Chapter Seventeen
HECTOR
We don’t speak for the rest of the day.
After our conversation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this girl had something to do with the deaths of those sailors. It makes no sense, of course. She was less than thirty feet away from me the whole time it was happening, and then she was unconscious.
I don’t understand, but my gut says I should probably leave this girl alone and flee far, far away.
But I stay. She’s not quite better. She looks frail, the way she’ll refuse to move for hours at a time, just lost in her thoughts. Maybe it’s selfishness, but taking care of her makes me feel good. I experiment with the flour and sugar to make some really bad pancakes, and she gobbles them down. Her appetite is a great distraction from everything else. That evening, she consumes another sleeve of crackers and jam, plus a load of biscuits as dense as rocks. She watches me, but says nothing. Not like she’s afraid of me—I get that plenty already, just walking down the street in Duluth—but like she’s afraid of what I think of her.
Smart girl.
But after a while, even I can’t bear the silence. When I pick up her dirty dishes, I say, “I wish we had more strawberry jam. We’re running out.” I pause, because she’s staring at me from her thin bed. But her eyes brighten at my comment. “Uh. I guess you like berries.” Dumb thing to say, but silence makes me talk without thinking.
“Strawberries are not berries,” she says.
Since when? I want to say. “Then why are they called—”
“They aren’t true botanical berries. They are an aggregate accessory fruit.” When I say nothing because the definition does diddly for me, she adds, “A false fruit, or pseudo fruit. Like pineapples.”
I lean against the wall by the door, dishes still in hand. “Wow. I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know things, too.” She sits up in bed, eyes brighter. “You like to eat fish. Why?”
I laugh. “Because I have no choice? Not much else to catch on this island, and I don’t plan on eating a moose.” She waits and seems to know that’s not the only answer I’m capable of giving. I focus on a hangnail and explain. “Well, my mom in Korea made it for me every Sunday. She’d sprinkle it with salt and cook it until the skin got crispy. I don’t really like fish any other way.”
“But no butter.” The girl pouts.
Oh. That’s right. Her version has been a bit different. “Hey, butter is good. I like the butter.”
She smiles, and we just hang in that silence for a minute, not knowing what else to say. Soon, her eyes flutter. Before long, she’s asleep again, and I wonder how a convo of berries, fish, and butter could be so exhausting.
The next day, I spend the afternoon with the radio, listening to more about the sinking of the St. Anne. Apparently, she was an old ship and bent too much in the middle from her heavy cargo. It’s weird to hear about a ship that’s over fifty years old, dying in such a way. But then again, all things have to die, right? Even ships. It’s sad, though. Funny how I care more about an old boat than my uncle or my dad.
There are still Coast Guard ships on the horizon. I put away the binoculars when the girl exits the bedroom. She eyes the binoculars on the kitchen counter where I put them and curls her lip a little, like she’s cussing at them. Weird.
“They’ll be there a week,” she says again, as if I forgot our conversation yesterday. I nod, but this time, I’m not bringing up the evils of the sweet Siren song of death, so she actually smiles at me. “Are you well?” she asks me.
I want to laugh. Well? Does she mean healthy? Intact? Sane? “I have no idea,” I say.
She grins at my response. What the hell? Sometimes I think if she were stuck here with the varsity football quarterback, the one who’s going to Princeton on a full ride and looks like fucking Tom Brady, she’d have torn him to shreds already.
Her white hair rises a little in the front from static, and sticks to her forehead in that annoying way that only happens to people with superfine, stick-straight hair. My head is covered in thick black stuff with a stubborn wave to it. Static runs screaming away from my head, as do combs and brushes.
She battles with her own strands for a moment, trying to push them back and flatten them down. She huffs with annoyance and marches to the kitchen, where she pulls out a large kitchen knife from a drawer. She grabs a hunk of hair in one fist and holds the knife to it.
Holy shit. “Hold on! Geez, what are you doing?”
“I’m cutting it,” she announces.
That would explain why it’s four different lengths and so irregular. “Don’t you have scissors?”
She blinks at me. Apparently, logic is some orange-winged creature she’s never met before.
“Oh.” She puts the knife down and rummages through a drawer full of twine, pamphlets, and keys that probably don’t open anything. She pulls out an old pair of long shears with black handles, the kind that teachers always have at their desk. And then she grabs another handful of hair and starts to hew at it with the scissors.
“Wait, wait.” I put my hands up to stop her. “Let me do it.”
She freezes with the open blades against a hunk of hair.
“I’m no expert, but I’ve watched the barber do this a million times, so…I’m a visual expert. Sort of.”
For a whole minute, she just stares at me. It’s distinctly uncomfortable. This girl would win the world championship of staring contests. This girl would make a damn fish blink.
“All right.” She takes the scissors and puts them on the counter.
I go back to the bedroom, where the three-legged stool sits beneath the now-empty mug of honey water. When I carry the stool into the kitchen, I notice that the stone cairns dotting the floor have been moved aside to make room for the stool. Oddly, the stones are still perfectly balanced on each other. If I’d moved them that fast, they’d just be a scattered mess.
I pat the stool, and she bends over and pats it, too.
I frown. “No, I mean, sit down here.”
“Oh.” She plops down and I stand behind her, reaching to pick up the scissors. I hope they’re not too dull, or else this is going to be as effective as cutting with spoons.
“How short do you want it?” I ask.
“Short.”
“Uh. Can you be more specific?”
“Like Jean Seberg.”
“Who’s that?”
“Jean Dorothy Seberg was an actress born on November 13, 1938. She starred in thirty-eight films in Hollywood and Europe, and died of a barbiturate overdose in Paris at the age of forty.” She turns to see my expression of undiluted surprise, then points to my head. “It was short. Like yours. Shorter, even.”
I nod. Okay. Short it is.
I start cutting bits off here and there, aiming to keep it about an inch long. I try not to touch her skin, but it’s hard not to. Especially when I start snipping off the bits at the nape of her neck. I do what the barbers do, and capture a lock of hair between two extended fingers, then cut it off on the palm side of my fingers to protect her skin. Her neck is so soft, like velvet or silk. And it’s still really warm, like she’s got a furnace within her body.
Every time I pinch another bit of hair and nestle my fingers against her neck, she blinks and swallows. And I blink and swallow. I’m not used to being so close to girls. To any girl. Carla’s a faint memory these days.
No one at my high school wanted to have anything to do with me. I oozed leperdom out of my pores. The truth is, most people want normal when it comes to choosing friends or hookups in school. Complicated is for the movies. Complicated gets you shunned faster than a case of publicly announced chlamydia. Complicated always ends badly. My life in the last ten years has only ever been school, my uncle, Walmart, and those letters. Those shitty letters.
There was never room for normal.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
I’ve stopped cutting, forgetting where I was. I’m not in Duluth anymore. I’ll be eighteen in a few months. I’ve left it all behind. All that matters right now are these scissors, and this girl.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m almost done.”
Her white hair is cropped short now. She looks like a pixie, or some sort of elf. I shuffle to the front of her and reach for some longer wisps of hair near her forehead. She leans closer to meet me in the middle. The neck of her nightgown bows open, and I see the tops of her breasts when I look down.
God, she’s so beautiful.
I swallow again and will my body to not embarrass me. I go from novice haircutter to an expert in seconds, desperate to finish before my whole body fires up like an inferno. I finish off the last few pieces, put the scissors down, and step away. “It’s all done.”
Her long, delicate fingers touch her head all over. She smiles, delighted. She stands up and approaches me, her breasts tenting the front of her gown. I take a step back, and then another. I’m afraid to be so close. She’ll know I’m attracted to her. I wish my body would calm down. Soon, my back hits the stone fireplace, and she closes the distance between us. She points at me with a tapered index finger, reaching until her finger pad touches my neck. It’s not a delicate touch, but deliberate and oddly aggressive. I get the distinct feeling that she’s feeling the pulse in my neck. It must be going a mile a minute. She opens her mouth.
“My name is Anda.”