road, and Rhetta Chaisson says there were planks down on the far road, too.”

  My walk to Clary General this morning had been a quick one. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the fence. Of course, my mind may have been a little too occupied with thoughts of kissing Heath to notice much of anything.

  Mrs. Chaisson lives down where things start to look less like town and more like the national reserve. Though her road also runs alongside the swamp, we call it the “far road.” We’re the only two families with houses that butt right up against the swamp. Except for the Lillard House, a few businesses, and one of the schools, everything else keeps a healthy distance.

  “Ain’t good,” Featherhead Fred barks, and more softly adds, “Bad omens.”

  “Now, Fred, it’s bound to happen. The fence is getting up there in age. This is probably the work of a couple rambunctious seniors pulling down planks to amuse themselves.”

  “But there was damage behind your house, too, ain’t that right, Gatty?” Mr. Tilly, a dog lover who always has one or two pale-eyed Catahoula curs around him, asks. Like so many others, he looks to Darold for reassurance. “And you and Emma didn’t hear anything?”

  “Doesn’t sound like rambunctious teens to me,” another voice adds.

  Theories start to fly. Someone suggests a squatter after wood for a new shack, someone suggests bears, and someone suggests poor Featherhead Fred’s just trying to make trouble. They’re all riled up about what’s to be done and who’s to blame. And they’re talking circles around the swamp; every single one of them working hard to believe there’s nothing unusual about it.

  “Why’s the fence so important, anyway?” I ask.

  All eyes fall on me, each looking equally baffled.

  It’s Darold who finally speaks. “What kind of question is that? You know as well as anyone the fence is there for our protection. It was your granddaddy who built it.”

  It’s no easy thing to challenge a pack of good ol’ boys. They wear their truths and sureties like armor and it’s probably foolish to think I’ll be able to force them out of a habit as deeply entrenched as denial.

  “Protection from what? It wouldn’t do much against a gator and it certainly wouldn’t stop a bear worth its hide. So why’s it there?”

  The silence that falls is heavy. No one’s willing to say it. They’d rather sit here and pretend we’ve got a squatter while people go missing.

  “Our swamp is a dark place,” Old Lady Clary hisses in my ear. I’d been too focused on the conversation by the door to notice her come forward. She stands at my shoulder, her soft body leaning into mine. Her breath is sweet and hot on my neck. “A wild place and no place for young girls like you to be treading. You can’t trust what goes on there. Can’t trust what you see, what you hear.”

  “How’s that any different from the rest of town?” I declare loudly, crossing to the front door. All but Darold clear the way. “I’m going to be late.”

  He stares down his nose and doesn’t move. We’ve never been close, but that’s not entirely his fault. Phin and I weren’t ready for another father figure when Mama first brought him home. We’d had all we could take between a violent dad and a dead-too-soon grandpa. But he’s good to Mama and that’s as much as we could ask for. It almost doesn’t matter what he is to me.

  Almost.

&n
bsp; “Excuse me,” I say.

  “Need a ride?” he asks. “I’m headed that way, and you and I have something to talk about.”

  So this is how it goes. He knows I lied and went out with Heath and, in return for not telling Mama, I’m supposed to let him treat me like a daughter.

  “No offense, Darold, but the last thing I need is a deputy escort to school.”

  It’s pitch perfect and all the old boys laugh me right through the door. They’ve probably already forgotten my troublesome questions about the fence.

  Because that’s what they’re good at.

  Candy finds me in two seconds flat. Either she was stalking my locker or she had a system of spies in place to tell her when I arrived. Both are likely.

  “Also, why are you suddenly so against using your cell phone?” she asks as though we were in the middle of a conversation. “I—” She stops dead, her eyes locked to the half-eaten sticky bun in my hand.

  “I’m not.” I shove my coffee into her hands and open my locker.

  “I beg to differ,” she volleys, wisely choosing not to comment on the pastry. “Where is it? Right now. Where is it?”

  It takes me a minute to fish my phone from the depths of my bag. I hold it up for Candy to see that the sound was switched off. Pressing the MENU button, I’m surprised to find I’ve missed ten text messages from Candy, three from Abigail, and one from Heath. The last sends an abrupt and rousing current through my body. I’m suddenly desperate to flip through the messages to his, but I’m too slow. Candy snatches the phone from my hands.

  “Oh, la la, what’s this?” she teases, pushing my coffee mug into my hands. “A message from Heath? Post steamy, illicit date? What could it possibly say? It’s a best friend’s job to screen, right?”

  “Candy, don’t!” I protest, but she’s too much in the spirit of things to relent.

  Her fingers move over the screen until she finds what she’s looking for. I brace myself for the worst.

  “Well, that was underwhelming,” she announces, handing the phone over. “What does this even mean?”

  Not sure what to expect anymore, I look at the screen where Heath’s message glows. It’s only three words, but they mean the world: i remember u.

  “Nothing,” I say to Candy. To Heath, I respond with four words of my own: i remember u, too.

  The day crawls by. I finish my French exam in half the allotted time, and my chem exam just as quickly. I wish I could put my head down and sleep like Abigail, but I’m too focused on how to get the single cherry into a tart for Lenora May. Over and over, I practice slicing the cherry in my mind, pitting it and setting the halves in a mug. When her back is turned, I’ll place them in a tart and pinch the corners so I know which it is. Then it’s as simple as handing her that tart. There’s so much room for error I couldn’t fit it all inside Noah’s Ark.

  But it’s all I’ve got.

  Things go smoothly enough at first. On the drive home, we stop by the Winn-Dixie where Lenora May grabs peach preserves and I buy a small bag of cherries.

  “My favorite.” She snatches a cherry straight from the bag and I thank Fisher for knowing his sister so well.

  At home, she puts on an oddly appealing mix of Mumford & Sons, Grateful Dead, and Phish. There’s no one else home, so we turn it up until the clock on the wall gives an occasional shiver. And then she’s dancing. She twirls on bare feet, her long curls dripping behind her. She gathers the flour and butter, the rolling pin and the pastry cutter, and lays them on the counter. Every step is part of her dance.

  I’ve never been much for dancing. Moving without a specific purpose makes me feel awkward and vulnerable. On a volleyball court, every movement is calculated and predictable. One thing leads to another in this reactive choreography. But dancing is another story entirely, and Lenora May will bounce around to anything without a care in the world. Some small part of me has always envied that about her.

  She sings and spins, and I can’t help but laugh. Then her eyes are on me and her smile is brilliant. She pulls my arms and twirls me around the way she’s done so many times before.

  “I dare you not to feel this music in your soul, Sterling.” She two-steps around me, pushing my arms into the appropriate form. “Music is where we sing our hearts for others to hear.”

  “I scream more than sing, really,” I say, somewhat satisfied that she doesn’t already know this about me.

  She counters, “Then scream your heart out, Sterling.”

  By the time we’ve got the dough prepped and rolled flat, the filling mixed and chilling, I’m totally caught up in the dance, singing at the top of my lungs.

  Lenora May demonstrates how to cut and fold the pastry. She’s deft with the butter knife and forgiving of mistakes in a way that reminds me of the first time I tried waxing her eyebrows. The experiment ended in the phrase “It’ll grow back,” but I’d felt horrible for weeks. Luckily, the dough recovers faster and when I hold up my first, perfectly folded pastry, she rewards me with a sprinkle of flour on my hair.

  “Now, you’re a bona fide pâtissier.” She holds up a defensive hand, but she’s laughing too hard to plea for mercy.

  “What’s the plural of pâtissier?” I ask, tossing flour into her curls.

  “Pâtissiers, of course!”

  “When is there ever an ‘of course’ with French?”

  “Les verbes doivent s’accorder avec leur sujet,” she cries, invoking Madam and her relentless claim that “verbs must agree with their subjects.”

  When the timer buzzes, we load fresh tarts on a tray, swapping them for the baked batch, and prepping more. Slipping the cherry into a tart is almost too easy. There’s absolutely no hint of suspicion about her and she doesn’t blink when I pinch one tart into the rough shape of a cherry blossom. We work this way, side by side, for a full forty-five minutes. In the end we have fifty-two bite-sized tarts, half filled with peach preserves, half with a bit of semisweet chocolate and fresh cherries.

  “This one’s for me, right? The May flower?” She repeats the corny joke I told while molding the dough. The tart sits lightly on her palm. It looks more like a sloppy fleur-de-lis than a flower.

  This startles me. Before we started, I’d been focused. Tense. Nothing but the embodiment of a plan to expel her from my life. But over the course of the afternoon I relaxed, becoming the Sterling who has a vibrant older sister and begrudgingly loves to dance. The plan—the tart—faded far into the background. I’d nearly forgotten it since putting it in the oven, nearly forgot that she was the enemy.

  She brings it to her mouth and blows the steam away, cooing for the cherry to cool quickly and not burn her tongue.

  It was that easy: she picked the one I told her was special.

  How will it happen? I wonder. Will she take one bite and go running into the swamp? Will she wail like a siren? Tear at her hair and transform into something horrid and ugly? I remember at least one of Old Lady Clary’s swamp stories about a woman who roamed the swamp in a white dress, forever looking for small children to lure beyond the fence. Is that what Lenora May will do? Lure others? Am I trading Phin’s life for that of the strangers Lenora May will harm next? Or will Fisher be able to help her remember who she was before?

  There are so many unknowns and potential consequences. I try to tell myself I’m only responsible for Phin. There’s something about that thought that doesn’t settle well. I shift on my feet, but the feeling remains, stuck somewhere between my diaphragm and my ribs.

  Then the thought I never expected to have: Should I stop her?

  But it’s too late.

  She bites into the tart. Her reaction is immediate. Her eyes open wide and she drops it to the floor. One hand flies to her mouth, the other reaches for the faucet, for water. She rinses her mouth again and again, spitting into the sink, and when her eyes return to me, they’re full of hurt.

  “Sterling?” She asks so much with just my name.

  I don’t have any answers. My guts
knot together and I feel sick, sick, sick.

  “No,” Lenora May mutters, stooping to collect the tart from the floor. It leaves a dark smear behind. “No, I’m not going back there. I can’t. And you, Sterling, you stay away from me.”

  She gives me one final look before rushing through the door. The color of her eyes is obscured by tears. The screen door slaps its frame three times, and I hear her heart as she screams at the swamp.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  I KILL THE MUSIC AND stand in the middle of the living room. Outside, Lenora May’s gone quiet. All I hear is the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall. I wait for her face to reappear so I can understand this feeling in my gut. I think if I saw her, I’d know if it was anger or fear or guilt. But she doesn’t return. The Chevelle revs and violently growls away.

  My hands shake when I reach for my phone. Without even thinking, I dial Candy’s number. She answers on the first ring.

  “Hola, chéri.”

  Now, I’m not sure what I should say, what I can say. I should have called Heath. He would understand and it would be so easy to lay this frustrating, emotional quagmire at his feet, but that’s not what I need right now.

  “Saucier?” she asks when I’m quiet too long.

  “Can you come get me?”

  “Shit, are you okay? I’m coming.”

  She hangs up without waiting for an answer. I barely have time to pull on my boots and leave a note for Mama before Candy’s honking her horn.

  “What’s all over you?” She turns the radio off as I climb into the passenger seat. The AC is set to arctic. “What’s happened?”

  It’s a good question. I’m not entirely sure of the answer. My plan happened. Exquisitely, but something else happened, too, and I’m not comfortable with what that was.

  Candy tugs at my hair, dusting the white powder from her fingertips with equal levels of concern and horror. Sunset makes her blonde hair shine orange.