Turtle is wearing old Levi’s over black Icebreaker wool tights, her T-shirt clinging to her stomach with damp, a flannel, an olive drab army coat much too big for her, and a mesh-back cap. She thinks, I would give anything in the world to be you. I would give anything. But it is not true, and Turtle knows that it is not true.
Rilke says, “I really like your coat.”
Turtle looks away.
Rilke says quickly, “No, like—I really do. I have nothing like that, you know? Like—cool and old?”
“Thanks,” Turtle says, pulling the coat up around her shoulders, drawing her hands back into its sleeves.
“It’s this whole, like, army surplus, Kurt Cobain chic you have.”
Turtle says, “Thanks.”
Rilke says, “So, Anna is, like—killing you on those vocab tests.”
“Fucking Anna, fucking whore,” Turtle says. The coat sits huge about her shoulders. Her hands, white-knuckled, wet with rain, are clenched between her thighs. Rilke barks out a startled laugh, looking forward down the aisle and then in the other direction, to the back of the bus, her neck very long, her hair falling about her in straight, black, glossy strands. Turtle does not know how it is so glossy, so straight, how it has that sheen, and then Rilke looks back to Turtle, eyes alight, putting a hand over her mouth.
“Oh my god,” Rilke says, “oh my god.”
Turtle watches her.
“Oh my god,” Rilke says again, leaning in conspiratorially. “Don’t say that!”
“Why?” Turtle says.
“Anna’s really very nice, you know,” Rilke says, still leaning in.
“She’s a cunt,” Turtle says.
Rilke says, “So you want to hang out sometime?”
“No,” Turtle says.
“Well,” Rilke says, after a pause, “good talk,” and returns to her book.
Turtle looks away from Rilke, at the seat ahead of her, and then out at the window, sheeted with water. A pair of girls tamp a bowl into a blown-glass pipe. The bus shudders and jars. I would just as soon, Turtle thinks, slit you from your asshole to your little slut throat as be your friend. She has a Kershaw Zero Tolerance knife with the pocket clip removed that she carries deep in her pocket. She thinks, you bitch, sitting there with your nail polish, running your hands through your hair. She does not even know why Rilke does this; why does she examine the ends of her hair; what is there to see? I hate everything about you, Turtle thinks. I hate the way you talk. I hate your little bitch voice. I can barely hear you, that high-pitched squeak. I hate you, and I hate that slick little clam lodged up between your legs. Turtle, watching Rilke, thinks, goddamn, but she is really looking at her hair as if there is something for her to see about the ends.
When the bell rings for lunch, Turtle walks down the hill to the field, her boots squelching. She wades out toward the soccer goal, hands in her pockets, and the rain sweeps across the flooded field in drifts. The field is enclosed by a forest black with rain, the trees withered and gnarled with their poor soil, thin as poles. A garter snake skates across the water, gloriously side to side, head up and forward, black with long green and copper runners, a thin yellow jaw, a black face, bright black eyes. It crosses the flooded ditch and is gone. She wants to go, to bolt. She wants to cover ground. To leave, to take to the woods, is to throw open the cylinder of her life and spin it and close it. She has promised Martin, promised, and promised, and promised. He cannot risk losing her, but, Turtle thinks, he will not. She doesn’t know everything about these woods, but she knows enough. She stands enclosed in the open field, looking out into the forest, and she thinks, the hell, the hell.
The bell rings. Turtle turns and looks back to the school above her on the hill. Low buildings, covered walkways, throng of raincoated middle schoolers, clogged downspouts sheeting water.
IT IS MID-APRIL, ALMOST TWO WEEKS SINCE THE MEETING with Anna. Blackberries have clambered into the old apple trees and are knitted into a wildly blooming canopy. Quail mince in nervous coteries, topknots bobbing, while sparrows and finches go wheeling and banking among the trunks. She comes out of the orchard and through the staked raspberry field to Grandpa’s trailer. Streaks of mold have run down the panels. The aluminum coping around the windows is caulked with moss. Pockets of leaf litter grow cypress shoots. She hears Rosy, Grandpa’s old dachshund/beagle mutt, heave herself up and come to the door, shaking herself and setting her collar to tinkling. Then the door is thrown open, and Grandpa stands in the doorway and says, “Hey there, sweetpea.”
She climbs up the steps and leans the AR-10 against the doorjamb. It is her gun, a Lewis Machine & Tool rifle with a U.S. Optics 5-25x44 scope. She loves it, but it’s too damn heavy. Rosy hops up and down, flopping her ears.
“Who’s a good dog?” Turtle asks Rosy.
Rosy shakes herself excitedly, wagging her tail.
Grandpa settles at the foldout table, pours himself two fingers of Jack. Turtle sits down opposite him, takes her Sig Sauer from a concealment holster in her jeans, drops the magazine, and leaves the gun on the table, locked open, because Grandpa says that when a man plays cribbage with his granddaughter, the two of them should be unarmed.
He says, “Have you come to play some cribbage with your grandpa?”
“Yeah,” she says.
“You know why you like cribbage, sweetpea?”
“Why, Grandpa?”
“Because cribbage, sweetpea, is a game of low animal cunning.”
She looks up at him, smiling a little, because she does not at all know what he means.
“Ah, sweetpea,” he says, “I’m joking with you.”
“Oh,” she says, and allows her smile to overtake her whole face, turning a little away from him, touching her thumb to her teeth shyly. It feels so good to have Grandpa teasing with her, even if she doesn’t understand.
He is looking at her Sig Sauer. He reaches across the table, sets a hand on it, lifts it up. The slide is locked back, the barrel is exposed, and he inspects it for fouling and touches it with a finger pad for grease, turning it this way and that way in the light. “Your daddy takes care of this gun for you?” he says.
She shakes her head.
“You take care of this gun for yourself?” he says.
“Yeah.”
He swings the takedown lever and drops the slide catch. Carefully he removes the slide from the frame, sits inspecting the rails.
“But you never fire this thing,” he says.
Turtle picks up a deck