“Close your window,” Stepmama said, keeping her eyes on the curving road and not even looking in my direction from the corner of her eye.
For once I disobeyed her.
I guessed that convinced her that if I didn’t keep the window down, I might throw up in her car again. She didn’t say a word more.
If I thought that was a victory, I was mistaken. But then I was always mistaken when it came to Stepmama.
We drove for maybe a half hour more before she abruptly turned off onto a country lane. It wasn’t the lane I was expecting, the one that led to the With Signs church. Instead it was a narrower, longer drive, lined with birch trees that were so tightly planted and so large, they made an archway and almost seemed to glow in the dark made by their own leaves.
I let out the breath I hadn’t known I was holding. My stomach suddenly relaxed. No snakes, then.
Ahead was a shabby yellow trailer parked in the exact center of the clearing in the middle of a stand of pines. To the right was a small, badly tended garden going to weed and seed. I couldn’t see a thing in it that wasn’t too small, too hard, or rotten.
Nailed to one of the pine trees to the left of the house was a target. There were three filthy arrows sticking in the bull’s-eye.
Stepmama slowed, then stopped the car and only then said, “Roll up your window and get out.”
This time I obeyed her.
The minute we were out of the car, the door of the trailer opened and someone came out and stood on the concrete step, hands on his hips. Blond, heavy-lidded, he was as blandly handsome as one of the princes in the pictures of my fairy-tale book, though not wearing armor but more conventionally dressed in tan slacks and a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up. His hair was slicked back. He rolled a toothpick in his mouth and smiled around it.
And then I knew him. He was the older boy from the With Signs church, the one who’d nodded at Stepmama. The one who’d looked so satisfied with himself. He was still looking satisfied, though why anyone who lived in such a run-down trailer with such an unkempt garden should feel that way escaped me.
Stepmama shepherded me toward him, and when we were close enough, she said, “Hunter, this is Snow.”
Hunter.
I went cold all over. Surely this was the one the mirror had warned me about.
But why?
He hadn’t any knife on him that I could see. And he didn’t look fierce, only fatuous, and that’s a word that means “silly in a self-satisfied way.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and spit out the toothpick, ran his hand back across his hair, and came down off the step, as eager as a pup in training.
He reached out to shake my hand, and his hand was large enough to entirely envelop mine.
I looked over at Stepmama and she crooked her finger at me.
I began to tremble, I’d no idea why, and tried to pull my hand away, but Hunter held it tight.
As he looked down at me, his big blue eyes seemed somehow comforting. The smile wasn’t so much fatuous as hopeful. A bit of wind from the east tousled his hair and pushed it across his broad forehead, softening how he looked.
“Hello, Snow,” he said. “We gonna be friends?” His voice had that soft lilt that some of the local boys have, but with a strange twang, too, as if he’d been studying from the radio or picture shows how to speak to girls.
I tried to smile back and couldn’t quite manage it, frozen as I was. But suddenly I felt my cheeks get hot and knew I was blushing in a way I’d never blushed before.
“When Hunter saw you last week in church, he asked me if you and he could walk out together,” Stepmama said. “And I told him you were just barely become a woman, but I would introduce you to him and see what happens.”
I could have asked why he should have said any such thing. After all, I didn’t think of myself as a great beauty. Or asked when he’d had time to ask her. Surely not after I’d passed out in church and then thrown up. Surely not then.
But I stopped wondering about that almost at once. And I conveniently forgot the mirror’s warning, forgot that I’d only just met Hunter, that Stepmama had made this promise without consulting me, that he must be five years older than me. Or more.
“Hello, Hunter,” I said softly, my voice nowhere near as loud as my beating heart. And at that very moment, I also inconveniently forgot to be afraid.
We stood in an attitude of talking, my right hand in his, but said nothing at all. I no longer needed his strength to keep my hand in his. It nestled there all by itself. And while we stood that way, hand in hand, my face got hotter, but his smile never changed. Still we couldn’t manage a word between us.
In the middle of all that stillness, I heard a sudden strange click. And then another, and then the roar of Stepmama’s engine. Before I could turn my head to see, she’d peeled out of Hunter’s driveway and left me to my fate.
My fate.
All I could think of was that if I was deep into first love, it wasn’t sweet at all like the songs on the radio said, nor the stories in my books. It was like a knife in my heart. Perhaps that was what the mirror had meant.
Surprisingly, such an idea was both exciting and terrifying, painful and pleasant all at the same time.
Once the sound of Stepmama’s car was out of our hearing, Hunter cleared his throat. “Do you wanna come inside?” he said, his hand still clutching mine.
“Inside where?”
“Inside the house.” He looked at me as if I was stupid.
I thought for a moment, because suddenly—almost as if someone was whispering to me—I heard “Too quick. Too quick.” I shook my head.
“Can we . . . can we walk a bit? And talk?” I asked. I needed the air right now, to cool my blazing cheeks, so I could breathe.
He looked down at me. “Talk? What do you wanna talk about?”
About why you asked Stepmama if we could court,
I thought, but didn’t say it aloud. I shrugged. “You could tell me something about you. All I know is your name.”
He smiled again, that melting smile. Then he shrugged back. “You can see me,” he said. “Not much to tell. I’m twenty-three and single. And you’re—what—sixteen or so. And single, too.” His hand was suddenly hot and moist.
“Not thirteen yet,” I said.
Something like a startled frown crossed his face, but briefly. “You’re mighty sophisticated for thirteen.” Only he said
sir-fister-cated.
“Not quite thirteen,” I repeated.
“Whatever.”
I swallowed hard, tried again. Behind us there were birds calling. A crow, I thought. Several crows. I suddenly remembered that a group of crows was called a
murder.
But Hunter was smiling again and my knees went weak. I struggled to say something different, something original, something fetching, before coming up with, “Tell me about With Signs church. Why do you go there?” And immediately afterward I was embarrassed to have said it.
He let my hand go and then wiped his own hand on the side of his slacks. His hand had been sweating, or mine had, or both of ours had. But it felt somehow as if he was trying to wipe me off. He thought for a long time before speaking.
“I like the snakes,” he said at last. “And the girls who like snakes.”
“I . . . I don’t like snakes.” My voice had gotten so hushed he had to lean in to watch my lips.
“Oh, that’ll come. When you believe.”
I wasn’t sure I could wrap myself in that particular cloak, but didn’t say so. I wanted him to keep liking me, snakes or not.
“So—now you wanna come into the house? I got ice cream. And beer.”
I didn’t really want ice cream. My stomach was tumbling over and over, doing handstands, backflips, somersaults. And of course I’d never had beer. I was too young for it. “I don’t think so. Can’t we just walk a bit?” My hand, the one that bore the imprint of his, made a kind of waving motion toward the path.
“I guess . . . ,” he said, but didn’t manage to make it sound as if he thought it was a good idea. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out another toothpick, stuck it in his mouth, turned on his heel, and started to walk off into the woods ahead of me, moving so swiftly, I had to double-time to catch up to him.
It seemed an odd beginning to what was supposed to be a courtship. But as I’d had only the fairy stories and
Anne of Green Gables
to go by, I supposed it was going all right. After all, look at what Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had to go through before they won their princes. And Anne and Gilbert managed to fall in love by being rivals first. So perhaps this was how true love was supposed to go in real life. Though deep inside, something was nagging at me.
We walked in silence into the woods, not the comfortable kind of silence I had with Cousin Nancy or the edgy, angry silences between Stepmama and me or the tragic silences that had become my only communication with Papa. This was a silence compounded of stranger-ness, where two people with absolutely nothing in common can’t think of a thing to say.
So I began to babble to fill the empty spaces. As we walked, I jabbered away at the things I knew: plants that Papa had shown me. Or wildflowers that Mama had loved. Or the wild herbs that Cousin Nancy knew. I pointed out a cluster of bloodroot, on the forest floor, with its scalloped leaves and white, daisy-like flowers. “I like the little white flowers and the yellow centers, don’t you?” And then I added, “Did you know, there’s a reddish juice in the stems and roots.
She-roots,
Papa calls them. You can grind the dried roots into a powder to be used for . . .” My voice trailed off.
“Yes,” he said. Or at least it was a grunt that sounded like
yes.
We passed some yellow-belled flowers and I knelt down, trying to be as graceful as a princess. “Trout lilies, Papa calls these.” I didn’t tell him Papa hadn’t called things much of anything lately, not since Stepmama came. After all, Hunter and I weren’t yet close enough for that kind of confession. “Papa says it’s because they look like the coloring on a brook trout.”
“Not
much
like,” Hunter growled.
We walked about a dozen more steps in silence, but when we passed by a stand of high grass where some busy spider had spun a web between two stalks, I said, “Did you know that spiderwebs can be used to stop someone bleeding, and—”
“Can it stop you talking?” He was no longer smiling that slow smile, and his lips had thinned down to a gash. For the first time, I saw something mean in his narrowing eyes. He was still chewing on that toothpick until he suddenly spit it out as if it—or something else—had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Hunter?” My voice squeaked a little. It was as if we’d both suddenly fallen out of whatever spell had been placed upon us.
He bit his lip, realizing he was scaring me, and I saw him trying to rearrange his features so he could be attractive again. For a moment he looked like a little boy who’d had a scolding and knew he had to seem innocent and sorry at the same time. Running his fingers through his hair, he leaned toward me as if to tell me a secret.
“
So, Snow, you ready to go back to the house now?”
“I prefer to be called Summer.”
“So,
Summer,
” his voice suddenly soft, low, as if softness would be more enticing, though in fact it made him all the scarier. “We go back to the house and you can have some ice cream, I can have that beer.” He smiled slowly, once again sure of his charm. There was a practiced element in his wooing, learned but not felt. As if someone had told him how to do it. “I got vanilla
and
chocolate.” This time the smile actually reached his eyes.
I wondered if the smile might have more to do with the possibility of that beer.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Look, we’re going to the house.” He was trying hard to hold on to his charm and failing. There was an edge to his voice.
“Trailer,” I said, not trying to be charming at all.
“Now, Summer, we can do this the easy way,” he said flatly, “or the hard way.” There was the smile again and now it seemed only sinister.
Sinister
—a word I’d read in stories but never heard said out loud, but the perfect word for how he looked. I was thinking about that as he finished his thought.
“I prefer this the easy way, though your mama—”
“Stepmama . . . ” I said automatically.
A small wind began puzzling through the trees. Something white floated off to the side of my seeing. I suddenly remembered a song of Papa’s about a little girl sleeping in the pines where the sun never shines and shivering the whole night through.
“I believe your stepmama prefers the hard way. Though she also wants it done far from home. Now
there
’s a woman loves snakes.”
“Stepmama
is
a snake!” I was surprised I’d said it aloud, surprised at the fierceness in my voice.
“Why,” he drawled, “I believe she is. Maybe
that’s
what I love about her.” That’s when he grinned mightily and bent down.
I watched as if mesmerized as he lifted his pants leg to reach into a sheath tied to his calf, a sheath where he’d hidden his knife. When he stood up again, knife in hand, I was already running as hard as I could down the long driveway.
About halfway, I looked once over my shoulder to gauge the distance between us and saw with astonishment that Hunter was down on his knees, hands over his face to shield it from the razor-sharp talons of a white owl that was beating its wings against his head.
I didn’t know owls did that. Not in the daylight. Not to human beings. But I whispered a prayer as I ran: “Thank you, God,” and wondered if I’d been saved by an angel, not an owl.
I knew I couldn’t count on Hunter being held off for long. And so I kept running as fast as possible, not down the driveway, where Hunter surely would have caught me, but instead plunging off to the left, into the darkening woods.