Bone Gap

by Laura Ruby

  “I wonder why,” said Sean.

  “He was following me. He was spying on Charlie.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Sean,” Finn said. “I saw him.”

  “Yeah, you said that. Where have you been anyway? Where do you go?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” said Finn.

  “You go out every night. You think I don’t know that?”

  “I saw the guy who took Roza. He was at Charlie Valentine’s.”

  “Where else would he be?”

  “Sean!”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “Are you even listening to me?” Finn said. “Are you hearing what I’m telling you?”

  Sean reached out, grabbed the bag, and yanked it toward him. He pulled out the large jar of Hippie Queen Honey, the cookie tin. He opened the tin. Something in his chest hitched, broke, as the warm scent wafted up toward him, honey and nuts and vanilla. And he knew where Finn had been going every night, night after night, and he knew why. He had tried so hard not to despise everyone—his father for dying on him, his mother for drifting from him, his brother for lying to him, Roza for leaving him—but he didn’t think he could stop himself anymore. He didn’t have the heart.

  “Priscilla Willis, huh?”

  Finn didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Sean’s whole life was in the toilet, and his brother was making time with the sad girl who’d go down on any guy who would tell her she wasn’t ugly.

  Sean unscrewed the jar of honey, dipped a finger, tasted. “Good for you, brother,” he said, voice a rusty blade. “Good for you.”

  Petey

  GET REAL

  HE WAS LATE.

  With the crickets chirping through the open window, Priscilla “Petey” Willis sat cross-legged on her bed in the dark of her room, waiting for Finn to appear like some sort of magic trick.

  This was unusual. Petey Willis wasn’t the sort to wait for anyone. And if she was forced to wait, she wasn’t so damned happy about it. Normally, Petey was too mad about too many things to list: her given name, her own face, that one horrible party, to name just a few.

  She should have gotten over her name by now, and maybe she would have, if the people of Bone Gap remembered to call her Petey. But they didn’t. They wouldn’t. And her mother outright refused. Priscilla, her mother said, was too much fun to say, tripping off the tongue like a favorite song. Pris-cil-la. “And you are my all-time favorite song,” her mother told her.

  And as much as the people of Bone Gap forgot her name, they wouldn’t stop reminding her of her face. Oh, most of them weren’t mean about it, at least not outright. But she could see them looking at her when they thought she wasn’t, saw how their eyes flicked from her mom to Petey back to her mom, and she knew what they were thinking: How did bright and sunny Mel Willis with her sweet smile and brown-sugar freckles produce such an unlovely daughter, more vinegar than honey? As a child, Petey would catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror or a window or the surface of a still pond and find her own outsize features interesting and unusual—unforgettable even. And how would that ever be a bad thing?

  While she was growing up, Petey’s mother, frank as she was, would talk to Petey about falling in love and falling in lust and everything in between, because surely someone would one day notice Petey. Petey was as curious as anyone, but her mother’s explanations too often veered from the scientific to the nostalgic as she remembered what it was like to be eleven and having your first crush and thirteen and getting your first period and fifteen when Tommy Murphy tried to jam his hand down your jeans during the movie previews and actually got stuck.

  Tommy Murphy was the last straw. Petey had snatched up the nearest utensil. “If you do not stop talking, I will find a way to off myself with this teaspoon.” Later, her mom simply had to appear as if she might start waxing poetic about making out with this boy or that one and Petey would say, “Teaspoon!” and her mother would laugh and change the subject.

  But Mel did not give up. When Petey was in the seventh grade, her mother gave her a book called Get Real. It had a hot-pink cover, strangely fascinating and explicit cartoons, and all sorts of information for girls who liked boys and girls who liked girls and girls who liked everybody and people who didn’t believe in gender binaries and about birth control methods and how to prevent STDs and fun things to do with showerheads and why it’s not such a good idea to text a picture of your boobs to that guy you just met at the mall.

  And then her body popped like a kernel of corn, and with that came the boys who followed her down the street, making comments about it and discussing which piece of it they preferred most and what they wanted to stick where, but when she turned around, they told her she was wrecking the view.

  The nice girls suggested different makeup and hairstyles. The mean ones suggested hockey masks or dog bones. And all the while, Mel told her that though most people were threatened by those who were different, not everyone was so shortsighted.

  Petey believed that, too. Needed to believe it. And her need to believe it led to that one stupid thing, the thing that everyone in Bone Gap used to define her, even when they got the story all wrong, and from all the wrong people.

  Now Petey got up from her bed and grabbed a book, one of her favorites. It was a graphic novel about two brothers, one who falls madly in love with a girl only to have his heart horribly broken. If novels could be trusted, there was a boy in the world who shared a bed with his brother when he was very small, peed on his brother for fun and torment, fell so madly in love with a girl that he could convince himself that she was crafted by a divine artist, and that she was both perfect and unknowable. Petey was an only child, and boys—kind ones, gentle ones—were a mystery to her. She liked imagining small boys fighting over blankets.

  But tonight the drawings in the book weren’t enough to satisfy. It was nearly midnight and her mother had gone to bed hours ago. The moon was a wisp in the sky and the bees were sleepy and hushed, the hives wrapped in their own sheets of shadow.

  Where was Finn?

  She closed the book and smoothed the quilt on her bed. Unlike the girl in the novel, she hadn’t made it herself, knew little about quilting or sewing or craftiness. And unlike the girl in the novel, she understood heat and wind more than ice and snow, and had no intention of breaking anyone’s heart, except maybe her own. Even Get Real had said nothing about this, about sitting on your bed in your room, stomach and head buzzing, nerves thrumming, heart beating in your earlobes and your toes, hoping so hard that there was one boy out there who wanted you as much as you wanted him, because you wouldn’t know what you would do with yourself if this were not true.

  Petey got up from the bed and went to the window, listening for the hoofbeats of the mare, but all she heard was the incessant rasp of the crickets. She loved bugs, all bugs, except for crickets, sawing away no matter what was happening around them. They had been cranking on the night of the party, the one that Amber Hass had begged her to attend. Petey wouldn’t have gone to that party for anyone but Amber. They had met on the first day of kindergarten. Amber had taken one look at Petey and announced, “You look like a fairy from the land of fairies!” and her opinion had never changed. When the other girls offered makeup tips or sympathy, Amber’s pretty face scrunched up in bemusement. “What’s wrong with the lip gloss she’s wearing?” she’d say. “Why would she want to borrow your hat?”

  The party was a town away, but Amber was hoping that Finn O’Sullivan would be there, because he was so hot, even though he was a little spacey, wasn’t one to attend parties, and though a mysterious and beautiful girl named Roza had just shown up in his barn, and if you were a teenage guy and a gorgeous chick appeared in your barn like a princess out of a fairy tale, you might opt to stay home, too.

  Petey’s throat had gone tight at the mention of Finn’s name. “I thought you said he was weird.”

  “Just a little weird.”

  “Not just a little. Reme
mber when he was going out with Sasha Butcher? And she decided to cut her hair into a pixie? And when she saw him at school, he walked right by her as if he didn’t even know her?”

  Amber shrugged. “In his defense, Sasha didn’t look like a pixie. She looked like a boy.”

  “You’d want to go out with a guy who’d dump you because of a bad haircut?” said Petey.

  Amber waved her hand. “She dumped him. And anyway, he’s weird, but he’s pretty. I wish he would just stand in the corner of my room so I could look at him.”

  “Maybe you’re the weird one,” Petey told her.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Amber, “because Finn likes Roza.”

  “Finn doesn’t have a chance with Roza. Roza likes his brother.”

  “How do you know that?” Amber said, handing Petey a paper cup full of punch.

  Petey took a sip, so sweet it nearly rotted her teeth on the spot. “You can tell. When she’s around Sean, Roza doesn’t stop smiling.”

  “Maybe she just thinks he’s funny,” said Amber.

  “Funny is the last thing Sean O’Sullivan is. He looks like Wolverine, only bigger.”

  “If I were as gorgeous as Roza, I’d smile all the time,” Amber said, glancing at the clots of guys assembled in the dank, dim basement. “We should all be that gorgeous.”

  Petey swirled the red liquid in her cup, thinking about how Amber wanted to pose Finn like a doll in the corner of her room. “Being gorgeous might be more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “I’d be okay with that kind of trouble,” Amber said, as a pair of flannel-clad farm boys headed toward them. Petey braced herself for their reaction; only Amber would think that Petey would make a good wing-woman. But one of the boys asked Petey her name and where she lived, and grinned when she mentioned her mother’s honey business. They talked about the bees, and how to harvest the honey, and which Batman movie was the best one. He topped off her cup with the too-sweet punch. It was spiked with something, but she wasn’t worried. This boy seemed reasonably human, Amber was crammed in a corner making out with his friend, no one had said anything awful, and for Petey that was good enough. She was careful to sip at the punch rather than drinking it down, however, because she didn’t believe in tempting fate. And when he wasn’t looking, she dumped the rest in a potted ficus.

  Maybe it was sips of the drink, maybe because it was creeping toward midnight, maybe because the party was getting loud, maybe it was the fact that the reasonable human took her hand and brushed her knuckles with his lips, that she followed him up the basement steps, that she went out to the yard with him, that she let him kiss her as they stood in the shadows under a tree. It took a lot of energy to keep your guard up all the time, and she was tired of it. Plus the kissing was okay, and she wouldn’t have minded more.

  Except, after a while, he put a hand on each of her shoulders and pressed down, which was annoying, and distracted her from the kissing, which was at least entertaining if not electrifying. She grabbed his wrists and pressed upward to release the tension. And then they were locked in a strange battle, him pressing down, her pressing up, a squat machine made entirely of flesh and bone, Petey unable to understand what he was trying to do until she remembered certain cartoons on the pages of Get Real.

  Abruptly, she let go of his wrists and allowed him to push her to her knees. She looked up, waited for his smile.

  And she punched him in the nuts.

  If it had been a direct hit, if he hadn’t managed to pivot at the last second, her dignity might have been left intact. But instead of falling to the ground and squealing like a piglet as she had hoped, he jumped back, clutching himself, and spluttered, “What the hell is wrong with you, you ugly whore!”

  Suddenly, lights flooded the yard, cops swarming, gathering drunken revelers as they came. “Party’s over,” a voice boomed.

  The not-at-all-human boy pretended to fix his fly. “Sorry, officers. We were just having a little fun out here.”

  A cop shone a light directly into the boy’s eyes. “You been drinking?”

  “No, sir!”

  The cop glanced down at Petey, sitting on her heels. “What about you, miss?” the officer said, aiming the light. She blinked furiously, no way she was going to cry. The officer turned to someone behind him, jerked his thumb at Petey. “Why don’t you take care of this one, O?”

  The cop grabbed the farm boy by the shirt collar and marched him from the yard. Sean O’Sullivan, the least funny man in the universe, stepped forward, huge and imposing in his crisp uniform. He crouched in front of Petey. His dark eyes were solemn as he regarded her.

  She said, “Since when do they call ambulances to house parties?”

  “Since a bunch of kids are puking up their guts in the bushes out front and the neighbors are worried about alcohol poisoning. Are you hurt?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “It’s a question.”

  “Stupid question.”

  “How about this one: Are you drunk?”

  “Are you?”

  He shone his own smaller penlight into her eyes, sighed, stood. “Did you come here with someone?”

  “Amber Hass.”

  “She drunk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should find her. And if she’s drunk, you’re driving, okay?”

  “Sure,” said Petey. He held out his hand to help her up, but she got to her feet without his assistance, brushed the grass from her knees.

  Sean said, “You should be more careful, Priscilla.”

  Petey laughed. “I thought I was.”

  Petey found Amber in the kitchen. Since Amber wasn’t drunk either, or at least, not drunk enough for the cops to arrest her, they were allowed to leave. As Petey drove them home, windows open, hot wind tossing their hair, the song of the crickets seemed to reach a furious crescendo. Only male crickets could produce the sound, drawing the one wing against the other, all to attract a mate. Once she was near, the male switched to a song of courtship. Some crickets even sang a postmating song of celebration.

  Not-at-all-human boys have those songs, too, it seemed, because when Petey went to school the next day, she learned all the things she’d done with not just one, but many guys at that out-of-town party. According to the stories, Priscilla Willis might not have a face you want to look at, but she was a real sweet piece.

  Petey didn’t want to think about that party, didn’t want to think about the crickets, didn’t want that humiliating night spilling over, tainting this one or any other. But she couldn’t help but hear the townspeople’s whispers hissing in her head, the new judgment in them.

  Where was Finn?

  She whirled away from the window and marched back to her bed. She scooped up the graphic novel and opened it to any random page, determined to get her mind on something else. But of course the page she turned to was a picture of two people kissing, melting together—you could not tell where one person’s face ended and the other’s began.

  “Petey?”

  She fumbled with the book. Finn was framed in the open window, his face beautiful as always—divine—but a little sad, too.

  He pressed his fingers against the screen. “Do you want to come outside?”

  Petey had been called many names in her life, but coward wasn’t one of them. She set the book on the bed. “Do you want to come in?”

  He blinked at her, perhaps surprised himself, then murmured to the mare, jumped down. He put a hand on either side of the frame. He threaded one of his long legs through the opening, then hefted himself into the room. She always forgot how tall he was until he was standing near her, and the cramped space made him seem even taller. He glanced at the photos on the wall behind her—bees, flowers—the bookshelves stuffed with fairy tales and myths and manga, the messy desk with the laptop and the piles of papers, the poster with E. B. White’s poem “Song of the Queen Bee,” the rumpled bed.

  “What are you reading?”

  “My favorit
e. Well, one of them.” She grabbed the book and handed it to him. He stood, lanky and awkward and distracted, and flipped through the pages. While he was flipping, she dropped into the chair by the desk, waiting—for what, she wasn’t sure. For him to kiss her in the hungry way he always did. Or for him to tell her what was wrong. Because something was definitely wrong.

  He had the book open to one spread or another, but she couldn’t see what it was. Then he shut the book and placed it on the desk next to her. He stared at her, and she stared back, because she was accustomed to the weight of his gaze, and because he looked at her like she used to look at herself in mirrors and windows and ponds so long ago. As if her face was interesting and unusual—unforgettable even.

  A pulse ticked in her neck, and she wondered if he could see that, too. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He shook his head but didn’t offer a reason. He stepped toward her dresser, where she had a random array of photographs—Petey and her mom, Petey with the hives, Petey and the Dog That Sleeps in the Lane—and picked up the nearest one, examining it. Her chest ached, and she prayed he wasn’t there to ask for space, or tell her about all the commitments he wasn’t ready for, or that he had found some regular-looking girl and this had all been a dream or a joke, because she would push him right back out the window, burn all her stupid fucking books in a ceremonial fire, and give herself over to her bees once and for all.

  Instead, he put the photograph back on the dresser. He knelt in front of her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and laid his head in her lap.

  Her arms jerked up like the limbs of a marionette, shocked by this gesture, this posture. But again, she waited. Waited for him to slide his hands up the back of her shirt or try to undo her shorts with his teeth or whatever it was that guys did when girls plucked up their courage and asked them in. Another thing her books had neglected to mention: what to do when the prettiest boy you’ve ever seen lays his head in your lap and seems content to camp out there for a few weeks. She dangled her fingers loosely, limply in the air over his back, wishing she could Google it.