One day, however, about six weeks after I’d arrived, she surprised me, slipping up on me so quietly that she reminded me of a deer trying to sneak past a bear. “Play now,” she announced, and handed me a rooster feather.
My mouth fell slack. “You’re talking.” In all my time spent with the Dyersons, both before and after my father’s death, I’d never heard her utter a solitary word. When she wanted something, she usually pointed or described the object with her hands, and Brenda and Gus obliged.
“Why doesn’t Amelia ever say anything?” I’d asked Brenda.
She’d just smiled her slow smile, wiped her hands on her apron, and shrugged. “Does it make any difference?”
“I guess not.”
“Well, then, there you go.” And she’d turned back to her oven.
In the fresh air of the woods, Amelia’s voice emerged rougher than I thought it would, like a curl of tree bark. “Play now,” she repeated. She had a hard time pronouncing the “l” in
play
.
I twirled the feather in my hands, trying to hide my surprise. “What do you want to do?”
Amelia plopped herself down right there in the dirt and blinked at me. “Story,” she rasped, then closed her lips again, retreating back into her eerie calm. I ran the feather back and forth under my chin. It tickled like velvet. Amelia sat patiently at my feet, staring at me. I stared back. I marveled at the bravery it had taken Amelia to utter those few words and wondered how best to honor it. Amelia became impatient, however, and pounded her little fist in the dirt, so I opened my own mouth and just started saying whatever popped into my head.
“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a beautiful princess with an ugly name—Bugaboo. All she ever wanted was for folks to like her, but as soon as she opened her mouth and introduced herself, they about busted their seams laughing. Not only did she have a real silly name, but her voice was about as croaky as an old bullfrog courting in a pond.
“No one believed Bugaboo was a princess until one day, she found a magic feather, kind of like this here rooster feather.” I held it up. “She thought it was real pretty, and she tucked it in her hair, but it was cursed, and it took away her voice.
“At first, Bugaboo thought that was a bad thing, but then she realized that no one could laugh at her anymore. And so, she grew up to be the wisest, best, most beautiful princess in the whole world, and she never even needed to speak again, for people just naturally figured out what she wanted before she said it, and she lived happily ever after.”
Amelia’s mouth fell open. Her little hands were folded in front of her chest, as if she were a victim of frost. For a moment, I wondered if maybe she really did have something more wrong with her than problems talking, but then she burst into applause so enthusiastic, I worried that she’d rip her clothes.
The next day, she brought me a circlet of twigs she’d bound with rawhide and demanded another Bugaboo story, so I told her about the time Bugaboo made a raft out of wood and sailed a sea so wide, it took her a year to get across it. Soon, I had an entire collection of Amelia’s found objects cluttering up the drawer in the chest between our beds, every day adding something new, until gradually I came to see that I wasn’t entirely alone and that Aberdeen still held some gifts for people like Amelia and me, even if we did have to make them up for ourselves.
Now that we had bonded, Amelia began tagging after me like a sticky shadow, whether I wanted her to or not. I even started taking her with me when I ventured into town to meet Serena Jane at Hinkleman’s soda fountain on Saturdays—the one day Mrs. Pickerton had decreed that we could visit. Mr. Hinkleman shook my sister’s pearly hand as though she were a highborn lady and gave her extra cherries for her soda, but when it came time for him to push Amelia’s and my drinks across the counter, he never said anything, and he always made sure never to touch our skin when he plucked the sticky quarters from our palms.
“Bad luck slips off easy as soot,” I heard him telling the pimpled counter boy as he swept the shop in aimless circles. My stomach did a flip-flop, but I ignored it. Without moving my eyes, I lifted my soda and drained it in one greedy swallow, pushing all the sweetness into me at once, letting it fizz good and hard right in the center of my belly. Next to me, swinging slowly from side to side on her stool, Amelia sipped her drink more conservatively, savoring the burn of bubbles in her throat, mixing pleasure with pain until the one became the other. I turned away from her and faced my sister on the other side of me. In public, I never bothered to talk to Amelia. She wouldn’t respond, I knew, just furrow her brow and suck harder at her straw.
“She talks,” I’d insisted when Serena Jane had made fun of Amelia. “She just won’t do it around strange people.” But Serena Jane had just tossed her curls and sniffed that Amelia was the strange one.
“What would you rather have on a desert island?” I inquired of my sister now, hooking my feet on the stool’s rungs. “Tools or food?” I was aware of Amelia picking at her cuticles. She seemed to be considering the question, even if she was going to answer it only in her head.
Serena Jane half shrugged and glanced at the clock. Amanda Pickerton was going to take her to the movies at one. “Who cares?” She tired easily of my games. In her new life, apparently, Serena Jane never had to make choices of any kind. When I’d asked her what she got for breakfast after we’d been apart for the first week, she’d looked at me as if I were from Mars. “Whatever I want,” she’d said. “Mrs. Pickerton just ties on her apron and whips it up. She produces marvelous cuisine.”
“But what if you wanted both pancakes and eggs,” I’d pressed, trying to imagine Brenda offering that choice and failing. Breakfast at the Dyersons’ was whatever the hens decided to give you. “Which one would Mrs. Pickerton fix?”
Serena Jane had flipped her hair over her shoulder. “What a stupid question, Truly. Why would I ever eat that much at one sitting?” I’d looked at my sister’s white knees nestled together like a pair of Brenda’s eggs and had the urge, not for the first time, to crack her right open. I wanted to pick her ribs apart until I got to the messy center of her—surely somewhere inside my sister there must be some sort of mess, I thought—and dip my fingers in.
Instead, I tried to make her make choices. I stuck us on theoretical desert islands, stranded us in dark jungles, dropped us out of smoking planes into cities in which we were the only two people alive. Then I presented some options. Starvation or cannibalism? Escape or befriend the natives? Hunting or fishing? I was the one who ended up doing most of the answering.
“I’d pick tools,” I said now, “because then you could catch fish and stuff, and make your own food.” I stretched my hand out toward hers a little on the counter. “I’d catch some for you, too. If we were on a desert island, I’d share everything I had.”
Serena Jane stifled a yawn, then squinted at my overalls. Now that I’d been liberated from the wardrobe clutches of Amanda Pickerton, they were all I ever wore anymore. “Really, Truly,” Serena Jane said, flicking a piece of lint off her cardigan, bored with my fantasies, “you might at least acknowledge that you’re female.”
I gazed down at the bulging universe of my body. “Why?”
“Because you
are
.”
I spun a quarter on the counter, watching it wobble harder and harder before it fell. I was a lot of things. Bigger than most boys. Stronger, too. But that didn’t matter if you were a girl. All anyone ever saw about me, I thought, were the parts that were missing: lovely clothes, and proper manners, and tidy hair. No matter what Brenda did to it, my hair refused to curl or behave in any kind of reasonable way. Amelia had long hair that could have held promise, but she always wore it tied up in a single braid she wove herself, and that suited Brenda just fine. “Doesn’t matter anyway,” I mumbled, slurping the dregs from my soda. “I’ll never be pretty.”
Serena Jane sighed. “That’s not the point.”
“Then never mind.” I smashed my straw down in my glass. But I knew what she was trying to say, even if I didn’t like it. She was trying to make me make a real choice before the world up and did it for me.
All that winter after my father’s death, Amelia and I learned to play five-card stud and rummy in the bittersweet air of the barn, the pungent odors of horses and hay wavering around us. By the end of January, August had taught us how to twist and throw a pair of dice so that one number, at least, would end up low and we wouldn’t lose our shirts. “That’s what you call evening up the odds,” August said, squatting next to us, the better to assess our technique.
Amelia fixed him with her clear and steady stare. Only in the barn with her father did her words come clear and easy, maybe because given August’s track record, it was impossible to believe you could disappoint him. “It’s what you call cheating,” she said, and August let loose a great bark of laughter.
“Who would have thought it?” he said. “A Dyerson on the straight and narrow!” And Amelia scowled.
“Come on now, girl,” August soothed. “Let’s see what the cards got in store for us today.” In the weathered air of the barn, his breath billowed out in defeated clouds and mingled with the exhalations of the horses. It looked as though halfhearted angels were descending, as though something almost wonderful were about to happen. Amelia and I were at the age where wonderful things sometimes still did happen, but far less often than they used to. August pulled a deck of cards from the sleeve of his coat, shuffled, cut, and then told us to take the one from the top. He took a card for himself, then asked us to pick again.
“Hold ’em close now. Don’t let me see.” I clutched the pair to my chest, the laminated cards slipping back and forth between my mittens. Amelia looked at hers once, then closed her fist around them and stared at the ceiling. August took another card for himself, then frowned.
“Now, it don’t matter what color you got or what the shapes on the cards are, all that matters is how
many
things you got. Are you good at your numbers, Truly?” I shrugged. Miss Sparrow had tried with me, rapping her pointer on the blackboard so hard that she’d sometimes gouged the slate, but I couldn’t seem to keep anything straight.
“Now, do either of you have a picture of a lady on any of your cards? Or a king?”
I checked and shook my head. Amelia didn’t answer.
August paused, then continued his instruction. “Okay, that’s good. So just go ahead and count up what you got.”
I ran my eyes over the black-and-white shapes on the cards. “Six hearts on one card and eight black things on the other.”
“What about you, Amelia?”
“A king and a queen.”
August whistled. “Well, now, that’s pretty damn good. I’d stick with that.” He turned to me. “And you’ve got fourteen altogether?” He bent down, and I could see the yellow tobacco stains on his teeth, the crow’s-feet lurking at the edges of his eyes. “The aim here is to make all your cards add up to twenty-one. Royals are ten. Aces can be one or eleven. You can ask for another card if you want, but it might put you over. You still got another seven to go, Truly, so I’d go for it, but it’s up to you.” He straightened up and stood over me like a judge while I tried to make up my mind. I’d never expected that one tiny thing would matter so much.
“Okay,” I finally announced. “Give me another card.”
August’s face bloomed into a panoply of creases. “Good girl.” He grinned. “Take that one right off the top.” His thumb slid out another card. But when I took it, drew it to my chest, and peeked at it, I saw that I had the king of hearts, his narrow eyes suspicious as a trout’s, his helmet of curls cut severely along his jaw. My face fell.
“Now what’s the matter?” August’s scarecrow features filled up the space in front of me. “Are you bust?” His gnarled fingers, one of the tips shorn off, tilted my cards. “Aw, that’s too bad. That gives you twenty-four. Too much. Let’s see what Lady Luck delivers me.” His fingers siphoned off a card. “Damn.” The word drifted from his mouth, a disappointment reluctant to leave the warm nest of his body and become manifest.
“I got twenty-seven. That’s even worse.” He showed his cards to me. A nine of hearts, an eight of spades, and the pucker-lipped jack of diamonds. I spotted a family resemblance to the king of hearts in the scaly stare, the pompous curls, the shoulders that didn’t look as if they were going to give in to Lady Luck anytime soon. The stamp of royalty, I figured, must make a person successful but cruel. I tucked that fact in the back of my mind to use in one of my Bugaboo stories.
“Don’t worry,” August said into the brittle air, laying a straw-boned arm across my shoulders. “That’s chance for you. The chips don’t always fall where you want ’em to.” His chin slackened with this admission, then tipped up, the stumps of teeth in his mouth little gravestones swimming in a yellow tide. His way of smiling. “Next time I’ll teach you girls grand hazard.”
His palm disappeared into his pocket and emerged with a trio of black-tipped, ivory dice. They gleamed in his hand, smooth and round, the way his teeth never had and probably never would.
At night, I took to sleeping with the deck of cards August gave me slipped under my pillow and hoped that when I woke, the bulbous eyes of the jacks, the haughty lips of the queens, and the ridiculous crowns on the kings would be squashed flat. Every morning, however, they were unaltered, and it was my own face—puffy and moon-sized in its proportions—that displayed all the damage. Week by week, my cheeks grew rounder, my head more elongated. My legs sprouted like vines. Soon, my ankles protruded a good three inches from under my pants hem, and my legs shivered in the raw air, but there were only so many sets of boys’ clothes the Dyersons could afford to buy. More and more clothing piled up on Amelia’s side of the room.
Serena Jane, on the other hand, was gathering more clothes than she knew what to do with at the Pickertons’. Mrs. Pickerton sewed them for her—dresses with butterfly collars and perfect white blouses with sheer sleeves puffed on them like dandelion fluff. Each week, Elsie, Mrs. Pickerton’s maid, laundered and ironed the garments back into elaborate shapes, ready for their next promenade. They stood at attention in the wardrobe like little tin soldiers. When I went over to visit her, I liked to comb through her closet.