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

I mean, I’m okay. Maybe later.”
    “Okay”—she frowns—“just let me know. Luscious doesn’t mind…. A-va!”
    The music has stopped, without my noticing. I plunk in another quarter, scowling.
    Soon, Patsy recommences, filling the straw room. Ugh. My sister has retreated to a dark corner, where she is nuzzling into the palm straw of the tiki wall. I chew on my pencil, unable to concentrate. I keep snapping up at every groove in the record, watching the windows for the Bird Man. He’s gone; I’m certain of it. I’ve scouted around, and there isn’t a single buzzard left in our mangrove forest. I haven’t figured out how to feel about this yet.
    The next song is a slow dance. Ossie is struggling with her empty sleeves, trying to slip her own hand under her dress. I stop hearing the spaces between words, every song rising into an identical whine, bright and coppery, the wail of a jukebox banshee. My vision blurs. I’ll think I see the Bird Man’s face, his long fingers twittering against the glass, and then the panes go dark again. For a terrifying moment, the table melts into numbered squares, rows and columns, all blank.
             
    DOWN
    ACROSS
    DOWN
    ACROSS
             
    Something is going wrong with my eyes, my forehead, my hot, stoppered throat, and I don’t know how to tell my sister.
    What’s a six-letter word, the crossword asks me, for…
             
    It is way past some kid’s bedtime when we finally leave the dance. My head is still pounding, but I’m not about to spoil Ossie’s good mood. She is flush with success, already nostalgic for the Swamp Prom. “Did you see those moves, Ava?” She keeps spinning beneath the giant cypress trees, starry-eyed, comparing Luscious to Fred Astaire. We hold hands on the walk home—Ossie’s fingers shooting out and linking through mine in the dark—and I feel a joy so intense that it makes my teeth ache inside my skull. It is everything I can do not to clamp down on Ossie’s hand, a gator wrestler’s reflex. We sing some silly songs from Ossie’s
Boos! Spellbook,
sloshing through the reeds:

    I loose my shaft, I loose it and the moons cloud over,
    I loose it, and the sun is extinguished.
    I loose it, and the stars burn dim.
    But it is not the sun, moon, and stars that I shoot at,
    It is the stalk of the heart of that child of the congregation,
    So-and-so.
    Cluck! cluck! soul of So-and-so, come and walk with me.
    Come and sit with me.
    Come and sleep and share my pillow.
    Cluck! cluck! soul.

    The palmetto trees look like off-duty sentries, slouching together, gossiping pleasantly in the warm breezes. Fireflies wink on and off. The world feels cozy and round.
    “Is Luscious coming home with us?”
    “No,” Ossie says, unlocking the bungalow door. “He’s not going to come to Grandpa’s house anymore.”
    I do my Flying-Squirrel Super Lunge onto my cot, burying my smile in the scratchy pillow. As I hear the door slam shut, I worry that I might start crying, or laughing hysterically. Just us, I grin, just us—just us! I don’t want to lie and feign regret, but neither do I want to hurt Ossie’s feelings by delighting in Luscious’s expulsion from her body. Instead, I make a noncommittal pillow sound: “Hrr-hh-mm!”
    “Good night, Ava,” Ossie whispers. “Thanks for being the record player.”

    When I wake up, my sister is not in her cot. Her shoes are gone. Her sheets are on the floor. The glass terrarium, the one Ossie dipped into as her personal jewelry box, usually opaque with lizards, has been ransacked. Only the water bottle and the decorative lichens remain.
    “Ossie?”
    In the closet, all of her hangers are naked as bones. When I check the bathroom, it’s like entering an invisible garden, perfumed with soap blossoms. The mirror is fogged up, and there is a note taped to the corner:

    dir ava
    i am not a bigtree enemore. i am living on my honey-moan. don worry we will com back and visat you. i will fid mom