Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  At the sound of her voice, and then the sight of her face in the doorway, your tears spill. Your boots are unlaced but still on your feet, and you put your face in your hands and let the tears come, and the ugly sounds you make when you cry.

  Mémé is beside you, moving your backpack off the bench, wrapping her arms around you. “Shh, shh,” she croons. Mémé does not push you for information. She just holds you, your wet cheek pressed against the warm soft indentation of her throat, the weight of her chin on the top of your head, and you are cocooned by her embrace, by her arms and her voice and the panels of her silver hair.

  “Did something happen?” she asks, finally. “With James? Last night?”

  “No,” you say, answering the second question, and not the first. “James is wonderful. He didn’t do anything.”

  You feel Mémé’s chin press into your head as she nods. You love her for not insisting, for holding you quietly.

  You could sit right there on the entry hall bench for the rest of your days. You and Mémé could fossilize, you in her arms. That would be fine. That would be good.

  But you are made of flesh and blood, and you are reminded of this by the urgent hot pulse that pushes from you now. The body must be tended to. You take Mémé’s warm hands into yours and bring them to your face, kiss them, place them back into her lap.

  “I’ll be okay,” you say. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  And you stand, and you stumble over the undone laces of your boots, and you feel as if your body is completely out of your control, as if it’s not your body at all, but someone else’s, as you trip and bleed your way to the bathroom.

  On the toilet, you find the blood-clotted string and pull. The tampon emerges, a triumph of gore, bloated now to more than twice the size it was when you put it in, a clump of some gelatinous red thing adhered to its side. It dangles like a hooked fish, swinging slightly, and you stare at it. Finally, you wrap it in toilet paper and push it to the bottom of the trash can.

  Mémé will want to know why you were crying. You will have to tell her something. You wish that you could tell her everything—how it all started with James in the car, how you might be losing your mind, how you thought you killed a wolf but maybe instead you killed a boy from school. But there are good reasons not to worry Mémé with such terrible possibilities. One very good reason, actually.

  Your father.

  ii

  i was alone

  in my booth

  selling tickets to dreams

  alone

  needing to be found

  he came

  bought two tickets

  to the five o’clock show

  and slid one back to me

  when our fingers touched

  he smiled, white and strong

  strong enough to keep me safe

  if he wanted to

  Crying, Wolf

  Your house in Quebec was not built of straw nor sticks, yet still the wind rattled it like the rageful breath of a hungry wolf.

  It was a big house—endlessly big, it seemed to you—but Mama kept most of the doors closed.

  One afternoon, after the shutters were up, when the bruises on Mama’s face had turned a mottled green, you snuck out from beneath the weight of her sleeping arm and slipped from the bedroom you shared. It was the only upstairs room with an open door.

  Mama needed lots of sleep. “The body heals when it’s at rest,” she said. But you did not need lots of sleep. Your legs felt itchy and twitchy from so much rest. You needed to climb, and run, and jump, and play. You longed to return to the pond, to practice skipping stones, though the ice by now was far too thick for such things.

  “We won’t stay indoors forever,” Mama promised.

  But the howling wind and the piling snow and the stubborn bruises seemed to conspire against you, keeping you locked inside the strange old house.

  Down the long, narrow hallway you walked, away from Mama. The doors were tall and thin, paneled and painted, though the paint was faded. Each door had a tarnished silver knob.

  Mama had never told you not to open the doors. You walked all the way down the hall, as far away from the sleeping room as you could, and then you reached up for the knob of the farthest door. It turned, and you pushed open the door.

  Behind the door, the room was full of ghosts. A tall, thin ghost, a short, fat ghost, a wide, low ghost. As the door yawned open, the ghosts began to dance, weaving eerily back and forth.

  With ice-cold clarity, you knew that they would come for you now that you had opened the door. They would circle you, and swoop down on you, and they would consume you, pulling your skin away from your bones and your eyes from their sockets and your nails from their beds. It would be slow and silent and so simple for them. You were frozen by this knowledge, paralyzed, and they danced closer, and closer, and closer.

  And then, you screamed. You screamed so high and loud that the sound set your own ears to ringing. Mama came running down the hall, you heard her steps behind you. She was a thousand miles away. She would not get to you in time. No one could save you. It was just you and the ghosts.

  But then she was there, and she grabbed you up, and you were in her arms. You wrapped your arms around her neck and your legs around her waist and you held on so, so tight, as tightly as she held you.

  Your scream turned to tears and jagged breaths. Mama held you safe and high, and she carried you away from the ghost room, back to the safe sleeping room, and she sat on the edge of the bed, and still you held tight, arms and legs clenched around her, and she didn’t complain, she didn’t tell you to let go. She held you until the tears were done and your muscles fell limp, and then she laid you in the bed and lay beside you, pulling the blankets up over both of your heads, making a safe little cave where no one could find you, no Papa, no ghosts, no one and nothing but you and Mama, and then you were tired, at last, and your eyes, swollen from crying, fell shut, and you slept.

  Later, when you woke, Mama took you back to the ghost room. You did not want to go—you begged her not to make you—but she said you needed to see that everything was okay, that there were no ghosts. She pushed open the door as you held tightly to her hand. “See?” she said. “Look.”

  You looked, and you saw furniture covered in sheets—a tall mirror, a fat armchair, an old bureau.

  “No ghosts,” Mama said. “Just as I told you.”

  But the room did not fool you, even as it fooled your mother. Yes, of course, now there was a mirror, and an armchair, and a bureau. Now there were regular things covered in regular sheets. But before, when you had been alone, the room had been full of ghosts.

  And you would not open the door again.

  The next morning, you return to school. Mémé has written a note to excuse your absence—“I had cramps, and I left,” you told her, the same lie you told the cops. Inside the school’s front doors, someone has set up a memorial for Tucker. It’s a folding table, maybe the same table the moms were sitting at the other night at the dance, and in the center is his basketball jersey, in the school colors, black and gold, with his last name—Jackson—and his number—45—emblazoned across it. There’s a framed picture of Tucker, his official team portrait, with him wearing that jersey; he’s half smiling, like someone just said something funny, some inside joke that he gets but you probably wouldn’t. Surrounding the jersey and the picture is a motley collection of things Tucker liked—a round green can of Copenhagen chew, last month’s issue of Thrasher, a few bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, a black box of Trojan condoms.

  Of course, there are flowers, even though you have no memory of Tucker ever mentioning an interest in botany. Arrangements in vases, bought from stores; cellophane-wrapped bunches, laid on the table; single blossoms, picked from home gardens.

  There are cards, too—the store-bought kind, with pictures of sunsets and flowers, these filled with the loopy cursive of girls, but also notes written on regular lined paper, and one, a single word scrawled on th
e back of a receipt—Dude.

  You stand near the table, out of the way of the flow of incoming students, and watch as people walk by, some stopping to read the notes, others pulling something out of their bags to add to the mix.

  Maggie comes in. She stops in front of the table, hands on the straps of her backpack, and stares, unblinking, at the table. You shift your focus from the display of inanimate objects to the real person now regarding them. Though she’s usually a makeup girl, today Maggie’s face is bare, save for some light pink lip stuff. Her hair is raked up into a bun on the top of her head. Her expression is inscrutable, totally blank.

  You watch as she loosens her hands from the straps of her backpack and reaches behind her neck, unclasps a chain, reclasps it, and lays it across the can of Copenhagen. Then she walks away.

  After she’s gone, you step forward and pick up the necklace. It’s a heart-shaped locket, one you don’t remember ever seeing her wear. You slide your thumbnail into the crack and the locket pops open. There is nothing inside.

  The chain pools on the table as you set the locket down. You stand beside the table, staring at the locket, trying to name the feeling in your chest.

  Not guilt.

  Not horror.

  Should you be feeling those feelings? Most likely, yes. But they do not come. There is a caginess inside your heart; an awareness of danger, and a desire to avoid being found out.

  Does this make you monstrous? A monster?

  That day, you avoid the lunch crowd; you don’t have an appetite. But the next day, Wednesday, you take your place in the cafeteria next to James; he squeezes your knee under the table to let you know he’s glad to have you back.

  “It’ll be a few more days before they get the results of the autopsy,” Caleb says from his usual seat next to Landon. A few other basketball players share the table, too. And there, next to Big Mac, is Keisha Montgomery.

  This is not usual. Keisha isn’t one to hang out with the athletes. Most of her friends are of the student council/yearbook committee/school newspaper variety, and she rarely makes an appearance in the cafeteria.

  You aren’t close with Keisha, but you find her interesting. In some ways, she reminds you of your grandmother, and maybe that’s why you notice things about her. Though the school doesn’t require one, Keisha wears her own uniform every day: jeans or cords, in black, gray, or dark brown; a button-down shirt, white, floral, or denim; underneath, either a T-shirt or tank, depending on the season. Doc Martens, eight-hole, or Mary Janes, black. You have never seen Keisha in shorts or a dress. She wears her twists in either a bun or a simple braid. She has three pairs of glasses: one pair round and tortoiseshell; one pair ovular and white; and the pair she’s wearing today, slightly cat-eye, black, with inlaid mother-of-pearl floral patterns on the bridge of the nose and along the outer rims.

  Last year, over the summer, Keisha went to Latvia on a student program, and when she came back, she spoke marginally decent Latvian. She gave a presentation in history class about Latvian foods, cultures, and traditions, including a slide show. “This is the Pokaini Forest,” she’d said. “No one is sure why there are all these piles of stones, but one theory is that ancient pilgrims brought them there as penance for their sins.” Keisha is a collector of facts.

  Next year, when you graduate, Keisha will be valedictorian. You don’t doubt that four years after that, she’ll be at the top of her class wherever she goes to college.

  She is a nail biter, a fact she tries to hide by balling her hands into fists, but when she disappears into thought, her fingers loosen and find their way to her mouth.

  Unlike Keisha, who is an unusual addition to this lunch table, you have sat, on and off, with the basketball team for a while now, even before you and James began dating last spring. Not because you were some fawning girl, but because you’d long been friends with James—not close, but comfortable.

  Finding a place to sit at lunchtime, or a lab partner, or someone to dance with, has never been a problem for you, but neither has it been a priority. Still, you’re aware of the social order, the groupings, the usual movements of your classmates—and Keisha at this table is not usual.

  Something else that strikes you as unusual: though you have, almost certainly, killed a human with your bare hands, you still have an appetite. You register this and wonder at it. What kind of a monster does this make you?

  “What did the cops ask you about the other day?” Keisha says to the boys. Her lunch bag, unopened, sits on the table. She perches on the edge of the bench, all of her energy forward. Her hands, in fists, rest in her lap.

  Caleb rips a bite from his sandwich, speaks around a wad in his cheek. “They wanted to know about Tucker. You know . . . who saw him at the dance. What he was acting like—if he was weird or anything.”

  “Was he acting weird?” Keisha asks.

  “Maybe you’d know if you’d been there,” Landon says.

  Keisha shrugs this off. “I had better things to do. What else did they ask?”

  “You could totally tell they were trying to find out if he’d been on something,” Landon says between handfuls of potato chips. “They were all, ‘Did Tucker seem out of sorts or unusual? What were you all doing before going to the dance?’”

  “And they wanted to know where we went after the dance, too,” Caleb says.

  You set your water bottle down. You force yourself not to look over at James. But you don’t have to ask the question—he answers, unasked.

  “Bisou and I headed back to her place after the dance. We barely even saw Tucker that night, other than when he tried to get her to dance with him.”

  James doesn’t look at you, but you feel the message he’s sending: he didn’t tell the cops that the two of you had been parked near the woods. He didn’t tell them that you got out of the car and ran away.

  He is protecting you, but it hurts your heart. Because he doesn’t know what he’s protecting you from. And now he has lied. He’s lied, and maybe that makes him guilty by association. Maybe that makes him complicit.

  You don’t contradict him, though. You don’t say, “No, babe, remember? We parked for a while by the woods, and I walked home from there.” You don’t say anything at all. You pick up your sandwich, unwrap the waxed paper, and you force yourself to chew, to swallow.

  When you look up, you find that Keisha is watching you.

  James drives you home after school.

  He puts the car in park and turns off the engine. He turns to you and smiles his dear smile, reaches over and brushes a curl back from your temple. “It’s Wednesday,” he says, which it is. But you know what he means: Wednesday is the day Mémé volunteers at the library. Wednesday is the only day that your house is reliably empty; on days other than Wednesdays, Mémé spends her afternoons in her writing room, or crisscrossing the living room, working out the plot for whichever novel she is drafting.

  On other Wednesdays, you have invited James inside. You have played house, fixing him a snack, pouring him a glass of iced tea from the jar kept in the refrigerator. You have curled in his lap on the couch, kissing until your chin is raw from his stubble. You have lain together in your bed, first him on top, then you, then him again.

  But today, though you hold his hand against your cheek, you say, “I’m tired. I think I’ll go inside and take a nap. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, though you know he is disappointed. Still, what does he expect? You have your period, and now that you’ve done the things you did in the car the other night—this same car—you think that it’s not like he’ll want to go back to kissing and cuddling.

  “I could nap with you,” he offers, but you force a laugh and shake your head.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” you say, and you kiss him, and then you go inside.

  It wasn’t your intention, but after you close the door and take off your boots and coat, you go to Mémé’s room. The door is open, as it often is, and her bed is neatly made, the white chenille bedsprea
d tucked up and over her pillows. There is her highboy, the one you used to sit beneath when first you came to this house, a dozen years ago. The first time you climbed under there, when Mémé found you, you thought she would make you get out. But instead, she opened one of the drawers and pulled out four long silk scarves, bright panels of flowers and birds, and she taped them just beneath the bottom drawer to form a little hideaway. Then you were safe and hidden, and she passed you a pillow from her bed and the blanket from her sitting chair, and that became your spot for months and months, whenever you needed it, until, one day, you did not need it anymore.

  You need it now, but when you try to curl beneath the highboy, it no longer feels like a safe little hideaway. Your legs are too long; your body too big. You try to fold yourself small enough, but you feel your ribs pressing together, you can’t take a full breath, and rather than feeling safe, you feel claustrophobic.

  You roll out from beneath the highboy. You suck in a full deep breath, feeling your lungs and ribs expand. You splay your arms and legs. You take up room, as much as you need.

  Better.

  Eventually, you climb to your feet. You should leave Mémé’s room—not that she would mind your being here, but just because it feels wrong to be in her space without her permission (though you have, over the years, pulled open every drawer, dug through every pocket). But rather than leaving, you go to her closet and slide open its door.

  The space smells like Mémé. You close your eyes and breathe, and as you focus on the scent, it is as if you can pick out each element: the rose water Mémé sprinkles on her skin after her bath; the lemongrass and patchouli she dabs on her pulse points; the cocoa butter she rubs into her face each night. And something else, something unnameable but distinct, some particular Mémé-ness.

  You open your eyes. You run your hand across the row of blouses and sweaters and skirts. Most of the clothes hanging in the closet, Mémé only breaks out when she volunteers at the library. The rest of the time, Mémé doesn’t dress all that differently from you: jeans, though she wears hers looser, T-shirts and flannels, good socks, sturdy boots.