Jennifer McMahon

Promise not to Tell mmp prel.indd 3 21/02/2014 09:29

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Orion
This edition rst published in 2014
by Indigo
a division of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martins Lane
London wc2h 9ea
An Hachette UK company
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright Jennifer McMahon 2007
The right of Jennifer McMahon to be identied as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.
All the characters in this book are ctitious, and
any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
isbn 978 1 78062 208 8
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
The Orion Publishing Groups policy is to use papers
that are natural, renewable and recyclable products
made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging
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www.orionbooks.co.uk
Promise not to Tell mmp prel.indd 4 21/02/2014 09:29
prologue
November 7, 2002
9:30 p.m.
When the Potato Girl was murdered, the killer cut out her
heart. He buried it, but the next day, she rose again from
that exact same spot. Ryan poked the campre with a stick
for emphasis, sending a shower of sparks up into the night.
Opal inched closer to Ryan. He was fteen, kind of cute
in that farm-boy way. Tori said Ryan had a huge crush on
Opal. Tori was the one whod set the whole thing up, said
it would be fun to go into the woods and make out with
the older boys. Opal was twelve and had never kissed a
boy before but it wasnt like she was going to admit that
to anyone, even her best friend.
What, like a zombie? Tori asked. Opal was quiet she
hated the Potato Girl stories.
Yeah, back from the dead like a zombie. Its like a
potato: you cut it up into pieces, bury any one of those
pieces even a little bit of peel if it has eyes and another
plant grows. Ryan snapped a stick as if he were breaking
a bone and tossed it into the re.
Opal shivered. She thought of the visit shed had just
that afternoon. But no, she mustnt think of these things.
And she knew better than to tell the others. Theyd think
she was lying or crazy or maybe a little of both.
1
And she roams these woods now, added Sam. You
know how you can tell when shes coming? By the smell.
That rotten potato reek. You can smell her a hundred feet
off.
Oh, puh-leeaase! Tori rolled her eyes. Sam was her
sort-of boyfriend.
Let me get this straight you dont believe the Potato
Girl is real? Ryan was incredulous.
I believe she existed once. I know she did. My mom
went to school with her. She was just some poor kid who
was murdered. All this ghost shit? Its . . . whaddaya call
it. An urban legend.
Jesus, Tori, are you forgetting that Dan and Chris saw
her right here just last week? Opal said. And what about
Becky Sheridans little sister, Janey? She says the Potato
Girl met her down in the Griswolds old eld and locked
her in the root cellar.
And what about me? Opal thought.
God, would you guys grow up? Dan and Chris were
wasted, as usual. Janey was just screwing around and got
stuck. Tori spread her hands in a tah-dah gesture.
Right, said Opal. The door was latched from the
outside, brainiac. How do you gure she pulled that one
off?
All Im saying is, shit can be explained.
And all Im saying is, theres some shit that cant, Opal
said.
Opal knew Tori was still mad at her about the jacket.
Earlier that afternoon, before meeting the boys, Tori had
found out about Opals borrowing her cross-country
jacket without asking. That was bad enough, but Opal
happened to wear it while xing the chain on her bike,
and Tori was furious about the grease stain on the left
sleeve. Opal had to promise to have it dry-cleaned, paying
2
for it with her own money. And in the meantime, Tori
could borrow her jacket. Only it wasnt exactly her jacket.
It was her mothers oldest and most favorite jacket, which
Opal had borrowed on many occasions without asking
and now was forbidden to so much as touch. It was fawn-
colored suede with fringe on the sleeves and front. A
cowgirl, rock-star jacket that Opal had to admit looked
better on Tori, who was a little older and actually had a
gure. The two girls had the same haircut (both done by
Shirley at Hair Today on the edge of town) and both were
blond, but the resemblances stopped there. Opal knew
Tori was the pretty one, the one the boys looked at; the
truth was, most days she couldnt care less. She had bigger
things to worry about than boys.
Opal knew her borrowing annoyed people, and that one
day she might get in real trouble for it, but she couldnt
seem to make herself stop. Half the time, she wasnt even
aware she was doing it. Like the night she took Toris
cross-country jacket, she was most of the way home before
she even realized she was wearing it. Some people smoked.
Some chewed their nails. Opal borrowed. It wasnt stealing
exactly. She took things only from people she knew, people
she liked and felt close to. And she did her best to return
the things unharmed before anyone even noticed they were
missing. It gave her a thrill. A sense that she was so much
more than her twelve-year-old self when she carried pieces
of other people around with her. They were like good
luck charms talismans imbued somehow with little bits
of other peoples souls.
It was a cold night. The four friends sat close to the re,
while the boys swapped more Potato Girl stories. Tori
mostly kept silent, smoking the Camel Lights shed
pilfered from her dad, occasionally ufng her hair,
3
snorting and shaking her head at the most outlandish
tales. There were plenty of stories to go around without
her input. Every kid in New Canaan had grown up
hearing about how the Potato Girl walked the woods
where she was killed, searching for her murderer, taking
her vengeance on anyone who crossed her path.
I bet the reason she hasnt left is that the killers still
here. She knows who it is and wont rest until hes dead,
Ryan said.
But its not just him shes pissed at its the whole
fucking town. Shes cursed the whole town, Sam said.
Curse or no curse, I have to pee. Ill be right back. Tori
rose, pulling the suede jacket tight around her.
Take the ashlight, said Sam.
Moons out. Ill nd my way, replied Tori as she
headed off, out of the circle of relight.
Be careful! I smell rotten potatoes! shouted Sam after
her.
Asshole! she called back.
They listened to her footsteps, crunching over dead
leaves and twigs, moving farther away, then disappearing
altogether. They heard her curse quietly once probably
got her foot tangled in the undergrowth. The re crackled.
They told more stories.
After ve minutes, Opal said Sam should go look for
her. The guys brushed it off, said girls took forever
pissing, had a good laugh about just what it was girls did
that could take so long.
When ten minutes had gone by, they called to her, but
there was no response. The guys said Tori must be fucking
with them. Trying to give them a good scare.
Fine, Opal said nally. You two macho men stay
here. Im gonna go nd her. She snatched the ashlight
from Ryan and marched out into the darkness.
4
*
Ryan and Sam stayed by the re laughing at how hys-
terical girls could be. Wasnt that what they were doing
there to begin with? Hadnt they come to the haunted
woods, as countless other boys had done, hoping the girls
would get a little scared, need a little comforting? Wasnt
all the ghost-watching shit just an excuse to get out in the
woods and fool around? Werent the woods behind the
Griswolds old place littered with bottles and condoms,
specters of couples who had come before, with not one
sign of some tormented little girl ghost?
Opals scream interrupted them. They ran away from
the warm glow of the re, toward the shrill cry in the dark
and tangled woods. They saw the ashlight bobbing in the
trees and heard Opal sob as they drew near.
Ryan got there a second ahead of Sam he stopped
short, backed up a step.
What the fuck? he breathed.
Under a big gnarled maple lay Tori, naked, a cord
wrapped around her neck and a square of skin neatly
removed from her left breast. Her clothes had been care-
fully placed in a folded pile beside her. Opal stood over
her, one hand clapped to the side of her face, making a
horrible mewing sound. The beam from the ashlight
danced over Toris pale skin.
Its a joke, Sam cried, laughing a harsh, crazy-
sounding laugh. Fucking sick joke. Cmon. He nudged
Toris body with his foot, pushing her face into the beam
of the ashlight. Her tongue protruded slightly from blue
lips. Her eyes were bulging in their sockets, wide and
glassy like a dolls. Sam, too, began to scream.
It was Ryan who broke the spell, took the ashlight
from Opal, said they had to go get help. The boys took off
5
running, and didnt notice when Opal, who had been right
behind them, turned back.
She made her way to the clearing, choking back sobs,
willing herself not to look at her dead friend, and went
straight to the pile of clothes. The suede jacket was at the
bottom, folded neatly. She removed the other clothes,
noticed the white lace panties on top, folded and glowing
like a large moth in the moonlight.
Then she slipped on the jacket it still held Toris heat
and this made bile rise in her throat. She glanced one more
time at the body. The other girl looked like a plastic
mannequin, splayed out on the forest oor. It wasnt
possible that this was the same girl who had just bitched
her out hours ago for wrecking the cross-country jacket.
The girl who refused to believe in ghosts.
Opal felt as if she were being watched, not by the blank
staring eyes of her dead friend, but by someone else
something else. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned.
And then she caught a glimpse of it: a small pale gure
in a long dress behind a tree not twenty feet away. Opal
watched as it backed away from her, zigzagging through
the maples, oating off into the dark heart of the woods
before disappearing altogether.
Opal ran as fast as she could until she caught up with
the boys, heart hammering, biting her tongue to keep from
screaming. She prayed they wouldnt notice she had on the
jacket Tori had been wearing all evening. They didnt.
And she sure wasnt about to tell them what shed seen
when shed gone back to get it.
Only hours later, back at home, once the questioning
was over and the coroner had come to take Toris body
away, did Opal realize what a mistake it had been. She
hadnt wanted to explain why her dead best friend had
been wearing her mothers jacket, the jacket Opal had
6
been forbidden to touch. But really, who wouldve given a
shit? And what was wrong with her that she was even
thinking about a stupid jacket? Now shed tampered with
a crime scene, which, she was pretty sure, made her a
criminal. The best thing to do was hang the jacket back in
the closet and never mention it to anyone. And thats just
what she was doing when she noticed what was missing.
The star. The tarnished metal sheriffs star shed pinned
on it just that afternoon was gone.
Shit! she said, ngering the two small pinpricks in the
suede where shed pushed the pin through.
It must have fallen off in the woods somewhere. The
only thing to do was go back and nd it. She had to return
it before it was discovered missing.
And for the millionth time, she told herself, This is it.
No more borrowing, and she believed she really meant it.
November 17, 2002
10:20 p.m.
My name is Kate Cypher and I am forty-one years old. I
killed someone tonight.
I have always believed myself to be a person incapable
of murder. Suicide has crossed my mind once or twice, but
murder? Never. Not this white-winged dove. Ive marched
for peace and give money on a regular basis to Amnesty
International. Im a school nurse who draws happy faces
on Band-Aids, for Christs sake.
But none of this changes the fact that it was little old me
who pulled the trigger and, with near-perfect aim, put a
hole in another human beings heart.
And in order to truly explain it, Id have to tell the
7
whole story. Id have to go back, not just to Tori Millers
murder in the woods ten days ago, but to one that hap-
pened more than thirty years ago. My story would have to
start back when I was in the fth grade with a girl named
Del Griswold. Its not a name many folks around here
even remember. There isnt a soul in town who hasnt
heard of the Potato Girl, though. She is, by all accounts,
the most famous resident of New Canaan which is funny
because, back when she was alive, she was just a skinny
kid with scabby knees who, you could tell just by looking,
would never amount to much.
How wrong we all were.
8
part 1
Now and Then
Spri ng, 1971
November 716, 2002
One potato, two potato, three potato, four
She used to live here long ago,
she doesnt anymore
a
1
Late April, 1971
Touch it, she said.
No way. Gross.
I dare you.
No way. God, what happened to its eyes?
Pecked out, I guess. Or just dried up and fell out.
Sick. I shivered. Partly from the cold breeze, partly
from the idea of those eyes. It was early spring. The
ground below us was thick mud, still half frozen. The
week before wed had the last snowstorm of the season
and there were still patches of it clinging to the ground,
melting in pools and rivers across the lumpy eld.
Come on, Kate, you gotta do what I say. When youre
at my house, I make the rules. You were the one caught
trespassing. I could have you arrested. Or get my daddy to
come out here with his shotgun. Now touch it!
I will if you will.
Dels pale face contorted into a smile. She reached out
and stroked the dead bird, starting at its head and moving
her ngers with their dirty nails all the way back to its tail
feathers. Her touch seemed almost loving like the bird
was her pet parakeet, a creature shed named and fed. A
bird whose song she knew by heart. Some Tweety Bird,
Polly-Want-a-Cracker kind of pet.
11
The putrid crow swung heavy on its wire. She gave it
a shove, making it y toward me. It was as if Del and I
were playing some sick game of tetherball. I jumped back.
She laughed, throwing back her head with its stringy
blond hair. She opened her mouth wide and I noticed
that her right front tooth was chipped. Just a little corner
was missing, not something youd notice unless you were
looking.
The crow swung, its left foot wrapped and tied with
white plastic-covered wire tougher than string, Del
explained. It dangled about three feet from the top of a
tall wooden stake driven into the center of the small eld
where uneven rows of green peas were just coming up.
Smaller wooden stakes lined the rows, and rusty wire
mesh was stapled to the stakes, forming a trellis for the
peas to climb.
Del said her brother Nicky had shot the crow two
weeks before. He caught it pecking the pea seeds up out
of the dirt before theyd even had a chance to sprout and
got it with his BB gun. Then he and his daddy hung the
crow up just like they did each year, a warning to other
crows to stay away.
I reached out and touched the greasy black feathers of
its ragged wing. Bugs crawled there, working their way
under the feathers and into the esh. Metallic green ies
buzzed in the air. Although dead, the bird pulsed with life.
It stank like old hamburger left in the sun. Like the
raccoon my mother once found under our porch back in
Massachusetts, way back under the oorboards where no
one could reach it. It just had to rot there. My mother
sprinkled quicklime through the cracks in the porch oor,
letting it fall down onto the bloated corpse like Christmas
snow. For weeks the smell permeated the porch, worked
its way into windows and open doors, hung on our
12
clothes, skin, and hair. Theres nothing like the smell of
death. Theres no mistaking it.
I had been crossing the Griswolds elds on my way
home from school every day for nearly a month on the
afternoon Del caught me and took me to see the crow. I
had been hoping to run into her. Hoping, actually, to
catch a glimpse of her to spy without being seen. Maybe
then I could learn if the rumors were true that her daddy
was really her brother; that she had chickens sleeping in
her bed; that she ate only raw potatoes. And the best
rumor of all: that she had a pony who limped and who
some kids claimed theyd seen her riding naked in the
elds behind her house.
I knew better than to make friends with a girl like
Delores Griswold. Id lived in New Canaan only six
months or so, but it was long enough to know the rules.
Rule number one for surviving the fth grade was that
you didnt make friends with the Potato Girl. Not if you
wanted any other kids to like you. Del was a pariah. The
kid all the others loved to hate. She was too skinny, and
came to school in worn, dirty clothes that were often
hand-me-downs from her brothers. She was two years
older than most of the other fth graders, having stayed
back in kindergarten and then again in fourth grade.
She had dirt so thick on her neck that it looked like
maybe she really was dug up from the ground like one of
the potatoes they grew on her familys farm. She was pale
enough to be from underground. And if you got close
enough to her, you got a whiff of moist earth.
Maybe, just maybe, if Id had any other friends back
then, if Id sworn allegiance to anyone else, I wouldnt
have started cutting across those frozen elds hoping to
catch a glimpse of her naked on a pony. Maybe then I
wouldnt have met her at all. She wouldnt have shown me
13
her secret in the root cellar or made me touch the dead
crow.
But I had no friends, and I, like Del, was an outsider. A
kid from New Hope who came to school with a lunch box
full of steamed vegetables, thick slabs of grainy home-
made bread, and dried fruit for dessert. How I longed
to be a white-bread-and-bologna girl then. Or even, like
Del, to have the worn brass tokens the poor kids used
in the cafeteria to buy a hot lunch each day. Something to
link me to some group, some ring of kids, instead of
sticking out like the sore thumb I was, eating my hippie
lunch alone, smiling stupidly at anyone who walked by
my table.
The Griswolds farm was at the bottom of Bullrush
Hill. At the top of the hill was the 120 acres owned by
New Hope, the intentional community my mother had
dropped everything to join the fall before. Shed met a
man who called himself Lazy Elk back in Worcester,
where my mother worked as a secretary and I had real
friends friends Id known my whole life and thought Id
go on knowing, never needing to make new ones. Lazy Elk
whose real name was Mark Lubofski swept her off her
feet and talked her into going back with him to New
Canaan, Vermont, where he had been living on and off for
almost a year. He said a man named Gabriel was starting
something big, something revolutionary there: a Utopian
community.
The truth is, I was as enamored of Lazy Elk and his
stories as she was. He had a kind face with deep, craggy
lines around his eyes and mouth. Self-conscious about
his receding hairline, he wore a wide-brimmed leather hat
with a brown-and-white-striped turkey feather in the
band. He took the hat off only when he went to sleep,
and even then, it often lay at the foot of the bed where
14
some other couples cat might sleep. He told me that the
feather, which hed found in the woods behind New
Hope, was a talisman a magic power object that helped
keep his spirit free.
So away we went, free-spirited, in his orange VW bus,
expecting to nd paradise. What we found instead was a
few run-down buildings, a well that drew water with a
rusty hand pump, a herd of goats hell-bent on destruction,
and a large canvas tepee that would serve as our home
for years to come. Lazy Elk had carefully left all of these
details out of his descriptions of New Hope, and while my
mother and I couldnt hide our initial disappointment, we
still believed that we could make a new and better life for
ourselves there as wed been promised. So it was with
hope and determination that my mother lled the tepee
with colorful woven rugs and clean sheets. She scrubbed
the lthy glass globes of the oil lamps and trained Lazy
Elk to take his muddy boots off before coming in. Our
little circular home, though far from paradise, was at least
bright and clean.
At the bottom of Bullrush Hill, on the corner where our
dirt road intersected with Railroad Street, which was
paved, even back then, was the Griswolds farm. It was
an old dairy farm, but theyd sold the cows off some years
before. You could still smell the cow shit when it rained,
though. That, like the smell of death, was not an odor that
faded easily.
The Griswold place was a leaning white farmhouse
badly in need of a new paint job. The roof had bald
patches where shingles had fallen off. Swallows nested in
the eaves. The faded red barn with its old tin roof had
fallen in on itself long ago, and the collapsed remains
seemed to be the home of about a hundred feral cats and
several dogs with various handicaps (one had three legs,
15
one was missing an eye, and another bulged with large
growths). In the front yard, which was more packed dirt
than grass, beside the big black mailbox that bore their
name, hung a white sign, hand-painted in red letters:
eggs
hay
pigs
potatos
Beyond the sign, set back about ten feet from the road,
was a little three-sided wooden shed with a rusted tin
roof. There, on any given day, were three or four dozen
eggs in cardboard cartons and some bushel baskets of
potatoes, beans, corn, and whatever other crops happened
to be in. The prices were written on scraps of paper
thumbtacked to the back wall, and there was a metal box
to put your money in.
make your own change. be honest! thank you
read the sign taped to the top of the banged-up gray metal
box. A dented scale hung from the ceiling, but the one
time my mother tried to use it, the needle refused to move,
the spring inside broken.
Another sign told you to ask at the house about hay,
pork, piglets, and free kittens.
Before New Hope got chickens, my mother and I would
walk down to buy eggs from the Griswolds stand. We
rarely ran into Mr Griswold, but sometimes wed see him
on his tractor off in the distance. His wife, we heard, had
died of cancer years before, leaving him to care for his
brood alone. Often wed see one of the kids doing chores
in the yard, or banging around under the hood of some
rusted-out car on cinder blocks. There were so many kids
eight, including Del. All boys but her.
16
*
You live up with the hippies, dont you? Del asked me
that day as we stood looking at each other in the eld of
peas reaching up with tiny, pale tendrils, the dead crow
between us.
Yeah.
You a hippie?
No.
Hippies are stupid, she said.
I didnt respond, just kicked at the clumps of cold mud.
Hippies are stupid, I said! Her pale gray-blue eyes
gleamed with anger.
Sure. I took a small step away from her, afraid she
might haul off and hit me.
Sure what?
Sure, I guess hippies are stupid.
Del smiled, showing her broken tooth. I have some-
thing to show you. A secret thing. Want to see?
I guess, I said, somewhat concerned that just a few
minutes before shed asked me the same question, then led
me to the decaying crow.
I followed Del through the trellised rows of young peas,
then across garden beds full of spinach, carrots, and beets.
I recognized the plants from the gardens at New Hope.
Our soil was darker, less clumpy, than the Griswolds.
And although our gardens were smaller, they seemed
healthier and better organized, with special walking
paths covered with wood chips between the planting
beds. The Griswolds elds were full of stones, rusted
plow blades, and forgotten rolls of barbed wire, and we
tramped right through the crooked rows of seedlings.
Watching over this landscape, as if daring any living
thing to grow, was the upside-down crow, hanging from
a wire.
17
Del and I passed a small fenced-in pasture where a large
gray mare was chomping hay. A spotted pony stood
beside her. He started when he saw us, running off behind
the stall, and I could see that he had a slight limp.
Is that your pony?
Yeah. His names Spitre. He bites.
Just past the horse pasture was the pigpen, where ve
enormous pigs were lounging in thick grayish mud along
with maybe a dozen piglets. A plywood hut, like a large
doghouse, stood in the back right corner of the pen. Along
the front fence was a big metal trough full of water and
another full of slimy food scraps.
I stopped and leaned against the top of the fence, my
feet on the bottom rail, trying to get a good look at the
piglets. The ammonia stench of pig excrement made my
nostrils twitch. I was staring into the tiny eyes of a large
sow with swollen teats, thinking that Id heard somewhere
that pigs were smart, smarter than dogs even, when Del
snuck up behind me and gave me a shove. It was a hard
push, no playful little messing around kind of tap on the
back. My stomach slammed against the top rail, my head
and shoulders falling forward. I nearly toppled headrst
over the fence into the mud.
Careful, Del teased. Pigsll eat ya. You fell in there,
theyd pick you clean.
I jumped off the fence and swung around to face Del,
thinking Id clock her one, but she quickly distracted me
and the urge passed.
See that mama pig right there, Del said, pointing to the
sow Id just been watching. She ate three of her babies
just last week. Pigsre savages.
I unclenched my sts, let myself breathe.
Del led me toward the back of their white house, at the
18
crest of a small hill, as she described the scene of the
mama pig gobbling up those babies.
Teeth like razors, she said. When she was done, there
wasnt nothing left but three little tails.
About fty feet from the house, we came to a wooden
door tilted into the hillside. It reminded me of the metal
cellar door that led to the basement of our old rented
house in Massachusetts. Del leaned down and unlatched
the heavy door, pulling it open. Rough wooden steps led
down into a dark pit that could have been a dungeon or a
bomb shelter.
Go on. You rst. I gotta close the door behind us.
I began making my way down the steps, and saw that
it was a root cellar: a small room, probably eight by eight
feet, with cinder-block walls and sagging wooden shelves
that went from oor to ceiling. On the shelves were
rows and rows of canned goods and bushel baskets full
of spongy, sprouted potatoes, bruised apples, and limp
carrots. Del closed the door and everything went black. I
wondered if shed stayed outside and locked me in, leaving
me to die in that damp place. Maybe it was a dungeon
after all, some kind of torture chamber. I took a nervous
breath. The air smelled of moist earth, forgotten vege-
tables. It was Dels smell.
Del?
Hang on, Ill light a match. I felt her brush by me,
heard her feel around along the shelves, shake a box of
matches, open it, and strike one. The small room glowed
orange. Del pulled an old jelly jar with a candle in it from
off a shelf and lit it. She blew out the match, then held
the stubby candle in the jar up to my face like she was
studying me, unsure of who I might turn out to be.
Okay, if I show you my secret, you gotta promise not
to tell. You gotta swear. Her pale eyes seemed to look
19
right through my own eyes, reaching all the way to the
back of my skull.
Okay.
Swear on your life?
Yes, I muttered. She pulled the candle back from my
face and set it on a shelf next to a row of dust-covered
canned tomatoes.
Cross your heart and hope to die?
Cross my heart and hope to die, I said.
Ive got a tattoo, she told me. Then she started to
unbutton her dirty yellow shirt, which was embroidered
with colorful little lassos, hats, and horses.
I wanted to tell her to stop, to say that I believed and
didnt need to see, but it was too late. The shirt was off.
To my relief, she wore a soiled white cotton undershirt
with a tiny pink-petaled ower stitched at the center of the
neckline. But then she peeled this off quickly, without
hesitation, and I looked down, embarrassed, thinking that
maybe the stories I had heard were true and yet there
I was, in the cellar with the Potato Girl. What was I
thinking? If this ever came out at school . . . I shuddered.
I struggled to think of an excuse to make a quick escape.
The dirt smell intensied.
Well, are you gonna look or what? she asked.
I slowly shifted my gaze from the packed earth oor to
Dels naked torso.
Del was a skinny kid I could practically count her
ribs. She looked like a person whod had all the color
washed out of her even her nipples seemed pale. And
there, over her bony cage of ribs, just where I believed her
heart might be, was the letter M. I moved closer for a
better look, trying to make myself forget that this was
some strange girls skin I was studying not just skin, but
the place that would one day be a breast. I could already
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see the beginnings of them, slight swellings that looked
out of place on her skinny frame. But what my eyes were
drawn to was not Dels developing breasts, and how
different they were from my own at chest, but the tattoo.
It was a cursive capital M, delicate and swirling. It had
been etched into her skin in black ink, and done recently
enough to still be red and puffy. It looked slightly infected
and terribly painful. I backed away.
The only tattoo I had ever seen in my life had been a
faded anchor on the forearm of one of my mothers
boyfriends whod been in the navy. There was him, and
there was Popeye, but cartoons hardly counted, and meant
nothing in the situation I now found myself in.
I tried to look unimpressed. But a tattoo? On a fth
grader? Del was more alien to me than ever.
Whats the M for? I asked.
Cant tell you that. She smiled at the power of her
secret.
Who gave it to you?
Someone special.
Didnt it hurt?
Not really.
It looks like it hurts now.
Its a good kind of hurt.
I didnt ask what a bad kind of hurt might be. I didnt
get a chance to ask any more about it before the wooden
door swung open and the root cellar lled with light. I
looked up and saw the silhouette of a lanky boy standing
at the top of the steps.
Del, what the hell you doin? And whos this with you?
Christ, you two making out down here or somethin? His
voice was scratchy, as if he had a sore throat and it hurt to
talk too loud.
Del turned away quickly and threw on her undershirt.
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Scram, Nicky! Del shouted with her back to him, and I
realized I was looking up at the crow killer. I squinted
against the light behind him to make out his features. I
could see raggedy pale blond hair and strangely long arms
that seemed to hang awkwardly. Orangutan arms. As my
eyes adjusted, I saw that this boy was as tan as Del was
pale. A dark-skinned ape boy in torn jeans and a white
T-shirt, heavy work boots on his huge feet.
Yeah, Ill scram all right, said his raspy voice. Ill
scram right back into the house and tell Daddy what I just
saw.
You shit! Del spat up at him.
Whos your friend? he asked with a sly, thin smile.
None of your beeswax, Del answered.
The boy laughed, white teeth ashing against the back-
ground of his bronze face, then backed away from the
door.
Man oh man, Id hate to be in your shoes. Daddys
gonna give you one hell of a licking. And then he took off
toward the house, leaving the root cellar door open.
You better go, Del ordered. But come back tomor-
row. Meet me in the eld after school. By the crow.
Okay?
Okay, I said.
She raced up the steps out of the root cellar, then
stopped at the top and called back down to me, See you
later, alligator! before chasing her brother back toward
the house.
I blew out the candle and crept up the wooden steps
slowly, peering right, then left when I got to the door. I
saw no one coming, so I bolted straight ahead, not daring
to turn and look back toward the house, toward Del and
Nicky. I ran past the pigs with their razor teeth; past the
horse pasture with its limping pony; through the spinach,
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carrots, and beets; and back to the eld of baby peas
where the dead crow hung still on its wire like some
broken marionette.
At the edge of the back eld, the woods began and I
found the path that would lead me all the way to the top
of Bullrush Hill, all the way back to New Hope. It was
only a fteen-minute walk home, but after being with Del,
it felt light years away. In just an hour, Del had shown me
a whole distant universe with its own set of dangers and
rules. I couldnt wait to return.
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