DEDICATION
Again, for Tara
It was nothing.
That night. I lie awake listening.
No. I am not listening. It’s thunder, pelting rain. Mixed with my dreams.
In another part of the house. Muffled, through the walls. A raised voice. The words are indistinct, but the rhythm of the voice is unmistakable.
The second voice, the weaker voice. I feel scorn for it. The deeper voice rolls over it, obliterates it. Like thunder rolling across the sky.
I’m awake, sitting up in bed. Kicking at the covers. It was nothing, only thunder. Now rain is pelting against my windows.
It was nothing. Only thunder.
In the bathroom mirror Freaky Green Eyes glares at me. I feel a crazy urge to claw at those eyes.
CONTENTS
Dedication
I. Crossing Over ONE: how freaky green eyes got her name
TWO: the celebration: april 18
THREE: the quarrel: may 5
FOUR: the quarrel: may 29
FIVE: “separated”: june
SIX: cape flattery: july 4
SEVEN: shame
EIGHT: skagit harbor: july 23
NINE: skagit harbor: july 24–27
TEN: yarrow heights: july 27
ELEVEN: the betrayal: august 11
TWELVE: the call: august 25
THIRTEEN: the last day: august 26
II. Missing FOURTEEN: the interview: september 1
FIFTEEN: the disappearance: august 27
SIXTEEN: the vow: september 2
SEVENTEEN: vashon island: september 3–4
EIGHTEEN: freaky-logic: september 4
NINETEEN: freaky green eyes: first day of school, september 8
TWENTY: aunt vicky and the giant atlas moth: september 9
TWENTY-ONE: the investigation: august 27–september 9
TWENTY-TWO: the don spence show: september 10
TWENTY-THREE: remember mr. rooster!
TWENTY-FOUR: the secret burrow: september 11
TWENTY-FIVE: “they shut me up in prose”
TWENTY-SIX: “now you know . . .”
TWENTY-SEVEN: the interview: september 12
III. In the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico: December
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About the Author
Books by Joyce Carol Oates
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
I
CROSSING OVER
ONE
how freaky green eyes got her name
Later, I would think of it as crossing over. Maybe it was what my mother was doing, too. Crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you.
Like there’s an actual river you swim across, an unpredictable, treacherous river, and if you make it to the farther shore, you’re a different person than the one you were when you started out.
It began with me a year ago this past July. A few weeks after my fourteenth birthday. When Freaky Green Eyes came into my heart.
The stuff between my parents hadn’t started yet. Well, probably it had but I wasn’t picking up signals. Wasn’t wanting to.
I hooked up with this older guy at a party, and it was a bad episode or would’ve been except for Freaky.
Where Freaky emerged from, I don’t know. I’ve never told anyone about this, not even Twyla, who’s my closest friend and what you’d call a calming influence on me. I never told Mom, though this was a time when we were still pretty close and I guess I should have told her, looking back on it.
The party was at some rich people’s place on Puget Sound north of the city. My family (except for my older brother, Todd, who hadn’t come with us) were house guests at the home of neighbors of these people, also very rich with a spectacular house on the Sound. The crowd was entirely made up of people I didn’t know, mostly college age. A girl from my school in Seattle, Forrester Academy, invited me along with a bunch of her friends, and when we showed up it was painfully obvious that I was like the youngest individual in the room. With my milky, freckled skin and carroty-red hair pulled back in a ponytail that sort of exploded out in frizz and static electricity halfway down my back, and a scared look, plus the skinny pink tube top and flip-flops, and no makeup, definitely I gave signals of being the youngest.
The girls I’d come with dumped me in record time.
It was a mile at least back to the house my family was staying in, and along a busy shore road with no sidewalks. Still, I wanted to turn and run out of that party the first few seconds I stepped into that scene.
Franky Pierson, climbing to the high board. Poised to dive, then freezing.
Except it was no diving event. I might have been invisible; nobody so much as glanced at me.
The music was so loud, I almost couldn’t hear it. Hard heavy-metal rock? Right away my heart began beating fast with this music, the way my heart tends to do in any nerved-up situation. My dad liked to say that though I look like my mom, I take after him: he’s a former athlete, a pro football player, and he says we take our cues from the immediate environment, like birds and animals do. If you’re challenged, it’s FIGHT or FLIGHT.
Definitely, I wasn’t in a mood to FIGHT. But FLIGHT didn’t appeal to me much either.
After a few minutes it was weird—I began to like the music. I mean, basically I hated the music, but I began to like the nerved-up sensation.
People were jammed into a long living room with glass walls overlooking the Sound. In midsummer the sun sets late in the Pacific Northwest, and it had nearly fallen beneath the horizon now, flamy red streaks on the rippling water, but nobody at this party was paying any attention to the landscape.
I drifted at the edge of the party, trying not to be jostled by strangers with dangerously sloshing drinks. By the smell of the room, it was beer they were drinking. Like flotsam, I was pushed along and found myself in another long glass-walled room, this one even bigger than the other, overlooking a dock with a tall, sleek sailboat and a large yacht moored at it. Everywhere were people I didn’t know, good-looking guys, glamorous girls, years older than me and showing lots of skin. It was like a pane of opaque glass was between us: they were in a dimension I couldn’t enter. Yet I was stubborn; I didn’t run away.
Thinking of my mom, complaining it was a strain on her, being with people most of the time who only want to meet Dad, the local celebrity “Reid Pierson.” They almost totally ignored her, she said, or spoke to her in a condescending way. (“Oh, and what do you do?”) Mom said she felt as if she didn’t exist, and this was the way I was feeling, embarrassed yet excited, too, hopeful. I was glancing around the party with a pathetic little smile of expectation, anticipation—like at any second someone was going to come up and hug me.
Some good-looking guy, a senior from Forrester, pushing through the crowd saying, “Francesca? Hi.”
It didn’t happen that way. Not quite.
Instead, I located a bathroom, gleaming white tile like pearl, a fancy Jacuzzi with brass fixtures, and in the mirror my flushed-cheeked face, and baffled/hurt/stoic green eyes. I was embarrassed to see myself, but who else did I expect?
It was only about a year since I’d started my period. (“Started my period”: what a dumb-ass expression!) I’d been pretty much a tomboy before that; now I didn’t know what I was, exactly. A girl, sure. But not a girly-girl.
Or maybe that’s what I am. Francesca Pierson, not Franky. And I’m fighting it.
Denial, it’s called.
When Mom was my age, she said, she’d been “obsessed” with her looks. And with guys. She told me she’d done some pretty reckless things that might’ve messed her l
ife up permanently except she was lucky. (“More lucky than smart, Francesca.”) So I worried sometimes maybe I resembled my mother more than I wanted to think I did. That I would become “obsessed” with my looks in high school like just about everybody else I know.
“Francesca, hi.”
I wink at myself in the mirror. Shake out my ponytail. Decide I look okay. Not glamorous, but okay.
“Hi.”
Don’t ask me how, or why: a guy appears out of the crowd nudging into me by accident, then decides to pause, and check me out, and smile. I’m grinning back like a lighted Halloween pumpkin. It’s perverse how my nerved-up state subsides—I’m playing the role of a girl who isn’t excited/scared/thrilled-to-bursting. You’d think this was a movie party scene, I’d played this role before.
This guy who’s smiling at me, who seems actually to like me, is shouting in my ear that his name is “Cameron”—I can’t make out the last name. He’s a freshman at USC—I feel really stupid asking what is “USC” (University of Southern California). He asks my name, and I tell him “Francesca”—suddenly Franky sounds juvenile—and I kind of mumble where I go to school. Cameron says that his family lives on Vashon Island in Seattle, his dad is an executive at Boeing, they have a summer place on the Sound, and he’s crazy about sailing, and what about me? I can smell the beer on his breath, we’re standing so close. Getting jostled by people, which pushes us even closer together. I hear myself tell Cameron, practically shouting into his ear, that my family lives in Yarrow Heights, and we’re staying just for a few days with friends on the Sound, not giving details like who my father is, and whose house guests we are, because the name of my father’s friend is pretty famous. (Not for sports or TV like my father, but for high-tech computer patents.) It’s fine with Cameron, he can’t hear me anyway, or if he does, none of this makes much of an impression. He’s in a revved-up party mood, leaning close to me and smiling.
“Let me get you a beer, Fran—did you say ‘Francesca’? That’s a pretty name.” I don’t tell Cameron that I hate beer, even the smell, the sharp taste like stinging that makes me want to sneeze; for sure I don’t tell Cameron that my parents would be madder than hell if they knew I was even at a party where “drinking” was going on. It’s like, though I definitely promised them that I wouldn’t drink “anything alcoholic” or “experiment” with drugs in any way, shape, or form, suddenly here I am at a party, with people I don’t know, older than me by years, and everything I’d promised and resolved just melted away.
Cameron grabs my hand, leads me somewhere. The music is so loud now, it’s like the eye of a tornado. Wild! I’ve never been at a party so cool. Cameron is talking to me and I’m grinning and saying yes not knowing what we’re talking about except it’s making me laugh. I’m at this party with a guy of maybe eighteen whom I don’t know but we’re getting along really well, and people are dancing and it’s this bumpy shrieking-giggly freaky stuff that’s easy to do, you just wriggle like a snake. And it’s like Franky Pierson has been transformed. Like I am a totally different girl because of Cameron. As if he’d snapped his fingers and made me good-looking and sexy where before I was gawky and self-conscious. And I can dance, I’m loose-jointed and limber like a gymnast. Shaking my hips, my arms, thrashing my ponytail from side to side. And Cameron is staring, he’s impressed. He likes it that other, older guys are watching me, and are impressed, too.
I catch a glimpse of the girls who brought me to the party, gaping at me like they can’t believe their eyes. Little Franky Pierson is pop-u-lar.
Maybe by now I’m drunk, but who cares. I’m just floating and grooving and I want the music and dancing never to end.
“Fran-cesca. Thas a pretty name.”
Cameron has led me somewhere. I can’t stop giggling. My head is a balloon getting bigger and bigger and in danger of bursting, but it’s funny, like beer bubbles rising into my nose making me sneeze-sneeze-sneeze.
The music isn’t so loud now. I can still hear it, and feel the vibrations, but at a distance.
Cameron is muttering words I can’t decipher. We’re in a room with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the water but it’s dark now. I can smell the water, and I can hear the water lapping, but I can’t see the water. It’s like I’m on a diving board with my eyes shut suddenly afraid of diving. And afraid of falling. Cameron’s fingers are strong and hurtful, gripping my rib cage and sort of lifting me. He leans down and begins to kiss me. But it isn’t like a first, new kiss, it’s like a kiss that has already begun, pushy, hard, and his tongue is pressing against my tight-shut lips, everything happening fast. I think I want this don’t I, don’t I want this: to be kissed? Because I can’t remember where I am, or who Cameron is. But I know I have to kiss him back. That’s what you have to do—kiss back. I’m giggling and shivering and a strange sensation comes over me like parts of my body are going numb. Fingers and toes turning to ice. Panic? But I’m kissing Cameron back; I don’t want him to know how scared I am, and how young. His mouth is fleshy and warm, and his hands are moving all over me, hard and practiced. I have a quick weird vision of my brother Todd working out with his weights, bench-pressing, on the treadmill panting and puffing and an oily film of sweat over his face, and if you speak to Todd at such a time he won’t hear you, he’s so concentrated on his body. This is the way Cameron is. My body can’t decide if it’s being tickled, or caressed, or—something else, not so nice.
“C-Cameron? Maybe we c-could—”
“Baby, relax. You’re so sexy, you’re fantastic.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve been kissed, exactly. But it’s the first time with an older guy, an experienced guy. Someone I don’t know who’s calling me “Baby” as if he’s forgotten my name. He’s lifting my tube top, he’s touching my breasts, which are the most ticklish part of me, I’m giggling and can’t catch my breath, and Cameron’s face is giving off heat like he’s been running hard, and I’m thinking Do I want this, is this what I want? I’m trying to remember what I’ve been told about safe sex and I’m thinking Safe sex? But is this—sex?
“Cameron, I guess I don’t want to—”
“Baby, come on. You know you do.”
I’m panicked but also excited. I guess that’s what I feel: excitement? I don’t think I’m drunk now. But my stomach is swirling and sickish. My hair is in my face—my ponytail must have come loose. Cameron is pulling my hair. He’s kissing me again; it’s like his mouth is gnawing at me. I try to push him away, but he doesn’t budge. Everything is happening too fast; it’s like sinking beneath the surface of the water, taking a breath, swallowing water, suddenly you’re panicked and flailing and fighting for your life.
Cameron is pushing me down onto something. Not a bed or a sofa, it feels like a table. Something hard, the edge cutting into my thigh. He’s still calling me “Baby,” but his tone isn’t so friendly now. Like he’s coaxing an animal to come to him he intends to hurt. And he’s acting like he’s been cheated, too. Like I’ve been playing some joke on him. He’s pinning me down, he’s unzipped his pants, he’s fumbling and panting and pulling at my shorts like he doesn’t care if he rips them, and I want to scream but his forearm is pressing against my throat. “Goddamn you, quit playing games. You little—”
I’m struggling hard. I try to scream. I don’t know what to do.
Then, suddenly: I know. It’s like a match being struck. My knee comes up, hard. I catch this guy in the pit of his belly, right in his groin. He gives a strangled cry and goes limp—it happens in an instant. I’m saying, “Leave me alone! Get off me!” Still I’m on my back, but kicking like crazy. It’s like I’m propelling myself across the pool using just my legs, and my legs are strong from years of swimming and running. Maybe I look skinny but I’m strong, the way a cat is strong. Cameron’s weight is on me but I’m able to slide out from beneath him, hitting him however I can, and slashing at him with even my teeth. My teeth!
This scares Cameron, I guess. He’s groaning and curs
ing me, holding himself tenderly between the legs. He’s staring at me saying, “You f-freak! You should see your eyes! Freaky green eyes! You’re crazy!”
A wild laugh comes out of my mouth. It’s like this guy has seen into my soul.
I’m free of him by now, and running. Out of the room, along a corridor, past potted ferns and Indian masks hanging on a wall, I’m like a wild animal seeking a way out of a maze, here’s a door, suddenly I’m outside in the fresh air, and I’m safe.
It’s dark and misty and I smell Puget Sound and I’m drawing in great gulps of air like I’ve been drowning.
But now I’m SAFE.
I’m a good runner. I love to run almost as much as I love to swim. So I jog home along the shore road, trying to stay out of the way of traffic, my hair streaming and blowing down my back. Probably I look like a maniac to people driving past. But I’m feeling so good. It isn’t like you’d expect, I don’t even think, I was almost raped, oh God, instead I’m thinking how happy I am, and how lucky. My mother said how she’d been more lucky than smart at my age, but I’m thinking I was lucky and smart, too. I fought my assailant, and he couldn’t overcome me. I kneed him in the groin, kicked and bit him. I escaped. I hadn’t had time even to be afraid. He was a bully and a coward and he’d be worried now, I bet, that I’d tell my parents what had happened, and he’d get into serious trouble.
Well, I wouldn’t tell. It’s enough to have escaped.
FREAKY GREEN EYES he’d called me.
FREAKY GREEN EYES saved my life.
TWO
the celebration: april 18
The good news was: Dad’s new contract with the network had come through.
The less-than-good news was: Mom wasn’t here to celebrate with us, like other times.
Dad was saying, “I’ve worked hard for this, and I think I deserve it. I’m just so grateful. I’ve been blessed. And you kids . . .” We loved Dad when he was like this, when he’d hug us so hard, our ribs practically cracked. “Well! What I’m trying to say is—the one thing that matters is family. A man’s family is his honor. It means far more to him than worldly reputation. The way the world knows him. His dignity, his respect. We love one another, we Piersons, and we stick together, right? We’re a team.”