Keeping her glued to my side with tight fingers, I muttered, “When you act like this, I second-guess that promise.”
She blew raspberries at me, and for a second, two images slid over one another.
An image of a little girl with blonde hair and distraught eyes limping painfully from Mclary’s farmhouse and crying herself to sleep, and then Della with her vibrant soul and fearless confidence.
Mclary lived to tear children apart.
I lived purely to ensure Della became everything she ever wanted.
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I’d figured out what Mclary was actually doing with his ‘special tasks.’ That form of education came from a tatty, well-read magazine I’d salvaged from a dumpster.
I’d never seen so much nakedness in one place before and never naked adults.
And the things they were doing?
It made me sick. At least…the first couple of times I sneaked a peek. The first time I’d cracked open the glossy sun-bleached pages, I’d slammed them shut again, disgusted.
The second time, I’d been curious and looked at every graphic image cover to cover.
The third…well, by the third time, my body felt different—tighter, harder, strange.
After that, the sickness turned into more of a sick fascination, and my body burned with heat and need, swelling uncomfortably between my legs.
Over the past few years, my voice had dropped, I had hair growing in places that embarrassed me, and now an undercurrent of hunger and searching for something I didn’t understand lived deep in my belly.
It didn’t happen overnight.
The familiarity of a boy’s body slowly faded into foreign lands of a man.
Even though it took a few years to fully understand what the heavy ache in my groin was or why my heart beat faster when a pretty girl came on TV, it didn’t mean I accepted it.
I hated not having control of my own body.
I hated having dreams of skin and touching and things that the magazine portrayed in explicit detail.
When I was younger, I’d woken to wet dreams with pleasure coursing through my body and not understood what happened. These days, I understood enough thanks to memories of helping Mclary breed his stock and watching bulls with cows and stallions with mares.
I’d come of age to reproduce, and I got the principal of why I hardened.
But I despised it.
I despised the complications it brought with it. I hated the random rage filling my blood and loathed the nasty demands, desperate for ways of releasing the pleasure lurking inside.
I didn’t like lying frozen beside Della as she slept unaware. I didn’t like having to hide my rapidly growing needs or lie to the one girl I promised never to lie to about why she wasn’t allowed on my lap at certain times.
The body I once knew was now hijacked with desires I didn’t.
For a couple of weeks, I’d watched Della to see if she felt different like me, but when I asked if parts of her were acting strange, she’d laughed and patted me on the head, saying if I was sick, she’d look after me.
But that was the thing…I wasn’t sick. Unless, I was mentally sick because looking at that dirty magazine did things to my body that I kept hidden from Della at all costs.
I started bathing on my own because I couldn’t control the hardness that sprang from nowhere. I started wearing underwear around her when before, we both didn’t care—especially in summer if we went for a swim in the farm’s pond or sun-baked on the porch.
That was another reason I wanted to do something different today.
I felt different, and it scared me. I didn’t want to change because I knew my body. I knew its strengths and weaknesses. Now, I didn’t trust it, and I was frustrated with the coursing newness and wants.
“Ren. Reeeeen. Ren!” Della planted hands on her narrow hips. She wore one of my sandstone coloured t-shirts as a dress with a piece of baling twine as a belt. She’d outgrown her clothes last year, and I’d yet to either make or steal new ones. “You’re not listening.”
“Sorry.” Shaking my head free of the horrors of living in a sex-evolving body with no manual or anyone to ask if these urges were normal, I smiled at her tiny temper. “What? What am I not listening to?”
“Me. You’re not listening to me.” She stomped her foot.
I let her display of disrespect fly, finding it amusing rather than brattish. “And what were you saying?”
“Ugh.” She blew a strand of hair from her eyes like an exasperated teenager—like me—and not like a five-year-old. “You didn’t tell me. How old are we?”
Skipping back to our original topic as if my mind hadn’t turned to less innocent subjects—like it did a lot these days—I said, “I’m going to say you’re five, and I’m fifteen.”
Thank God for the kid TV program; otherwise, I would still be a stupid farm boy unable to count his own age. Then again, who knew if my math was right. It probably wasn’t and I’d just added or subtracted a year I shouldn’t.
She wrinkled her nose. “Why can’t I be fifteen, too?”
“Because you can’t.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“You haven’t been alive for fifteen years.”
“Neither have you.”
“I’m closer than you are.”
She studied me like someone studied livestock to purchase. “I don’t think you look fifteen.”
I returned her look of underwhelmed judgment. “And I don’t think you look five.”
“That’s because I’m not five.” She trotted off, heading toward one of the two diners in this sleepy town. “I’m fifteen, same as you.”
If that was the case, she’d be going through the same crazy changes I was, and I’d have someone to share this minefield with.
But she wasn’t.
She was still just a kid, and I was responsible for her happiness and well-being.
With her chin arched like a princess, she pranced right past the diner with its garish stickers of delicious looking food and loud jingling bell on the door.
I called, “Della Ribbon.”
She spun instantly—like she always did when I called her that—her face happy, eyes glowing, body crackling with obedience and energy. “Yes, Ren Wild?”
I shook my head, chuckling—like I always did when she called me that. I didn’t know where she’d come up with it.
For so long, I was used to her mimicking me and instantly recognising where she got certain mannerisms from and similarities in speech and tasks as it all stemmed from me.
But lately, she’d taken what she’d learned and adapted them to suit herself. She chose different words, spoke in different rhythms, and even attempted to do simple chores in her own way not mine.
Adding the word Wild to my first name had taken me by surprise.
I’d asked her why she called me that.
Her reply?
“Because you’re wild like the bobcats we see lurking around our dairy cow sometimes. You’re wild like the wind that blows in the trees. You’re wild and don’t have a last name so that will be your last name because it suits you and because you’re wild.”
Her child logic was simple and spot on and despite myself, my heart swelled every time she used it.
I was proud to be called Wild.
Proud that she recognised and understood me without having to spell out just how hard it was to live a domesticated life when I wanted to return to the untamed one we’d tasted for just a few short months.
“You went too far.” I strode to the diner door and pushed it open, smiling as she gawked at the bell ringing our arrival. “This is the place.”
She sidled close, tugging on my waistband for me to duck to her level. Whispering in my ear, she said, “But there are people in there. They’ll see.”
I stood and pushed her gently so she’d go ahead of me through the door and into the grease and sugar smelling diner. “I know. Don’t worry. I have it und
er control.”
I’d planned this for weeks. I’d ensured we both dressed smartly and didn’t look like homeless ragamuffins who didn’t eat or bathe. I’d dressed in a pair of shorts that were too short thanks to a growth spurt but still fit around my waist. My t-shirt was a little grubby with holes under the arms from scrubbing, but overall, it was presentable.
I’d even snuck out late one night while Della was asleep and broke into a house on the opposite side of town. I didn’t stay long and didn’t take anything apart from the cash in the wallet on the counter and coins from the handbag on the kitchen bench.
Thanks to a money section on the cartoon channel, I laboriously worked out I had forty-three dollars and twenty-seven cents to buy Della the best damn birthday lunch she’d ever had.
“Whoa.” She slammed to a stop in the middle of the entrance, her blue eyes dancing over everything as fast as she could.
I knew how overwhelming this would be because it was just as overwhelming for me. We’d never been around this many people. Never been to a restaurant. Never had someone cook for us.
But thanks to television, we knew the principals of it, and as much as I wanted to stay off the grid and renounce my place in the human race and truly live up to the last name Della gave me, I couldn’t.
For her.
One day, she would want to be normal.
She would want to have friends other than me.
A husband.
Children of her own.
She had to become used to people looking and talking and being cramped in a tiny space all eating together.
A woman in a purple and grey uniform with a stained apron spotted us lurking by the door. She waved with a pad and pencil, brown hair escaping her hairnet. “Grab a place anywhere you want, kids. I’ll be right there.” She returned to the people at the table before her, scribbling something down on her pad.
“Ren.” Della tugged my hand, pressing her body against my leg. “I don’t like it.”
All around us bright lights flickered, plates clattered, people laughed and talked. The walls were painted the same purple as the waitresses’ uniform, the booths wood and grey vinyl.
Not letting her fear override a new experience, I grabbed her hand and tugged her toward the closest booth by the door. I kept my own discomfort hidden, but I couldn’t conceal the fact my hand trembled slightly in hers, matching her jumpy need to run.
“Get in.” I pushed her onto the booth then sat beside her, gripping the table with my fingers. This was supposed to be fun.
It was terrifying.
Della scowled as if she was mad and hated me but cuddled close due to fear. “I don’t like birthdays.”
Sucking up my own issues with this outing, I kept my voice cool and commanding. “You’re not a baby anymore. You have to deal with new things so you grow up.”
My voice sounded hypocritical even to my ears.
My legs bunched and bounced beneath the table ready to bolt. My fists clenched to strike anyone who looked at Della wrong.
“I want to go home,” she whined.
“And I want to go back to the forest,” I snapped. “But we can’t have everything we want.”
Her eyes filled with liquid. “I want to go back to the forest, too.”
“You don’t remember it.”
“Do too.”
I rolled my eyes. “You were in diapers. Trust me. You don’t remember it.”
“Liar. I do. I do. I want to go now. I don’t like it here.” She scrambled at my arm, trying to raise it so she could climb into my lap.
I kept my elbow locked and remained unmoved by her terror of new things. “Della Ribbon, don’t make me get angry.”
She lowered her chin, her shoulders sagging even as her small body continued to quake with nerves.
“Now, kids. What can I getcha?” The waitress from before appeared, flipping her pad to a new page and looking at us expectantly.
I stiffened as her gaze slipped from my face to my chest then over to Della who’d turned into a tiny pouting mouse beside me.
I waited for her to recognise us.
For her to announce to the entire diner that we were the kids from Mclary’s farm all those years ago.
But her eyes remained void of recognition, and no child snatchers appeared from the walls.
Della looked up with big blue distrusting eyes. Distrust that I’d put there from my own distrust. I’d failed her in that respect.
She shouldn’t fear her own species, and I needed to fix that error on my part.
The waitress suddenly leaned on the table, planting her elbows in the middle and reaching for Della.
Della shrieked and practically crawled into the vinyl booth while I couldn’t stop my natural instinct to protect.
My hand lashed out, locking around the woman’s wrist, stopping her mid-touch of the only thing I loved, the only girl I ever needed, the only friend I ever wanted. “Don’t.” My voice smoked with ice. Possession snaked in my gut.
Della was mine, and I would kill anyone trying to hurt her.
The waitress froze, leaving her wrist in my iron-shackle grasp. “I wasn’t gonna do anything. She looks sad poor poppet. Only gonna cheer her up.”
I let her go, narrowing my eyes as she straightened and rubbed her wrist. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone else had witnessed the vicious teen grabbing her.
I glanced at the exit already planning how to run.
This was a bad, bad idea.
“Look, sweetie.” The waitress waved kindly at Della. “I only wanted to touch your beautiful hair and tell you what a pretty little thing you are.” She smiled.
Della bared her teeth like a feral kitten.
The woman carried on unfazed. “You know…I work at the school down the road on weekdays and never seen you guys there. Are you new in town?”
I crossed my arms. “Something like that.”
“What school do you go to?”
“Mr. Sloshpants and friends,” Della whispered. “It’s the program—”
I wrapped my arm around her tight shoulders, squeezing her in warning. “No school you will have heard of.”
The woman pursed her lips. “Well, if you’re new in town and don’t have a school to go to, you should come to ours. We always have room for newbies.”
Della perked up as the woman smiled bright as the sun. “We have finger-painting, playgroup, story time, maths and sciences and English—”
“Story time?” Della asked. “As good as the stories Ren tells?”
The waitress flicked me a look. “I dunno if they’ll be as good as that, but they’re pretty darn amazing.” She winked. “You should come sometime. We’d love to have you. Show you around. You get a backpack full of crayons and colouring books and exercises. We even provide a uniform free of charge thanks to a grant from the government for small rural towns and our slipping education.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, and I almost forgot the best part!”
I didn’t buy the sugary sweet delivery, but Della slurped it up like it was her new favourite food. “What?”
“You get homework and gold stars if you do well, and each class has their own pet. I believe there’s a rabbit in one and a guinea pig or two and even a parrot. Pretty cool, huh?”
Della stopped shrinking into the booth, scooting to the end and beaming. “Whoa.”
“I know.” The waitress nodded solemnly. “It’s awesome. Like I said, you should come along.” Her eyes met mine. “You too, Ren. Brothers and sisters are all welcome.”
Ignoring that she’d used my name thanks to Della giving it away, I opened the menu in front of me, unable to read most of the words but glancing at the pictures in record time. I wanted this woman gone. Now. “We’ll have two burgers and anything else suitable for a birthday party.”
“Oh, it’s your birthday, sweetie?” She clapped her hands at Della. “How old are you turning?”
Della bounced on the vinyl. “It’s me and Ren. We’re
fifteen.”
The waitress laughed. “Wow, you look really good for fifteen. Bet when you’re fifty you’ll still look like an eighteen-year-old.”
Della scowled. “I’m not fifty. I’m fifteen.”
The woman laughed harder. “Okay, okay. Fifteen. Well, I better make sure the chef puts fifteen candles on your cake, huh?”
“Cake? There’s cake?” Della’s smile split her face. Her fear was gone. Her trepidation over new things vanished.
“Sweetie, there is always cake. Give me ten minutes and I’ll have your bellies round as barrels.”
I should thank this woman for making Della’s first diner experience so easy on her.
I should smile at least for making my first diner experience more tolerable.
But all I could manage was a cool nod as she gave us one last grin and turned toward the kitchens with our order.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
REN
* * * * * *
2005
THE BIRTHDAY LUNCH cost me thirty-four dollars and ninety-one cents.
But it was worth a million, thanks to Della’s happy squeals when the waitress brought out three iced-pink cupcakes all squished together with fifteen candles stabbed into them.
The cheery flames flickered all over Della’s cute face as she stared, hypnotized.
Her sheer amazement made me forget we sat in public, and I grinned, loving her happiness.
It was the only time I dropped my guard. The entire meal, I’d watched, just like I did in the forest and at the farm, suspecting everything and everyone, making sure nothing could take me by surprise and hurt Della.
A little while ago, a family walked in with a girl about my age. She caught my eye and flipped her long black hair over her shoulder in a way that made my stomach clench. Not being around people meant I didn’t have the worries of another version of my mother trying to sell me or another Mclary trying to buy me, but it also meant I didn’t meet girls like her.
Like the dark-haired one who never took her gaze off me the entire time I sat steadfast beside Della.
She unnerved me—not because she stared and licked her lips full of invitation just like the dirty magazine showed, but because I didn’t like my body’s reaction to her.