Every house from the ranch except the baby house went. We all packed tents and sleeping bags the church had donated and drove up in white vans to a public campground in north Georgia. Amicalola Falls. A wildly beautiful place, Mr. Cleve announced at Vespers, with a set of creaky stairs that scaled the rocky face of the waterfall.
Even Omega admitted it was the prettiest place she’d ever seen.
The festivities would kick off at one of the park’s picnic pavilions. The director, Cleve, would lead prayer, then everybody from the boys’ and girls’ ranches would eat lunch. After that there would be a time of what Mrs. Bobbie called “fellowship,” which consisted of a bunch of super-lame (according to Omega) team-building games while the older boys and girls did the important work of scoping each other out and figuring out who was going to meet up later that night. The ranches would split up then. Mr. Al and Mr. Barry would take the girls hiking up the mountain one way, and the boys’ leaders would head in the opposite direction.
Separate campsites would keep us in “the pure zone,” Mrs. Bobbie said, although, from what Omega and the other Super Tramps told me, a couple of girls had once been intercepted on their way out of camp after curfew. Also, one boy had gotten lost on his way to meet up with a girl. Deep in the woods, he’d run smack into a black-bear cub and its mama and gotten so scared he’d started screaming at the top of his lungs. The next morning, before anyone woke up, that boy’s housefather marched him down the mountain and drove him all the way back to the ranch.
“Those ranch boys may sneak out, but it’s not because they’re getting any of this.” Omega leaned forward and shimmied, and her boobs practically fell out of her shirt.
“Hey!” Mrs. Bobbie snapped, banging her fork on the table. Mr. Al said nothing.
“Most of them guys are as gay as my Aunt Fannie. They don’t need to sneak out, long as they get a cute tentmate.” She had a sly expression on her face. Mrs. Bobbie looked like she was about to burst into righteous flames.
Two weeks before the camping trip, Chantal and I were in the tiny, mildewy laundry room off the garage, doing the weekly load for the house. Chantal held up a pair of rainbow-striped cotton panties and danced them in my face.
“Hi! I’m Omega and I shake my smelly ass in front of all the boys because I think they all want to have sexy-wexy with me!”
I kept shoveling clothes from the basket into the washer. She reached around me again, extracting another pair of underpants. These were plain white cotton—mine. She inspected them coolly, then grinned at me.
“Just what I thought. Skid marks.” She pinched her nose. “What’s the matter, Daffy Duck, you can’t hold in your poop at school?” She started a jig around the room, waving the threadbare cotton, and my face burned. “Hey, look at me,” she crowed. “I’m Daffy Duck, and I shit my pants. I’m just a fat fuck baby who poops her little-girl panties.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look close enough to see if she was telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. The thought of Chantal telling everyone at school was mortifying enough. I swiped at the underwear and tossed it in the washer with the rest of the clothes. Chantal dumped in an overflowing scoop of soap powder.
“Hey,” I said. “That’s way too much. You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
Her other arm lashed out so fast I didn’t see it coming, but the backhand sent me reeling into the set of wire shelves where Mrs. Bobbie kept her cleaning supplies. A wire protruding from one shelf dug into my skin, and a thin stream of blood spiraled down my arm and dripped onto my favorite olive-green capris.
“Whoops,” Chantal said, then widened her buggy multicolored eyes at me. She yanked open the dryer door, grabbed a dry shirt, and started dabbing it on my arm.
“Hey, stop!” I said and backed away. “That’s my shirt.” And it was, my favorite pink sleeveless baby-doll top that I’d found in the castoff closet. But the damage was already done. She threw the shirt into the washer with the rest of the clothes and banged the lid shut. I stood there, the scratch on my arm throbbing.
“Blood comes out, you doofus.” She twisted the dial and pulled it out, and I heard water gush into the machine. “Quit being such a baby.”
Back in our room, I tried not to cry. I only had three good shirts, and one of them was too short and showed my stomach if I had to reach up for something. Now my favorite top had a bloodstain on it. Great, just great. Not that any of the ranch girls had fabulous wardrobes to begin with, but I dreaded the necessary trip to the clothes closet in the main office. Those clothes smelled funny and looked like they’d come from a thrift shop in the 1970s. To keep myself from crying, I cursed Chantal in my head, using every evil word I could think of.
Pizza Face, Fat Fuck, Egg Salad.
Jackrabbit.
Devil Eyes.
Nobody.
When I returned to the laundry room, she had folded the clean clothes neatly, stacked them, and told me she would take care of the remaining load. I stood there, unsure of what to say, waiting for I didn’t know what—another insult, a good reason for me to fly at her and slap her. But she only smiled and handed over my stack of warm clothes, which made me positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt, things weren’t over between us.
Chapter Sixteen
I woke sometime later in the night, overheated and drooling. My neck was twisted in such a way that I knew, instinctively, that I was going to feel it for days. We might be catching up on our sleep in this creepy old house—enjoying the respite from Heath’s nightmares—but I didn’t feel any more rested.
I just felt uneasy. About the nine extra cameras that were watching us at all times. And the creepy Sinatra music playing in the McAdams’ room.
Heath was sitting in one of the chairs by the fireplace. He wasn’t doing anything in particular, just staring into the middle distance. A feeling of disquiet—a premonition, maybe, of something to come—stole over me. I wanted to reach out to him, to comfort him. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I sat up, clutching the bedcovers to my chest.
Heath shifted in the chair. “I’m sorry I woke you.” His voice was so gentle, so soft, that the fear in my heart was almost quelled.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“What did you do this afternoon?”
I kept my voice light. “You’re looking at it. Nothing much. You?”
He just shook his head.
“Heath. What’s going on?”
He was running his finger along the arm of the chair. Watching the movement, fascinated by the journey of his own hand. Or maybe he just didn’t want to talk to me. I didn’t know whether to feel relief or concern. It seemed like everything that happened here divided me.
His finger stopped on the curve of the chair arm, and his back bent. It looked like he’d suddenly been struck with a pain in his stomach. He stayed there a moment, hunched and still, and then I heard a sound. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening, but when I did, I almost couldn’t believe it. He was crying.
I didn’t know what to do. Should I go to him? Try and comfort him in some way or just hang back and let him alone? I clenched the covers in my fists and did nothing.
He was really weeping now. Convulsing heaves punctuated by pathetic wails. I resisted the tears that rose to my own eyes.
“Heath,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t look at me, didn’t even seem to notice I’d spoken. But at the sound of my voice, his sobs lessened some. Eventually, they wound down to sniffs and then there was complete quiet. He finally faced me. Leaned forward, lacing his fingers together.
“I’m not who you think I am,” he said.
The panic slammed into me with a force that took my breath. And then my next thought, Not in front of the cameras.
But I couldn’t think about that. If this was really happening, if Heath was finally going to talk to me, Cerny’s secret backup cameras were beside the point. I threw off the blanket and crawled off the bed. Knelt at the chair and gr
abbed his hands. He gripped mine back so tightly that a fresh wave of panic sluiced through me.
“I’m not good for you,” Heath said. “You deserve—”
“No.” I shook his hands. “I love you. I love you more than you could ever know, and whatever you had to do to survive, I understand. And I forgive you, without even having to know what it was. That’s how much I love you.”
He pressed his lips into a tight line. I could tell he wasn’t convinced.
“I won’t judge you, I swear. I had to do things to survive too.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Please, stop. Just listen to me.” I pressed his hands to my chest. I was sure he could feel my heart racing.
And then, I suddenly knew. I was going to do it.
I am going to tell him everything.
“I did a terrible thing,” I said. “It was a long time ago, but it changed everything. And to survive, to stay sane and function in the world, I had to keep it a secret.”
I didn’t know what I expected him to do. Leap out of the chair? Faint with shock? Suddenly regard me with disgust? Whatever dramatic reaction I’d imagined, he didn’t do any of them. He just studied my face like it held a secret he wished he could be privy to.
“You’re an angel,” he said.
“I’m not.” I shook off his hand. “I’m . . .”
. . . half-savage and hardy, and free . . .
“You are an angel,” he repeated dully. “You’re trying to make me feel better. And I love you for it.”
“You don’t know what I’ve done.” I tried not to think of Cerny’s high-tech spy cameras consuming my pain, crushing it to ones and zeros and storing it until the doctor decided to watch it.
“What? You stole a pack of gum at the dollar store? You cheated on a chemistry exam? You had unprotected teenage sex behind the bleachers with a boy everybody told you to stay away from?” His expression grew distant. “This is different. If I told you this, you’d leave. I know you would.”
“You’re not Jeffrey Dahmer, are you?”
He shot me a rueful smile.
“See? We’re good.”
The wind buffeted the glass panes, the loose joints and eaves of the house. I could feel the pressure inside me, building. We’d both kept our secrets, kept the doors shut and locked tight. And now, I had the worst feeling that those doors were about to burst wide open. That our secrets—beasts with claws and fangs and foul breath that had grown in the dark and transformed into something hideous—were on the verge of escaping.
He spoke again, his voice deliberate. “I don’t know where we go from here, Daphne. I don’t know how to go forward anymore. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of. I am a fraud. A perpetrator.”
His face was still, a mask of calm, his eyes glittering in the semidarkness. He didn’t look ashamed. He looked unflinching.
“I used to think I could be in a marriage where we kept secrets,” he said. “I don’t anymore. I know we’re both scared as hell to do this, but one of us has to bite the bullet. One of us has to lead the way.”
There was a moment of quiet, then I spoke in a low voice. “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” He looked surprised. “That’s what you want?”
Yes. It was what I wanted. Finally, after all this time of covering up and running from the truth, I wanted to show Heath who I really was. I saw then, in the darkness, the way his lip curled up and his head tilted to one side, and I knew it was what he wanted too. This moment would draw us even closer, our dark confessions. This moment would bind us forever.
He was ready to hear my story. And I was ready to tell it.
“I killed someone,” I began, my voice trembling. “I hid the evidence, and no one ever knew.”
Chapter Seventeen
I found out the meaning behind Chantal’s smile a couple of days later, when Mrs. Bobbie called Omega and me back to her bedroom.
Earlier that afternoon, the ranch girls had spilled out of the bus and streamed down the long red-clay drive, ready to get down to the business of the weekend. We’d slung off our backpacks in our bedrooms and scattered to our own activities for a few hours. Fridays were chore-free. For Omega, that meant trooping off with the other Super Tramps, toward the lake and the clubhouse.
For me, it meant figuring out wherever Chantal happened to be and making sure I was as far away from that place as humanly possible. Sometimes that was the clubhouse, but the last couple of times I’d gone down there, Mr. Al had shown up, and Omega had told me to scram. I was happy enough to comply. I’d made a chart for myself of all the books I’d finished since Mr. Al had first taken me to the enormous library in Macon after we’d gone to pick up my new glasses. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was my seventeenth. And anyway, I’d spied on them before, and all they ever did was sit around and smoke lumpy-looking cigarettes.
Our small Christian school’s puny football team was playing a nearby public school that night, and Mrs. Bonnie had promised that Mr. Al would load all us girls in his ancient minivan and take us to the game. Not only that, she said we could swing by the pizza parlor with the old-fashioned pinball machines beforehand. But around four o’clock, when I saw Omega and Mr. Al approaching me where I sat cross-legged on the dock with Harry Potter, my gut flip-flopped nervously.
Omega’s head hung low and her eyes kept to the ground. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her like that—she usually had such a defiant tilt to her chin. Alarm rippled through me, even though they were still several yards away. All my foster-kid alarms were going off, in fact, readying me for fight or flight. I closed the book, laid it to one side, and I scrambled up. Began methodically popping my knuckles, one by one.
“Hey, Daphne-Doodle-Do,” Mr. Al said when they reached the dock. “I need you to come on up with me to the house. Mrs. Bobbie wants to talk to y’all for a minute.”
I glanced at Omega, but didn’t move. Omega was staring at the ground, her shoulders hunched into her hoodie like she wanted to disappear.
“What about?”
“Come on now,” Mr. Al said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”
Which must’ve meant he didn’t know what this was all about either. But that wasn’t a surprise. It hadn’t taken me but a week at the ranch to figure out that Mrs. Bobbie was the ringmaster and Mr. Al was the clown that cleaned up the elephant poop. Now that I thought about it, he was looking every bit as miserable as Omega.
My palms pricked with adrenaline. I wondered if the trouble was about what Mr. Al and the Super Tramps did outside the clubhouse. I didn’t know any specifics, but maybe Mrs. Bobbie had suspicions and she wanted me as a witness. I didn’t want to tell on anybody, but I also didn’t want to make Mrs. Bobbie my enemy.
My mother was long gone. Never coming back for me—that’s what the social worker and lawyer had told me as they’d driven me to the ranch in the lawyer’s shiny red car, which smelled like Christmas trees and hot plastic. The courts had signed parental rights over to the ranch until I turned eighteen, and because they were designated as only a “children’s institution,” they didn’t have the legal authority to place me for adoption. I’d stay here until then, and afterward get to go to college, maybe, if I made good grades and one of the state schools awarded me a scholarship. Omega said there were tons of scholarships out there, that she was probably going to go to FIT up in New York, then get a job in fashion design.
If I betrayed the Super Tramps, they’d never let me back in the clubhouse, and I’d be left to handle Chantal on my own. On the other hand, if Mrs. Bobbie wasn’t happy with my answers, she might send me to a different house—maybe the blue-shingled one at the other end of the road where Mr. Barry, an ex-marine, woke the girls up at four thirty every morning before school and made them do exercises, then cook their own breakfast. Or I could be sent back to my caseworker. Even though she hadn’t returned to check on me since she dropped me off, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t take me to another group home. I’
d heard about those homes where the people took in foster kids for the money.
That fat fuck. Chantal must’ve done this. She must’ve tattled to Mrs. Bobbie about the clubhouse or what went on in the woods or something. She was the cause of this—she was the cause of all my problems, the root of all evil. That fat, ugly, mean fuck. I wanted to shove the heel of my hand right into her stupid upturned nose, a move that I’d heard could kill a person.
I could kill her. The words made my scalp prickle deliciously and the adrenaline surge from my hands all the way through me. The simple thought of Chantal being dead settled my nervous stomach. I wrapped my arms around my torso, tucked my book under my arm, and followed Mr. Al and Omega up to the house. I wasn’t scared any longer. A new power nestled safely inside me, a hard little nut no one could crack.
Fat fuck, I repeated silently to myself the whole way up to the house. Not the whiny way Chantal said it to me, but the way Tré and Shellie had flung it casually over their shoulders at me the first couple of days I was at the ranch. Just an afterthought, a bad girl’s inside joke. And then it hit me—the name-callers had only been Tré and Shellie. Omega had never said anything mean to me, not one thing, not once. She’d intimidated the hell out of me, but she’d only ever spoken to me in a kind way.
Warmth filled me, an unreasonable optimism. We’d stand together against Mrs. Bobbie, whatever happened. Omega was my friend. My sister.
Mr. Al ushered us into the bedroom, where Mrs. Bobbie sat at her sewing table, a huge swath of gauzy mauve fabric cascading around her chair and over her lap. She was in charge of making all the pillows and curtains for all the houses at the ranch. She kept her back to us, the whir of the machine filling the air. I wondered for a brief, wild moment if there was a new girl already on her way to replace me, and these were the new curtains for her room. Chantal and I had white plastic blinds. Maybe Mrs. Bobbie thought the new girl should have curtains.
Every Single Secret Page 15
