FIRST PLACE—2019 FIRST ANNUAL SHORT STORY CONTEST

It’s Tuesday afternoon, late summer, and my two younger brothers are making a bomb. Mom’s supervising in that weird way of hers—half doting, half deer-in-the-headlights—and I can’t tell yet if the old couple across the street is finally going to call the cops on “them two kids who don’t do regular school,” or not. Nothing’s exploded. Not yet. But watching it all come together from my second-story bedroom window, I have to admit—my brothers are pretty much on track for psycho.

Our front yard is two acres, just like Dad wanted, and the Spoon Street sidewalk parallels our grass. Last week, a new family moved into the brick house next door—two moms, one daughter. Everyone in Andersen is waiting to find out why they came. I haven’t seen the girl yet and am starting to think she’s a rumor. Still. Someone new is something special. If Sam and Temple’s science experiment works—which it will, their experiments always work—I can’t say I’m going to feel good about knocking on the neighbors’ door and asking that girl if she wants to walk to 7Eleven for Slurpees.

Sam—he’s the older one—reaches for the blue and red wires. I lean out my bedroom window and start yelling. Temple ducks instinctively, shielding his pokey nose and freckled face. Mom looks up from her lawn chair, where she’s been painting her toenails. “Now, Sam,” she says, and just then, the front door to the house next door opens.

The girl steps out.

Sam freezes. For a moment, I swear he looks like a weasel contemplating a nest of chicken eggs. The girl holds a bright teal notebook in front of her and it seems to glow there, pressed against her denim skirt. She takes in the scene of our front yard—boys, bombs, blades of grass.

“Sam,” Mom says again, but his eyes stay glued on the girl next door. Dark hair. Flat chest. Legs as spindly as a willow switch. Temple makes his move, ripping the wires from Sam’s hands, then swooping to the ground to pick up the bomb. Within seconds, he’s dashed through our tall grass and around the side of the house, out of sight.

“Get back here, mouseface!” Sam hollers, giving chase.

“Sam,” Mom whimpers. “Don’t call your brother a . . . ,” but they’re already gone. Into the abandoned lots behind our own, curse words and fistfuls of wire trailing behind them.

This is us. Sam and Temple Tiller, two brothers who are so smart they could teach themselves to fly to the moon. That’s what I mean by psycho: super smart and super cruel, just like that bomb they were making. And then there’s me—Carrie Tiller—tall as the trees lining our junk pile out back and just about as notable. Which is to say, plain.

I look again at the neighbor’s house, but the girl has disappeared. Dark hair, right? Or was it blonde? A denim skirt. Was she even my age?

Moments later, I hear a whimper in the hallway, then a knock on my bedroom door. The dopey scent of toenail polish fills my room. “It’s OK, Mom,” I say, and flop onto my bed. “They won’t go far. They never do.”

Most days in our house, it feels as if the world revolves around my brothers. One day, it’s lever-and-pulley systems running between the first and second floors, designed to pass objects between rooms without having to get up. The next, it’s a saltwater aquarium filtration system, homemade, and before you know it, Dad’s on the computer ordering tropical fish off the Internet. What that means for fourteen-year-old me is, I do the chores because everyone else is too busy trying to catch up with whatever’s next. Doing chores is less painful than watching Mom’s face when she stands in the hallway all huffy, her bottom lip glistening into a pout just because the boys are ignoring her again.

The truth is, Sam and Temple really are different. The most adult thing I’ve had to do in my life is watch my parents fail to comprehend their own sons. I feel somehow responsible for letting my brothers know. When I try to talk to them, it usually comes out like this: “You two could leave. You could fly to the moon.” Sometimes they’ll pause and look at me, half-interested, smiling these marshmallow-cheek smiles. Then Sam will say something bold like, “The moon? That would be so inconsequential.” He only talks that way to family. He won’t let other people hear him sound smart. When it happens like that, though, I can tell by his tone, he’s done with me and I know anything else I have to say will be pointless.

What they don’t understand is that I’m trying to let them know they’re lucky. They could leave, which means they could get out of this house and they could get out of Andersen and they could even get out of the Carolinas entirely if they’d just a) stop being bubbleheads, b) start acting as smart as they really are, and c) get some manners. That last one is a problem. Mom tells Sam and Temple to brush their teeth or at least wash their pits—ages eight and nine and already they smell like jock itch—but they never say anything back. They don’t have to. To them, everyone else is just air, this thing you need to survive even though you never actually see it.

I’m right about the bomb. I hear it go off, and then I hear my brothers laughing, and ten minutes later they walk into the living room and stand in front of the television, blocking my show.

“Boys,” Mom says from the kitchen, “go get the mail.”

“I’ll go get it,” I say, and hoist myself off the couch.

Outside, the air hums with songbirds. Grasshoppers click ahead of me as I cut a path through the lawn to our mailbox. I can feel the new neighbors’ house as though it’s on fire, each brick glowing inside a kiln of possibility. On the stoop, the notebook’s teal front cover flaps in the breeze, as if dropped in a hurry. Across the front, in large black letters, I read her name: AMELIA.

A car idles in front of our mailbox. “Lookie here,” calls a voice. “Somethin’ fancy.” It’s Jiles, our mail carrier, and he’s rumored to deal drugs with kids from the high school.

“What do you know about the new neighbors?” I ask.

“Well, I . . . them three?” A mosquito lands on his upper lip, but he doesn’t notice, or if he does, he doesn’t care.

I nod.

“Missy, you got bigger things. Lookie here,” he repeats, producing a manila envelope marked “Special Delivery.”

I take it and retreat. Jiles’s car sputters down the block, and when he gets far enough away, the songbirds begin again. Third Notification, Return Response Requested, a label on the envelope reads. I already know who it’s from; the South Carolina Governor’s School has been courting Sam and Temple all year, and summer’s almost over. I angle toward our front door, carrying the thick envelope. My legs shift through the high grass, sandbagged—to this town, to this lot, to this tiny existence—but my heart feels lofty, light, and for a moment I pretend the letter is for me. Once inside, I bring it straight to my brothers. They won’t listen to me, but maybe they’ll listen to this. Within seconds, Mom intercepts.

There’s no school for Sam and Temple here, not in Andersen, and not sixty miles north across the state line into Asheville and not even in New York, Dad says as he joins us all in the living room to center around the envelope. “Not even all the way in New York.”

Mom grabs the letter out of my hands and starts to sniffle. Dad takes her by the wrist and pulls her into the sitting room—that’s the one we’re not allowed to go into, the one with plastic covers still on the couches—and together, they rip the letter to shreds. “Wait,” I want to scream, but my voice, like my feet, stays stuck. I might even forget to breathe. Meantime, Sam and Temple don’t bother looking up from their current project—something having to do with photosynthesis and food coloring and this epic carnivorous plant they found out back.

Our parents disappear into each other, weird grabby hugs and more sniffling, and by the time I can finally lift my feet again, Sam and Temple have moved on to the kitchen. I charge up to Sam, who’s hauling a mini fridge out the sliding glass door using some mechanically operated dolly he’s rigged. He wears a tight grin on his face, and Temple’s eyes bug so wide he looks like a squeezy doll. For most people, these are looks of fear. For my brothers, looks of anticipation.

“What are you doing?” I ask, following them onto the back porch.

“None of your business,” Sam says. His tone carries a million insults.

“Don’t you want to talk about the letter?” The air feels murky and warm, like how our kitchen feels after we microwave corndogs, and for a moment I remember getting my foot caught underwater on a grabber-log last summer in Grub Lake.

“What about it?” Sam asks.

“It said you could leave. It was a free pass,” I tell him.

“Talk about inconsequential,” he says and the way he looks at me, it’s like he’s suddenly an old man, ready to die in the same house he’s lived in his entire life.

That fall, my brothers don’t go to the Governor’s School. They stay with Mom to homeschool, while I ride the bus to Andersen High and try to keep Jeremy Key from sticking his fist under my butt when I sit down. That’s the kind of smart Jeremy Key is, which ought to tell you something.

The thing about that grabber-log at Grub Lake and the thing about Jeremy Key is, they both taught me the same thing. I always wanted to swim past the docks. When I got up the nerve, the water that held me every summer since I could swim, nearly swallowed me. I remember the instant I realized I’d have to pull my own foot out, scraping it bloody to the bone. I never felt scared. I knew it was up to me; if I really wanted to live, I could. Lukewarm water lapped over my head. The sunlight turned blurry, like a dream or a blanket or maybe like what Dad’s Mammaw Tiller saw before she died. I kicked hard and broke free, one thousand fireworks up my leg. My entire body lit, alive.

Now, every time flipflop season comes, the scar reminds me that I chose, and even though Jeremy Key is basically a turd, I realize that I’m choosing something there, too. I don’t have to sit within arms’ reach of his pervy fists. I don’t have to let him look at me the way he does with eyes too close to the brim of his nose and a mouth so tiny you could almost forget it. But I do. I choose. And one of these days, I suspect I’ll choose to either punch him or kiss him, because the way I see it if you’ve never kissed a real person before, you might as well start small.

When Sam and Temple were babies, Mom used to lug them around Andersen, all gooeyfooted about Jesus. There wasn’t anything “freewill” about her recruiting, but I couldn’t have told you that then. I was six and already sided with Dad, opting out of prayer. The church had a point system, like Mary Kay cosmetics or Weight Watchers, and I imagine the appeal had something to do with those little hatch marks the preacher kept on his clipboard, beside Mom’s name. The marks were quantifiable in the face of her two sons, who as far as I could tell had come along and made the planet seem shaken and small. Like Earth was just a marble in their satchel of mayhem.

Mom breastfed both boys at the same time. There were weeks on end when it felt like our entire house held its breath over Sam and Temple’s kicking legs, their latched lips, their utterly smart smarts which—even then, even before they could talk in complete sentences—had announced itself like a comet streaking across our lives. For years, I would think they were just destructive. But it was more than that. They seemed to be taking apart the world for their own purposes, yes, but I believe eventually they wanted to put it back together again. Maybe even for the better.

Sundays, Mom took Sam and Temple to church. I stayed with Dad and played Go Fish in the sitting room where we had to vacuum stripes back into the carpet before Mom got home, otherwise she’d know. Once, Dad told me I’d never beat him at cards, then he tried to grab my wrist like I’d eventually see him do that time with Mom, but I said, “Stop. Why do you say things like that?” and I knew I’d caught him in something uncalled for. Dad let go of my wrist. The soft rubber of his slippers pressed into the vacuum-striped carpet and behind him, on the coffee table, I could see his last hand of cards from our unfinished round. I was going to beat him, if we’d finished the game, but I didn’t need to win to feel satisfied. Throughout my childhood, I experienced moments where I inherently understood Dad wanted me to be the son he never had—a son who wasn’t smarter than him. I knew I couldn’t change any of that and it hurt, but I had to stick with him. Mom, Sam, and Temple paraded around Andersen like some Holy Trinity, and that left Dad and me either looking like disciples, or fools. I think we instinctively chose the latter, without naming it. I might have been a fool, but I’d be my own fool. A wild card. Even at six, I wouldn’t let Dad have any piece of me.

We didn’t play more cards that day. We went to the park. We swung. Me, Dad. Swinging and pumping our legs so hard we were the same person and for a few minutes everything felt right again. The chains made a fantastic metallic song as we moved in arcs back and forth. I asked Dad if he could go anywhere, where would he go, and he said he’d keep going, and then he waited until he got to the highest point on his swing and jumped. His arms waved through the air like Palmetto fronds. For a millisecond, I worried he would die. “Try it, Carrie!” he shouted from the ground, “I’ll catch you!”

I felt my bottom separate from the swing at the top of each movement, but my fists wouldn’t let go of the chains. I didn’t trust him, and he must have seen it in my face because he smiled cruelly and said “Carrie Tiller we’re not leaving this park until you grow some balls.” I didn’t understand what he meant—how could I at age six?—but I understood from the way his stance broadened and his arms folded across his chest that I had no choice and I hated him for that.

The chains turned cold in the center of my fists. The entire swing set seemed to teeter and lean toward sudden death. The sound of metal hinging on metal no longer soothed me. “Well?” Dad kept asking, “Well?” and I conjured the Steller’s jay that visited the feeder outside my window each dawn, the way its markings were designed so its top half appeared cloaked in dark gray, but underneath the cape there were always hints of brilliant blue. I knew then that, for me, growing up in my family meant something like that kind of hiding. When my parents and brothers looked at me, they didn’t bother seeing what was underneath. They couldn’t get past the cape, and that meant they’d boss me around forever if I let them.

I pumped my legs hard, harder; exhaled and loosened my grip. I flew through the air, and as I did I flung that cape into the sun. The sun burned it up. I landed hard. Heat surged through my right ankle, and later, after the plaster hardened and after Dad took me out for ice cream and Mom drew pretend footprints from Sam and Temple on my cast, I couldn’t stop smiling. I couldn’t let go of what I’d discovered. Even on crutches, I knew I’d learned how to be seen, and I loved Dad for it. Loved him so hard it hurt.

The thing about that kind of love is this: it only feels like love until someone else discovers the wonky calculations you made in your mind. I lost most of a good summer to that cast, the neighborhood kids doused in Grub Lake and me lugging myself from room to room, tethered. Eventually I realized it was just as many crutch-hobbled steps from my room to the kitchen as it was out the back porch and into our neighbor Mrs. Steadman’s yard.

When you’re young it’s OK to invite yourself over and so it came out easy: “Mrs. Steadman, I’m inviting myself. I’m here,” I said. She lounged on her patio in the late afternoon sun. She was pruney and old but not cranky like you’d think and mostly she just stayed still like a lizard, only a lizard with a piece of aluminum foil held in front of her face, working on her tan.

When Mrs. Steadman asked what kind of mess I’d been into to deserve a cast, I told her all about the Steller’s jay, about the gray cape, about loving Dad. Instead of nodding like I thought she would, she took me into her lap and tried to make me promise. “Say it back to me out loud, Carrie,” she commanded. “Love isn’t like that. Love should never hurt your body. Say it.” I looked at my cast. I looked at her face. I saw my reflection in her buggy sunglasses and it felt like looking into a time machine, one where if I always did what the adults in my life told me to do, I’d end up just like that—a mere reflection. I shoved myself off Mrs. Steadman’s lap, knocking over her lemonade with my crutches. “Wait,” she said. But I hobbled back to our yard and slammed the patio door behind me, loud as shotgun fire.

By the end of my first semester at Andersen High, all of this is gone—the grabber log; Jeremy Key, who never came back after winter break; my cape, an ashy memory; the letter from the Governor’s School. I suppose it’s no surprise Mom doesn’t want my brothers to leave. Without them, what can she show for herself? They continue their posturing around Andersen. Sunday morning worship. Sunday evening potluck. Wednesday night Bible study. In their wake, a trail of innovation: scrap metal and tossed aside screws, epoxy, and stained glass, copper pipes scrounged from behind Walmart. Toss in odds and ends and Sam and Temple have a homebuilt robot on their hands. Make it look easy.

Through all of this, there’s AMELIA. I barely see her that first semester, but in January we have three classes together and I find out her last name is Thompson. She sits in front of me three periods in a row, boom boom boom. I marvel at the waves of coal-colored hair draping down her back like a comforter. Stardust freckles cover every inch of her skin. Her eyes are magnetic, a pair of river-bottom stones. When she walks down the hallway between classes, her limbs meet the air ahead of everything else, as knobby and notable as Cypress knees rising from a swamp, and her skin appears so pale she could be porcelain. I’ve never seen anyone like her.

It isn’t long before I can’t stand the mystery any more—the way Amelia glows like something magnetic and unbroken living right here in Andersen. Has a mistake been made? No matter how I consider her origins, I can’t fathom how we deserve her. Even watching her do something as ordinary as raising her hand in class makes me feel plain. My brown hair. My flat green eyes. My patterned shirts like somebody’s kitchen wallpaper. Not a bodily curve to show for myself, and it’s not an especially flattering experience for a girl who already feels behind in so much, to have to sit close to someone like that.

Except Amelia is different. Amelia is kind.

Between classes, I study my reflection in the bathroom mirror, moving through the thickly perfumed air. I shove past the girls with shoulder bags the size of a small house. Past the besties in tight black skirts and slouchy tees. The counter in front of the face mirror always feels cold against my fingertips. Stainless steel smeared with lipstick, Pop Tart crumbs, flecks of mica from the cheerleaders dousing blush across their cheekbones. All around me, girls I’ve gone to school with since grade one, girls I don’t care two licks about, girls who talk about threesomes, the numerology of despair. Girls leaning toward the windows to hide their cigarette smoke or hovering over sinks to cough up hangovers or girls aerosoling their hair in a flurry of four minutes between bells.

What do I expect? That I’ll find more and more freckles each day I look at my reflection, that my skin will lighten, that my hair will turn black? I can’t say, and even though a teensy part of me wants to believe that if I brush my hair one hundred strokes per night or pucker my lips and practice kissing on my own hand, the boys and the friends will come, mostly I just don’t believe any of that crap.

Then one morning. Amelia passes the teal spiral notebook from her desk to mine, slipping it beneath our civics teacher’s gaze. We’ve still never spoken to one another, but I know instantly not to share whatever message the pages contain. I slip it into my backpack, where it burns a hole through my attention the rest of the day. When I get home, Sam and Temple are reworking advanced equations from an MIT MOOC course, dotting the chalkboard that hangs on the wall behind our dinner table in code. I want to say something nasty about how normal people wouldn’t bother trying to understand those equations and how normal people wouldn’t bother trying to understand them either, but Mom stands between the table and the front door filing her nails into corners, and something in the way she looks at me tells me not to even start.

But there’s more to the moment than just that. Something about the notebook, which I haven’t been able to open, tames me. I don’t care so much about Sam and Temple. Mom is suddenly just Mom. A nonentity. Dad’s still at work, and for a flash of a second the house feels completely empty, even with three of my family members standing within ten feet of where I’ve dropped my coat.

“You’re blocking the light,” Sam taunts. He has a smear of white chalk on his shirt.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“The light,” Temple repeats. “From the window behind you. It’s messing with his concentration.”

I want to roll my eyes but that notebook. The question of what it contains. The possibilities. I feel a rush of freedom and fear all at once. If I look at its pages, I’ll lose the mystery that’s fueled me all school year, the feeling that somehow quiets all the hard edges around my family. But I can’t stand the thought of never looking. What if she asks me a question, what if she wants to come over, what if she needs help, what if just like me she has the biggest crush on Finky Bennett, the Andersen junior who sunk a tiebreaking three-pointer during the last home game? Not that I’d been there to see it, but high school can be funny that way when you get caught up in the tide even if it’s a tide you don’t usually care about because how can a girl not blush at least a little bit when someone as tall and tousle-haired as Finky Bennett—with his Nike high-tops and mid-calf socks, his slow gaze and feminine eyelashes—strolls past your locker in the hallway and you think for just one second he might, just maybe this time, actually stop and say hello?

I turn around to see if I can understand what Sam and Temple are fussing about, and when I do, the light in the room shifts back. They continue their work, uncaring. I dart up the stairs two at a time and leap onto my bed like always. A slight smell of dust and hair oil and the just-me-Carrie-Tiller smell wafts around me. The view from my bedside window that day looks especially glorious, bright—the earthly world forgotten two stories below, and the opal blue sky filling every pane with yellow hope. I want to bask in it forever, or at least, to soak up enough so that whenever things get confusing or whenever Dad gets pushy again as if I was supposed to turn out different, I can just tune out and conjure this view.

I don’t know how much time passes between that bright-sky moment and the onset of dinner, but it doesn’t matter. I hear the clomping of Dad’s boots on the hardwood downstairs. I hear Mom clanging in the kitchen. I can even hear Sam and Temple working their chalk across the chalkboard, faint taps and scratches like that time a family of mice got trapped between the walls of our bedrooms. I hear all of this, but it blows away from me, eradicated as if by lasers or solar winds. Somehow, I’ve retrieved the teal notebook from my backpack and even out of Amelia’s hands, even however many feet away her bedroom is from mine right now, it still contains traces of her porcelain magic.

The first page is blank, and after that, she’s left cues for me: What do you most desire? If you could change one thing about the world, what would you change? How many lifetimes do you think we get? Do you ever think about the fact that we’re walking on a curved surface and that there are people on the other side of the globe, yet somehow they’re not hanging upside down? What would you do if your house caught on fire? How many colors make up the night sky? On and on. Page after page. Mom calls again for dinner, but my name sounds wrong in her voice. I’m already someplace else, already leaving Andersen, already believing in a better choice. I find my pen. I start answering. I head for the moon.

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