Chapter 20
You comin’ to the Wicked Woods after school?
Bring matches.
And a knife.
I crouch at the beer-colored creek, pressing a hot sharp stone into my palm.
We used them as bottle openers, sticking the sharp ends under stolen beers, grunting with effort.
Sometimes, if we couldn’t get it open, we’d smash the rock into the bottle neck, press our lips to the broken glass, and drink, long and deep.
Luke chugged an entire beer like that before vomiting blood and splintered glass.
The local kids used to swim here after school, tearing off our school uniforms, splashing in T-shirts and cotton underwear until Heath told me not to.
Later, the year-ten boys arrived, roaming the woods in their feral packs, hot with hunger.
They found me on my knees, water pooling the tops of my thighs, stuffing slimy palmfuls of creek mud in my fists, squishing it through the cracks in my knuckles.
Then one of them called my name.
Mangled hair down to the shoulder blades, he stared hard at my T-shirt and the mud in my fists, and his eyes were like a shark, starved. A Bell Miner bird chimed, once, twice, sounding like a dinner bell. My skin stung. My mouth burned hot. I prayed he would look away.
Prayed he wouldn’t.
You’re either the shark or the food.
For the first time in my life, I was both.
Yeah, I liked it.
I squeezed my fist tighter, letting the mud splatter on my thigh like hot chocolate.
Heath charged the water then, grabbed my elbow, pulled me roughly to my feet. He stuffed my wet legs into my skirt, marched through the creek, and split his knuckle to the bone on the boy’s teeth.
That was the first summer without my mum.
She’s shot through, Dad said. Can ya blame ’er?
In our town, mums often shot through, never to be spoken of or heard from again.
Can ya blame ’er?
Yes. I could. And did. My hometown hummed with anger, and after my mother left, I joined its chorus. I had no idea what to do with all that pain. Heath and I were expected to simply Get on with it. You got nothin’ to complain about. Why are you crying? Little bitch.
Sometimes I slumped at the foot of my bed, out of breath even while sitting still. Sometimes I cut my palms with fishing hooks, let the blood drip onto my tongue, tasting like salt and rage.
I get to my feet, peel my jeans and T-shirt off, think of the hungry boy as I wade in.
Think of him again as I drop to my knees, grabbing at mud, squeezing it through my fists.
I glance at the creek bank, remembering.
I wonder if the boy left town, but he probably didn’t. Blood boys don’t leave blood towns.
I lie on my back and drift in the filthy current, thinking about Amy Anderson.
Amy was different. From us, I mean. We were mud-crusted fingernails, bare-chested and underfed.
Feral. Amy was nice. Amy had bulky teeth, a limp ponytail, and a mum who dropped her off at our filthy creek on summer afternoons because she wanted to hang out with Trav and me.
She didn’t technically live in Kangaroo Bay, and I guess that was the first line drawn between us.
Us. Them.
Her house in Pine Bay had soaring ceilings, air-conditioning, and private access winding down to the sea.
She also had a mum.
Trav and I were the only ones invited to her tenth birthday party.
I was surprised, because Amy and I weren’t really friends.
We just sat next to each other at school, and when she found out that Trav and I met up at the creek, she got her mum to drop her off.
She never asked if she was invited. She wasn’t.
Trav and I wandered into her home, slack-eyed and silent, the filthy cuffs of our jeans dragging on her slate floor. We watched a movie on her sugary pink bed, piled high with heart-shaped pillows. It started out fine, until it wasn’t.
I was digging into the popcorn bowl when I saw something. Amy’s pink-polished fingers inching toward Trav’s hand. Her hand grew closer, grazing his. I felt myself grow very, very still. My jaw locked. My chest burned with anger.
Trav drew his hand away and tucked it into his pocket, keeping his eyes locked on the movie. Amy’s hand hovered in the space his used to be, and the silence stretched and stretched. I hid my rage away, but the heat kept building.
Later that week, I invited Amy to the creek, alone.
And I tried to drown her.
I watched her floating in her striped swimsuit, eyes half closed and restful.
And I crouched on the bank, hungry like a shark.
I don’t remember crossing the water, don’t remember if she cried out when I grasped the back of her skull, shoved my knee atop the small of her back, and held her under.
But I do remember her clawing at my arm, breaking the skin.
I remember the pink glitter in her nail polish sparkling in the sun.
I remember the fight fading as her limbs stopped thrashing.
I remember the stillness, the strange calm.
In the silence, I thought of my brother. Saw his face in my mind. Surf Lifesaver of the Year. I felt guilty. Watched.
I let her go and she struggled toward the creek bank, flailing like a dying fish.
Sometime later, she quietly emptied her desk and asked Miss McKenzie if she could sit at the front of the class, away from me, please. But she didn’t tell her the reason why, not until later.
Amy spent the next week in the front row and averted her eyes whenever she saw me. And I spent that time staring hard at the back of her head, remembering.
That week, I spent every afternoon in this creek with Trav, spitting water into his open mouth. He’d let me hold him under, hand cupping his skull, mouth on the back of his neck. We took turns drowning each other, over and over again. Drowning and kissing. Kissing and drowning.
Until it felt like the same thing.
—
I slip my clothes back on, follow the creek’s muddy mouth. In some areas, the grass is yellowing and brittle, crunching under my shoes. A moment later it’s thigh-high, tickling my kneecaps. The blackbirds pause on branches as dry and bare as bones.
I pause under a ghost gum, spitting on the red dirt and scraping it in with the heel of my shoe until the ground looks like a bloodstain.
When we were children, Trav and I would stand in this spot and spit ourselves dry.
We dipped our fingers into the red earth, smearing the paste all over our arms and cheeks.
Shivering with energy in the fading sunset, we shook up heavy cans of gasoline, pouring them onto old clothing and setting it alight with stolen matches; then we threw our heads back, howling for the dark.
We sprinted through the woods, lighting it up with fire and our madness, blackbirds falling silent as we barreled through, screaming childish warnings they needn’t have listened to.
We’re coming! We’re coming! Watch out!
On Friday nights, our dads staggered home from the pub, a universe of rage boiling inside them. On those nights, you’d find stray kids hungry and scattered around town like dogs. Too afraid to go home.
Nobody really spoke about the violence. It’s not something you speak of. It changes you, though. I watched smooth-cheeked boys turn cruel and canine. Even Trav grew sullen and aggressive, lost to his mum. Lost to everyone. All pain is the same, but what we do with it isn’t.
Heath became our guardian. He built the cabin here, gave us a safe place to run to, until it wasn’t safe anymore.
Something shrieks through the woods, and I glance over my shoulder, peering into the semi-dark. Skin prickling, I wait there, squinting through the woods. The birds stop chirping mid-song, the cicadas burrow, and the woods are so quiet that all I hear is the thumping of my heart.
I press ahead, squeezing past charred tree trunks, low-hanging branches that scratch at my cheeks, chin, and neck. I hold a hand in front of my face to protect it, tripping over the twisted carpet of roots, walking deeper and deeper into the woods.
Tucked away like a crouching cat is a cabin shaped like a capital A. It’s half buried in broken branches and autumn leaves, as if the Wicked Woods were trying to swallow it whole.
The A-frame stretches up to the bloodied sky, and a hot wind weaves through its wooden rib cage, whistling unpleasantly. It smells gory, fresh mud and sour meat. Despite the warmth, there’s a weird chill in the air. I flatten my back against a charred blackwood, unwilling to step inside.
Our real education began here.
I spent my younger years in this cabin, surrounded by boys who learned more with pocketknives than they ever did in school.
Local kids who went to my school, twitchy and restless with nowhere else to go.
In the beginning, I was ignored or tolerated by them because I was Heath’s sister, but as we grew, I felt something shift.
The weight of their stares, heavy, uninvited.
Greedy. I realized finally that I needed to vanish or grow teeth. Be the shark, or be the food.
Heath and Luke showed us how to rig up fishing line, how to scale and fillet a fresh snapper.
Heath was patient and encouraging, a surgeon.
Luke, restless and bloody, a butcher. Heath stepped up for us, but Luke stepped back.
He grew bored of us, looked at the weight of the responsibility and decided we weren’t worth the cost. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for months.
Nobody asked my brother to do it, to carry the weight of these forgotten kids, but it settled on his shoulders anyway. He picked it up because no one else would and he bore it quietly. Dutifully.