The counselor comes back with the child’s records. “Are you serious about this?”
“Very.”
“Well, the first thing you’re going to have to do is improve your grades. Which means applying yourself a good deal harder than you have so far. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
The child’s terseness does not seem to bother the counselor at all. “We can increase your load a little, put some meat in here and there. What about summer school, are you up for that?”
“All right.”
“Let’s say we give it a couple of months, then if you stay serious about this, we’ll have another chat.” When the child rises from her seat, the counselor adds, “Sometimes the hardest lesson to learn is when to ask for help.”
“There’s no problem,” she replies and leaves the office.
And there isn’t. Not anymore.
She severs all connections with her friends and the game. In fact, she stops almost everything that is not directly tied to school and her work. That term, she receives one C and manages to raise the rest of her grades to B’s and A’s. The crowd of former friends rename her Casper. The next term, she receives her last B ever. By that spring her former friends no longer even greet her in the hall.
Two weeks before her seventeenth birthday, she graduates with honors. Two universities offer her full rides. She accepts the offer from Georgetown because they agree to defer her entry a year.
The day she turns seventeen, she gives herself a ticket to Europe as her birthday present. Her parents do not even know she has left until they receive her one and only letter, sent the week after her arrival in London.
Two months later she has made her way across France and down the length of Italy. Her passport and a wad of traveler’s checks are stuffed deep inside her backpack. She likes introducing herself as Casper, and by the time she arrives in Rome it is the only name she uses. She makes no plans further along than the next seventy-two hours. She wears Gortex ankle boots and high wool socks and hiking gear and a Gypsy kerchief sewn with silver spangles to hide her hair.
She meets some Dutch backpackers at the hostel in Naples who invite her to take the train over to Bari. From there they will catch the two-day ferry to Athens. On the train ride they talk about mystic beaches untouched by tourist hordes-the southern coves of Crete, Cleopatra Island off Turkey, Lamu Island near the Kenyan coast, Niias in Indonesia. The child listens and laughs and shares a wineskin of fiery red. As the day trundles on, she aches with the realization she has finally found a reason to use the word happy and mean it.
If only she could hold on to that feeling a little while longer.
The second night of their boat crossing, three of the backpackers drug her wine and rape her repeatedly on the upper deck between the two smokestacks.
All she remembers afterward is their drunken laughter and the way smoke keeps rising to stain the star-flung sky.
The next morning, Kirsten worked in Marcus’ front garden forming a periwinkle border around the central elm. She dug between the roots and tried to hold to a circular formation. A high summer wind blasted through a cloudless sky. Heat squeezed sweat from her forehead like a weightlifter working a sponge. Why she remained here at all was a question that only aggravated the fissure in her brain. Two warring factions battled in fierce mental salvos. Impossible choices. Impossible decisions.
Six months ago she had started working as Marcus’ research staffer. Almost immediately the neighbors had taken her presence as a sign of something deeper in the making. They welcomed her with flowers and shrubs from their own gardens. It was the clearest possible message both of her own acceptance and of the affection they felt for Marcus.
It was also a quiet signal of their watchfulness, for never did she receive the next gift until the previous one was planted. Half this neighborhood attended Deacon’s church. While they were far too polite to say a thing, Kirsten knew the eyes were scouting carefully. Her comings and goings were the subject of the same stream of gossip as their own children. This she knew from Netty, who had heard the mildly approving chatter at the supermarket checkout counter.
The only exception to the community’s cordiality was Deacon’s wife, Fay Wilbur. She was inside right now, doing her thrice-weekly cleaning. The woman had said nothing, but Kirsten sensed the storm brewing. Fay eyed her with the same distaste she would a worm among her vegetables. There was going to be a reckoning. It was only a matter of time.
Her internal foment and the day’s searing wind masked the man’s approach entirely. Then a shadow fell over her and a man’s voice said, “You just gotta be the Yankee dolly they warned me about.”
Kirsten scrambled to her feet. “Can I help you?”
“Soon as they heard I was stopping by, they said I was gonna fall in love with this dolly and I might as well get used to the idea right fast.” He was a redheaded behemoth with a blade for a face. All his features slanted sharply toward the arrow of a nose, the angles so tight even his forehead appeared retooled. The swept-over curl of greasy red hair almost met with his eyebrows, which only accented the barbed glint to his eyes.
When his gaze drifted down her sweat-stained front, Kirsten shifted her grip on the trowel. “I asked you what you wanted.”
His grin ridged out in taut compression until his eyes almost disappeared. “Just came by to deliver this check. You ain’t so rich you’d pass up some extra greenbacks. Not with Glenwood camped over here on the trashy side of the river.”
“I don’t recognize you as one of Mr. Glenwood’s clients.”
“That’s all right, dolly. We know Marcus.” A blast of wind pried back the sleeve of his rumpled jacket like the lid of a filthy gray jar. Tattoos crawled down his wrist and over the back of his hand. “Somebody oughta told you by now, it ain’t healthy to do your planting in the high heat.”
She took a step away, backing toward the porch. “Unless you are registered as a client I can’t help you.”
He tracked her, moving closer in the process. “I’m the one doing the helping, or I would, if you’d stop this two-step across the lawn.”
“Are you or are you not a client?”
“I’m what you might call an interested third party. Never had the occasion to meet old Marcus personally. Couldn’t hardly pass up the opportunity to call on the man himself when I heard he was knocking on New Horizons’ door again.”
She kept her face to him and tried to angle her backward motion toward the house. “Please come back another time and talk with Mr. Glenwood directly.”
“You don’t look all that busy to me.” He paced lightly along with her. “Hot and bothered, maybe. But I’ve always liked my ladies to glisten.”
Kirsten aimed the dirt-flecked trowel straight at the man’s heart and screamed, “Netty!”
Quick as a striking cottonmouth, the man snatched the trowel from her grasp. He tossed it in the air and caught it at shoulder height, such that it was now aimed for a downward killing blow. His grin was a distillation of menace.
“What on earth’s going on out here?” The front door slammed back. “Sephus Jones, are you messing with that lady?”
The grin relaxed a trifle. The man leaned down and jammed the trowel so hard it disappeared into the earth up to his fist. He then reached into his jacket and plucked out an envelope. He whipped forward and jammed it into the front pocket of Kirsten’s shorts. In and out so fast she did not have time to scream. “Deliver that check to Marcus for me, will you?”