Chapter Annabelle
ANNABELLE
Sabrina spends homeroom scribbling hard in a notebook you’ve never seen before.
She says it is homework, but she never consults any books, just writes and writes, pausing to shake out her cramped fingers, her hand stained with smeared ink.
Look at me, you will her, but you can only make out some of her features through the curtain of her hair.
Even as the other girls hiss whispers about her, she doesn’t lift the tip of her pen from the page.
She writes like her life depends on it, and you can practically feel it in your own skin.
Her urgency, a burning in her chest, and the pain of biting down on her lip to keep her expression even.
To contain all the hurt in that one small place.
The girls in the corner have gotten bored with their whispers and have escalated their tactics. Now they have chants.
Annabelle the good, Sabrina the bad. She made her mother run away and now they’re both sad.
Annabelle the prude, Sabrina the slut. One spreads her legs and one keeps them shut.
Annabelle the wise, Sabrina the fool. Annabelle off to college, Sabrina will flunk school.
“Those are the stupidest rhymes I’ve ever heard,” you say, loud enough so Sabrina can’t help but hear you, so that the girls in the back hear too.
It takes all of your nerve to speak up against them and you know Sabrina knows this. You expect her to look at you sheepish with gratitude. Instead she spits at you.
“Fuck you, Annabelle. And you know you are getting fat, right?”
The girls howl. Sabrina leaves in a huff, two spots of color high on her cheeks, with her notebook tucked under her arm while Mr. Pierce, the homeroom teacher, uselessly calls after her, telling her he will have to write her up if she doesn’t return to her seat.
You look down at your middle, prod your thighs, pinch your upper arms.
It is true, that the sickness that plagued the end of summer is gone.
That in its place is a hunger that wakes you in the middle of the night like a presence in your room.
You eat only as much as you dare, having already been scolded by Sabrina for scarfing a box of macaroni and cheese at two in the morning when it was the last one left.
You’re not getting fatter, you tell yourself.
Sabrina’s just lashing out, being mean. You heard her on the phone again this weekend, murmuring into the receiver.
While she was talking to him, her voice small and high, you crept into her room and slid open her desk drawers.
Your fingers came away dusted with purple iridescent eyeshadow.
You rubbed them on the front of your sweatshirt, pushed yourself to think harder about where Sabrina might hide something.
You wanted the notebook the most but you would settle for any clue.
When you turned to her unmade bed you saw the glint of something metallic nestled in the sheets.
A lighter, just like the one Sabrina used to sterilize the needle when she stitched you together, an S scratched into the back.
You recognized it as the one the Coyote used to light his cigarette in the car that day.
You’ve tried not to think of it but it takes you back, his eyes narrowed in some private delight, like he was pulling off a practical joke.
The bell rings, startling you. As the girls in the back file out of the room one of them reaches into her bag and drops a can of chocolate SlimFast on your desk.
You feel relieved to go to history class first period.
It is barely October but Miss Hamilton already has the room decorated for Halloween, paper moons silhouetted with black cats against the window.
Bats swooping from the top of the blackboard.
Diaphanous tissue paper ghosts hang from the ceiling above the heat registers, twirl on their strings.
Behind you Jessica Wolfson whispers to Anna Kempe. Shit, do you have a tampon?
You shiver, as though someone has put a cold hand on the back of your neck. Start to count.
You haven’t had your period for over three months.
You pluck at your sweatshirt. Sabrina’s voice in your head.
You’re getting fat. You try to remember what your mother told you, all those years ago, about periods and when and why they come.
About what it means if it stops. But what you remember best is your mother talking about the moon, how women’s bodies are tied to its pull.
How women give life and how she summoned you and Sabrina from the darkness of the world’s unconscious, the two of you glinting with stardust. You liked this idea so much—your baby limbs shimmering in her womb—that you never bothered to question it. To hold it to the light.
Miss Hamilton clears her throat to get everyone’s attention, easy in this advanced class, smaller than the rest and populated by overachievers aching to get scholarships to Rutgers in a few years.
“Today we’ll be doing something a little different.
Holidays and celebrations are as much a part of our discussions of history and culture as battles and treaties, though the people writing your text books aren’t exactly doing you a service in that sense.
Folklore is an important part of any place’s history,” she tells them.
“Now, this isn’t exactly going to be on the AP exam in May but it is important to understand the stories a place can generate.
So, every October in the seven years I’ve been teaching here I’ve set aside part of the lesson plan to talk about a fixture of local folklore: the Jersey Devil. ”
The other kids let out theatrical groans.
You feel a sense of dread. You know the story, or at least you think you know the story.
But the departure from routine makes you nervous.
Miss Hamilton has a wink of mischief in her eye and you don’t like that either.
You’d rather just continue yesterday’s lesson about the Mayan civilization.
You’d rather be bent over your notes, scribbling away.
But you have no excuse not to look at her.
There’s a low gurgling in your guts that’s been persistent for days.
A bubbling sensation that won’t go away no matter how many saltines or pieces of toast you eat.
Today you’ve even tried no food at all, not giving your stomach anything to work away on in hope that it will go quiet.
But this feels like a mistake too; your hunger pangs so loud that you know the kids sitting close to you can hear them.
You cross your arms and hunch forward, waiting for Miss Hamilton to begin.
“There was a woman who lived in these woods long ago, before this territory was even a colony. Her name was Mother Leeds. Mother Leeds spent her days caring for her twelve children: washing clothes, heating food, filling up cups of water, scalding her hands as she scrubbed pots and pans. All this while her husband was off at the taverns drinking his wages away, almost never home to help, or when he was home he would take off his boots and pass out in his bed, leaving her to her endless work.”
You think of your mother, in the days before she left. Counting cans in the pantry. Staring out the windows.
“When Mother Leeds found out she was expecting her thirteenth child she was distraught. She didn’t know how they would afford to feed another mouth, how she could carry one more baby in her arms, how she would manage to wash even more diapers and cups and tend to more crying children in the night.
She cried and cried and finally issued a curse. Let him be the devil!”
The other kids laugh at the way Miss Hamilton makes her voice solemn and deep for the curse, at the way she shakes her fist to the sky. But you feel your throat tighten. Your palms go hot and damp in your lap.
“Weeks and months passed. Mother Leeds grew larger, got more tired and worn out with the constant demands of her children, with dragging her husband out of the tavern or begging him for some of his wages so that they might eat that week. Even though she was pregnant she gave most of her food to her children, saving just a few spoonfuls of watery soup or porridge for herself a few times a day. She tallied up the days on a piece of wood and knew that soon, the baby would be here and her life would get even more difficult. The cabin they lived in more crowded. Her nights sleepless. She did so much cleaning and cooking that the skin on her hands was raw, the color of uncooked beef. Her feet swelled from the hours of standing at the stove or rocking babies so that she couldn’t wear her shoes anymore.
When she needed to go outside she wrapped her feet in cloth.
“She went into labor on a stormy night. She had her oldest child, a girl of twelve, run through the woods to tell the midwife in town that Mother Leeds needed help. The midwife came, and so did Mother Leeds’s neighbors.
Or the wives anyway. The women of the town the only ones who might ever drop off an extra loaf of bread or a pair of their children’s mended pants that they had outgrown.
The women formed a circle around Mother Leeds as she writhed in pain.
All the while the rain is thrashing at the cabin.
They can feel the thunder grumble through the floorboards, and every few moments a bright bolt of lightning illuminates the room.
Mother Leeds contorts on the floor, begging one of her friends to save her, to spare her.
The pain is worse than with any of her other children, searing through her.
The women have lit candles and the light makes their faces look strange and unfamiliar to Mother Leeds, these people she has known her entire life.
They sing and chant and pray. They give her a spoon to bite down on when the pain peaks.
She grips their hands and squeezes tight enough so that they ache. ”