Chapter One

State Highway 59 becomes Plantation Road two miles after the exit for Barrens. The old wooden sign is easy to miss, even among the colorless surroundings. For years now, on road trips from Chicago to New York, I’ve been able to pass on by without any anxiety. Hold my breath, count to five. Exhale. Leave Barrens safely behind, no old shadows running out of the dark woods to strangle me.

That’s a game I used to play as a kid. Whenever I would get scared or have to go down to the old backyard shed in the dark, as long as I held my breath, no monsters or ax murderers or deformed figures from horror movies would be able to get me. I would hold my breath and run full speed until my lungs were bursting and I was safe in the house with the door closed behind me. I even taught Kaycee this game back when we were kids, before we started hating each other.

It’s embarrassing, but I still do it. And the thing is, it works.

Most of the time.

Alone, locked in a gas station bathroom, I scrub my hands until the skin cracks and a tiny trickle of blood runs down the drain. It’s the third time I’ve washed my hands since I crossed the border into Indiana. In the dinged mirror over the sink, my face looks pale and warped, and the memories of Barrens bloom again like toxic flowers.

This was a bad idea.

I shove open the bathroom door and squint into the early sunlight as I get back into my car.

At the turnoff I pass a deer carcass buzzing with flies, its head still improbably intact and almost pretty-looking, mouth open in a final sigh. Impossible to say whether it was hit by a car or struck by a passing bullet. Typically fresh roadkill gets scooped up by a good ol’ boy, loaded into a smoker, and made into venison jerky. I hit a deer in my old Ford Echo when I was seventeen; it was picked up even before I was. But this deer is, for some reason, undisturbed.

Hunting game is a main activity in Barrens—the main activity, actually. It’s built into the culture. If you can call it that. Hunting season isn’t officially until winter but every year kids sneak out with a six-pack, a spotlight, and their fathers’ guns to scout for a big buck or watch a few fawns and a doe grazing. And after a few beers, they take shots at whatever they can aim for.

My dad used to take me with him to hunt; our father-daughter bonding activities usually involved an outing to the taxidermist. Deer, coyote, and bear heads adorn the walls of our house like trophies. He taught me to step on the bodies of the pheasants he took down while he snapped their necks in one hand. I remember how annoyed he was when I cried over the first deer I watched him kill, how he made me place my hands on its still-warm body and the blood pulsing out of the hole that had ripped its life away. “Death is beautiful,” he said.

My mother was beautiful once, too, until bone cancer did its work. Chewed off her hair, carved her body into a shell of muscle and bone, took her cell by cell. After she died, my father told me it was the ultimate blessing and that we should be thankful, because the Lord had chosen her to be part of his flock in heaven.

I turn from Plantation Road onto Route 205, which eventually becomes Main Street, struck hard by the smell of cow manure in the heat. It’s mid-June, end of the school year, but it feels like high summer. Fields brown beneath the sun. Another mile on, I pass a brand-new sign: Welcome to Barrens, population 5,027. The last time I was here, ten years ago, the population was barely half that. Main Street is in fact the main street, but even on a nine-mile stretch, passing three cars is high traffic.

I count telephone poles. I count crows swaying on the wires. I count silos in the distance, arranged like fists. I turn my life into numbers, into accounting. For ten years I’ve lived in Chicago. I’ve been a lawyer for three. After six months in private practice, I landed a job at CEAW, the Center for Environmental Advocacy Work.

I have a future, a life, a clean and bright condo in Lincoln Park with dozens of bookshelves and not a single Bible. I meet friends in downtown Chicago bars and clubs and speakeasies where the cocktails have ingredients like lilac and egg white. I have friends now, period—and boyfriends, if you can call them that. As many as I want, nameless and indistinguishable, rotating in and out of my bed and life and on my own terms.

Most nights, I don’t even have nightmares anymore.

I swore, many times, that I would never go home. But now I know better. Any self-help book in the world will tell you that you can’t just run your past away.

Barrens has its roots in me. If I want it gone forever, I’ll have to cut them out myself.

Main Street. What used to be the chapel—a one-story concrete building with no windows where we used to go on Sundays, until my dad decided that the pastor was interpreting scripture as he pleased, infuriated particularly that he seemed too lax on “the gays”—is now a White Castle. The library where my mother used to take me to story hour as a kid now touts a sign for Johnny Chow’s Oriental Buffet. When I was growing up, we had practically no sit-down restaurants at all.

But so much is the same: the neon light from the VFW bar still flickers, and Mel’s Pizza, where I would ride my bike sometimes to get a slice after school, is still churning out pies. So much might have tumbled out of memory intact—the Jiffy Lube Pit Stop, Jimmy’s Auto Parts Supply, the run-down porn shop Kaycee Mitchell’s father used to own. Might still own, for all I know. Temptations has a new roof, though, and a new electric sign. So business has been booming.

I spot a crow on a telephone wire and another one nesting farther along. One crow for sorrow, two crows for mirth…

Past Main Street nothing looks the same: brand-new condos, a Jennifer Convertibles, a sit-down Italian place advertising a salad bar in the window. Everything is unfamiliar except for the salvage yard and, just beyond it, the drive-in movie theater. Site of many birthday parties with kids from Sunday school and even a depressing Thanksgiving right after my mom was buried. Our claim to fame, prior to the arrival of Optimal Plastics.

More crows perched on a pylon. Three, four, five, six. Seven for a secret, never to be told. A murder of crows.

Being back is giving me that tight-chest, lumpy-throat feeling. I grip the steering wheel tighter. At the first red light—the only red light in Barrens—I hold my breath and close my eyes. I am in control now.

The guy behind me lays on his horn: the light has turned green. I press the gas pedal just a little too hard and shoot forward into the intersection. When a familiar orange sign flashes in my peripheral vision, I signal to turn without thinking and swerve into the parking lot of the Donut Hole—this, like the drive-in movie theater, is totally unchanged.

I turn off the ignition. Sit in silence. After just a few seconds of no air-conditioning, it’s painfully hot. It must be eighty degrees—much warmer than it was in Chicago. The air is chokingly heavy with moisture. I wrestle off my leather jacket and grab my purse from the floor of the passenger seat. I could use a water.

As I’m opening the car door, a blue Subaru pulls up next to me, jamming its brakes at the last second and making me jump. The driver honks twice.

I slide out of the car, annoyed by how close the other driver has parked, and then notice the woman in the car is smiling at me and giving a frenzied, two-handed wave. She motions toward the Donut Hole and I have a split second to decide if I should turn back toward Chicago and forget this whole thing. But suddenly I am paralyzed. Somewhere along the line, my fight-or-flight instinct turned into freeze, turn invisible, wait for it to pass.

Misha Dale. Blonder, heavier, still beautiful, in her small-town way. Smiling. I used to dream of her smile—the way, I imagine, bottom-feeding fish must dream of the long dark funnel of a shark’s throat.

Misha at twelve: getting all her friends to pelt me with stale lunch rolls when I walked through the cafeteria. Misha at fourteen: planting an animal femur in my locker, claiming it was one of my mother’s bones, whispering that I kept body parts in my freezer, a rumor that achieved such aggressive popularity that Sheriff Kahn came over to check. At fifteen, she organized a campaign to raise money for the treatment of my acne. At sixteen, she circulated an online petition to have me suspended from school.

A sadist with a beautiful smile. She, Cora Allen, Annie Baum, and Kaycee Mitchell fed on me for years, grew fat and strong on my misery, ecstatic when junior year I tried to swallow half a bottle of Advil and had to spend a week at Mercy mental hospital—something my father refused to ever acknowledge and of which we have never spoken.

Next time, I’ll help, Misha whispered to me in the hall when I finally got back to school.

Terrible girls. Demonic.

And yet, I’d envied them.

“I don’t believe it. I heard you might be coming back.” Her eyes have softened but her smile is the same—sharp, and slightly crooked. “And your car! Lord knows you’ve done well.” She folds me briefly into a one-armed hug. She smells like cigarettes—menthol—and the heavy perfume used to mask them. “Don’t you remember me? It’s Misha Jennings. Dale,” she corrects herself, shaking her head. “You’d know me as Dale. My Lord, it’s been a long time.”

“I remember you,” I say. Panic flashes in me, quick as the baring of teeth. She heard I was coming back—but how? And from whom?

“You coming in?” She gestures toward the Donut Hole. “They’ve added about a million varieties in the past year. All thanks to Optimal, I guess. We’ve had something of a population boom around here, at least by Indiana standards.”

The mention of Optimal is bait—it must be. But this time she’s not the one who gets to stand on dry land and cast.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I’m coming in.”

“The jelly is still my favorite.” Her voice has softened, too. She genuinely appears happy to see me. “Do you keep in touch with any of the old group?”

I hesitate, suspecting a trap. But she doesn’t seem to notice my confusion. There is no “old group.” At least not that I was a part of. I just shake my head and follow her inside. I notice that when she yanks open the door, she makes sure to step ahead of me.

The Donut Hole is home to its namesake, the donut, as well as a truly random assortment of drugstore supplies and our historical society “museum,” a corner display with pamphlets for the taking. There’s even a small, unofficial free library in the Donut Hole—you leave one, you take one. The particular odor of artificial air freshener, musty old travel guides, and baked goods is like the barrel of a gun, shooting me into the past.

“Must be fun coming back after so long.” Misha bypasses the donut counter and heads instead for a wall of pharmaceutical products, where a handwritten sign blandly announces No Pharmacist/No Suboxone/No Sudafed Sold.

Misha picks out antacid, baby shampoo, lilac-scented body lotion, a box of Kleenex: all so normal, so domestic, and so at odds with the vicious girl who preyed on me for years.

“Fun isn’t the word I would choose.” Mistake is closer to it, especially now as I’m standing in front of Misha at the Donut Hole. “I’m here for work.”

When she doesn’t ask me what kind, I know for sure she’s heard.

“Well, I think it’s fun to have you back,” she says. Her tone is warm, but I can’t help but feel a current of anxiety. Misha’s fun was always the kind that drew blood. “Your dad must be glad to have you home after all this time. He worked on our fence for us just last summer, after that big tornado came through. Did a great job, too.”

I don’t want to talk about my dad. I definitely don’t want to talk about my dad with Misha. I clear my throat. “So you married Jonah Jennings?” I ask, with a kind of politeness I hope she’ll interpret, correctly, as fake.

Misha only laughs. “His brother, Peter.”

The new Misha is unpredictable. It’s as if the rules to the past have been rewritten, and I’m still learning the game. All I know of Peter Jennings is something I saw in the Tribune, a year or two into college—that he’d been arrested for dealing heroin.

Misha fiddles with the magazine rack. “Held out for as long as I could, but he was persistent.” She hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “We have a baby, too. Kayla’s out in the car. We’ll say hi on the way out.”

Even inside, with the air-conditioning going, it feels like standing inside a closed mouth. “It’s so hot,” I say. Misha’s not my business. Misha’s baby’s not my business. But still, I can’t help it. “You sure she’ll be okay?”

“Oh, she’s just napping. She’ll scream like anything if I try to wake her. God. Listen to me. Can you believe it? I swear, you blink and ten years go by and it looks nothing like you thought it would.” She eyes me as if we’re sharing a secret. “You know I work over at Barrens High School now? I’ve been vice principal for a few years now.”

This shocks me. Misha hated school almost as much as I did, though for different reasons. She found class to be an inconvenience, and the mandatory homework a distraction from getting felt up by random guys on the football team.

“I had no idea,” I say, although what I really want to ask is: How? Then again, Barrens High, a tiny school with a graduating class of about sixty, probably isn’t attracting the best and the brightest in the education system. “Congratulations.”

She waves a hand, but she looks pleased—pleased, and proud. “We make plans and God laughs. Isn’t that what they say?”

I can’t tell if she’s kidding. “I didn’t think you believed in all that religious stuff. In high school, you hated the Jesus freaks.”

But of course she didn’t: she only hated me.

Misha’s smile drops. “I was young then. We all were.” She lowers her chin and looks up at me through lashes thick with mascara. “It’s all water under the bridge now. Besides, you’re our big star around here. The girl who got out.”

Of course it’s bullshit. It has to be. She tortured me, tortured my family, got pleasure out of making me cry. I didn’t make that up. I can’t have made it up. She left a razorblade taped to my homeroom desk with a note saying, “Just do it.” That’s not water under any bridge I know. She spread rumors, humiliated me, and why? I had no friends anyway. I wasn’t a threat. Back then I was barely even a person.

Still, when she takes my arm, I don’t pull away. “I could use an iced coffee. How about you?”

“Nah,” I say. I swing open the cooler door and stare at the rows of bottled water, gripping the handle to steady myself. Six bottles, side by side. Three in each row, except the last, which has only one. That’s the one I grab. “Just this.”

Even though I really want to say, Stop touching me. I’ve always hated you. But maybe this is Misha’s ultimate power, like the witch in The Little Mermaid: she steals your voice.

I watch her fill up an iced coffee. I’m trying to figure out how to excuse myself, how to say, Good-bye, have a very mediocre life, hope I never see you again as long as I live, when she suddenly blurts, “You know, Brent still asks about you sometimes.”

I freeze. “Brent O’Connell?”

“Who else? He’s a big shot at Optimal now. Regional sales manager. Followed in his father’s footsteps and worked his way up.”

Brent was from one of the richest families in town, which for Barrens means a basketball hoop, aboveground pool, and separate bedrooms for Brent, his older sister, and their parents. Brent’s father wore a tie to work, and his mother was like Carol Brady: big smile, blond hair, very clean-looking. Brent was hired at Optimal straight out of high school. Whereas the other guys had after-school jobs pumping gas or stocking shelves at the grocery store or even sweeping stables at one of the local farms, Brent had an internship at Optimal.

“He’s still single. A shame, isn’t it?” She stirs her coffee slowly, like it’s a chemistry experiment and the wrong blend of sugar and cream will make the whole place blow up. One sugar. Stir. Two sugars. Stir. Three. Then, suddenly: “He always had a crush on you, you know.”

“Brent’s with Kaycee,” I say quickly. I have no idea where the present tense came from: five minutes back in town and the past is invading me. “I mean, he was.”

“He was with Kaycee, but he liked you. Everybody knew that.”

Brent O’Connell was one of the most popular guys in Barrens. What she’s saying makes no sense.

Except…

Except for the kiss, the one kiss, the night of graduation. A first kiss almost exactly like I’d always dreamed it: an unseasonably warm June day, swimming weather, almost; the smell of smoke turning the air sharp; Brent coming through the trees, lifting a hand to his eyes against the dazzle of my flashlight. How many nights had I walked the woods behind my house to the edge of the reservoir, hoping to run into him just that way, hoping he would notice me?

It was so perfect I could never be sure I hadn’t made it up, like I did Sonya, a dark-skinned colt-legged girl who lived in the attic of our old house when I was a kid and used to play games with me in exchange for leaves, twigs, and branches I brought her from outside; she had once been a fairy, I explained, when my mother found the attic nesting with rotten leaves and beetles. Like the games I made up after my mom died, to bring her back. Skipping over the sidewalk cracks, of course, but other ones, too. If I could hold my breath until five cars had passed…if I could swim down to the bottom of the reservoir and plunge a finger in the silt…if there were an even number of crows on the telephone pole, any number but ten.

Misha carefully seals a top on her iced coffee, pressing with a thumb around the edges. “Why?” she asks—so casually, so sweetly, I nearly miss it.

“Excuse me?” For a second, I really don’t understand.

Finally, she looks up. Her eyes are the clear blue of the summer sky. “Why do you think Brent liked you so much?”

I clutch my water bottle so hard the plastic takes on the imprint of my fingers. “I—I don’t know,” I stutter. Then: “He didn’t.”

She just keeps smiling. “All that long hair, maybe.”

And then, unexpectedly, she reaches out to tug my ponytail lightly. When I jerk away, Misha laughs as if embarrassed.

“Maybe that’s where all that BS came from, Kaycee wanting us to hurt your feelings,” Misha goes on. “She was cuckoo, that one.”

“She was your best friend,” I point out, struggling to keep up with the conversation, to haul myself out of the muck of memory.

“She was yours, too, for a little while,” she says. “You remember how it was. She scared me to death.”

Could it be true? Whenever I remember that time, it’s usually Misha’s face I picture, her crowded teeth and those big blue eyes, the look of pleasure whenever she saw me cry. Misha was the vicious one, the pit bull, the one who made the decisions. Cora and Annie, the followers: they trailed after Misha and Kaycee like worshipful little sisters.

Kaycee was the prettiest one, the one everyone adored. No one could ever say no to Kaycee. Kaycee was the sun: there was no choice but to swing into orbit around her.

Now, ten years older and ten years free of her best friend, Misha seems to be at ease. “Brent will be so happy you’re back, even if you’re on opposite sides now. Well,” she adds, seeing my face, “it’s true, isn’t it? You’re here to shut Optimal down?”

“We’re here to make sure the water is safe,” I say. “No more, no less. We’re not against Optimal.” But to the people of Barrens, the distinction will make little difference.

“But you are with that agency group, right?”

“The Center for Environmental Advocacy Work, yeah,” I say. “News travels fast.”

Misha leans a little closer. “Gallagher said they’re going to shut off the water to our taps.”

I shake my head. “Gallagher has his signals crossed. Anything like that would be way down the line. We’re just here to check out the waste disposal systems.” Law school teaches you one thing above all: how to speak while saying absolutely nothing.

She laughs. “And here I was, thinking you were a fancy lawyer. Turns out you’re a plumber instead!” She shakes her head. “I’m glad to hear it, though. Optimal’s been such a blessing, you have no idea. For a while we thought this town was turning to dust.”

“I remember,” I say. “Believe me.”

A look of sudden pain tightens her forehead and pinches her mouth together. And for a long second she appears to be working something out of the back of her throat.

Then she grabs my hand again. I’m surprised when she steps closer to me, so close I can see the constellations of her pores.

“You know we were only kidding, right? All those things we did. All those things we said.”

I guess she takes my silence for assent. She gives my hand a short, quick pulse. “I used to worry sometimes about you coming home. I used to fear it. I thought you might come back looking for—” She breaks off suddenly, and I feel a cold touch on the back of my neck, as if someone has leaned forward to whisper to me.

Kaycee. I’m sure she was about to say Kaycee.

“For what?” I ask her, deliberately trying to sound casual, spinning a rack full of cheap sunglasses and watching the sun get sucked into their polarized lenses.

Now her smile is narrow and tight. “For revenge,” she says simply. This time, she holds the door open and allows me to pass through it first.

Misha’s baby is fussing in the car seat. As soon as she spots Misha, she begins to wail. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding when Misha reaches in to unbuckle her.

“This is Kayla,” she says, as Kayla begins to cry.

“She’s cute,” I say, which is true. She has Misha’s eyes, but her hair, surprisingly thick, is so blond it’s nearly white.

“She is, isn’t she? Thank God she didn’t get Peter’s coloring. The Ginger Ninja, they call him at work.” Misha jogs Kayla in her arms to quiet her. I somehow can’t square an image of Peter Jennings—blunt-jawed and stupid-looking—with this child. But that’s always true of babies, I guess: it’s not until later that they inherit their parents’ ugliness. “You’re helping put us on the map, you know, living all the way out in Chicago with your big job.” It’s half-compliment, half-command. Subtext: Don’t fuck with us.

“You’ll have to come by the house for supper. Please. You at your dad’s? I still have the number.” She turns and fastens Kayla into the back seat again. “And let me know if you need anything while you get settled in. Anything at all.”

She slips into the car before I can say don’t bother, and there’s no way in hell I’d be staying at the old house anyway. As soon as she’s gone, it’s like a hand has released my vocal cords.

I will never need a thing from you.

I will never ask you for anything.

I’ve always hated you.

But it’s too late. She’s gone, leaving only a veil of exhaust that hangs in the thick summer air, distorting everything before it, too, vanishes.