Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  Those lips tighten. “Bisou,” she says, “what’s the matter?”

  And there’s a moment where you nearly tell her everything—everything—the blood, the shame, the race through the forest, the attack by the wolf, your escape. She is the sort of grandmother you could tell such things. She has been, for these past twelve years, since you returned to Washington and moved into her home, a vessel for almost all your feelings, your fears, your concerns. She has become the voice you hear inside your head, better than a conscience—Mémé is cautious and smart, always fair, tough sometimes, yes, but true. It is a good voice to carry with you, and you yearn to hear it now, telling you everything will be okay.

  But every relationship has its limits, you realize suddenly, as you swallow back the words that wish to spill out. You are not going to tell your grandmother about the feel of James’s mouth between your legs. You are not going to tell her about your orgasm in his old blue wagon, or about the moonbeam that illuminated his face just as he looked up to see your pleasure on your face and showing you your blood on his.

  And you are not going to tell her about what happened after.

  “It was fine.” And you go to the kettle for water for your morning tea.

  “I didn’t hear James drop you off,” Mémé says. “That clunker of his usually is loud enough to wake up the whole street.”

  You scoop some English breakfast into the infuser, lower it into your favorite mug—the fat-bottomed one with a lid—and pour a stream of boiling water over it. Aromatic steam billows up and you breathe it in.

  “You must have really been asleep,” you say, and there, you have lied two times to Mémé in the span of ten seconds.

  The water in your mug turns to tea as you slice a piece of bread from the loaf near the sink. Mémé bakes twice a week, and today, Monday, is a baking day. Already dough is rising in a bowl on the countertop, draped with a blue checked dishcloth. There will be fresh bread when you get home from school.

  “I’ll be going out to market today,” Mémé says, sipping her tea. “Do you need anything special?”

  You shake your head and slip the slice of bread in the toaster.

  “If you think of anything, call me before noon,” Mémé says. “I’ll be heading out then.”

  Mémé’s bone-deep distaste for cell phones means that she almost always forgets hers at home and barely ever checks her messages; if you need to get ahold of her, you have to catch her on the landline or leave her a note. It’s then that you realize you don’t have your phone; you must have left it, along with your shoes, in James’s car.

  When the toast pops up, you slather it with butter and drizzle honey both on the bread and into your tea, now near-black, dump the loose tea leaves into the compost bin, and snap the mug’s lid into place.

  Mémé has been watching you move about the kitchen—you feel her watching you—but this is not unusual. Mémé watches people. It’s just the way she is.

  You zip a jacket over your sweatshirt, shoulder your backpack, wrap your toast in a cloth napkin, and take up your tea. “I’ve gotta go,” you say. “I’m late for the bus.”

  But you would never leave without kissing her goodbye, and so you turn, lower your face as she turns hers up, and you kiss, left cheek, right cheek.

  “Des bisous de ma Bisou,” she says, as she always does. “Kisses from my kiss,” a play on your name.

  It’s the familiarity of the routine, probably, a force of habit, that prompts you to say, just before you leave the house through the kitchen door, “Oh, I got my period, finally.”

  Your hand is on the doorknob, and you turn back to smile goodbye, and Mémé’s face is open in a way you have never seen. Her eyes are wide, her forehead deeply wrinkled, her mouth round.

  You open the door, and a brace of wet, cold wind knocks you back a bit, so you struggle out to the porch to close the door quickly, not wanting to let too much of the outside in.

  Hood up, eyes down, you descend the steps and head toward the sidewalk, hurrying now to make your bus.

  Your steps slow as you contemplate Mémé’s expression. The wide eyes. The open mouth. She looked . . . surprised? Yes, that. But also, something else.

  You get to the bus stop just in time to see the plume of exhaust as your bus pulls away. You could run after it and yell for it to stop. Maybe it would. But what is the hurry? You don’t want to hang out in the hallways before class, and James shares your homeroom . . . are you really so eager to see him again?

  You will walk. You’ll arrive late, but so what? It’s drizzling, but that’s nothing here in the Pacific Northwest, where rain is constant throughout the fall, winter, and even spring. You’ve got the hood of your sweatshirt to protect your hair and your mug of tea to warm you.

  So you cut right, across the misty park, and you bite into your still-warm bread, sticky with honey.

  School, when you arrive, is quiet, classes already in session. The wide swath of steps that leads up to the door of the old stone and brick building is dark with wetness, and you take it slowly. You are already late—why rush now?

  Raphael, the security guy, sits on his stool just inside the purple, glass-paned front doors, paper folded open. He’s got a cup of coffee squeezed between his legs. He must be reading something interesting because he barely registers your entrance, raises his chin slightly without raising his eyes, and waves you to the admissions office.

  You’re not the only person arriving late today; there are a few bleary-eyed stragglers in the hall, and Big Mac pushes out of the attendance office just as you reach for the door to go in, a gray cast across his usually pink skin telling the story of how much he must have had to drink at whatever after-party he went to last night, and how he must have woken up feeling this morning. He raises his chin at you in a halfhearted greeting, something he wouldn’t have bothered doing last year, before you were James’s girlfriend.

  Inside, the office feels off. Everyone is there who is usually there—Ms. Nguyen at the front desk, a couple of student aides pretending to file things but really checking their phones, the half-closed door to the principal’s office no different than any other morning. But you sense something, something you don’t have the words for. A disturbance.

  Ms. Nguyen shakes her head when she sees you standing in front of her desk. “Really, Bisou, you too? I would have expected better.” She dashes her signature on a tardy slip and tears it from the pad, handing it to you. “Off to class,” she says, and so you go.

  “I don’t know if it’s any better this way, having the dance on a Sunday and all of them showing up late and hungover,” she complains behind you as you push through the door.

  “Sharing, Valuing, and Caring About Each Other’s Feelings,” reads the banner above the entranceway into the main hallway. It’s a new sign, bright yellow background, letters all in blue except for Caring, which is an enormous looming red word in the middle of the banner, its i dotted with a red heart.

  The floor is speckled gray-white linoleum, scuffed here and there, and slashed across with bands of brick red, for contrast. All down the right side of the hall spans an enormous mural—a visual history of Washington State. Here, a gathering of Native Americans incongruously holding aloft a sign that reads “The Garfield High School History Project”; there, a group of unsmiling Chinese immigrants; farther down, a half-finished building on the edge of the water, a ship in the distance.

  The hallway is silent but for your steps, the occasional squeak of your sneaker on the linoleum, and the tinny, faraway slam of a locker. You pause outside your chemistry classroom.

  You’re grateful that the door opens in the rear of the class. You slide into your seat. Ms. Walker is turned away from the students, doing a problem on the board, some molecular equation, and you take out your notebook and copy it down. Toward the front, near the window, you see James. His head is down, he’s writing in his notebook, and the back of his neck is exposed. Seeing it fills your eyes with unexpected burning tears—t
he vulnerability of it. The bareness of his skin.

  He’s wearing a red-and-black checked flannel with a black puffer vest. His long legs, stretched out, reach underneath the seat in front of him—Keisha Montgomery’s seat—and are in a pair of deep black jeans. He’s wearing his basketball shoes, the high-tops.

  He wore those same shoes last night, with his jacket and tie. The same jeans, too.

  Maybe he feels your eyes on his neck, because he brings his hand up and rubs it.

  You look down. You don’t want him to turn around and see you staring at him. What will you say? He’s going to be disgusted by you, by last night. He probably won’t break up with you, though, because he’s not that kind of guy. You’ll have to do it. There’s no way he could be with you again, after last night. How could he? After you . . . bled like that?

  You imagine the blanket he spread in the back of his wagon, bloodied by you.

  Disgust. He must be disgusted. You are disgusted. Disgusting.

  Then—shit. It occurs to you that you should have packed some tampons into your bag. That was stupid, not to do that.

  You scan the class. There’s Maggie, playing with a long strand of her flaxen hair, dreaming out the window. You could ask her, but you don’t want to maybe have to deal with whatever feelings she might be having about what you said to Tucker at the dance last night. Your eyes return to Keisha, in front of James. Her hand moves quickly across paper on her desk, taking notes. Her twists are wrapped into their characteristic low bun, out of the way. You can ask her. She’s the prepared type, always with an extra pencil, happy to hand out a sheet of paper to anyone who needs it.

  You don’t really like the idea of asking anyone for a favor. It’s just not the way Mémé has raised you, to need anything from anyone. It’s not that she had actively discouraged you from asking for help; she didn’t have to. Just looking at the way she lived her life—practically a hermit, making for herself things that she could easily buy, never bringing home friends or going out to eat—told you all you needed to know about how best to live.

  Your mother told you the rest.

  Someone’s phone beeps—an incoming text. Ms. Walker looks around, annoyed, but it’s impossible to tell whose phone it was. Her gaze lands on you.

  “Bisou,” she says. “Do you have a tardy slip?”

  You hold it up. She folds her arms and raises one eyebrow. You sigh, stand, and deliver it to her at the front of the class.

  “Not like you to be late,” she says, accepting the pink slip of paper.

  Behind you, suddenly, phones begin to vibrate, all across the class, like a breaking wave. People pull their phones out of backpacks, out of jacket pockets. A gasp. And then another. Students begin to murmur.

  They are talking about you. The certainty of it is a crash of nausea in your gut. James must have told someone, just one someone, about what happened last night, in his car, after the dance. And that someone—one of his basketball friends, probably—told somebody else. Who told someone else. And now everyone knows, and right behind you, they’re all laughing. They’re all covering their mouths and laughing at you.

  You lift your chin and prepare to face him. You will level him with your gaze. You know how. You got it from Mémé, the ability to wither with a glance. She doesn’t need anyone, and it was a mistake, you feel with sudden clarity, to want James as much as you did. It leads to pain, love. Always. You should have known.

  But when you turn, it is different than you expect. Yes, they all are holding their phones, James included . . . but their faces are wrong. Not laughing, not disgust—shock. Horror, even.

  Ms. Walker feels it, too. She doesn’t reprimand the class for having their phones out. “What is it?” she asks. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Tucker Jackson,” Keisha says.

  “What about him?” Ms. Walker folds your tardy note, absentmindedly, into the pocket of her blazer. “What happened?”

  “He’s—it says he’s dead.”

  Flocking

  The class erupts. A noise comes out of Maggie, an animal wail that raises the hair on your neck. Three girls jump up to cluster around her. She says, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” over and over again, and tears streak her face. She has her phone in both of her hands, like a prayer book, and text after text lights up its screen. She shakes her head and cries and thumbs through them, one after the other.

  “What happened?” Phillip demands. “Was he in an accident?”

  “I don’t know. Wait.” Keisha is scrolling through something—an article? a text? She looks up, her glasses flashing.

  “What happened?”

  “How did he die?”

  “What do you mean, he’s dead?”

  Everyone is asking questions, talking over each other, forming little groups clustered around phones, looking for answers.

  An uncomfortable tingling begins in your brain, as if it is trying to recall a forgotten dream.

  You are still standing at the front of the room. You start back toward your seat, but when you walk past James’s desk, he puts a hand out, touches your hand, squeezes it. You stop.

  “Everyone, stay here,” Ms. Walker says. “I’m going to the front office. Just stay here.”

  She leaves, closing the classroom door behind her. Maggie is wailing, and the girls tighten their circle around her, making shushing noises and patting her back, holding her hand. Lorraine takes Maggie’s phone, gently, and sets it facedown on her desk. This is as nice as you’ve seen the others act toward Maggie in a while, since the rumors started up a month or so ago. You’d overheard Lorraine gossiping with Darcy about Maggie—how the things she was into were too weird even for Tucker, that she was a nympho, that she begged Tucker to have a three-way with her and some guy from her job, which was why Tucker finally broke up with her. But you suppose none of that matters now.

  You stand in the aisle, the warm familiarity of James’s hand in yours. He leans his forehead into your hip.

  “I can’t believe it,” he murmurs. Then, “You scared me last night.”

  “I’m sorry.” You squat down on your heels so you can look into his eyes. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I didn’t know that I—I’ve never done that before. Any of that. I mean”—and here you whisper—“I’ve never had my period before. I am so, so sorry. It’s so gross. I don’t know what to say.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” James says, his voice lowering to match yours. “I tried to find you after you ran off, but you were gone. And I texted you like five times before I realized that your phone was still in my car.” He reaches into his vest pocket and fishes it out, hands it to you. “It’s dead now,” he says.

  “Oh,” you say. “Thank you.”

  “That other thing,” he says, his voice dropping even further, like he knows you wouldn’t want anyone to hear. “It’s no big deal. Actually, I was kind of relieved when I figured out that that must have been the reason. I mean, I didn’t know why you’d run off like that. I thought—I was afraid I’d done something wrong.”

  His face is so dear, so open. You bring your hand up against his cheek. “No,” you say. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  He smiles, and then you can see that he remembers the news about Tucker as the smile collapses.

  “I can’t believe it,” he says again. “Tucker. I wonder what happened.”

  You shake your head. There is a feeling in the pit of your stomach—dread.

  Ms. Walker comes back into the class and you squeeze James’s hand once more before returning to your seat.

  “Everybody quiet down,” she says, and it’s comforting, the way she takes charge, that authoritative ring to her voice. “I don’t have much more to tell you. It’s true—Tucker is dead. His body was found, early this morning, in the woods nearby.”

  She keeps talking, but you can’t get past those words—his body was found, early this morning, in the woods.

  In the woods.

  You c
an still hear the pounding pace of the wolf at your back.

  You can still see the wolf’s flashing eyes. His flashing teeth.

  Your legs are weak, and you are grateful to be sitting. Your hands are gripping the edges of your desk. You tell them to release, you fold them in your lap.

  Ms. Walker is still talking. “Principal Evans has called a school-wide assembly. Everyone, pack up your things.” She goes over to Maggie, puts her hand on her shoulder. “Maggie, honey, do you want to skip the assembly and go to the office? See the nurse?”

  Maggie shakes her head, swipes her hand across her eyes. “I want to hear what happened.”

  Ms. Walker nods. “Okay. Take a friend and go to the bathroom. Splash some water on your face. Then come join us.”

  Maggie sniffs loudly. She shoves her notebook into her satchel and gets up. Keisha gets up, too, even though you didn’t think she and Maggie were particularly close, and they make their way to the doorway. Before they disappear around it, Maggie turns back for a moment and looks right at you.

  “All right,” Ms. Walker says, “decorum and patience, everyone. Let’s do this right.”

  Everyone gets their stuff together and heads out the door, up the hall toward the gym. James waits for you just outside the classroom, laces his fingers through yours, and you walk together with the crowd, the whole herd of you moving as one, and the other classes emptying out into the hallway, too, merging with your class, all of you going together to the gym to hear what there is to hear.

  It’s a big school. There are more than a thousand of you, pouring out of doorways all up and down this hallway, and every hallway. You don’t know everyone, but you do know lots of people, and they know you. Though you don’t play any team sports, though you’re not a joiner, really—not of clubs or societies or teams—people have always seemed to listen when you talk, and kids in younger grades have always known your name. “Hey, Bisou,” boys always say, some with shy grins, some with sly grins. Today, though, no one is saying your name. Only one name is on their tongues: Tucker Jackson.