After a couple of days at the girls’ ranch, it became clear that Chantal had decided she was my own personal earthquake.
My third day there, I’d satisfied my itch to explore every inch of our house and yard. We were the last house at the end of a long dirt road, backed up against the woods, and I’d grown curious about the other houses and the rest of the place. Sunday, after church, Mrs. Bobbie said Chantal could show me around the expansive sixty acres.
The girl took me behind the house and through the woods, looping back around to the entrance, where the ranch’s mile-long red-clay drive turned off the state road. A hand-carved wooden sign swung on the branch of a gumball tree, and even though I’d seen it before, I smiled.
“Welcome to Piney Woods Girls’ Ranch,” Chantal announced in a tour-guide voice and then took off, jogging down the drive. I followed her, panting and struggling to keep up in the sticky south-Georgia September heat, until she slowed at the main offices. The buildings were designed to look like an Old West town, ramshackle and shingled and hung with old-timey signs that said “Office” and “Library” and “General Store.” A boardwalk connected them, and our feet made satisfying clomping sounds as we walked over it.
The building on the end was where the director, Mr. Cleve, and his staff worked. I’d met him that first night—he was a jovial man with a white beard. There was a sparse library with homemade bookshelves, a game room with a Ping-Pong table and board games in cabinets, and one other building, for group activities and meetings. From the Old West town we walked down a hill past two large vegetable gardens, to an open-air pavilion where Chantal said everybody from each house gathered together on Sunday evening for something called Vespers. Past the pavilion, we started back down the dirt road where all the houses, including ours, sat in two untidy rows. We dawdled for a minute in our front yard, which was mostly dirt and crabgrass.
“If we go in, we’ll have to finish our Sunday-school lesson,” she said. “Wouldn’t you rather go to the lake? And maybe somewhere else, a place I haven’t showed you?”
We’d been to church that morning. And Sunday school after that, where a lady had handed out worksheets on a parable that Jesus told about a woman who swept her house. The teacher had kept staring at me while she put paper cutouts of the characters in the story onto a flannel board, as if it was a lesson she thought that I, in particular, could learn from. A few times, her gaze dropped down to my clothes, and I thought I saw her nose wrinkle the slightest bit. I hadn’t had a chance to check the cast-off-clothes box in the hall closet, so I was wearing the old, stained yellow pants with the hems ripped out that I’d brought from home.
And now that I thought of it, why hadn’t Chantal shown me the lake in the first place, on our tour? It was just like her, keeping something back. Trying to show me who was boss.
I told Chantal I wanted to go to the lake.
It was a pond, actually, a murky man-made thing crusted over with green algae and rimmed by thick, sharp-edged grass. A cloud of gnats swarmed over it, and I made up my mind that I would never dip a toe in its disgusting depths. There was a short, wobbly dock of splintered wood, booby-trapped with nail heads that snagged at our shoes when we walked to the end of it. In the summer, Chantal said, the girls were allowed to swim or fish with poles they kept up at the ranch house. Onshore, a cobwebbed canoe lay flipped upside down. When I asked about it, she looked at it blankly for a second, like she’d never noticed it until now.
“We don’t use it. No oars.”
I pushed at one end with the toe of my sneaker, but she grabbed my arm. “Don’t. There are probably snakes under there.”
Something buzzed in my head—not so much a warning bell as just an indication of the presence of new information. The upside-down canoe was important to Chantal, and I could imagine several reasons why that might be so, mainly because I had immediately recognized it as a prime hiding place.
“You want to see a secret place?” Chantal said quickly.
“Okay.”
“Swear on your mother’s grave that you won’t tell anyone.”
“How come?”
“Just swear.”
“All right. I swear,” I said, not bothering to mention my mother wasn’t dead. Besides, there probably wasn’t really a secret place, so who even cared?
Chantal and I set off, following the curve of the lake until we reached the woods. About a half mile in, we arrived at our destination—a moldy plywood structure that looked like a cross between a tree house and a fort. It was built by some girls who’d lived at the ranch long ago, maybe even in our same brown brick house. They’d filched the wood from somewhere—probably from Mr. Al, who, since I’d arrived, had spent every afternoon in the driveway, surrounded by stacks of lumber and tools. He was building a doghouse for Bitsy, the ranch hound who wandered from house to house, begging scraps and pooping in everybody’s front yards. I thought that was sweet of him.
Inside the clubhouse was another world—a distant planet strung with old Christmas garlands and grimy cast-off pillows, and filled with an impressive stash of snacks, magazines, and tattered paperbacks. It reminded me of what the inside of a genie bottle must have looked like, and smelled like it too—that same scent of sweet cologne that clung to Omega and Shellie and Tré. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.
“These woods don’t belong to the ranch,” Chantal said. “They’re a national forest. So we can do anything we want here—smoke, drink beer, or read dirty books. Even if we get caught, there’s not a damn thing Mrs. Bobbie can do about it.”
I nodded, truly and legitimately enthralled.
“You ever read a porno book? They have them here. And Omega and them bring boys out here and have sex sometimes too. But you’re just eleven, so I can’t say anything else about that.” She ticked a lock over her mouth. I was relieved.
That night, after we all sat down to dinner and Mr. Al said the blessing, Mrs. Bobbie pointed to a large orange pill sitting in the upper-right corner of my place mat. I scanned the table. All the other girls had identical pills sitting on their mats as well. Chantal had two—one orange and one small blue.
“Vitamins first,” Mrs. Bobbie said.
I swallowed the pill with one big gulp of cherry Kool-Aid, then noticed the other girls only sipped theirs. I wondered why.
Mrs. Bobbie watched me with a gimlet eye. “It’s a multi.” She said it like mult-eye. “Because I can’t afford to be driving you gals into town for this, that, and the other. Around here, if you get a fever, we call the preacher ’cause he lays on hands for free.”
“He sure does,” one of the Super Tramps muttered.
One of the girls giggled, then all of us got to laughing; even Mr. Al cracked a grin and shook his head. Mrs. Bobbie hushed everyone. She declared she had something else to say, and all at once everything got really quiet. My stomach flipped—the way it used to every time I came home to find our apartment door locked even though it was too early for my mom to have gotten home from work for the day. That stomach-flip feeling meant she was inside and up to no good, and I would have to find a place to wait until dark. It meant I’d have to figure out a way to stay out of sight of the older boys who hung around the parking lot.
“There’s some food missing,” Mrs. Bobbie announced. “From my top shelf.”
She didn’t elaborate or say what the food was, but I figured it was something good, cookies or candy or something. I’d seen inside the pantry—counted everything from stem to stern one morning before anybody was up. Mrs. Bobbie was on the ample side, and she probably didn’t like it when the kids got into her snacks.
“We don’t hide food here, Daphne,” Mrs. Bobbie went on, and I jerked in surprise. “There’s a gracious plenty to go around for growing girls. And anyhow, when you hide food in your room, it brings roaches, so you need to bring it back to me right away.”
I glanced around the table. The Super Tramps were all staring at me—Omega with her beautifully pursed fuchsia lips, Shellie with her languid eyes, and Tré behind her curtain of stringy hair. I could feel the weight of their attention, like stones crushing the breath out of me. Their eyes were aflame with some expression I didn’t recognize. It might’ve been admiration. Or bloodthirstiness.
I looked down at my plate. We’d all been given a scoop of macaroni and cheese with chopped-up hot dog mixed in it. The whole concoction was dusted with crushed potato chips. There were no vegetables or fruit accompanying the meal, only the one half a cup of Kool-Aid to drink. It wasn’t a shock that the food had been taken, but all the same, I hadn’t been the one to do it.
“Mrs. Bobbie has a special diet from her doctor, hon,” Mr. Al said. “She gets sick if she don’t take in enough calories.” His face was kind under the floppy blond wings of hair, but I had a hard time believing what he was saying. I’d never heard of a sickness like that.
“I didn’t take it,” I said.
Mrs. Bobbie made a sound like Of course you did. She’d been doing this long enough to know better, I guessed. She knew how foster kids were.
Chantal piped up. “I’ll check our room.”
“Now, hold on.” Mr. Al put out a hand, but Mrs. Bobbie shook her head at him. Chantal scooted back her chair, ran out of the room, and, in an astonishingly short amount of time, returned with three small boxes of yogurt-covered raisins. She laid them on the table in a neat row and I stared at them, openmouthed.
“She ripped a hole in the mattress and stuffed them up inside,” she announced, then turned to see my reaction.
My face heated and my eyes watered. I hadn’t done that. I didn’t know there was a hole in my mattress. Chantal would, though. She sure would. That bitch!
Mrs. Bobbie regarded me, her lips pursed. “Where’s the rest of it, Daphne? There was more.”
“No, there’s not. I don’t know. I didn’t take those raisins.” My voice shook.
But there was the evidence lined up beside my plate, three tiny red boxes. I looked at Mr. Al, hoping for some sort of help, but he glanced over at Chantal.
“Let’s eat up, girls,” he said and hunkered over his plate of hot-dog mac and cheese. He didn’t look at me again.
Later, after Mr. Al and Mrs. Bobbie had settled in front of the evening news and we were cleaning the kitchen, the Super Tramps crowded around me at the sink. They were so close, their scent enveloped me. It was sweet, some kind of cotton-candy perfume I didn’t recognize.
“What did you do with the rest of Mrs. Bobbie’s food?” Omega said. “If you tell us, we’ll share it with you.”
“I don’t know.” I stole a glance at Chantal, who was flicking crumbs off the table with a dishtowel, spraying them across the floor I’d just swept. “I didn’t take it.”
They stared at me blankly for a few more awful seconds, then ordered Chantal and me to finish the kitchen for them. Then they all trooped upstairs to their room.
“Homework, ladies!” I heard Mrs. Bobbie shout after them from the TV room, and a door slammed above us in response. Chantal went back to flicking crumbs from the table instead of coming to help me at the sink. I turned back to the suds without a word.
After lights out, I waited patiently for Chantal to finish kicking my bunk. When she finally quit and I heard her breathing deepen, I climbed down the ladder and tiptoed down the hall. I tapped on the Super Tramps’ door as loudly as I dared and immediately it swung open. Tré in a T-shirt, her hair in short braids, stood before me. A pink light glowed behind her. I could see the other two girls were awake too, propped on their elbows, heads close where they’d pushed their beds together. That cotton-candy smell enveloped me again. I really liked it.
“What?” Tré said. Her fingers were splayed out on the door, nails slick with wet black polish.
“I think I know where the food is,” I said.
Her eyes widened and she flashed a delighted smile down at me. I thought suddenly how pretty she looked with her hair pulled back. Her skin was porcelain, and her legs were long and toned. I wondered why her mom and dad had given her away. And why nobody had adopted her. Suddenly, Omega appeared in the doorway and, shoving Tré aside, propped her hip against the frame. She was wearing a T-shirt too, but she’d cut the sleeves and neck out of hers and it showed the ribs of her sternum. The rise of small breasts.
“Where?” was all she said.
I told her about the overturned canoe. After which, she clicked the door shut in my face.
In the morning, after our breakfast of cornflakes, there was a flurry of gathering backpacks and jackets and shoes. I didn’t have any of the above, so I walked out to where the white bus waited to take us to school. Someone plucked at my shirt. I turned. It was Omega.
“Hold out your hand.” I did, and she dropped into it two Chips Ahoy cookies. “Don’t fucking eat ’em where anyone can see. You have to be alone in the girls’ bathroom. Alone, locked in a stall. Okay?”
I nodded, curling my fingers around the crumbly cookies. My stomach growled as I imagined them melting in my mouth. The sharp, sweet tang of the chocolate chips in the crevices of my molars.
“You know where the clubhouse is, right?” Omega said.
I squinted up into the piercing morning sun, up at her gorgeous face. Her lashes were coated with mascara and lined with a thick black sweep. Her mouth glowed fuchsia. She looked like a girl that should be on TV.
“Chantal showed me,” I said.
She pursed her pillowy lips. “I should’ve known she’d sneak. I bet she lied and said that we let her come in, didn’t she?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to give the wrong answer and ruin my chances.
“Because we don’t let her in,” Omega said. “And we never will.”
I smiled.
Omega did too. “You wanna know why? She’s a disgusting piece of shit. She’s trash. Her parents killed each other, did you know that? Her mother shot her father in the face, and then shot herself in the face, right in front of Chantal.”
My throat went dry.
“You know what she did after that? She ordered pizza and watched a movie. I’m not even kidding.”
I waited. There was more, I could tell from the gleam in Omega’s eyes.
“Has she thrown up yet in your bedroom?” she asked.
“Well, she will. She has these fits and throws up everywhere. And we don’t want her getting sick in our clubhouse. Having one of her fits and upchucking all over the place like that demon-possessed girl in The Exorcist.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about, but I nodded. Omega studied me with narrow eyes. I wondered how she got her eyeliner to wing perfectly like that on both sides.
“We got something better than cookies in the clubhouse, if you’re cool,” she said. She had a devilish tone in her voice. “After school, okay, little Daphne-Doodle-Do? You come to the clubhouse and hang out with us.” She reached out and tweaked my left nipple and the shock of it, the sting, actually made my eyes water. “Titty twister!” she shouted over her shoulder. I didn’t say anything. My newly budded breast burned.
I watched her saunter away, her hips swaying in her tight, low-slung jeans. Her deputies running to flank her as they approached the bus. They were a force to be reckoned with, the Super Tramps. And I was going to be one of them.
When I got to school, I scooted into the girls’ bathroom, counted the cookies one more time for good measure, then threw them in the trash. I brushed the crumbs from my palms, as something warm and strong surged through me. It was a new sensation, one that made me feel ten feet tall. I didn’t need cookies. And I wasn’t going to be a fat fuck anymore. Omega had given me a gift. And it had made me into someone completely different.
It was the new Daphne.
And she could withstand a million earthquakes.