St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Read Free Page A

But today I find myself walking around back behind the stadium to the red coop. The swamp hens greet me with a flurry of shin pecks, puffing out their patchy, distended chests. I pick them up, one by one, and unceremoniously dump them into the wooden crate. Then I attach the crate to our pulley, ignoring the jabbing beaks, and hoist it out over the water.
    The hardest part is figuring out how to manipulate the pulley, and then guessing when to pull the lever to release the crate. After that, it’s all over in a matter of seconds. I listen to the cooing panic, the frantic splashing. I wait, alone in the concrete half-moon of the stadium, until the splashing has stopped. Above me, the sun has nearly set. In the distance, the river is the color of a melting pearl. There, I think, I’ve done it. When the Chief gets back, he’ll make me the line girl for sure. And still I feel nothing—just a numb surprise at my own lack of affect, like watching your foot curl when it’s fallen asleep. I lie belly-flat on the blue mats. I peer into the turbid pit, feeling light as the feathers floating on the rosy water.
             
    On Saturday, Ossie announces that she is taking Luscious to the Swamp Prom. From her huffy, vaguely French pronunciation of “Swamp Prom,” I gather that I’m not invited. It will be held at seven in the Bigtree Café, she says, and I can be on the Decorating Committee. She hands me a box of party toothpicks and a bouquet of wilted balloons.
    “Can I come?”
    “Do you have a date?”
    We glare at each other. I nearly tell my sister about the Bird Man, and then bite my lip. She finally agrees to let me go to her dance, but only on the condition that I be the chief musician. Basically, this means that I have to supply a sack of quarters for the jukebox in the Bigtree Café.
    “Only love songs, only slow songs, mostly Patsy Cline,” she instructs.
    I haven’t actually spoken to my sister for several days. She comes home from her swamp dates after I’ve already fallen asleep, and then spends the day in bed. Now that she’s with Luscious, she has no free time for me. It’s not like I particularly want to chaperone her dates to the underworld, but I’m starting to feel a little crazy, a little like a spook myself, wandering around the park with no one to talk to. I’ve tried and failed to develop a rapport with the gators.
    “Hello, Seths,” I say, shaking a bag of alligator flea powder over their pen.
    “How is it going? Hot enough for you?”
    Sometimes a Seth will sneeze, but mostly they ignore me. In my library books, kids always seem to develop a transcendental bond with their animals, detective cats or injured eagles, stout ponies that save people from drowning. But the gators discourage this sort of identification, by being scaly and reptilian and so thoroughly alien, and by occasionally trying to eat my relatives. At this point, I am grateful for Ossie’s company, even if it means I have to share custody of her with a ghost.
    In the early evening, we decorate the café with hula lamps and old vanity posters of Luscious. The torchlight casts ivory shadows along the hairy walls of the tiki hut. Patsy Cline croons, “till death do us pa-a-art.” Even without a ghost boyfriend of my own, I recognize this phrase to be a stupid fantasy. Is Patsy for real? What makes Patsy think that she’ll get off so easy, loving only for a lifetime? I plunk in another quarter, scowling.
    I am sitting at a round café table, pretending to do a crossword puzzle, while Ossie waltzes around the room with Luscious. Her head is crowned with an unhappy hydra of geckos. We couldn’t decide between Yellow-head, a gaudy meringue, or Tokay, an understated avocado, so she’s worn them both. My sister isn’t a very good dancer. Yellow-head is livid, envelope-flat against her fancy bun. Tokay is trying to bite his leg off.
    “Wanna cut in, Ava?” She holds a hand to my forehead. “You okay?”
    “Nah, s’okay.