Sight Read online

  Then our teacher, Mrs. Fenderson, motioned to Miss Donna like she was pretending to be on the telephone. Miss Donna nodded and stopped squeezing our toes. Something in my belly felt like it was slipping as I watched Miss Donna cross the room and pick up the phone on the wall by the door. The singing voices became a swollen, wordless hum underneath the sound of my own breathing and the terrible sound of the paper snowflakes unpeeling and falling from the windows. I watched Miss Donna’s lips, and I saw her say the word “Clarence.”

  There was a feeling like when my dad would toss me up into the air and catch me again, a feeling like slipping on the wet dock and falling into the lake. My eyes rolled up, looking for darkness, my eyelids closed, and I saw Clarence. He was sleeping—but not sleeping—lying under a green tarp. I saw that he wasn’t wearing his glasses or his favorite smooshy hat that was the same orangey-red color as his hair. There was heavy snow weighing down the branches surrounding him. The tip of one branch bent so low that a cluster of pine needles, frozen into a point, touched his bare ankle where his dark blue jeans had ridden up. He had no boots on, and he had no socks.

  I pulled my eyelids open with my fingers, making the white electric light of our classroom and the snow outside wash out the image and dilute it until it was gone. Then I threw up. It felt so wrong, what I’d seen. Like seeing your own guts, or eating someone else’s boogers.

  I didn’t tell my mom what I’d seen, not for days, because I knew that seeing things was worse than anything. Worse than overflowing the sink in the bathroom or going to my neighbor Ben’s without permission. Seeing things was so bad, I’d been afraid of it happening my whole life. Before Clarence, and sometimes even after, my mom would walk suddenly into my room when I was playing and ask me who I was talking to. My dolls, I would tell her, holding one up for her to see. Sometimes I would feel her watching me as I ate my lunch or worked on a puzzle or watched a cartoon. She would ask me in a shaky voice, “Dylan, honey, are we alone in this room?” I knew the right answer to that question; I knew to nod my head and say, “Yes, Mommy.” Saying yes to that question made my mom smile, made her hug me and tell me she loved me. I don’t think I was lying to her. if I try to think back now, I don’t remember seeing things, or talking to people that weren’t there. But sometimes I think maybe I just wanted to disbelieve so much that I rubbed them out, erased them, like from a picture. Sometimes there are people-shaped holes in my memories.

  Three days after Clarence disappeared, when they’d found his body in the woods, my mom and dad sat down on my bed to tell me softly that my friend had gone up to heaven. I’d been sick in bed since he’d disappeared, slipping in and out of a hot and restless sleep where the only dream that came was of Clarence, lying in the snow. After they told me, my dad got up to get my mom a tissue because she was crying. My mom smoothed the hair on my forehead, and the softness of her touch made the lump in my throat crack into a sob. She thought I was crying for Clarence, but I wasn’t. I was crying for me. I was going to make my mom stop loving me because I wasn’t strong enough to keep this secret anymore. “I’m sorry, Mommy,” I said.

  Mom held me so tight when she carried me into the police station that the thick beads of her necklace bit into my collarbone. We had fibbed to Daddy and told him we were going to the doctor. Mom held me close until Sheriff Dean led us into his office, then she sat me on the edge of his desk and backed away from me, fingering the beads around her neck. Eleven years ago, Sheriff Dean was still the one you went to when something bad happened. He was the one who came when Thea’s mom ran their Cadillac into a tree, and when someone stole the inflatable Santa Claus from in front of Sheboa’s Grocery. Dean’s still officially sheriff, but everybody knows he spends all his time in his office with his door closed, napping in his chair. It’s Deputy Pesquera who does most of the real work now. But it was Sheriff Dean there when Clarence died, and it was him that Mom made me tell what I’d seen. I told him that Clarence’s feet were cold from the snow, and that he’d lost his glasses. I said that he was near a big green plastic sheet that was hung between two trees, like when mom let me make a fort in our den by spreading my Hello Kitty comforter between the chair and coffee table. I said that there was a man who was walking away from Clarence, leaning forward against the wind and the snow.

  “She’s right, isn’t she?” my mom asked Sheriff Dean.

  My mom didn’t stop loving me. But I think now that maybe something in her love changed color, shifted from all bright colors to some shadows and muddy grays. I know what that’s like. It happened to me, when my dad left us. My love for him stayed, but it was colored by the darkness of what he’d done.

  Before that, though, when Daddy was still with us, when my mom brought me home from the police station that day, she said we shouldn’t tell him what I’d seen. She said it was all gone now, and I didn’t need to dream it anymore. What I heard was You shouldn’t dream anymore. Never again. That’s why my dreams come to me when I’m awake.

  For months and months and years and years people were waiting for the Drifter to come back. To “strike again,” like the newscasters say. But he never came back. And he never showed up anywhere else, either. He never terrorized some other mountain town, or some other city, or some other anything. Sheriff Dean had the Drifter’s DNA, and he would have it compared to other DNA found on other kids who had been killed, all over the country. We used to tell one another he kept the DNA in a safe behind his refrigerator, because back then we didn’t really know what DNA was. We thought it was a puzzle piece dropped out of the Drifter’s body that he’d left behind, and all the police needed to do was find the body the piece fit back into.

  Back then I didn’t think the Drifter had feet, because drifting seemed like something a ghost would do—float a foot above the ground, soundless and cold. I thought he floated off the mountain and into the sky. It made me feel better, to think that. I think that everybody, even the grown-ups, told themselves the same kind of story. It makes it easier to do things like breathe and say hello to your neighbors if you tell yourself he’s gone.

  The texture under the tires changes, the low rumble of the dirt road jolting into the smooth hum of pavement. Ahead of us the white neon lights of a gas station glow against the night sky. It’s the first building we’ve seen in over a hundred miles, and I’m guessing from the dark road ahead that there won’t be any others until we get to the highway.

  While the deputy pumps gas, I go inside the store and walk up and down the aisles, my stomach grumbling but my sleepy brain not able to make sense of the rows and rows of chips and canned ham. I end up at the orange counter that lines the window overlooking the gas pumps, watching the soft-bellied bean burrito I got in the freezer section turn slowly in the microwave’s sick-looking yellow light. I can feel someone watching me, and when I can’t see anyone to my left or right, I look up to see the counter man’s reflection in the rounded security mirror mounted on the ceiling. He has his elbows resting on the counter, and he scowls at me when our eyes meet in the mirror. I look away, and see another reflection, this time of myself in the window. No wonder he scowled. I’ve got the hood of my black sweatshirt up, and my hands are shoved into its pockets, stretching the sweatshirt down so that my head is tipped back a little against its pull. I look at my tipped-up chin and the yellowing bruise on my cheek in the reflection and think, You talkin’ to me? When Pilar and I drive cross-country, we’ll be tough girls, glowering our way from truck stop to gas station to roadside diner. We’ll smile only at waitresses, and we’ll scowl at all the men. Maybe we’ll kiss a boy or two before leaving them in the dust, but mostly we’ll just strut with such long-legged attitude that everyone will assume we’re on the run from the law.

  You talkin’ to me? I think again, imagining myself walking up to the man behind the counter.

  “Ow!”

  The deputy pulls my hair as she yanks down my hood.

  “You’re too cute to look like a convict,” she says. “God, what is tha
t smell? Are you going to eat that?” she asks, pointing to the rotating burrito.

  I shrug, and run my fingers through my hair till it’s sticking out in all directions. “I’m hungry.”

  The deputy looks at my hair and gives an exaggerated flinch. “Suit yourself, tough guy.”

  “That’s ‘tough lady,’ thank you very much,” I say as the microwave beeps and the display blinks OPEN, OPEN, OPEN.

  “Do you want water?” the deputy asks, walking away.

  “Root beer,” I answer, trying to pull the burrito out of the microwave without burning myself. I end up wrapping it in paper towels.

  The deputy has two large bottles of water and a package of trail mix sitting on the counter when I get there. I set the mummified burrito next to them, and head to the refrigerator to get my root beer.

  When I get back to the counter, the deputy sighs. “Well, I guess that will cover up the taste of that dead-dog burrito.”

  When we’re outside, the deputy says, “He wanted to search your pockets.”

  “What?”

  She opens my door for me. “He thought you were stealing”

  “I wasn’t stealing,” I say to the slamming door. As soon as she gets in I say it again. “I wasn’t stealing.”

  “You sure?” the deputy asks.

  Even though I’m secretly thrilled the guy thought I was badass enough to pocket an extra burrito, I do a furious and very effective emptying of my empty pockets. The only thing that comes out is a school-picture-size photograph that slips through the air and lands next to the stick shift. The deputy picks up the photograph. Tessa had straight hair down to her chin, her bangs cut high and crooked on her forehead. In the picture you can see she’s missing her front teeth, and the teeth she does have are all pointing into each other. She looked like her mom.

  “She was a cute kid,” the deputy says, handing it back to me. I slip it back into my pocket.

  I wait till she’s pulling out of the gas station driveway before I throw the burrito out the window, making sure I give the finger to the guy who’s still watching us from behind the counter when I do.

  The deputy slams on the brakes and makes me get out to pick up the burrito—which exploded into beany gooeyness when it hit the asphalt—and throw it in a trash can. She doesn’t make me apologize to the guy, though, and she lets me pick the chocolate out of the trail mix, which I think is decent.

  It’s only an hour before the mountain is in front of us, jutting up out of the flatlands, the winding road to the top looking from a distance like a snake pulling the mountain back into the ground.

  The farther we get up the mountain, the greener the landscape gets, until the desert scrub and cactus have been replaced by thick groves of tall trees that tower over the road. We’ve kept the windows rolled down, even though the refreshing cool air of the desert has turned chill and damp on the mountain. We turn onto Lakeshore Drive, the main road that circles our town, cutting right through the village.

  Mom says people used to joke that the center of town had anything you ever wanted, as long as all you wanted to do was drink a beer and shoot something. That was when it was still called the center of town, before the Village Business Association voted to change the name to “the village” because it made it seem more like a destination, more like “an outdoor shopping plaza,” which is how they describe it on the official Pine Mountain website. Now that the gun store is gone and the liquor store’s been remodeled to look like a place Santa Claus might live, the village is sort of painfully adorable. There are high wooden arches that curve over Lakeshore at either end of the village, carved with the words WELCOME on one side and THANK YOU FOR VISITING on the other. For the quarter-mile stretch of road between the two arches, it’s supposed to feel like you’re in an alpine village, especially when it snows. I’ve never been to an alpine village, so I wouldn’t know. From our village, though, I’d guess the alpine ones have cute little brown-shingled stores with white trim and hand-carved signs and tub-gutted flatlander husbands sitting on benches flanked by oversize wooden flowerpots, waiting for their flatlander wives to finish buying pinecone ornaments.

  “Roll up your window,” The Deputy turns on the windshield wipers, smoothing away heavy drops of rain. “Glad this didn’t hit us on our way up-mountain. I bet it freezes before morning. First snow’s coming soon.”

  First snow’s coming and he’s coming back. We wrote that song about the Drifter together, Pilar, Thea, MayBe, and me. The summer after Clarence died, we spent a lot of time sitting in the shaded dirt under my back porch. Our house is built into the side of the mountain, so the back porch sits on stilts stretching twenty feet down. Even if we stood against the house, where the porch was closest to the ground, there was no way we could jump up high enough to touch the porch’s underside.

  We were allowed to sit under the porch when Mom was sitting in a lawn chair, reading under an umbrella, in the thin strip of grass between the back porch stilts and the chunk of forest that separates our house from our neighbors’, the Abbotts. Mom would glance up at us before she turned every page. Me and my friends sat in the dirt and made up that song, line by line, and then sang it quietly to ourselves over and over and over again.

  It’s weird, having happy memories of that song. Not the song so much, but what we’d do when we sang it. We’d sing the song almost absently, while we braided one another’s hair, played cat’s cradle, or dug holes in the dirt with twigs. The song was a soundtrack to that summer and, less and less, to the years after it. I felt safe, singing it, surrounded by my friends, my mom close by in her lawn chair. Even now, sometimes one of us will sing a snippet of the song in the same absent way.

  Just past the village the constant curtain of trees that flank the road is interrupted by a wide and hard-packed dirt road that cuts straight down to the lake. I crane my neck to see the giant flattened patches of dirt that mark where the new houses are going to go up. A bulldozer with its scoop raised sits in the moonlight. Behind it the lake spreads out, houses dotting its shores.

  At the top of the dirt road is a giant wooden sign, reading THE WILLOWS: OWN A PIECE OF THE FOREST IN THE SKY and under that, scrawled in still-dripping red spray paint, is You Prick. Deputy Pesquera makes a growling sound in her throat. I look back out the window and see two figures crouched down at the foot of the sign, trying to hide from view behind one of the thick poles. Even with them in the shadows I recognize the square head and hulking figure of my friend Frank, and, next to him, the long-limbed gawkiness of Thea’s brother, Cray. I turn away from the window, trying to keep them from seeing me, and trying to keep the deputy’s attention away from the sign. I glance at her, but she’s still looking straight ahead. At first I think she didn’t see anything, but then she says, “You tell your friends they’re playing with fire.”

  I close my eyes.

  “You’re not asleep, Dylan,” she says. “Tell them they’re playing with fire and I’m the fire hose that’s going to put them out.”

  I keep my eyes closed. “I’m not going to tell them that.”

  “Why not?” she asks sharply.

  I sigh, and keep my eyelids pressed together. “Because that’s stupid. ‘You’re the fire hose.’”

  “Fire … extinguisher?”

  I shrug and then yawn so hard that I have to open my eyes. I look at her. “I’ll tell them they’re playing with fire and you’re going to piss them right out.”

  She laughs hard, then points at me. “Watch your mouth!” And then laughs again, slapping the steering wheel and breathing deep. “Jeezum Crow, what a night. Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “I just need some sleep.”

  “Tell your mom I’ll call her tomorrow and brief her on what happened.”

  I groan. “You’ll brief her?”

  “You know the deal,” she says. “It’s either that or she comes with you next—” The deputy interrupts herself by clearing her
throat.

  I finish the sentence for her. “Next time. And I don’t want her to come with me. It’s bad enough that you tell her what it’s like.”

  “I don’t understand.” She sighs.

  “No, you don’t.” The thought of my mom there, watching me, makes my stomach clench.

  The headlights do little to puncture the inky darkness of my dead-end street. This slope can feel almost vertical when you’re driving up it on a snowy winter day. The only other house on the street is Ben Abbott’s house. The Abbotts are downslope from us, so sometimes in the winter we end up just leaving our truck in their driveway and walking the rest of the way home. As we pass by Ben’s house, I see the rambling white farmhouse through the trees, and the barn beyond it.

  “Ben’s a good kid,” the deputy says.

  I stifle a laugh. What does that even mean, good kid? I know what the deputy thinks it means. That she’s never had to come down to the school to arrest him for slashing the tires on a weekender’s sports car, that she sees him at Sheboa’s or whatever the hell it’s called now, with his mom and little brothers, carrying grocery bags for his mom. Ben is a good kid, even though he seems hellbent on changing that. I’m surprised I didn’t see him crouched down with Frank and Cray by the Willows sign. For a while now I’ve watched as he’s gone through a sort of transformation. He’s still the same Ben—with the crooked smile, flannel shirts, sort of smooshy face, and goofy laugh—but it’s like he’s trying to get himself a starring role on When Good Kids Go Bad, which even though it’s not technically a TV show, it could be. It’s sort of cringe-making to watch Ben laugh too loud at Frank’s stupid blockhead jokes, and to watch the way Ben sort of postures that he’s going to be this old mountain tough guy.