She stands watching him for three heartbeats. She pops the magazine, ejects the round from the chamber, and catches it in her hand, locks the slide back, and sets the gun, magazine, and shell on the table beside her dirty plate. The shell rolls a broad arc with a marbly sound. He wets a finger and turns the page. She stands waiting for him to look up at her, but he does not look up, and she thinks, is this all? She goes upstairs to her room, dark with unvarnished wood paneling, the creepers of poison oak reaching through the sashes and the frame of the western window.
That night Turtle waits on her plywood platform, under the green military sleeping bag and wool blankets, listening to the rats gnawing on the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Sometimes she can hear the clack clack clack of a rat squatting on a stack of plates and scratching its neck. She can hear Martin pace from room to room. On wall pegs, her Lewis Machine & Tool AR-10, her Noveske AR-15, and her Remington 870 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Each answers a different philosophy of use. Her clothes are folded carefully on her shelves, her socks stowed in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. Once, she left a blanket unfolded and he burned it in the yard, saying, “Only animals ruin their homes, kibble, only animals ruin their fucking homes.”
IN THE MORNING, Martin comes out of his room belting on his Levi’s, and Turtle opens the fridge and takes out a carton of eggs and a beer. She throws him the beer. He seats the cap on the counter’s edge, bangs it off, stands drinking. His flannel hangs open around his chest. His abdominal muscles move with his drinking. Turtle knocks the eggs against the countertop, and holding them aloft in her fist, purses open the crack and drops the contents into her mouth, discarding shells into the five-gallon compost bucket.
“You don’t have to walk me,” she says, cuffing at her mouth.
“I know it,” he says.
“You don’t have to,” she says.
“I know I don’t have to,” he says.
He walks her down to the bus, father and daughter following ruts beside the rattlesnake-grass median. On either side, the thorny, unblooming rosettes of bull thistles. Martin holds the beer to his chest, buttoning his flannel with his other hand. They wait together at the gravel pullout lined with devil’s pokers and the dormant bulbs of naked lady lilies. California poppies nest in the gravel. Turtle can smell the rotting seaweed on the beach below them and the fertile stink of the estuary twenty yards away. In Buckhorn Bay, the water is pale green with white scrims around the sea stacks. The ocean shades to pale blue farther out, and the color matches the sky exactly, no horizon line and no clouds.
“Look at that, kibble,” Martin says.
“You don’t have to wait,” she says.
“Looking at something like that, good for your soul. You look and you think, goddamn. To study it is to approach truth. You’re living at the edge of the world and you think that teaches you something about life, to look out at it. And years go by, with you thinking that. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Years go by, with you thinking that it’s a kind of important existential work you’re doing, to hold back the darkness in the act of beholding. Then one day, you realize that you don’t know what the hell you’re looking at. It’s irreducibly strange and it is unlike anything except itself and all that brooding was nothing but vanity, every thought you ever had missed the inexplicableness of the thing, its vastness and its uncaring. You’ve been looking at the ocean for years and you thought it meant something, but it meant nothing.”
“You don’t have to come down here, Daddy.”
“God, I love that dyke,” Martin says. “She likes me, too. You can see it in her eyes. Watch. Real affection.”
The bus gasps as it rounds the foot of Buckhorn Hill. Martin smiles roguishly and raises his beer in salute to the bus driver, enormous in her Carhartt overalls and logger boots. She stares back at him unamused. Turtle climbs onto the bus and turns down the aisle. The bus driver looks at Martin and he stands beaming in the driveway, a beer held over his heart, shaking his head, and he says, “You’re a hell of a woman, Margery. Hell of a woman.” Margery closes the rubber-skirted doors and the bus lurches to a start. Looking through the window, Turtle can see Martin raise his hand in farewell. She drops into an open seat. Elise turns around and puts her chin on the seat back and says, “Your dad is, like—so cool.” Turtle looks out the window.
In second period, Anna paces back and forth in front of the class with her black hair gathered into a wet ponytail. A wetsuit hangs behind her desk, dripping into a plastic bin. They are correcting spelling tests and Turtle hunches over her paper, clicking her pen open and closed with her index finger, practicing a trigger pull with no rightward or leftward pressure at all. The girls have thin, weak voices, and when she can, Turtle turns around in her chair to lip-read them.
“Julia,” Anna says to Turtle, “can you please spell and define ‘synecdoche’ for the class? Then please read us your sentence?”
Even though they are correcting the tests, and even though she has another girl’s test right in front of her, a girl Turtle admires in a sideways-looking and finger-chewing way, even though the word synecdoche is spelled out in the other girl’s neat script and glittery gel-ink pen, Turtle can’t do it. She begins, “S-I-N …” and then pauses, unable to find her way through this maze. She repeats, “S-I-N …”
Anna says gently, “Well, Julia—that’s a hard one, it’s synecdoche, S-Y-N-E-C-D-O-C-H-E, synecdoche. Would anyone like to tell us what it means?”
Rilke, this other, far prettier girl, raises her hand, forming an excited O with her pink lips. “Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which the part is made to represent the whole; ‘the crown is displeased.’” She and Turtle have traded tests, so Rilke recites this from memory, without looking at Turtle’s page, because Turtle’s page is blank except for the first line: 1. Suspect. Believe. I suspect we will arrive late to the party. Turtle does not know what it means, when the part is made to represent the whole. That doesn’t make any sense to her, nor does she know what it means, the crown is displeased.
“Very good,” Anna says. “Another one of our Greek roots, the same as—”
“Oh!” And Rilke’s hand shoots up. “‘Sympathetic.’”
Turtle sits on the blue plastic chair, chewing on her knuckles, stinking of the silt from Slaughterhouse Creek, wearing a ragged T-shirt and Levi’s rolled up to show her calves, pale and swatched with dry skin. Under one fingernail, a rusty grime of synthetic motor oil. Her fingers have its prehistoric smell. She likes to massage the lubricant into the steel with her bare hands. Rilke is applying her lip gloss, having already gone down Turtle’s test with a neat little x beside each empty line, and Turtle thinks, look at this slut. Just look at this slut. Outside, the windswept field is spotted with puddles, the flooded ditch cut from the ash-colored clay, and beyond that, the forest’s edge. Turtle could walk into those woods and never be found. She has promised Martin that she will never, not again.
“Julia,” Anna says. “Julia?”
Turtle turns slowly around to look at her and waits, listening.
Anna, very gently, says, “Julia, if you could pay attention, please.”
Turtle nods.
“Thank you,” Anna says.
When the bell rings for lunch, all of the students stand up at once and Anna walks down the aisle and puts two fingers on Turtle’s