St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  This rhetorical strategy doesn’t go over so well. In fact, Molly looks like she’s about to burst into tears.

  “I bet he doesn’t even know your favorite constellation. You probably haven’t even told him you’re a Junior Astronomer, have you?”

  “Well…”

  “You faker, you phony!”

  “Look, I’m not a phony!” I try to huff my voice up to an appropriately righteous volume. “It’s just that I choose to accentuate other aspects of myself around Raffy—sort of like how you glob on mascara so as to indicate, Look! I have eyelashes! So maybe I don’t mention the Junior Astronomer Society. Well, you don’t use mascara on your chin hairs.”

  “Fine.” She sniffs. “Have fun with your new friends, Mr. Faker. I’ve got a date with Vulpecula.”

  “Does Dad know you’re out here? If he finds out, he’ll be furious.”

  “Ha! Dad’s been down at the bar with his buddy astronauts for so long now that I doubt he even knows there is an ‘out here.’”

  I look over my shoulder. Raffy is waving at me impatiently.

  “Go back to the hotel, Little Dipper,” I beg, whirling her around and giving her a little shove. “You can see Vulpecula just fine from the window of the Bowl-a-Bed.”

  “I’m ashamed to share your DNA.” Molly whacks me with her own dog-eared copy of the Starry-Eyed Guide to the Galaxy—hard. Then she stomps off to the Bowl-a-Bed to constellate and sulk.

  Molly’s pretending to be asleep when I get back that night. She’s left me an angry message written on one of the Bowl-a-Bed bar napkins.

  Q: What is the constellation that never varies from its position at right ascension seven hours and declination eighteen degrees? Or have you forgotten? (Hint: it used to be your favorite.)

  A: Gemini aka The Twins!!!

  By the fifth night, the Christmas lights have run out of batteries. Now Petey has a compromised glow. His outfit looks less like the moon and more like a giant prewar nickel. Then Marta decides that we have to put the lid back on the trash can. These huge raccoons have taken up residence inside it, and she’s worried about rabies.

  “Well, bitches,” says Raffy, Boy Scout–resourceful, “I guess we can always get more foil.”

  So we shoplift some Reynolds Wrap from the Night Owl Mini Mart and triple-wrap all of Petey’s extremities. Including his head. It looks like a giant baked potato. Sweet little Marta remembers to make silver slits for his eyes and nose and mouth.

  I think I might be developing a species of crush on Marta. It’s not sexual or anything, I don’t think. It’s sort of like what I feel for Molly, and sort of not. I just want Marta to let me lace up her sneakers. I want to rock her and knee-sock her and push her on swings. And, you know…I guess I wouldn’t mind doing a few other things.

  But later, Marta and I have a conversation that effectively forecloses that possibility. Raffy decides that we need a getaway vehicle, and he goes off to try to hot-wire a miniature golf cart. I like it when Raffy leaves Marta and me to babysit Petey; it’s like we’re playing house. Tonight we break open some coconuts and give him the sugary-sweet milk, and then we use the scooped-out shells to dig a shallow little bed for him. We tuck Petey in by shoveling a white blanket over his hulking body. He yawns and smiles up at us, just his downy head sticking out of the sand.

  “This should be creepy,” I tell Marta, patting down the sand around Petey’s neck. “But it’s not.”

  She nods. “Do you ever get that cobwebby feeling when grown-up men look at you?” Marta asks me. “Like you’ve just walked into something sticky and invisible?”

  “Oh, sure.” I nod. “Right.” I have no idea what Marta is talking about. For all I know, I am giving her this sticky look right now.

  “Me too. But it never feels like that when Petey looks at you, you know?” Marta brushes sand off Petey’s nose. “Hey, Ollie,” she asks me, “can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure.” I try to sound big brotherly and nonchalant, but my breathing gets all fast and wonky. Tell-me-that-you-like-me-too! I think with every exhalation.

  “Tonight’s my birthday,” she says.

  “Heeeey!” I give her a noogie. “Happy Birthday! Here…” I cup her chin in my hand and tilt her face up at the sky. “Blow out the stars and make a wish.”

  Dad told me and Molly that our mother used to do this with us when we were very little. We both pretended like we remembered.

  Marta shuts her eyes. She smiles. And I am seriously considering leaning in and kissing her.

  “Can I tell you what I wished for?” she asks, her eyes still closed.

  Kiss her now! I think. But I can’t do it; I mean, how do you do it? I just keep picturing my big nose crashing into her smooth cheek like some clumsy meteor.

  She opens her eyes. “I wished that Raffy—”

  “Don’t tell me,” I say, and something bee-stung and bitter creeps into my voice. “It won’t come true.”

  Raffy.

  I should’ve known. When Raffy’s around, she gets all dumb and honey-eyed. She half parts her pink lips. With me, she turns furry-browed and philosophical, just like the girls in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club.

  I bet I know exactly what she’s wishing for, too. I’ve already had every girl in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Club confess the same stupid wish to me. I’ve been working on a formula to explain this phenomenon. Apparently: 13 cruel comments / 2 not-unkind words © 1 weak-kneed girl

  Raffy returns fifteen minutes later. On foot.

  “Watch out for Petey’s head!” we call. Petey’s still snoring in his sand bed.

  “Why is Petey sleeping on the job?” Raffy grumbles. He’s grumpy because it turns out there are no golf carts on the island, probably because, as I respectfully pointed out to him several times, there are no golf courses on the island.

  I’m about to go help Marta excavate Petey when I get a second chance to prove my worth as the lookout. Two men are power-walking down the beach in our direction, pumping their arms with the frustrated vigor of flightless birds.

  “Look out!” I yell. Everybody but Petey turns and obliges.

  “It’s the environmentalists,” Raffy wails. “Shit, man, do something!”

  Marta warned us yesterday that a group of environmentalists were holding a conference at the Hostile Hostel, but I told her not to worry about it. I figured that the environmentalists would probably just stay in the lobby the entire time so as not to put any undue strain on the fragile beach ecosystem.

  “What should we do, Raffy?” I ask. “If these environmentalists find out about this nest, they’ll be here every night with their environmentalist friends, waiting to take digital photographs of one another as they shepherd our baby turtles into the sea!”

  Raffy pushes me towards them. “You’re a good talker, Ollie. Make with the orating.” He can tell he’s surprised us with his diction. “I do go to class sometimes, you bitches.” He shrugs. “Now go!”

  So I orate. I extemporize. I run like hell.

  “Hey!” I yell to the environmentalists, leading them far away from the nest. “Over here! I think I hear some beached marine creature.”

  Then I try to approximate the sound of air wheezing plaintively out of a blowhole. But I can’t figure out how to do this without interrupting my own speech like some ventriloquy school dropout:

  “I [bubble bubble] think [bubble bubble] it’s a whale!”

  A hand clamps down on my shoulder. And it’s not the hand of an ovo-lacto vegan. It’s a big, red-meaty kind of hand.

  “That’s no whale,” the man growls, whirling me around. “That’s a human boy making those noises!”

  “Well, you got me, sir,” I admit. Then I wriggle out of his grasp and do wind sprints down the beach. I just keep on running, even though neither of the men bother to give chase, until I finally collapse on the sand outside my hotel.

  All I’m saying is, Raffy better remember this come school time.

  “Sorry, Dad,” I say when I get in, d
isheveled and breathless and over two hours late for my newly extended curfew. “I got a little Milky Way–laid and lost track of time.”

  “Ahhh, Ollie,” he chuckles. “Like father, like son.” He shakes his head fondly. “I know it’s hard for you kids to imagine, but your old man spent some wild nights up in the Milky Way himself when he was your age.” He lifts his glass in my direction.

  “Here’s to youth! Here’s to you, Big Dipper!”

  “So what did you see up there tonight?” I ask, and my voice comes out choked and strange. “You, uh, you notice any new nebulas? Any anomalies in the orbit?”

  But my father has gone somewhere pensive and inward and doesn’t answer. So I get away with it, for the fifth night in a row. I should feel good, I guess, but instead I feel this awful loneliness, an outlaw’s loneliness, lying to the person I love best in the world. It’s too easy to use his love to fool him. I almost want to be found out and grounded. I don’t know why my father believes me. I don’t know what the other kids tell their parents they do at night.

  We think there must be something wrong with Petey’s parents. What kind of parents would allow their adult child to play on the beach at night with kids like us? What kind of parents would bring their mentally handicapped albino son on a beach vacation in the first place?

  Nobody knows if Raffy has parents. Raffy’s not very forthcoming about these kinds of details. I’m still not sure where he’s staying on the island, and we’ve been hanging out every day for nearly a week.

  We know that Marta has a mom, because we keep having these awkward run-ins with her outside the Crustaceous Cocktail Lounge. Marta’s mother is always draped across some jowly older individual, and it’s never the same one twice. Two nights ago it was a much older man whom she introduced to Marta and me as “my gentleman caller.” He had a face like an uncooked steak, pink and unsavory. When Marta’s mother got up to use the restroom, I saw him offer Marta a sip of his Coco-Loco cocktail. Marta’s mother and her decrepit beaus all look like they came to the island for spring break several decades ago and never left.

  “Are you playing nice, honey?” Marta’s mother always asks. “Did you make some little friends?”

  “Yes, Momma.”

  “Oh, good,” she says, and her smile is as vast and empty as the Gamma Quadrant of space.

  You know, it might be my imagination, but it seems like lately our crimes have been getting a lot less comical, and a lot more criminal.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny,” Raffy says idly, “if we got Petey drunk?” He pauses, biting his lower lip, and you can tell he’s trying to think of some comical ironical twist. Then he gives up. “You know, it would be even funnier if we got drunk, too.”

  So we take a ten-dollar bill out of Petey’s pocket and close his fist around it and send him into the Night Owl Mini Mart with this note pinned to his lapel:

  I WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE

  YOUR LEAST EXPENSIVE BEER.

  Five minutes later, Petey gets sent back to us with a new note written beneath the first in prim red letters: NICE TRY, YOU HOOLIGANS!

  We peer in the window and see another kid’s mother scowling back out at us, holding some eggs and a carton of milk. Her very hair seems to frizz with maternal disapproval. She whispers something to the gas station attendant, and they both shake their heads in our direction. Raffy thinks we could try sending Petey into the Crustaceous Cocktail Lounge, but we can all hear the other mother berating us through the glass—“And if I catch you hooligans out here again, I won’t stop at your parents, I’m calling the authorities!!”—and her abrasive voice stops us in our tracks.

  “Stupid bitch,” Raffy mutters, but he doesn’t sound terribly upset. In fact, I think we all look a little relieved. And I am reminded of Wowie Zowie! Fun Fact #52—

  INERTIA: Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed—indefinitely!

  That night, Molly breaks down and talks to me. She is standing by the bathroom sink and running cold water over her planisphere. She doesn’t see me at first. I watch her from the door frame, crossing and uncrossing my toes inside my socks. The harsh bathroom light picks out all the cracks in the mildewed tile between us.

  “Ollie! Aren’t you going to clean your star compass with me?” She sounds hurt and suspicious. “It’s Saturday night.”

  “Sorry,” I lie. “Already did.”

  “Oh,” she says in a tiny voice.

  And suddenly my eyes get all hot, and I worry I might actually start to cry. I can’t tell Molly this, but I really miss that planisphere. Lately, I feel so lost when I look up at the sky. I’ve been combing the dunes in the early mornings, checking to see if it’s washed up. Maybe some deep-sea diver will find it one day and give it back to me. Dad had it engraved with my initials.

  “Sure you don’t want some of these scrubbing bubbles? You know what Dad always says…” We roll our eyes and repeat it in unison:

  “You can’t make sense of the universe if you’re looking at it through a fogged-up lens!”

  And it feels so good to giggle with Molly again.

  When I meet up with Raffy on Sunday morning, he’s just sent Marta running down the beach to get him a soda. Her little red bathing suit rides up in the back, her white bottom flashing in the sunlight.

  “Damn!” Raffy whistles after her. “Forget the eggs, yo, wouldn’t you love to crack that open tonight?”

  (Yes.)

  “No! I mean…”

  We watch her run. The soles of Marta’s tiny white feet are always dirty. Even from here, you can see the tar-skunked stripes when she kicks up her heels.

  “I mean, it’s too bad she’s so young….”

  “Hey.” Raffy winks. “We commit all kinds of crimes together….”

  We both laugh a little, and then there’s this long pause when neither of us can really look at the other. We stare at Marta’s sun-browned legs, the curve of her shoulder blades. I can hear my heart pounding in my chest.

  “But, you know…” I’m still not looking at him, but I’m not looking at Marta, either. “That wouldn’t really be comical, Raffy. Or ironical.”

  He kicks a sand ball at me. “Where’s your sense of humor?”

  He’s only joking, I think, my pulse quickening. We’re only joking here.

  Marta leans forward to pay the man for Raffy’s soda, and we both lean forward with her. Her wet hair is curling down her back like a question mark.

  Unless we’re not.

  Tonight, the other kid’s mother is nowhere to be found, and Raffy manages to shoplift a whole case of beer. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” he burps halfway into it, “if we got Petey to go skinny-dipping?”

  Nobody thinks this would be funny, not even Raffy. Petey is terrified of the water, and I know we all love Petey.

  “Hilarious,” I hear myself say.

  “If the skin on Petey’s face is that white, just imagine…”

  We all look over at Petey.

  Marta gives us an uncertain smile, like she wants very badly to laugh but doesn’t understand what the joke is.

  Please don’t do this, I think. We don’t have to do this. Even as I am helping Raffy pull down Petey’s pleated blue shorts.

  He grunts and looks up at me unhappily as I pull his shirt over his head. Raffy and I stop laughing and stare. The skin beneath Petey’s clothing is whiter than the lunar snow on Io. Whiter than the instep of a baby’s foot, before it’s learned to walk.

  “Atta boy, Petey,” I say. “Time to go swimming!”

  I know we all love Petey. But we sure have a funny way of showing it.

  Petey gets all clumsy and sea-cowed when we lead him to the water. You can tell he doesn’t trust the waves to buoy him up. He screams when the sea foam first washes over his long toes. It’s a bloodcurdling sound, as if Petey thinks the ocean’s actually erasing his foot. Raffy keeps trying to force him in, wedging his fists into the base
of Petey’s spine, but Petey finally breaks away from him and runs back to sit shivering and naked by the turtle nest. Raffy laughs and laughs—and so do we. The sound of it rings hollowly down the empty beach.

  The worst part is, I know that no matter what crimes we do to Petey, he’ll always come back the following night. Being with Petey is like being with a dog, or a mother. There is nothing you can do to make him stop loving you.

  “He’ll go in if you go in, Marta,” Raffy says. “Go tell him that you want to go swimming with him.” He elbows me. “Marta and Petey—that’ll be doubly hilarious!”

  “Ha.”

  Raffy raises his eyebrows at me. “Maybe later Ollie and I will come in, too.”

  “You’ll come in, Raffy?” Marta hesitates for a moment, then starts to unbutton her sweater. She won’t look at either of us. Raffy rolls his skullcap up over his empty eyes to watch her, and I watch her, too, a hot cowardly watching. It should be a very easy thing to look away. But this heat feeling that’s keeping me watching, it’s nothing I can lower like a telescope. And I don’t know the mechanics of shutting it off. I resolve to scream, to say something. We don’t have to do this. Then Raffy grins at me, and I feel myself grinning back.

  Now Marta has undone her very last button. Now she’s rolling up the bottom of her shirt. The moon gets squeezed to bits by a black fist of clouds. Under the palm trees, our sockets fill with shadows. Marta’s skin is just visible in the new dark. I feel itchy with excitement. Please don’t do this, I wish again. But I wish it in a much weaker register.

  “Time to go swimming, Petey!” we say. I can hear his teeth chattering from here.