Mississippi Noir

Uphill by Mary Miller

Biloxi

The RV park is nice and shady. The residents are mostly older and quiet, but the bugs are loud. There are all sorts of bugs and they are all so loud.

I’m sitting at the picnic table next to the trailer Jimmy has just bought, carefully avoiding the piles of bird crap while watching him fashion a wooden chute for the sewer hook-up. He’s impressed with himself, using nails he’s found on the ground and wood from a scrap pile. Every few minutes he stops to regard his work.

“Our shit travels uphill,” he says, looking at it admiringly.

“That’s amazing.”

He sits across from me and I watch him dig around in his box full of small tools.

Before the trailer he lived on his uncle’s boat, but he sunk it, and before that he lived in a van in his boss’s garage. When I get drunk, I yell at him and call him homeless and we don’t talk for weeks but then I find myself with him again — just a cup of coffee, just as friends — and the cycle repeats itself. We’re at the beginning of the cycle now.

“So I got this call earlier,” Jimmy says. His voice has the high, strained quality it takes on when he’s lying or asking to borrow money. “This friend who lives in Hawaii wants me to drive to Biloxi to take a picture of a lady.”

“A picture of a lady?”

“I haven’t talked to this guy in a long time.”

“Who is he?”

“He sells dope,” he says. “He’s a bad guy.”

A lot of his friends sell dope, but I’ve never heard him call any of them bad guys before. “He sells weed?” I ask.

“Huge quantities of high-grade stuff. Mostly legal.”

“That sounds like a bad idea.”

“Yeah, it’s probably a bad idea,” he says.

I’m surprised to hear him agree with me. He stops digging around in his box. I turn a page in my magazine. “How much did he offer to pay you?”

“He said to name my price. I was thinking a thousand.”

“A thousand? If someone tells you to name your price, you don’t say a thousand. Did you tell him you couldn’t do it?”

“I said I’d call him back.”

“Why didn’t you tell him you couldn’t do it?” If I wasn’t here, or we were in a fight, he would already be on his way down there.

“I’m not gonna do it.”

“They’re going to kill that woman,” I say, because I want to hear what it sounds like. I want him to say, No, they’re not, but he doesn’t. There she is — eating a tuna fish sandwich or watching a game show on TV, not knowing she will soon be dead. It’s kind of thrilling. I wonder what she looks like, if she’s pretty.

“I’ll call him right now with you sitting there and tell him I can’t do it. I’m going to have to make some stuff up.”

“Of course, make some stuff up. I don’t care.” I flip another page in my magazine, a Cosmopolitan from November 2002. I found a whole stack of them in his laundromat. “Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”

“What?”

“Let’s think about this for another minute.” This is not my life, or it is not the life I’m supposed to be living, and so I can pretend that it is. I don’t consider the actuality of my situation, which is that every day I live this life it becomes more and more mine, the real one, and the one I’m supposed to be living falls further away; eventually it will be gone forever. “Whether or not you take the picture, somebody’s going to do it and the woman’ll be dead, right?”

“That’s right,” he says.

“So either way she’s dead and all he wants you to do is take a picture. And you’re broke.”

“I’m not broke.”

He takes a sip of his beer, the beer I bought. I know exactly how much money he has because he empties his pockets out on the counter as soon as he gets home, balled-up ones and fives, sometimes a couple of twenties. He never has more than fifty dollars on him.

“People take my picture all the time,” I say. “Every time I go through a toll road my picture gets taken.”

“Not really the same thing. And when are you going through toll roads?”

“Are you sure he doesn’t want you to do anything else?”

“No, just the picture.”

“Your child support’s late,” I say, though we don’t talk about his children, who live in Oregon — a state he is not allowed to enter for a reason that remains unclear — or his child support. I can just assume he hasn’t paid it. He has no bank account. When someone writes him a check, I have to cash it for him because he lost his ID, sunk to the bottom of the lake along with the boat.

“You think I should do it?” he says. “I can’t believe you think I should do it.”

“For two thousand.”

“Are you serious?”

“You’d do it if I wasn’t here.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Then why didn’t you tell him no right off?”

“Because he’s my friend — I was going to think about it first. I owe him that much.”

“Well, call him back and tell him you’ll do it. And I get to come.”

“No, babe. I’m not involving you in that kind of stuff.”

“I’m coming,” I say, “and that’s final.” He seems pleased and I wonder if this is what he wanted all along, if I’m stupid. We stay together, I tell myself, because the sex is so good; if the sex weren’t so good, I would have broken this cycle a long time ago.

He calls the guy back and makes affirmative-sounding noises while I watch him pace. So many of my boyfriends have been pacers — it must make them feel important. He says, “Fifteen,” and gestures for a pen. I hand him one and he scrawls an upside-down address on my magazine, a phone number, and the name Susan Lacey. I went to school with some identical twins named Lacey. They were of average intelligence and attractiveness so no one seemed to know what to do with them.

I gather my stuff and climb the two steps into the trailer. I’m still not used to the dimensions — the narrowness of the doors, how small everything is. There are booby traps everywhere, sharp edges that need to be filed down, cabinets that fall open when you walk by. Only in the bed do I feel my normal size.

I open the closet and a light comes on; it’s his favorite feature. I shove my clothes back into my overnight bag, my toothbrush and toothpaste and foaming facial cleanser. We’ll have to go by my apartment to get my camera because he doesn’t have one. I wish he had his own damn camera and find myself getting angry about all the things he doesn’t have and how he assumes I will provide them. I sit on the bed with its ugly pilled comforter that probably came with the trailer and look at my arms, the finger-shaped bruises. I’m going to be involved in a murder, I think. There is no voice that tells me to stop, that says what I am doing is wrong. I can’t remember if there ever was a voice. I don’t remember a voice.

I refuse to let him take my car so we clean out the truck he uses for work, which belongs to his boss. There’s a situation with a headlight that is an illegal blue color; the cops have already pulled him over twice and told him to get it fixed. We pour two beers into giant McDonald’s cups and he rolls a joint for the road. All of this is worrisome but he says he would die before he went back to prison and I believe him — he says it with such conviction — and he’s been out for five or six years and has never been back for even a night.

We pass a group of men near the entrance and Jimmy rolls down his window. They are born-again bikers, men with lots of tattoos and angry faces, but they don’t drink or do drugs or get into fights; they show up at trials to support children who have been abused, stand in the back of the courtroom with their arms crossed. They’re biker angels, he tells me, making fun of them, but I think it’s what they call themselves.

At my apartment, he waits in the truck while I walk the three flights upstairs. I get my camera and a pair of shorts and a bikini; the bottoms can double as panties. I wander the rooms wondering what else I might need, if I should just lock the door, put on my pajamas, and get in bed. It looks so comfortable, the sheets newly changed, sage green — such a pleasant color. I grab a pack of cigarettes and a Clif bar and then we’re on the highway, headed south. I haven’t been to Biloxi since I broke up with Richard. I have so many old boyfriends now, spread out all over, and so many things remind me of them. I’ll pass a Wendy’s and remember the one who would only eat plain hamburgers. There we are, sitting under the yellow light with our trays in front of us, eating one french fry at a time. Nearly every movie, every song and TV show and food item, reminds me of someone and it is a horrible way to live.

I flip down the visor to look at myself. My hair’s in a ratty ponytail and I don’t have any makeup on and I’m too old to be going around barefaced, my mother says. I wish I’d showered before we left his trailer but it’s so small and the water runs everywhere and I can’t turn around without the curtain touching my arms or legs, which is the same curtain that touched the arms and legs of some stranger.

“I brought my swimsuit in case there’s a pool at our hotel,” I say. He puts a hand on my knee. “I need a new one — this one’s from three summers ago and it’s all worn on the butt.”

“I’ll get you a new one,” he says. “I’ll get you a white bikini so I can see your nipples.” The word bikini doesn’t sound right in his mouth. He hardly ever buys me anything, though it is always his pot we smoke and I’ve never once bought condoms. Condoms are expensive, he tells me, especially the way we go through them. He has never suggested we don’t use them, though, which is nice of him.

“Do you want me to drive?” I ask.

“I’m fine.”

“I haven’t had as much to drink.”

“I’m fine,” he says again.

“Did the guy say what he wanted the pictures for?”

“We know why he wants them.”

“I know, but did he say it?”

“No.”

“’Cause that’s not how it works.”

“Right,” he says. He turns the radio up. We both like country music. We also like rap. No one knows where I am. When I’m with Jimmy, I don’t return my friends’ text messages or answer my mother’s phone calls unless she calls twice in a row. I fall down a Jimmy rabbit hole.

It’s not a bad drive down 49. There are plenty of places to stop, which I appreciate, and lots of antique malls made out of connecting storage units. My mother used to make me go to them with her back when I was too young to refuse, but I don’t remember her ever buying anything. I wonder what she was looking for. There’s a catfish house shaped like an igloo and another one in a massive barn, only about five miles apart. I like the men on the side of the highway selling sweet potatoes, nice-looking men in overalls, real country people. We live in Mississippi and almost everyone we know is from Mississippi but we don’t know any real country people.

“I have to pee,” I say, “just stop wherever, whenever it’s convenient.” He tells me I pee too much, and it’s true, I do pee a lot. I close my eyes and think about the woman, Susan Lacey. I imagine her in a shapeless housedress and heavy shoes with rubber soles like a nurse, eating ice cream from a gallon container. And then I imagine a younger Susan Lacey, her hair long and dark, eyes full of life. She’s on the street, carrying a recyclable bag full of organic fruits and vegetables, flowers sticking out the top of it. The picture will capture her midstride, head turning to look for cars as she crosses the street. It’s a picture I’ve seen so many times on the crime shows I watch, the photograph snapping the color out of everything.

“Can I smoke?” I ask.

“I don’t care.”

“No, the joint.”

“Let’s wait till after,” he says.

I say okay but after feels like forever. I wish I’d grabbed a book from my apartment; all I have is the Cosmo with the address and number on it and I’ve already read it from cover to cover. I reread an interview with Cameron Diaz. Cosmo asks her what the secret is to being an effective flirt: “Is it ‘flipping your goddamn hair,’ like Lucy Liu advised you to do in Angels?” And Cameron Diaz says, “Yes, flip the goddamn hair [laughs]. I think the secret is trying to be charming. I always try to make a man laugh, and usually, it’s by making fun of myself.” I wonder if her answer would be different in 2013, if she would say something so embarrassing and unfeminist-like. I light a cigarette and try to focus on the trees, the way the light filters through them, but there’s Susan Lacey again — she is definitely the younger, dark-haired one. Perhaps she’s even beautiful, but that isn’t going to save her.

Three hours later, we’re in Biloxi. Jimmy pulls into a gas station and I slip my card into the slot before he can ask and then I go inside, buy a sixteen-ounce beer and a king-size Twix.

He’s still pumping when I come back out, talking on his cell phone. I get in the truck and take off my flip-flops — my toenails bright red, so pretty.

He hands me a receipt, which I let fall to the floor without looking at it. I type the address into my phone, direct him through the city. For some reason the sound isn’t working and I can’t get it to work even though the volume is turned all the way up.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend that lives here?” he asks. He knows I have an ex-boyfriend that lives here. He lives in a high-rise apartment and drives a black Mercedes with a personalized license plate that means supreme ruler in some Asian language. He is a horrible person who made me go to church with him on Sundays, a pretentious guy full of pretensions, a Californian, a former Marine, a drunk. I have no idea where I find these people.

“No,” I say.

He looks at me.

“That was like three years ago.”

“When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“Not since we broke up,” I say. “Richard.”

“Dick,” he says, “that’s right, good old Dick.”

“Let’s talk about your ex-girlfriends. Were they all ugly? Make a left at the next light.”

“I don’t date ugly chicks.”

“You know I’ve met a lot of the girls you dated, right?”

He sighs because I’m right — they were all weirdly tall or hook-nosed or something. One of them had so many tattoos she looked deranged. “How much further?” he asks.

“Farther.”

“Okay,” he says, “Jesus Christ. How much farther?”

“Three miles. If he has her address, why’s he need a picture? Why doesn’t he just send somebody there to kill her?”

“We’re going to her job,” he says, and then, “Hey, babe? Could you just stop talking for a minute?”

We pull into the parking lot of an Office Depot. “Is this it?” he asks.

“This is the address you wrote down.”

Office Depots depress me and I refuse to get out. I open my bag and hand him the camera, turn it on and off. “This button here,” I say. “I hope she’s in there and we can get this over with. I want to go swimming, and maybe gamble. I love to gamble.” I’ve decided I’ll definitely rent a room at a casino, a nice one, and order room service and drink overpriced drinks at the hotel bar and fuck him in a huge bed with too many pillows.

I watch his back as he walks into the store: stocky and bald-headed, tattoos covering his thick arms. He’s not attractive in the conventional way but he makes beautiful babies. I’ll never have a baby with him but I like the idea of it, having a small version of him that I could control, who would listen to me and obey me and tell me every thought that popped into his head. The doors slide open and he’s gone, disappeared into the sadness of Office Depot forever. The turn of events deflates me.

Ten minutes later, he gets back in the truck.

“So?”

“No Suzie.”

“What took you so long?”

“I bought some envelopes,” he says, and tosses the bag to the floor. He hands me the camera and I immediately check to see if he took any pictures; he didn’t. I turn it off.

“What now?”

“I don’t know. Let me think for a minute.”

“Drive us to a nice hotel and I’ll rent a room and we can pretend we’re on a stakeout. Set up a command center.”

“This isn’t a game,” he says, pulling out of the lot. “It’s not a game.”

He drives in an angry silence. When someone is mad at me, I don’t know what to do except be mad back. He drives fast, like he knows where he’s going, and I don’t ask. When he decides to talk to me, I won’t be ready to talk to him, I tell myself, and it makes me feel better, but then I start thinking about all the things I want to say. Every one of them is a question. I look out the window as he drives and I have no idea where he’s going or what we’re doing. I want to be inside his head for one minute, just one minute so I can get ahead of him, or at least not feel so behind. We could be here to kill Susan Lacey, for all I know, though I don’t think he would do that for fifteen hundred dollars, but maybe it’s fifteen thousand and then I’d go to prison as an accessory because they wouldn’t believe me, they never do. I’d get five years, at least, even if all my people pooled their money to get me the best lawyer.

I tell him I have to pee again and he pulls into a gas station, throws the truck into park so fast it lurches. In the bathroom, I wash my hands, my face. I look at myself in the mirror and think, Fuck you. Fuck you, you fuck-up. I think all my problems might be solved if I could look in the mirror and see my ugliness reflected back at me.

As I’m purchasing a six-pack, my phone rings and I know it’s my mother so I don’t answer. I don’t even look. She’ll call again in twenty minutes or half an hour and ask what I’m doing, if I’m okay. She always wants to know if I’m okay, if I’m happy, which makes it impossible to talk to her.

“Where are we going?” I ask, as coldly as possible.

“I’m dropping you off at my father’s house,” he says. “You can spend the night there.”

“Oh no, I’m not going there. I don’t know your father.”

“You’ll be fine,” he says. “It’s safe there.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I have to find this woman.”

“I know, that’s why we’re here. We have to find her so let’s find her.”

“You don’t understand,” he says.

“You’re right, I don’t, so explain it to me.”

I open a beer and he takes it out of my hand. I open another. I tell him I am not, under any circumstances, going to sit and watch TV with some old man I don’t know. An old man he hates and doesn’t talk to. I had forgotten that his father even lived here. I tell him to take me to a hotel but he doesn’t take me to his father’s house or to a hotel. He takes me to a bar. We get out and I follow him inside. It’s not the kind of place we frequent — a fancy wine bar with too many mirrors, where I feel underdressed and greasy. The Office Depot girl wouldn’t be here.

I sit next to him on a barstool and he orders his usual: a Budweiser and a shot of Jameson. I order a gin martini, dirty. The olives are pierced with a long wooden stick, dangerous, and I eat them carefully, one at a time, and remember that there are pleasures in life; sometimes they’re so small they shouldn’t compensate for all of the shit, but they do. They really do. Once the olives are gone, I look up hotel reviews on my phone even though I know where I want to stay: the Hard Rock. There are young, good-looking people there and they let people bring their dogs.

“Hey, babe,” he says. “Hey, love.” I don’t look at him. Other women may do their best to be nice and accommodating, but I try to be as unlikable as possible, test men too soon and expect them to love me for it. The right one will, I imagine, though I’ve been through enough to know that the right one doesn’t exist, this perfect man who will be whole yet malleable, who will allow me to be as ugly as I want.

Twenty minutes later, I’m in a hotel room by myself: two beds, a large bathroom with an array of soaps and lotions, everything perfectly beige. It’s on the fourteenth floor overlooking the Gulf and I stand in the window and try to make out the barrier islands: Cat Island, Ship, Horn, some other one I forget. In ’69, Camille split Ship Island in two: east and west. I used to go to West Ship with another of my exes.

It’s not the first time I’ve waited for Jimmy in a hotel room. I’ve given up so much to be with him and some of these things are for the best. He has taught me sex without love, a Buddhist’s degree of unattachment. He’s taught me that I can only rely on myself and it’s a good lesson, one I needed to learn. He also taught me to drive a stick shift and put cream cheese on sandwiches, an appreciation of Westerns. Everyone leaves something behind; there are so many things I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t had all of them, every one.

I know Jimmy’ll show up in the morning when it’s time to check out and it’ll be done: the picture taken, cash in hand, an inexplicably large amount unaccounted for. I call room service and order a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a vanilla milkshake and eat everything including most of the condiments in their fat little jars. Then I lie in bed and watch the most boring thing I can find on TV — old women selling garish jewelry and elastic-waist pantsuits — and the longer I watch, the more I begin to imagine a world in which these things might appeal to me.

I call my mother; I can’t help it. She always answers, even if she’s with her priest or in the movie theater.

“Hello?” she says. “Who’s this?”

“Mom? Are you there?”

“I was asleep,” she says. “I fell asleep. What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock.” I don’t know why I called her but I do it constantly, against my will. More often even than she calls me. I call her because she is there, because she loves me, and because one day she’ll die and I won’t know how to live in a world without her in it. I don’t even know how to live in this one.

When we hang up, I look at my phone: three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. It seemed like so much longer.

Sometime during the night, he comes in. I pretend to sleep as he takes off his clothes and gets into bed. He puts a cold hand under my shirt, pinches my nipple.

“Tell me,” I say, swatting his hand. “What happened?”

“I got it.”

“Where’s my camera?”

“On the dresser.”

“What’d you do?”

“It was nothing,” he says. “It was easy.”

“Okay, but what’d you do? What happened?” I ask, knowing I’ll never know what happened. I’ll never know what he does when I’m not with him. When I’m alone I don’t do anything the least bit interesting. He tugs at my panties and I help him, kick them to the end of the bed. I run my hand over his prickly head because it’s what I like best about him. But once I’m safe inside my apartment, I won’t answer his calls or listen to his voice mails. I’ll watch him through the peephole until he goes away and if he acts crazy I’ll document his behavior and get a restraining order. I’ll tell Farrell, the apartment manager, to keep a lookout and she’ll be happy to be given this assignment — she loves a purpose, someone she might yell at as she hobbles around the parking lot on her crutches. I’ll even move if I have to, to Texas or North Carolina, somewhere far enough away that he won’t bother to find me unless a bad man calls and offers him money, and he’s the only bad man I can say for sure I know because this is not my life. It isn’t the one, I tell myself, as I wrap my legs around him as tightly as possible.

Boy and Girl Games Like Coupling by Jamie Paige

Lauderdale County

Glen meets me at the overpass over Pine Forest Road, just after sunset. She’s wearing a pink tank top and a pair of jeans. I’m sitting on top of a cinder block by the guardrail. There’s one for her too. She puts her handbag down and sits next to me.

We’ve been together for six months. I didn’t know we were together, but she says so, and it’s too much trouble to fuss. I had known of Glen since second grade, but we had never talked. Then one day she and her boyfriend Terry got into a fight in homeroom. I watched the whole thing from my desk in the back of the room. Glen broke up with Terry and spent the rest of the day crying. That afternoon, I saw her walking home from school, about a mile from her parents’ house. I knew that Terry usually drove her home, so I pulled my truck next to her on the shoulder and rolled down the window. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was panting.

“Want a ride?” I said to her. She spent a minute looking me over like she was trying to place me, then she opened the door and climbed in.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I could have run you over just as easy,” I said.

She laughed.

Things are pretty good most of the time. Fucking? Oh yeah. And she brings me food home from her job. Sometimes she gives me money for weed, but she doesn’t know it. She really needs to be more careful with her purse.

Lately she’s been acting strange, talking about wanting me to meet her family, wondering why I spend so much time here at the overpass. It was her idea to come along. We’re way up high. I stand and look over the rail. I’m straining through the dark for something, anything. Glen is talking about her family again, and I can’t think.

“When you meet Mama, you’ll understand,” she says. “I’m not saying I want you to hate her, but I don’t see how you couldn’t at first. Don’t get me wrong. I want you to like everyone if you can, but I can’t see how.”

The wind is cold. I put my jacket around Glen’s shoulders. I’m shivering and leaning closer against the rail now. The rail is still warm from the evening sun. I grit my teeth.

“You don’t have to meet them all at once,” she’s saying. “I know how you are about people.”

We’re quiet for a while. I’m glad. Glen knows everything, and she’s always telling you about it.

“I just don’t understand why you like it up here so much,” she says. “It’s so lonely.”

“It’s peaceful,” I say. “Usually.”

“Don’t you wish you were doing something else?”

“Nothing else to do.”

“You could call me,” she says.

She calls me at all hours of the night. I hold the phone up to my ear and let her talk. She goes on for hours. “I get so lonely sometimes,” she told me once. “I feel like I don’t have nobody at all sometimes, except you. Why don’t you ever call me?”

I never liked phones. And knowing Glen is like falling into the middle of something all the time.

“My dad would like you, I think,” she says. “He’s got his quiet ways too. Loves to shoot. He says he’ll take you hunting when you meet him. He can’t believe you’ve never been.”

I don’t say anything. I feel her eyes on me. I feel her hand on my shoulder. She moves closer, puts her arm around my waist. Her breath is warm against my ear.

“I tell him you’re too gentle. Baby, I just know my family’s gonna love you,” she says.

“Sure.” I put my arm around her. I hear nothing but her breathing, my breathing.

Soon there are headlights cresting the hill far off, and I say, “Just a minute,” and pull away from Glen. I’m leaning over the rail again, looking out. The lights are growing, haloed. It’s a pickup truck, I think, going thirty-five, maybe forty.

“Baby, is something wrong?” she says.

I don’t say anything. I back off the rail. I’m stooping now, feeling around in the darkness. I hook my fingers through the holes in my cinder block, and I’m lifting it, pushing up with my legs.

“We’re going so soon?” she says.

“Something like that,” I say, and I wobble closer to the rail. I balance the cinder block along the edge. I’m reckoning time. The truck comes closer. I turn. “We better hurry up and get yours lifted. It won’t be much longer now.”

Glen is just looking at me.

“Let’s go,” I say. “You can push this one.”

“Quit playing around,” she says.

“Who’s playing?”

“Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“Something like that,” I say. I look back down the road. Glen is screaming now and reaching around me, trying to grab the cinder block. She gets a grip, but I pry her fingers loose and push the cinder block over the edge. I hear the screech of tires. I hear my cinder block crash and break against the pavement. I hear the crunch of gravel as the truck veers onto the shoulder.

Glen is staring at me, again not saying anything. I grin, and she backs away.

“What’s wrong, baby?” I say to her. “Don’t you understand?”

She says nothing.

“I bet you were right,” I say. “Your folks would love me. I’m so gentle. I’m so sweet.”

“Stop it,” she says, her voice just above a whisper.

“Let’s get married. Let’s have babies and drop them off this overpass.”

She’s crying. “Please, just stop.”

I’m laughing now. “You’ve gotta love the whole of the man,” I say. “Gotta love him all the way.”

Then I hear footsteps crunching through the high grass leading up to the overpass. I hear two men’s voices, angry voices. One of them pumps a shotgun, and they keep coming, creeping their way up the slope. I turn and run, from what exactly I’m not sure anymore, but I’m laughing harder all the time. The soles of my tennis shoes go slapping across the pavement, then I run deep into the woods, cutting down the old dirt road toward the fish camp. Glen is right behind me all the way. Running like hell.

Oxford Girl by Megan Abbott

Oxford

Two a.m., you slid one of your Kappa Sig T-shirts over my head, fluorescent green XXL with a bleach stain on the right shoulder blade, soft and smelling like old sheets.

I feigned sleep, your big brother Keith snoring lustily across the room, and you, arms clutched about me until the sun started to squeak behind the Rebels pennant across the window. Watching the hump of your Adam’s apple, I tried to will you to wake up.

But I couldn’t wait forever, due for first shift at the Inn. Who else would stir those big tanks of grits for the game-weekend early arrivals, parents and grandparents, all manner of snowy-haired alumni in searing red swarming into the café for their continental-plus, six thirty sharp?

So I left you, your head sunk deep in your pillow, and ducked out still wearing your shirt. Wore it hustling across the Grove, my legs bare and goosy in last night’s party skirt, the zipper stuck.

I wore your shirt, frat boy, because it was stiff and warm and smelled like you, your bed, you.

I wore it all day Friday, to my midterm and to gen chem lab and to Walgreens and Holli’s Sweet Tooth to pick up the cookies for tomorrow’s tailgate.

That evening, head in my calc text, I fell asleep at my desk still wearing it, page crease on my cheek.

So of course I was still wearing it when you woke me up, coming on eleven o’clock, you drunk and heated up on something, everything.

You had a funny look in your eye I’d not seen before and I thought, Does he know? But you couldn’t have.

I’d only learned myself a few hours before, the Walgreens bag hidden in my trash.

The baby inside me was far smaller than a pinhead, the Internet told me.

Did you feel it, though, somehow — can boys? — when you hoisted me on the sinktop in the Kappa Sig bathroom the night before, your hands on my belly? Your fingers were five thumbs like hot dogs but you were strong, strong as my dad swinging a bat in our backyard in Batesville, saying, My girl, my girl, she’s going to the U, all. That’s my pride and joy. She aims proud and true.

Someone as strong as you couldn’t feel something as small as a pinhead, could you?

But is that why you did me, because of the baby you put inside me?

It wasn’t even a baby yet, except maybe to God.

Didn’t you know I would fix it. I had dreams too.

Bigger dreams than you, frat.

The first time I saw you was at church, and it was fate because I hadn’t been since Easter. Your face stuck out among all the others. It was like I knew you, girl.

It wasn’t until later I figured out where I’d seen you before: in the painting hanging on the wall of my grandmother’s house. A smudgy rendering of a petticoated country girl feeding a baby calf with a bottle. It was on her wall my whole life, right above the table with the phone you had to dial, and the girl was so beautiful, with light on her face.

You had that light on your face.

The next day, I saw you again. You were gliding up the library steps at seven a.m., just as I was slouching home. One of those mornings I’d been sneaking fast through some girl’s pink-foiled door — the entire door covered in wrapping paper, that’s a thing some girls do, the door also dripping with things, Mardi Gras beads, a message board with a frilly pen hanging from it. So many things, so that when you snuck out just as the sky was shaking night off you couldn’t help but wake that girl, the cinnamon blast of last night’s fireball from her open sleep-mouth.

Even after I escaped the sweet cream whip of a bed, wriggling free by sliding out from her arm hooked around my neck, wrist pinned to my thigh, that booby-trapped door still told on me. The clatter-click shimmy-slap of that gimcrack door, waking all the girls on the hall, their topknots sliding from sleeping heads.

These girls, they were all like candy, sweet ’n’ sour.

My mouth, my gut, coated with it. With them.

But you were different. I could tell.

Your heart, pure as a girl in a dream — that’s what I knew, just from looking at you. You in the faded pasteled picture in my grandma’s house, that baby calf near purring with delight, head nestled on your soft bosoms.

Your heart pure and your body barely touched, never said a curse and bet you ironed your bedsheets just like my grandma too. She told me that boys were meant to misbehave and it was for a good girl to save us boys, each and every one.

You were that girl.

“Don’t drink anything served out of a trash can.”

That’s what my big sisters told me before the party.

“Which will be a change from Batesville,” one of them added, winking mean at me.

I was the only Batesville Chi O. Mom had the plan long ago, all those weekends I spent babysitting for her boss at South Panola Veterinary, Dr. JoAnn Kitts, who also happened to be president of the local Chi O alum chapter.

Once she knows you, Mom said, she will love you, everyone does, and then you’ll get your bid and you’ll live in that big house white as coconut cake with such grand pillars.

After I pledged she had me take pictures of her standing on the porch wearing her Proud Chi O Mom sweatshirt, waving and waving under the sky-high pillars.

At the party, there was no trash can I could see, only the sunshine punch in the plastic bowl made to look like crystal.

Do you know it was you who served us first, me and my Chi O sister Briane, giving us two plastic cups apiece, saying to me, Pretty gals shouldn’t have to wait twice?

The music was shaking through us and the punch tasted like Country Time, but I saw the jugs of Everclear behind you.

Soon, we were dancing. Time shook us free and our bodies leapt and writhed for hours.

Chi-O, my ho, it’s off to bed we go, some of you boys were singing. Were you one of them?

Midnight struck with Briane puking great golden gushes on my shoes in the bathroom.

In the tight stall, she cried hot shudders against me and told me all about you. Did you see the boy who gave us the cups? she sobbed, sputtering. Then saying she couldn’t believe you didn’t recognize her because you had loved her one weekend last spring. How she met you in this very house for a boots-and-bowties mixer and after many vodka sodas you took her on the roof and persuaded her with such honeyed words to dip her dainty duckling neck into your lap and gave you everything her little motor mouth could. Later, she passed out in your room and in the morning you were gone but left her a half-full bottle of Gatorade and an empty trash can in case.

Which she thought was sweet.

But she was a Jackson girl, and what did she know of love?

Her breath sweet and rank in my ear, she confided that, the next day and the next, she texted you and texted you — dirty things she thought you might like, and romantic thoughts too because you’d told her the night you two met, her head resting wearily in your lap after her task, her mouth suffused with your love: You are my girl, aren’t you? you’d said. Ah, you are, hot thing.

You never texted her back, not even when she sent you that picture of her Chi-O-My! thong twirled around one sparkly fingernail.

When Monday came — or so she told me, her gritty teeth clicking in postvomit chill — she walked into the student union, the air thick with the sour yeast from the Subway’s ovens gusting through the pipes, and saw you sprawled across one of the crusted lounge sofas with a ponytailed girl in shearling boots and the shortest of MissBehavin pom shorts and probably hailing from Texas. Oh, how she wriggled and cuddled against your Kappa Sig shirt, the same one against which Briane had pressed her cheek two days before, doing your business for you in your frat boy lap.

That was all there really was to Briane’s sad story except for a dry heave or two. So I cleaned her face with a paper towel and tried to winch her upright, but there was no doing. I would have to call for backup.

I waited on your staircase steps, Briane huddled at my feet. That was when I saw you again and you were so drunk you tried to hand me another cup of that selfsame party punch that had been splashed on my ankles as Briane had relayed her tale of woe.

I said a foul thing to you, but you didn’t seem to hear.

But what you said, frat — do you remember? You said, I’ve seen you so many times. Like, my whole life.

And I didn’t know what it meant, but it moved me.

Well, I never cared much for Briane anyway, or any of the Jackson girls with their pearls and buttery purses.

Me, I hold my heart with great care. I do not tender it lightly, over soft words.

The party after the LSU game, and there you were, in my own house.

You were holding that stubby Chi O’s hair back as she heaved SoCo punch down the front of herself like a little girl spilling lemonade on her Sunday dress.

The church, the library, and now here: I guess it came to seem you were always doing honorable things: praying, studying, helping people.

Later, after king’s cup and the glass leg of beer, I looked for you. I hunted the house for you, calling your name, bawling it, shantying it. I sought to conjure you, but you had gone.

It never would have happened if you hadn’t left the party. In that way, it was your fault, in part.

Searching on the sagging back porch, so heavy with red-faced partiers it seemed to undulate, a ship on a stormy sea, I came to see that Sigma Nu derelict (oh, I knew his kind, played against them in high school, those tufthunters from Jackson Prep). He was swinging high his solo cup and shouting for all to hear, his arm flailing back and swatting that little white-blond girl, who collapsed like my grandma’s lung.

I had to hit him, you see. I had to hit him every time I did. All those times.

I did not have to kick his head on the porch floor, his body curled S-like, like the snake he was. But it felt at the time that I did.

It turned out the white-blond girl had only been bent over laughing, her beer cup knocked from her hand by that Sigma Nu in a way that made her laugh.

But when she saw what had happened — the guy, the dude, the date-raper-type miscreant lying there on the planks, his face swirled red — she stopped laughing, her hand to her once-loud mouth. She did not even have the words to thank me.

There was the feeling that I should leave, and Keith put his baller hands on me and made it so.

His bros will be here soon, he said. They will hunt you, dude. They will take you down and bury your bones in the Walk of Champions.

I wasn’t afraid.

I took a long stroll and fell asleep a while on a sofa in the student union. When I returned, everyone was gone. My shirt had red dots all over the front and I tore it off, hulk-like, and hid it in the dumpster behind the house.

The dude was fine. Mr. Sigma Nothing. I saw him in accounting on Monday.

The blood collecting under his cheekbone, well, it looked impressive. Like a Purple Heart.

Two days later, there you were, frat, sitting two tables away at the library Starbucks. You came over, hot chocolate for you, skinny mocha for me.

Is that what we all drink? I said. And I told you I’d heard some things about you that I did not care for.

You said it was probably all true. Regrets, misdeeds, bad temper, and careless love. But you weren’t like that anymore, everything was changing inside you.

Then, like in a bad song lyric, you fingered a heart in my foam.

I rolled my eyes, but still: I felt a shiver on me. Inside, I was afraid. Because it seemed to me you didn’t know yourself at all. Like others, my brother, my loudmouth dad.

But just like that, your finger there, your eyes lowered, I knew I likely loved you anyway. Because we were meant to cross paths, boy, just like I knew what was coming.

I could feel the blood pushing at my temple.

I knew you would taste like the inside of a sweet apple.

I talked you into following me up two sets of library stairs, among the humming copiers, the chug of the vending machines, whispering students, keys clicking.

Then I talked you into taking my hand as I led you between two rolling stacks in a far corner where books on things like tax incidence and the fishery industry sit.

My boy Keith spotted us and summoned a young pledge to wind the handle on one of the moving stacks, pressing us two together.

We could feel everything about each other. I wasn’t even embarrassed. We were crushed.

You reached out for my hand. In that moment, I would’ve married you. If only you—

The next night, we took that walk in Bailey Woods, beers poured into camelbacks, and the sky went gold, then black, and we got lost, even though it’s less than a mile deep. Sweet gum trees overhead, kissing long and slow at the juniper stump, our fingers poking into its dark pockets. Then we saw that dead dog and said a prayer over him because we both have Jesus sneaking in our hearts somewhere. We went back to the Kappa Sig house and to your mold-furry room and your roommate gone, and I couldn’t get my jeans off fast enough.

You owned my heart, frat boy.

So fast the feeling, I didn’t care what was coming.

I think it wasn’t what we did in your dirty-sheet twin bed that mattered. After all, it only lasted as long as it takes to walk across the square. I think it was the way you looked at me, the moon coming through the Reb pennant hanging in the window, pink on your boy face.

How you looked at me. Your eyes all crazy, like you saw something I’ve never seen in myself before, never seen ever.

There’s a universe out there, little girl is what I came to know through each of those soft explosions I felt after I showed you what to do with your hand, that trick of the wrist.

You had a surprising way of shivering through intimacies, which you did each of the twelve times we did it before I died.

My legs shaking, like a little bare-balled virgin.

I’d forgotten to put in my contacts and during it everything was blurry and flashtastic and I couldn’t see much of you in the dark except the dark inside of your mouth, open when you felt the shock of love, or pretended to.

There’s been so many girls, and they are all in some way one girl, tan and sparkle-lashed, like my sisters’ dolls arrayed on the circle carpet, hair stretched radical to center.

But you.

It was only after that I saw the tear in the condom. Which is on me, baby, it is. It always is.

Would you believe me if I said it wasn’t like the other times?

I swear I didn’t feel it rip, didn’t feel anything but you, your monumental fucking beauty and the little sounds from your throat, and the way your thighs, like smoothed sticks, held me so.

You were in the bathroom for so long after, and I was glad because my legs were still shaking and I didn’t want you to see.

The longer I waited, having slung the split condom from thumb to trash can, I started to wonder a little at how quick you had laid down for me.

But I swear, girl, getting you so easy didn’t make me love you any less. Just wonder, a little.

It was only when in the bathroom after, the boy bathroom so thick with mildew you could feel it fuzzing your mouth, that I found the piece of latex inside me.

My brother had told me once, and older girls too. They always know when it happens, they told me, and they should stop.

But it had broken and part of it was inside me now.

Oh no, I cursed myself. I have let myself be fooled and misled. I am such a girl. A weak, weak girl.

Except still, I didn’t know I cared, my hands trembling, shaking with that speckle of powdery latex on my fingertips.

Part of you was inside me now.

And you asked me to stay over. And you talked in your sleep, your face in my hair, your hands on my excitable hips.

You said I was your country girl even though I told you I was from Batesville. I guess you were still drunk.

You came back from the bathroom, scrubbed and smelling like our soap-on-a-rope. Your shyness made my blood hotten again, but I couldn’t make it work, the heavy of the beers pinning me down.

We slept.

I dreamed all night of scaling skyscrapers and sailing the high seas. Of pirate ship masts and spaceships. And I was king in all these worlds.

I didn’t even care to find I’d slunk so strangely in the bed that my head was resting against your chest, your tiny tits still in their bra, me too drunk to flick the hook.

There would be time enough.

I have to go, you said, before I could. I have my kitchen shift at six thirty.

No, I said, because, look...

Standing in the cold and big kitchen of the Inn at Ole Miss, I could still feel you the whole three hours. In front of the industrial dishwasher, scooping stuck-corn pudding and biscuit-gravy skim into the disposal trough, I could feel you inside, and slipping from me.

Is this the one? I wondered. Even as I knew it was.

You see, you were foretold, frat boy.

Sun beating down, the railroad festival in Amory when I was ten years old, a man in a shabby hat was giving out fortunes from his slanting card table. Staked between the heat-pressed T-shirts and the frozen cheesecake on a stick, he sat in that folding chair, the little sign before him, corrugated cardboard, that read: Fates Disclosed. Paths Foretold. I See You, and All.

My brother was far ahead, wending through tents and bouncy castles to catch up with some girls in snug shorts, and I could tell the shabby-hat man had me in his sights.

Pointing one horny finger, he said: I’ll tell anyone but yours. You’re too pretty to have your heart broke. That yellowing finger seeming to hypnotize me closer.

Tell it! said a passing lady, large of body with a hat shaped like a steam engine and evil eyes. Tell the little girl! Tell her what she must know!

And bringing me close, hand on my arm, the leather twists of his pinched finger skin, the man told. He will come with nectar on his tongue, he said, tears in his eyes, I swear. But he will send your head spinning, seal you up in silver. Swallow you whole.

Standing there, still in his clutches, I felt my heart cut loose inside me. Is this to be my fate?

Suddenly, my brother’s hand fell fast upon my shoulder, tugging me backward. Don’t you know not to talk to the tatty hobos?

Quickly, we were stumbling through the grass of Frisco Park, the sparkle from all the hanging goods, the sparkling purses and glad rags for ladies who’d venture through the festival, looking for objects to wear to entice boys and men.

Listen: I told you I had once been a bad young man, a fool and coward. And I told you I’d changed, and I had. You were my change, and I thought about you days and nights, in accounting and business communication, and porch-drinking at the house with Keith and the boys. Just like a girl, I held my phone tight, and when it pulsed with you, it felt like a church thing.

I didn’t sleep with anyone else, all those three weeks.

And so, October fell to November and that Friday came, the one where I came to be sneaking from your bed at dawn in your XXL shirt, green as a glow stick, as play slime, as a jellyfish under a microscope.

Did I know that would be the day? No.

But I had a special stitch of worry over my brow anyway.

Checking my underwear between every class. I was only five days late, but I had not forgotten the latex clot found via my fingertip three weeks prior, and I could not wait any longer.

In our three weeks together, you always came to my room, so I decided that night to come to you. I wanted to see your room, and your tits so extrasoft the night before, I got crazy just thinking about them.

Dusk falling, I stepped through the Tara pillars and into Chi O.

Your door (spare, unfoiled) was open, but you weren’t there.

Sitting on your bed, I waited, smelling your powder-fresh smells and looking through your underwear drawers filled with such neon-colored beauty I felt sick from it. Honey and strawberry butter, the sheets smelled just like you.

You don’t remember me, the girl in the doorway said.

And I said, Sure I do. Because I did. From the party where I met you. And how that puke bib she wore and her weakness to drink had taken you away from me.

She said she had something to show me and outstretched her hand, palm up. At first I thought it was a blowpop stick, or a thermometer, its tip blue.

But it wasn’t either. It was scepter. A sword into the center of my heart. Because in its little window there was a +, like a tiny blue cross.

She said you had shown it to her, confided. I just thought you should know, the girl said. Being as you’re a good guy. Adding, She’s my sister, but she’s a sly kitty.

I saw you buy the kit, Briane said, standing outside the bathroom stall. I saw you today at the Walgreens.

Briane always had eyes on all sides of her bobbly head.

It’s okay, sis, she said. It’s okay.

I opened the door, my — your — neon shirt like a flag, a flare, staring her down.

That’s right, I said, it is okay. Because I’m not. Which was a lie, at least for now.

Maybe I should have taken the blue stick with me. Hidden it in the dumpster behind the kitchen, somewhere. You could never hide things in the house. The sisters were always watching. But I buried the stick under all the blister-foil laxative strips and seeping old tampons in the stall bin.

Briane couldn’t ever have found it. She wouldn’t have put her Jackson-girl fingers into that bin, mingling with all our girl blood and shame.

The Chi O girl wouldn’t stop talking to me, saying she wants her an Oxford boy or Jackson or Houston oil. Country club golf and fine china on the Grove, a house with white pillars. None of this had to do with me, my dad in a divorced-man’s condo in Atlanta for work, my mom the pharmacist at Kroger.

But the girl kept talking, and I had to leave, sickened suddenly by all the ugliness and the girls’s pink-papered doors and sweet vanilla smells that are meant to keep you there forever, to choke you.

The Grove was dark but neck high in girls, all with their mouths open, teeth glowing. Or so it seemed.

But I wished I hadn’t started drinking.

If only you’d texted me back right away. I said I needed to see you. Even if you were in some lab, or something.

But you didn’t text back, at least not right away, and soon I stopped looking at my phone like a girl, because I found Keith, staking the spot for tomorrow’s game, and we started drinking from that bottle of Aristocrat tucked under his arm like a baby doll.

We couldn’t put up the tent till nine so we were tossing those loose tentpoles like batons, like girls swinging batons. We were swinging them like baseball bats. The ping of the fiberglass on cement, on everything.

Everything was like a bright, spangled blur. My blood was pounding. Like I said, I wished I hadn’t started drinking right then.

At my desk, trying for concentration, I wasn’t thinking that much about the blue stick exactly, my palm touching once, twice, my stomach.

WHERE R U, your text said.

I texted you back, but you never replied.

This won’t happen, I said to myself, but I wasn’t even sure what it meant.

I knew I wouldn’t have that baby. But I wasn’t sure the way it would play out.

Until you came calling.

Prowling the campus, Keith loud in my ear beside me, I kept talking about you. About how I’d seen you in church and you were just like the country lass nursing the baby calf who was like my grandma and all good women everywhere, and now I’d defiled you and myself in the eyes of God and all that. Except hadn’t she said it was for the girl to save us boys? I couldn’t make all the pieces fit.

Keith would have none of it anyway, and never liked church talk. He shoved me hard and told me to stop being a pussy. Then he told me how he saw you sneak out of our room that very morning wearing my shirt like you owned me, or some such badge of domination.

My shirt, I said, because I hadn’t realized.

And that’s how I came to thinking I hadn’t defiled you, you had defiled yourself, your jeans off so fast our first date, and this dawn striding out of my room in my shirt, my own shirt.

And for that, you must be taught a lesson.

Well, that is how I thought.

I had it in my mind that I would retrieve you and we would walk once more in Bailey Woods, like we had that magic night three weeks before when you sealed your fate with me, girl.

But I had no other plan, on account of I could barely walk and had lost Keith some time ago, left him in the shadow of Vaught-Hem knocking out parking-lot lights with his tentpole.

That last pole he struck, it looked like something surged through him.

When he fell onto the cement, his knees knocked together, like a cartoon. On the ground, stuttering, he was a slug-struck bird.

So I pushed on. I couldn’t remember at first which house was yours, even though I’d been there mere hours before.

They all had white pillars, you see.

But I still had that tentpole, it felt like a saber.

Show me your blue stick, I’ll raise you a saber.

It was so late. I’d fallen asleep, my arm still stuck in my phys sci textbook.

You can’t hide, you said, standing in my doorway. And I thought it was a joke, you with the tentpole in your hand, the way you grasped it, caveman, club.

I didn’t tell you no when you asked me to come with you. But I did not yet know what was in your heart.

We didn’t walk far, you intent on mad circles, swinging that tentpole into trash cans, trees, whatever came in your way.

You said, I know I’m drunk, but I wanna show you something.

And I thought, Is this going to be it? Will this be how it goes?

When we came under one of the streetlamps, you looked at me, your face shadowed. You said, Is that my shirt, girl?

You were more beautiful than ever that night. Your face angel-lit under all the streetlamps.

That’s why it happened, if you want to know.

We tramped across campus, all the sculptures and statues of important men. You didn’t seem afraid of me, despite all the noise that came from me, my mouth uncontrollable, and my arms too.

Watching you take that errant tentpole from my hand and twirl it like a baton, like you were a twirler, and weren’t you? The way you wielded your weapons, after all. Blue stick, love’s arrow, that warm spot between your legs.

And where did we end up anyway, roaming the campus near and far, the great bronze hands of the mentor instructing her flock in the rose garden?

Finally landing back where we began, at the foot of Sorority Row long after midnight.

All those white pillars, there must’ve been a hundred of them, all gleaming in the moon, and on the pond that lay there, silver and shimmery like a mirror laid flat.

Oh God, don’t you see I had no choice?

When I took the pole from you, everything turned. But I had to, don’t you see?

Return my sword, girly, you said, your voice gone high and strange. And you yanked it so hard, I fell back.

You may ask me how I knew you were going to raise high that tentpole. But I never didn’t know.

Except I do wish I could have stopped you.

It was the two things at once, you see. It was you holding the pole and you wearing the shirt.

You could spin and flip it in ways that seemed miraculous. All while wearing my shirt, fluorescent-green and too big for you by half, dragged over your head like you owned it. Or me.

Under the shirt, your belly, the thing inside it — well, I thought of that too.

I know you! I said, shouting now. I know your kind! Because you’d pretended to be a country girl who never heard a word of sin, a girl who would make me — make me — behave. And be good.

I never met a country girl, and it turned out you were from Batesville.

My, oh, that tentpole in my hand felt like it swung itself, swinging with such a whirring sound and the terrible, suctiony thunk as it hit your pretty, perfect head.

Oh, my girl, my girl.

The swirl-slap of the alcohol, gallons of it, suddenly cleared away, like the seas parting and receding like the old, bright-colored movie I watched with Gran every Easter my whole life till she died last year.

I saw it then. I saw it. Like everything else fell away and you were praying in church, by the tallest window.

Alas, it was now too late.

This is it, I thought.

Yet I felt no danger.

High above your head, that pole glinted under the streetlamp, swinging it like a mighty ax, a giant in a fairy tale.

I felt a crashing in my brain. I think I saw stars. And I was hearing something like beads shaking inside my head, like in the woods, my brother showing me how to shake the cocoon we found in the branch.

If the caterpillar is alive, it’s heavy, you hear a thud.

If it’s dead, it’s light, and all you hear is a rattle.

I wonder what you heard when you shook me, frat boy. Oxford boy. My beloved.

Did you hear our baby rattle?

Remember how you fell?

Landing on your knees with such an awful smack, the pond like a black hole behind you, the black hole spreading in my brain. Oh, how you looked up at me, your eyes shining.

Please don’t, you said.

But I saw what the pole had done, your temple sunk deep as a cave and your eye bulging.

You didn’t know it yet, but you were nearly gone.

Your face, I watched you watch me, my head spinning so.

It was that face I knew from the twelve times in your darkened room. The face that told me you had big visions of life in your head, the way you were shivering, standing above me, that same lovely way of shivering you had each of the twelve times we did it before I died.

I don’t remember falling, but the red covered my eyes and I could see nothing.

Someone was crying.

They say the light goes out of the eyes when you pass, but it didn’t with Gran at Baptist Memorial and so not with you, my country girl.

I saw the shining as I carried you from Sorority Row straight to the edge of Silver Pond.

I saw it as I dropped you in the water, and my sword too, which was nothing but a tentpole, bent upon itself.

I saw it long after you sunk to the shallow bottom, my shirt billowing, a bright lily pad, and your body making ring after ring after ring.

I wasn’t gone yet, but you were dragging me. Down that grassy slope I went, like a sleigh ride, the leaves curling and cutting my legs.

I grabbed at you, clawing at your ankles, nails sunk deep, but you have near a hundred pounds and a foot of monster blood and bone on me.

My hair knotted in your hand, I looked up at you and my head kept knock-knock-knocking on the ground, the blood coming wet and soft from the open hole in my head.

He will come with nectar on his tongue.

I guess I always knew that shabby-hatted man would prove true one day.

But he will send your head spinning, seal you up in silver. Swallow you whole.

You were well under.

There was stirring briefly, glugging bubbles. Once, your head came up, your eyes glassy, arms grabbing, wanly, the surface of the water. Then your head tilting backward, disappearing.

Finally, you stopped.

Then I went home.

I did find my bed, my ankles and shins slimed up from the pond, and my face speckled red as Raggedy Andy.

I showered at three, no one heard. Then back to bed, a heave and horror in me, where I commenced crying.

Before that, I’d never even noticed Silver Pond. But the next day, and the next, Silver Pond was all I could see, from wherever I stood.

As there was no escaping it, I sought it out.

I even lingered at your house, hand on one of the pillars, like a wedding cake, wondering, missing you.

In the water, I sunk. I felt the thing blooming at the top of my chest, spreading down and in. The thing was the darkness of you, and what we shared.

My lungs swimming inside me, my heart growing small and raisin-like, I thought how it came to be.

Might I have shrunk from my fate?

But one can’t ponder such things too long.

I might’ve got caught anyway, but your sister sealed the deal.

He saw the stick and then he left the house filled with rage. That’s what the Briane girl told the police, as if she’d played no part.

They were a fiery pair, she said, her voice excited, and now their fire has swallowed them both.

What did she know of us, girl?

For ours was a tender thing, deep down.

They talked about how I smiled when they put the cuffs on to take me to county and that’s not true.

But I did tell them how I pictured you up there in heaven, halo fired up, having sweet tea with my grandma.

How she said: A good girl to save us boys, each and every one.

Here comes that grapple hook again, swinging slow for me.

I can hide among the floating ferns and duckweed.

I won’t leave until it has me.

From here I can see the white pillars.

My, how they shine.

Digits by Michael Kardos

Winston County

The Monday after fall break, I welcome everybody back and ask if anyone went anyplace interesting. (Winston County isn’t so far from New Orleans to the southwest and the Alabama beaches to the southeast.) That’s when I notice Britney, in her usual seat, end of the second row, with a heap of gauze taped to her pinky. Or to where her pinky ought to be.

“My family almost went to Dollywood but didn’t,” says Jason, my talker in the front row.

“Britney?” I say.

“Yes, sir?” she says.

Britney is pretty in the predictable way that my students depict pretty in their short stories: blond hair, blue eyes, hell of a smile. Except nobody writes hell.

“My God — what happened?”

She looks around at her classmates, then back at me. “I had an accident over the weekend.” She could be explaining a rip in her knapsack. No wet eyes, no anything.

She’s either being tough or is still in shock, so I let it go and start in on Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants.” This is a fiction-writing class, but I assign plenty of literature too, so they’ll have something to imitate besides stories about vampires. I can take or leave “Hills Like White Elephants,” probably I’ve just read it too many times, but it’s a useful story to teach setting and subtext, and I figure they ought know at least one Hemingway.

As I explain how the conversation about beer in the story keys us in to a broader power struggle between the man and girl, I keep stealing glances at Britney. At that finger. At the absence of that finger. When class ends, I consider keeping her after, but what am I going to say? So I pack up and drive home, where my wife will be counting the seconds until she can steal a moment of peace. We have a three-month-old.

The rest of the week passes predictably: too little sleep, always running behind. Some laundry gets done. The baby becomes a week farther away from the moment of his birth, when he was just a squishy stranger. You can’t use a phrase like “squishy stranger” in Mississippi to describe your newborn, I’ve found. You can’t joke to your neighbors about the old dog crate in the garage alleviating your need for a babysitter. Not unless you don’t want any more casseroles.

The following Monday, the start of week seven of the semester, two more students walk into class missing their pinkies.

“What the hell?” I ask, and they all look at me critically.

“Accident,” says Jeremy, from the back row.

“What about you?” I ask Brian, who sits front and center. His first writing assignment, in which the students described a farm from the perspective of a man whose wife had just died (but they weren’t allowed to mention the spouse or death), included a detail about the peeling paint on the barn’s walls. I knew right away he’d be one of my better writers. Specificity is everything.

“One of those weird things,” he says.

Outside our windows, huge pine trees with their million green needles are set against a sky as bright and blue as my son’s Fisher-Price whale bathtub. Back in New Jersey everything has stopped growing by now and the air is raw, but here the sun is finally a warm kiss instead of a branding iron, and winter is still a lifetime away.

“Guys,” I say — because y’all sounds inauthentic coming from my lips even after five years — “are you okay? I mean, talk to me.” Half of them stare down at their desks. The other half look at me as if I’m overreacting. But I’m teaching three other classes this semester (two freshman comp, one intro-to-literature), and in all of them the number of fingers corresponds exactly to ten times the number of students. “Just do me a favor,” I tell them. “Promise me you’ll all be extra careful, okay?”

They smile. “Sure thing, Dr. P.,” one of them says from the middle row. Baseball cap. College T-shirt. Brandon? Austin? Halfway into the semester, and I still confuse my baseball-cap wearers.

There’s a similar look that many of them have. A way of dressing, a way of talking and moving through their days.

My students at Winston State, I have found, are almost uniformly gentle, kind, and Christian. Many are the first in their families to attend college. Most hail from tiny, tight-knit rural communities. They are totally secure in their beliefs about God and man and would rather not question the reassuring narratives that have gotten them this far. They have little use for nuance, don’t like to consider that Atticus Finch’s stubborn and naive refusal to see anything but the goodness in his dark-hearted neighbors nearly got his children murdered. Atticus Finch, flawed? Boy, they sure don’t like to consider that.

So I push, but not too hard. Fifteen weeks is enough to open eyes but rarely very wide. Anyway, my objective is to make them better writers, not to muck with their lives or how they make sense of it. Yet writing isn’t ever divorced from life, and how someone can become more attuned to the possibilities of literature without becoming more attuned to the world itself, I have no idea.

On the first day of the first class I ever taught — this was at Penn State — I was fishing for a text we’d all read before, something to forge a fast literary bond. I was working toward my PhD in twentieth-century American literature at the time, and in my class sat twenty-four freshman comp students who would rather have been anywhere else.

Most of them had been assigned The Great Gatsby in high school, and some had even read it. I confessed to them that I’d once had my own Daisy Buchanan problem back when I was an undergrad. The young woman and I had dated all sophomore year, and then I went to England for a semester abroad. When I came back to the States, she was seeing a guy on the lacrosse team. It’d wrecked me for a while, until I started to understand that Jessica had represented beauty and love and lightness to my twenty-year-old self more than she’d ever actually embodied those things. “Does that make any sense?” I asked my class of freshman comp students. “Do you see what I’m saying?”

Nobody said anything, until finally a student in the back row asked, “Which one was Daisy?”

I don’t have a Daisy Buchanan problem anymore. I have Beth, my wife, who shares my bed and my life. I have a job where every day is, if not an adventure, at least interesting. I’m not rich, far from it, but I don’t need to be. Don’t want to be. I have a family. A career. Through the books I read, I can visit any place or any time, and, to paraphrase my pal Atticus, I’m able to step into an infinite number of other people’s shoes.

Week nine and we’re down two more fingers. Week ten and it’s two more, making seven fingers total. Five are pinkies. One’s a ring finger. Britney is missing the middle finger on her right hand now, in addition to the pinky on her left. I’ve started pretending not to notice, because there’s no profit in calling attention to something that everyone with eyes can plainly see. We drag our chairs into a circle, as we always do when it’s time to workshop their stories, and discuss two student manuscripts. One chronicles spring break aboard a cruise ship. Most of the story depicts a beer-pong tournament. The story ends with the sentence, It was the best spring break ever!

“Does anyone else feel that ping-pong maybe isn’t enough conflict?” asks Brian.

“I agree,” Britney says. She lowers her voice and says to the writer, “You’re sort of wasting our time here.”

“Now hold on,” I say. Britney is right, of course, but this isn’t the diplomatic workshop environment I’ve been fostering. I look around at my group of gauze-wearers and fight back a moment of nausea. “We should at least consider the possibility that Bruce has minimized conflict for some larger narrative purpose.”

“No,” Bruce jumps in, “I just wrote it for fun.” He’s a business major, one of the ten-fingered. I shoot him a look, because the author isn’t supposed to talk during his own workshop. It’s a cardinal rule. “It doesn’t have any deep meaning or anything,” he continues, ignoring my glance and further undercutting my pedagogical position. “I’m not trying to be Hemingway.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” Britney says. “I mean—” She catches my eye and stops talking. For the next ten minutes, we discuss the story’s descriptions of the ship’s stateroom, the swimming pool, the grand atrium, the food served at the buffet, the vast sea.

In the second story, a fourteen-year-old girl living in a strict household with deeply religious parents lies to her mother about kissing a boy, and when her mother finds out, she has the girl’s favorite backyard tree cut down branch by branch. Sap spills everywhere. The story is a big hit. The word symbol gets said a lot in our discussion. It isn’t lost on me that only a handful of weeks ago, these same students refused to admit that the beer in Hemingway’s story could symbolize anything.

Everyone has lots to say, and class nearly runs over. This is exactly the sort of student-centered learning that a teacher is supposed to dream about, but as I watch my students file out of the room, still chatting, I wonder just what it is that’s being learned.

What I didn’t tell my class at Penn State all those years ago, what I’ve never told anyone, is that Jessica, my college girlfriend, had been eight weeks pregnant when I left America. It was cowardly of me — I knew it then, know it now — but I was a college junior, just twenty years old, and practically a kid myself. I left her some money and refused to talk to her until it was done.

And it really was an awfully simple operation.

In bed that night, I tell Beth about the growing finger tally. She only knew about the first one. Between the postpartum hormones and lack of sleep, she didn’t need anything else upsetting her.

“Where do you think they all are?” she asks.

“What — the fingers?” The lights are off. It’s eleven p.m. Through the baby monitor, ocean waves crash softly onto shore. “I really don’t know.” I rub the base of her neck awhile in the dark. “I want my students to develop a deeper understanding of the human condition. But not at the expense of their fingers.”

Pillow talk is rare these days. One of us will be up with Twain before long, and most nights Beth and I race toward sleep as if the first one to get there wins a night alone in a motel with free HBO.

“Do you remember that movie?” she says. “The one where the eccentric but devoted English professor gives his blasé students a renewed zest for life?” When we first started dating, we watched movies together all the time in theaters and on sofas.

“Are you talking about all movies?” I ask.

She yawns. “Exactly. It’s a cinematic conceit.”

Beth and I first met the year I moved to Mississippi. She’s literally a sexy librarian. She said she was drawn to my tattoos and my shaved head. She liked that I didn’t look like some crusty old professor. I feigned humility and told her I had no idea what she meant.

She’s originally from Maben and graduated from Mississippi State before going on for a master’s degree in library science at Vanderbilt. She stuck around Nashville for a few years afterward, working at Belmont University before coming home when her mother became ill. She and I had only been dating a couple of months when her mother passed, but instead of returning to her life in Nashville she decided to stick around. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. A tenure-track job in my field is hard to come by, and I can’t just pick up and move. Now she’s a reference librarian here on campus — a good job in her field — and is halfway through the six months of unpaid leave that the college granted her.

“I need some adults-only time,” she tells me the next morning. There are dark circles under our eyes. Twain was up every hour overnight. This has been happening too often lately — I thought we were past all that. But he won’t fall asleep unless he’s wrapped in a swaddle, and then he breaks out of the swaddle and goes nuts until he’s wrapped back in it. But he hates being in it. Over and over again, all night long. I can imagine Twain years from now, a middle-aged man still breaking out of his swaddle ten times a night.

I e-mail my student Latoya to see if she’ll come to the house on Saturday so that Beth and I can put on fresh clothes and cologne and have a date. It will be our first time out together, just the two of us, since Twain was born. Latoya is one of the last ten-fingereds in my fiction-writing class. She’s an honor student double-majoring in English and French and strikes me as especially responsible. She arrives at the house missing a thumb, eager to tell me about the new story she’s working on.

“Sort of O’Connor-esque,” she says, looking around our living room. It’s been overrun with the baby swing, baby mat, piles of laundry we haven’t had time to put away, all the books we read to Twain even though he can’t follow along yet. “It isn’t very redemptive, though,” she says. “I hope—”

“Sweetie,” my wife says, “what happened to your thumb?”

Latoya glances at me, then back at Beth. “It was a dumb accident, ma’am. Totally my fault.” She doesn’t elaborate until Beth is doing a last makeup check in the bathroom.

“You know, the other kids are stupid,” Latoya whispers to me.

I’m holding Twain, who finished nursing before Latoya arrived, and gently patting his back. “How do you mean?” I ask.

She raises an eyebrow as if I’m being intentionally obtuse. “Fingers are pretty necessary. But two thumbs and only one space bar?” She shrugs. “You do the math.”

I do the math. The math tells me I’d better start thinking about deans and tenure committees, about campus police, about uprooting my family and trying to find another academic job in a recession. The math tells me to believe that Latoya’s injury is the accident she says it is, and to tell her to eat whatever’s in the fridge and that we’ll be home by nine thirty for the baby’s next feeding.

I hand Twain over to Latoya.

“You have spit-up on your shirt, Dr. P.,” she tells me.

But it’s only a little spit-up, not worth the time it takes to dig through the laundry basket for another shirt. For bank robbers and new parents, every second counts.

For the next two weeks, Beth and I talk about our two hours of chips and margaritas at the Rio Mexicana as if it were the daring adventure of a lifetime. It felt like it was.

The class before Thanksgiving, we’re discussing Britney’s second story. Her first one, workshopped early in the semester, was about a recent college grad who leaves Mississippi and struggles to find work in New York City. The main character carries around some kind of vague guilt because she left her steady boyfriend back home, and at the end of the story, she decides to leave New York, which she finds cold and unfriendly, and returns to him. Every semester I receive one or two of these stories, always written by bright young women who are far more ambivalent about breaking free of their families’ limited expectations of them than they’d ever acknowledge. These students want to convince the class, and therefore themselves, that their white-gown, hometown endings are happy and redemptive, not realizing that their stories are actually the tragic tales of unreliable narrators. Britney’s first story concluded with the words kiss the bride.

Her second story, turned in eleven weeks later, is set in a German concentration camp during World War II. When the Jews die, they become zombies that eat the flesh of the Nazi soldiers, who in turn become zombies that eat more Nazis, until there are no Nazis left — only a lot of zombies and a few very dazed Jews. In my five years at this college, it’s by far the most compelling story I’ve received. Her sentences dazzle. Her scenes bring her monstrous milieu to life. You can smell the flesh rotting. You can feel the hunger, the urgency of insatiable revenge. Rarely have I read horror that rang so true, and never in a student manuscript.

“I thought it was just awful,” says Jenna, who is generally quiet and always pleasant.

“Jenna,” I say.

“But we’re supposed to be writing realistic fiction.” She looks at me. “Isn’t that right, Dr. P.?”

Jenna is right. It says so on page two of the syllabus. Our mode is literary realism.

I’m thinking about the proper response — something about knowing when to break the rules, or maybe quoting Flannery O’Connor, how writers are free to do anything they want as long as they can get away with it — when Jeremy, who’s down to eight fingers, laughs and shakes his head. “She’s earned the right, Jenna.” He’s looking at her perfect hands.

On the last day of the semester, we hold a class reading — always a nice, celebratory way for my students to hear a sampling of one another’s revisions. I bring doughnuts and apple juice to class. I know I should be feeling drained and bewildered because of all the missing fingers, but the truth is I’m elated, because Twain slept for five consecutive hours between one and six a.m. We think he’s finally worked out his swaddle problem.

There’s time for each student to read two pages. Today we leave our desks in rows, and students go to the front of the room to read. I sit amongst the students in the third row, and listening to these introductory students read their own sentences, I find myself becoming misty-eyed. They’ve worked hard. They’re invested. Even Jenna, my realism cop. She stands at the front of the room holding the pages of her story with trembling hands, her eight fingers really gripping the page, her voice quavering... well, it isn’t great prose — she’ll never be a writer — but there are a couple of moments where surprising language and emotional intelligence meet, and everyone in the room sits up a little straighter.

When class is nearly done, I return to the front of the room and tell everyone that I’ve enjoyed teaching them this semester, and I wish them all a happy and safe winter break. They file out of the room smiling and chatting with one another about travel plans and finals exams and end-of-semester parties. A couple of the baseball-cap guys come over to shake my hand, but our hands don’t fit together well.

I’ve driven past this apartment complex on the way to the dentist. Four two-story brick buildings, small windows, Soviet aesthetic. Even the holly bushes lining the foundation look utilitarian. On the stoop outside apartment 3 sit two guys with cigarettes in their fingers and beer cans at their feet. They both wear knit, button-down shirts, blue jeans, and leather shoes I wish I owned. They tilt their heads up at me as I approach the door and step between them.

“Hey,” I say.

“Yes, sir,” one of them says.

My torn jeans and black T-shirt, chosen to make me look youthful, only flag me as out-of-shape and underdressed. I often run my choice of outfits by Beth, but when I was leaving the house tonight, Twain was asleep in his crib and Beth had seized the opportunity to shower. She was humming to herself, some melody I didn’t recognize, and I left her alone.

Now, I try to remember why I decided to come. Other than the portfolios I still have to grade, the semester is over. I don’t owe anybody anything. But after five years, this invitation is the first concrete bit of evidence that maybe I’ve had a lasting impact on my students. The first indication that despite our differences in age and geography and personal histories, we all expanded our sense of what it means to be a writer in the pursuit of truth and original expression.

Or maybe this: parenting a newborn is a lonely business, and it’s nice to be invited to a party.

I open the door, step inside, and scan the crowd. Undergrad parties haven’t changed much: too many people crammed into too small a space, a keg sitting in a barrel of ice, those oversized red plastic cups. Even the posters are the same as when I was in college — Bob Marley, Robert Plant — though the posters don’t match the music, with its electronic beats and autotuned vocals.

A few kids eye me and turn away. Then Gina, who lives here, spots me, and her eyes widen. She shouts across the room — “Dr. P.!” — and weaves through the crowd to greet me, laying her hand on my arm. “You made it!”

I smile. “Of course I did.”

“What?”

I have to lean in and talk directly into her ear. “Of course I did!” Her hair smells sweet and smoky, and I suppress a surge of jealousy toward every last person in the room.

She takes a step back and sizes me up. “Hard to believe this is... you.”

“How do you mean?”

“You look really — cool!”

“I feel like an idiot. I like your bandanna.” It’s tie-dye, and covers her hair. She has some kind of flowery hippie shirt on.

Her smile returns, and she grabs my hand. Hers is warm. “Get a beer and come on. A bunch of us are in the bedroom.”

She leads me to the keg, then pulls me through the apartment, past the kitchen, and into a short hallway. Just as I’m becoming a little nervous — young woman, bedroom — she opens the door. More than a dozen people are in the room, drinking and talking. Gina announces to the room: “See? I told you he’d make it!”

Then she’s gone again.

“Dr. P.!” Brandon comes over, all smiles. He was one of the few kids who said almost nothing in class all semester, but here he seems relaxed and magnanimous. If I were his age, I’d want to be his friend. “We’re glad you came.” He clicks his plastic cup against mine, and the beer is cold and watery and wonderful. I haven’t had anything to drink since those two margaritas several weeks back, and the first sip of beer slides down my throat and shoots out to every part of my body.

Gina reenters the room with three more of my students. Nearly the whole class is here now in this small bedroom. I’m touched. Wendy, not the best writer but a serious, earnest student with perfect mechanics, emerges from the hall bathroom. She totters — clearly drunk — into the bedroom behind the other students. She grins. “Hi, Dr. P.” The cup of beer is to my lips when I notice the gauze on her hand. It’s dark, blood-soaked. In her other hand she holds a large ball of tissues.

“Wendy—” I begin, but she cuts me off.

“It hurts,” she says, “but not as much as you want.” Another grin. “Are you going to do it tonight too?”

Gina shuts the bedroom door, dampening the music, and I whirl around to face my class.

“You’re a really good teacher, Dr. P.,” Brandon says. “You got us thinking.” The others nod. “Don’t you think it’s your turn now?”

Gina steps over to the closet and reaches up to the top shelf. She pulls down a large black trash bag, from which she removes a stack of gauze, a roll of tape, a tube of antibiotic cream, and a branch lopper — same brand I use to prune the crape myrtles in my front yard.

“The semester’s almost over,” she says, and smiles warmly. She returns to the closet, pushes aside some dresses and pants on hangers, and carefully drags out something heavy. It’s one of those capped glass urns you use to make sun tea. The urn is full of what looks like a streaming red ocean populated with little submarines.

I turn and catch Britney’s dazzling blue gaze. Her blond hair is salon-perfect. She sits on the bed, legs crossed at the ankles. She’s wearing an off-the-shoulder black sweater and dark blue jeans with pink high heels. Her toenails are the same color as her shoes. Her hands rest on her lap. She has three fingers on her left hand and two on her right. “Just think of it as your final exam,” she says, smiling.

The beer feels heavy and sour in my stomach. “You don’t understand,” I tell everyone. “I don’t need this.”

“You mean because you once went to England? Because you have tattoos?” Britney shakes her head. “Come on, Dr. P. — you need it more than anyone.”

“No, that isn’t—” My class is watching me, rapt. I try to put words together as beer sloshes over the edge of my cup, soaking my wrist. “It’s just... I have everything already.”

A few of them are smiling the way you smile at an elderly relative who says the most darling things. Britney takes my beer cup from me and sets it gently on the bedside table.

“Sure you do, Dr. P.,” she says.

The edges of my vision start to darken and my legs go weak beneath me, so I sit down on the bed beside Britney and look up at the ceiling, which has little glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the paint in various constellations.

I stay there for maybe a dozen seconds, not looking at a single one of my students, refusing to be seduced into acquiescence or numbness or acceptance. “Dr. P.?” a couple of them say, but I focus on taking breaths and letting them out. When I think my legs will support me again, I stand up, and then I leave the bedroom, still avoiding their faces, which will hold only disappointment, and I’m out of the apartment and hurrying home to my family, to my life of confident narratives and lucid exposition, my life of the mind and of ten fingers and of the next semester, and the next, and the next.