The story cuts off at a weird point for various reasons. Still developing the rest. Forgive.
_____
Now I speak to you, are you in there?
You have her face and her eyes
but you are not her
and we go at each other like blankettes
who can't find their thread and their bare
-- Tori Amos, “Bells for Her”
The mountains were too squat, and the fuzzy coat of fir trees around them forewarned unbearable winters as harsh lake winds dissipated any air of welcome in the town. Little Valley nestled between ski resorts and deep ravines, and though not many people moved in, there were always enough new children to ensure the town was going to keep on existing no matter the weather.
My family grew flighty and found Little Valley when I was old enough to be enrolled in the first grade. It was close enough to kindergarten that the teachers could pretend that I had never been tainted by any suburban schooling. On my first day of class in the new windy town, my mother put me in dress shoes that looked like two blobs of spilled ink, pulling a blizzard of a white dress over my head. She drove me to the school that was tiny and colorful enough that I could have believed it was made of Legos, and I toddled into the office where the puffy secretaries cooed over me as my mother signed my name on a clipboard.
One secretary pinched my cheek, her arm fat wobbling, and I burst into tears. Shoving a box of tissues to my escort, they forced me to go to my classroom anyway, taking me away from my laughing mother and pulling me down a labyrinth of bricks and construction paper. The escort opened the classroom door without giving me a moment to breathe, and the students looked up, little squinting bats startled by the light.
I saw they all wore holey t-shirts with bears and John Deere on them, overalls and tiny steel-toed boots. With my skirt puffed out around my knees, I looked like I had sailed in on a gust of wind. That feeling never left me; I was the girl who had sailed in dressed like a fairy for the rest of my schooling there.
The teacher didn’t introduce me in front of the classroom before lessons like they do in movies, and the students craned their heads over their books to see the name she taped to my desk. A whispering chain of “Daisy DeLillo” spread across the classroom, but they all seemed to forget the name by lunchtime. This was understandable, as the cafeteria was a monitored cavern where language was unnecessary and children screamed and squirmed at their tables. I was ushered in by a teacher’s aide and clung to a round table, sniffling into my lunchbox as images of a wild jungle with vicious monkey creatures circled in my mind.
There were children crawling under chairs and touching the dirty floor everywhere, so I didn’t spot her circling around my table’s legs right away. Resting my chin on my lunchbox, I caught sight of her blonde hair, sun-kissed and tangled, and then her sweaty hand reaching up toward my face. Her face, freckled and round, was in front of mine when she grabbed one of my pigtails and yanked it with all her might. She smiled with glee as I screamed, and didn’t let go, even when I kicked her with my ink-blob shoes.
“Fairy queen,” she said, letting go of my pigtail after saying this and ducking under a nearby table.
Tears were on my cheeks again, and my eyes were starting to sting. The girl was gone, but there were new faces creeping toward my table as I screamed and kicked my feet.
A lunch monitor, wobbling like the office secretaries, gathered me up and led me out into the hallway. She wiped at my face with a crumbled napkin as I held my pigtail and blubbered about the wild girl who crawled under tables. The monitor asked me for a name, but I didn’t know any names, so I cried into the folds of my white dress, my pantyhose showing and my dress shoes sticky from spattered ketchup.
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The weekend brought peace from the muddy jungle that was school; I could explore the angles of my new house without being forced to step outside. I could bury myself in the familiar sofa with my books and fill my heart with them and forget about foreign-acting schoolchildren and jello-skinned secretaries. With certain stories in mind, I tiptoed around the new house and searched for secret corridors and trap doors.
The new house could hardly be seen from the road. It hid under the trees and behind the weeds that grew along the ditches, the front porch larger than half the house. It was almost unsettling how the road was a stretched thread of civilization and the house remained connected to it through the stones of the driveway. Beyond the tiny stones and pebbles, our house was lost to the foot of the mountains, the fir trees green hairy beasts that leaned in and whispered frightening stories to my new home, making it creak and shiver.
There were tracks in the earth as well between the trees in our backyard. I found out what made these on Sunday morning of that first weekend, when a raucous buzz came from behind our house, making me think the mountains spawned a breed of giant killer bees that had smelled the honey my mother put into her tea. I ducked down in my chair and she pushed her tea mug aside, standing up and walking toward the sliding glass backdoor.
I heard the whoosh of the door opening, and my mother calling out, “Ay, what do you all think you’re doing there?”
Padding quietly over, I grabbed the bottom of my mother’s bathrobe for security and peered toward the source of the incessant buzzing roar that rose and fell in hoarse waves. Past the small inclination of our backyard and into the trees, two ATVs spat like fat cats and edged between the firs. The wheels spun muddy circles, and bounced over the roots; the smaller vehicle held the figure of a young boy, his body poised like a boomerang over the handles. The larger ATV, moving more sluggishly through the trees, had two people on it. The driver was another young boy, red-faced and poised.
Sitting behind him, her hands clinging to the pockets of his jacket, was the mad girl who had yanked my pigtail.
There were leaves in her hair and she looked at me, her face squinted up and her cheeks like apples. Her upper arms were an even brighter red and she bounced up and down on the back of that seat, looking frighteningly wild though I just screwed up my face and stared back at her. The two boys she was with were looking at my mother though, and I don’t think they would have stopped if they had expected us to be in the house. But they hadn’t. The ATVs rolled to jerky stops at the hairline of the trees and they stayed there, on the defense.
“What do you kids think you’re doing? That’s our property there, all the way back far into those woods. Now, look at these tracks you’ve left, mud in our backyard,” my mother chided evenly, gesturing with her hands.
“Sorry, Miss,” the boy on the smaller vehicle shouted out. “There hasn’t been anybody living here for the summer, so’s we just been driving through here to get to road without going near the ravine.”
“You aren’t supposed to be driving those on the road, young man. And you don’t even have helmets. That girl there could fall off and crack her head, and then look.”
“We’re sorry, Miss. We won’t drive her anymore,” the boy said, giving the other boy on the four-wheeler a quick look. The engine began to buzz again.
“You better not,” my mother called back, shaking her head and dismissing them. The boys began to kick up the ATVs, ready to flee from a disgruntled neighbor, when to my horror the girl climbed off the back of hers and stepped onto my backyard. The boys gave her only a momentary back glance before their muddy hornets turned back into the trees and took off.
I wanted to duck behind my mother, but the mad girl waved to me and then I knew I was doomed. At least my hair wasn’t in pigtails that day.
“Do you live nearby?” my mother asked the girl, her voice all sugar cookies now.
The girl pointed sharply off in one direction, her finger waggling. “We live only three minutes that way.”
I was left with the beast girl then. Left to socialize and make friends, my mother bustling off into the bathroom, the door still open a crack so she could tell if I snuck off into my room or even hid with the bookshelves in the basement. Standing behind the glass door, the girl ambled over, her feet in massive red boots and wrinkled denim washing over her legs.
“What’s your name?” the girl asked, her tone harsh, barbed with curiosities and speculations. She was on my land, my territory, and I felt my skin prickle all up my arms.
“Daisy,” I answered, my voice too plush compared to hers. She looked at me with eyes that seemed to be disassembling me, saying nothing for too long of a time. Then,
“Bernadette Blackwood.” She thrust her hand out, but didn’t give me time to shake, as she immediately drew it back and began to eye up my house. “It’s easier to say Bernie. Those were my two brothers I was with. They’re idiots. Your house is all ugly and stuff, ain’t it? Are your parents going to fix it up?”
“It ain’t ugly,” I defended, raising my voice as much as I felt brave enough to do. Upon having explored the corners and turns of the house all weekend, there existed a fledgling fondness.
“Yeah, i’ssa ugly house, and that old woman used to live here, and she was ugly too.” Bernie crossed her arms and the matter was settled. “Have you ever gone four-wheelin’?”
“No.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Let me see your house. I’ve never been inside.”
The house cast a delicate weave of safety over me, and her presence was picking it apart. I wanted solitude, to be cradled by the empty rooms of my new fort. Bernie’s feet were planted firmly before me though, and I couldn’t figure out how to remove her. I could pick up a book and then set it down when I was finished, but I couldn’t put away other people.
