“What’s got you sad?” Madge said. Collette shrugged. She held the mug in front of her mouth.
“Will you tell me?” said Madge. Collette shrugged again. “Go on up, then. Sweet dreams. It’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Sweet dreams,” said Collette. She left Madge’s room and stood in the hallway, in front of the bathroom door, blowing on the steaming milk for a few minutes. She put her hand on the bathroom doorknob, turning it very slowly so that Valerie wouldn’t notice from the other side. It was still locked. Valerie had gone to the hardware store to buy the lock herself, had installed it without saying anything to Collette.
“Goodnight,” Collette said to the crack of light coming from the seam in the door.
“Goodnight,” Valerie said. “Weirdo.”
Upstairs, the bedroom was quiet and too hot. A spider crawled across the floor, and Collette searched for something to kill it with. She grabbed one of Valerie’s magazines and snuck up on the spider, which had frozen in its path. She slapped it hard once. When she pulled the magazine up, its legs had curled in on itself but they were still moving.
“I’m really sorry,” she said, “sorry, sorry, sorry,” with each slap of the magazine. The broken pieces of spider stuck to the magazine’s cover. She slid them into the wastebasket with the end of a pen.
Collette undressed under her blanket, changing into one of Madge’s vintage nightgowns. It had frills on the collar and round pearl buttons down the front. She got up to close the curtains, keeping her eyes on the reflection of the room in the window and not the quarry beyond it. She was in bed when she noticed the closet door was open. She got up again to close the door, but left it slightly ajar to show whatever she was afraid of that she was not really so afraid. Then she adjusted the bedroom door, making sure it was angled exactly with the knot in the pine floorboard. The milk had grown a skin, and she didn’t want it anymore.
She wrapped her sheet tightly around her, pulled the collar of Madge’s nightgown over her mouth. One pillow went behind her, and she held Mr. Rabbit to her chest.
Sometime after she fell asleep she woke up startled, and in the darkness could make out the shape of Valerie standing naked before the mirror, her back to Collette. The air smelled like bubble bath. When Collette’s eyes adjusted to the dark of the room, she saw the clean stripe across Valerie’s back. It was a tan line. The pale outline of skin in the dark made it look like Valerie was wearing a bikini. She turned toward Collette, as though she’d known she was being watched. She had smudges under her eyes where mascara had bled. Her eyes were shining. She put a finger to her lips.
Collette liked to turn over rocks in the woods, to watch what was underneath scuttle down into the earth. She was looking for a salamander, black with yellow spots. She found a daddy longlegs, a fragile lattice of moss, and mealy bugs that scattered. When she overturned a piece of rotten wood the salamander was there, its tail stuck up in the air in fear. It didn’t run from her, and she laid her hand down beside it, palm up, and waited, hoping it would forget it was afraid.
Its feet were sticky as it walked onto her palm, and its skin was sleek and slippery. The woods around her smelled like the inside of a greenhouse. This was Collette’s favorite smell.
There were people laughing up on the quarry cliffs, but Collette didn’t move to see them, and she didn’t want them to see her. She was holding the salamander very still, and she put her other hand gently over it, leaving a hole between her fingers so she could be sure it was still breathing. A long time passed before it went still in her hands. The trees around her cracked, sounds that came from deep inside their trunks. She eased the salamander into a cleaned spaghetti jar with holes poked through the lid. The voices up on the ridge rose. Collette put the jar in her backpack, leaving the top unzipped so it wouldn’t get too hot inside. The pine needles that covered the ground had pressed into her knees, and when she brushed them off the grooves in her skin looked like fingernail marks.
She heard it clearly then, Valerie’s laughter. Valerie’s laughter was carrying over the water, through the line of trees that separated the woods Collette explored from the quarry cliffs.
Madge was at work at the restaurant, with Valerie left to babysit. When Collette snuck off to play in the woods that morning, Valerie was dozing outside on the rocks, her feet in the water, the sleep lines from her sheets still imprinted on her shoulders. Collette almost left her a note, but she liked the idea of Valerie walking through the woods, her gaze searching between the tall pines for Collette, the sound of Collette’s name being called quietly at first and then louder.
But Valerie was not looking for her. Valerie was laughing, and her laughter came from the cliffs where Madge did not allow them to go. Collette kept low and climbed closer, to the bank where the woods overlooked the quarry. She ducked behind a tree that had fallen onto its side, the roots making a wall she could peek over.
And there was Valerie, on one of the lower ledges, one you had to jump to get to. It looked like the kind of jump that hurt your ankles when you landed. She was crouched at the edge of the rock, her hands arrowed in the direction of the quarry. She wore the purple bikini, and her head was bent down to her chest so her black hair hung over her face. A man crouched behind her, in a pair of swimming trunks and a white T-shirt. He had his hand on the small of Valerie’s back. He was showing her how to dive.
Even stooped over as he was, Collette could tell the man was Mr. Reed. He was lanky and tall, with ears that stuck out, dark eyebrows, a wide smile. His curled brown hair was thinning on top and cropped close to his neck. He had a wrinkle there, where the skin sunburned two crisp lines. He pressed Valerie’s head down, stretching her hands longer in front of her.
“This is how you do it,” Collette heard him say. He stood and took his shirt off. He was skinny, with softness above his hips and tight curls of hair across his chest. Valerie sat back, looking up at him, her legs dangling off the ledge. Her cheeks were red and shiny, and she was smiling, shielding her eyes. He got into the diving position again, then tipped forward into the water. His hands cut the surface first, his body arrowed in after. Collette watched his shape swim down deep, then emerge through the green murk, eyes squinched tightly closed.
He reached his hands up out of the water, planted them on the slab of rock between Valerie’s thighs, and lifted himself from the quarry, landing on top of her. Collette couldn’t see her sister anymore, only the dripping shape of Mr. Reed that covered her body. Valerie’s hair spilled out behind them.
“Hey!” Collette was about to shout, “Leave her alone!” when she heard Valerie say, clearly, “John.” Neither of them had called Mr. Reed John before. Collette watched as Valerie’s hand wrapped itself around the back of Mr. Reed’s neck, tugging gently, pulling him closer.
OK, she thought, as she walked through the woods back to the house, it’s OK, everything is going to be all right. She mouthed the thought to herself.
But when she got to her house, she took off her backpack and realized her mistake. She had leaned too long on the zippered opening while she watched Valerie. She had forgotten about the salamander. Of course, she thought, pulling the warm jar from her backpack. The jar had turned upside down on her walk back to the house, and her salamander lay near the lid, the tension in its limbs gone lax.
There was a burn in the back of her throat that would not go away. She didn’t want to touch the salamander anymore. Its eyes were still open, and she picked it out of the jar with a pair of tongs from the kitchen. She laid it on Valerie’s pillow. It curled in on itself like a tiny black snake.