As the days after my father’s death turned into months, and as January led into February’s dreaded chill, I refused to return to school. Nothing Brenda said to me made any difference, either. “Don’t you miss Serena Jane?” she asked. “Don’t you want to spend more time with her?” I shook my head. At school, Serena Jane had always made it a point to sit as far away from me as possible, and she’d consistently ignored me in recess, flocking instead to the more pleasingly proportioned girls.
Brenda tried a different tack. “Don’t you want to see your friends?” I snorted.
“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. “Saves us on gas. You can stay out here with Amelia.” Because of Amelia’s mute spells, Brenda taught her at home. Amelia had never set foot in that schoolroom, and I intended to follow her lead. At the sound of her name, the muscles in my throat slackened as though they’d been given a balm. Amelia. My main companion now. Amelia, who bubbled like a soup kettle when she tried to speak to anyone but me, who glided unseen in the edges of shadows, whose skin was so pale, it seemed as if the daylight might break her in half.
Not everyone was pleased with my new arrangement, however. Miss Sparrow, for one, was starting to stew in her classroom. What was it about me? she wondered. Why couldn’t I be fenced within the reasonable bounds of educational authority? According to her view of the universe, if ever a creature needed institutional shaping, it was I. And even though she found me absolutely grotesque and personally repugnant, she was still more than willing to have a whack at whittling down the bulk of me.
She waited until after Valentine’s Day before she paid her first visit to the farm, sparing me the usual flurry of construction paper hearts passing in and out of everyone’s hands but mine. Through the grime of a frosted upstairs window, Amelia and I watched her mince her way from her car toward the rickety front door, her rabbit-skin boots leaving a refined calligraphy in the snow. There was a series of machine-gun raps on the door, and then Brenda answered. Priscilla Sparrow’s eyes raked over Brenda’s thin shoulders and paisley head scarf, and Brenda’s jaw tightened like a bow. Then Brenda’s lips moved and released all the arrows she was hiding in her mouth, piercing Miss Sparrow’s armor of nail lacquer, and hairspray, and Coral Gables lipstick. The nicked wooden door swung closed in Miss Sparrow’s face. Upstairs, I dug a single fingernail into my palm, scratching a line into my flesh to keep score. Downstairs, I could hear Brenda banging pots and pans in the kitchen.
“Girls,” she crowed, “come on down here and help me set this table.” She clattered a handful of forks together like sabers. “That damn fool woman,” she muttered, slamming bowls of Irish stew onto the table. “Thinks she knows it all.” She ran her eyes over the bumps of my body, then over Amelia’s skinny cheeks, and paused. “She doesn’t know the first thing about us.”
The sentiment proved to be equally true on Brenda’s part when it came to underestimating Miss Sparrow. For in spite of her carefully limned makeup, and clattery high heels, and fancy words, Priscilla Sparrow was a warrior at heart. In her opinion, she had right on her side, and she had no intention whatsoever of letting an illiterate like Brenda Dyerson call the shots. She tromped back to her car, the heels of her furry boots leaving a trail of cruel crescents, and drove home, where she brewed herself a strong cup of tea, spiked it with a splash of sherry, and regrouped.
The day of Miss Sparrow’s second visit, the snow was up to her knees. She had to abandon her car on the main road and stumble down the dirt lane to the farm, but it didn’t deter her from reaching the farmhouse door and pounding on it like a refugee. This time, I was in the kitchen, drinking cocoa at the scabbed table with Amelia, and I could see large wet flakes staining Miss Sparrow’s painted cheeks. Once again, Brenda blocked the doorway with her meager body and cocked her jaw, resenting the heat that was curling around her ankles and out into the air. Priscilla Sparrow might have been good at math, but she wasn’t even aware of the calculations we went through in deciding whether or not to put another log on the fire.
“What is it?” Brenda spat.
Miss Sparrow didn’t waste precious words. She scrabbled in her pocket with her finely gloved fingers and produced an envelope.
“From the superintendent of the board of education. It states that, by law, you’re required to send any children in your care to school, and that if you don’t, you can be found negligent and have the children removed.” She glanced over Brenda’s broom-handle shoulder and took in my bulk and Amelia’s greasy hair and sleepy eyes. Unattractive girls, both of us, she thought, but that wasn’t her concern. She was merely here to see that the rules were followed, that justice was done, that no one fell through the cracks on her watch.
Brenda accepted the envelope, stuffing it into her apron pocket without looking at it. She was an expert in receiving unwelcome news. In her experience, bad correspondence always arrived dressed up—splashed with red ink, embossed with seals and a lot of stamps, as if written threats needed extra muscle the way loan sharks needed heavies. She knew all about them, and they knew about her.
Brenda shivered with a blast of icy air and scuttled her shoes on the floorboards. On the other side of the door, Priscilla Sparrow was still craning her neck, trying to get a good look us.
“Is that all?” Brenda closed the door a fraction of an inch.
In the cold, the tip of Miss Sparrow’s nose was turning bulbous and red. Nevertheless, she managed a sickly smile. “Unless you have any special circumstances of which I’m unaware.” Her teeth hung in her mouth like icicles.
Brenda produced a sickly smile of her own. “No special circumstances. Truly will be back at school in the morning.”
Priscilla Sparrow’s stained lips retreated even farther over the ridges of her teeth. “Oh, but this letter stands for all the children at this residence. I believe you and your husband have a child of your own? A girl? Whom you’ve never sent to school?”
“I teach Amelia here at home. She’s shy. She has a hard time with her speech.”
The corners of Priscilla Sparrow’s eyes narrowed into poison- tipped darts. “And what makes you think you’re qualified to meet that responsibility? Do you have any kind of formal training in pedagogy? Any familiarity with child development and psychology?”
At that moment, Amelia snuck up behind her mother and peeked around her apron. A life passed amid gangsters, horse thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow’s skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the musty decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy—in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow’s better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.
I didn’t think a person like Priscilla Sparrow was going to have any more luck getting Amelia to speak up than her mother did, and even if she succeeded, it wouldn’t change anything. At the end of the day, Amelia would always still be a Dyerson—soft-spined, down at the heels, patchworked. She was what she was, and she didn’t mind, either. Not like me, who would have given anything to shed my cumbersome skin and bones, stripping myself down to marrow, to nothing more than a gambler’s heart, which beat fast and true and still believed that somewhere out there, a deck was stacked entirely in my favor.
I was correct about school. Miss Sparrow hated me, but she hated Amelia even more. It turned out Amelia was unable to make any progress whatsoever with elocution, dictation, repetition, or any form of memorization. For an entire month, Amelia was kept so late after class that the moon would begin to rise in the schoolroom’s paneled window, but it did no good. No matter how many chalky columns of letters and words Miss Sparrow tallied up, no matter how much she banged on the blackboard, Amelia simply couldn’t force out a sound. She did better with her numbers, having a firm grasp on the concept of zero. She knew, for instance, that nothing divided by nothing was still nothing. “Things are what they are,” she muttered to me on the long cold walk home, her tongue loosened after the confines of school. “You can’t change them.”
Not that Miss Sparrow didn’t try. First, she punished Amelia for being unwilling to speak, sticking her in the coat closet, then she tried coddling, intimidation, and, finally, wheedling. “Come on, darling,” she’d say, hooking a finger under Amelia’s chin and tipping it up to her for better eye contact. “The other children find recitation easy. You should, too.” When Amelia merely blinked at her, silent as an owl, Miss Sparrow dug her finger harder into Amelia’s skin. Her teeth seemed to grow a little longer in her mouth. “You know, don’t you, that children who refuse to repeat their lessons don’t get visits from Santa? You wouldn’t like that, would you?” Amelia, for whom Santa was an abstract concept, merely blinked again.
In the end, Miss Sparrow gave up, ignoring the listless presence of Amelia in the back row and contriving to have her miss school on the day the state assessment exams were held. Amelia didn’t mind. She spent the afternoon at home, curled in a nest of blankets, reading the Sears catalog, and helping Brenda bake.
My reentry to school was hardly smoother than Amelia’s. The day she skipped the test, I muddled through the pages of questions, my tongue trapped between my teeth, my ankles squeezed together under my desk, as if by tightening all the screws of my body, I would summon up the answers. I gave a glance over to the seat next to me, where Marcus Thompson scratched his pencil across his paper as fast as he could, his lips whispering the answers to himself as he scribbled, adding extra facts and explanations in the margins as he saw fit. I leaned forward, hoping to overhear an answer or two, but it was all mumbo-jumbo to me. “Smarty pants,” I hissed, and he jerked his head up, startled. Then he grinned.
“Big bones,” he snapped back, but his eyes twinkled as he said it.
Ever since my return to school, Marcus had been the only pupil with any kind words for me. Even my sister was as distant as a ghost, gliding past me at recess like an unattainable spirit, and it was this canyon of strangeness between us that pained me even more than my troubles with numbers and letters or the rude comments I got from everyone else.
“Hey, Truly,” the kids taunted, “come sit on this here rock. You’ll crush it, and we’ll have us some marbles.” Or, “Truly, Truly, two-by-four, couldn’t get through a barnyard door.” Always, I searched for my sister, but she was usually too far away to do any good, as flickering and unreliable as a lightning bug.
During classroom hours, if I turned my eyes to the desks on the far left side of the room, I could pick out her waxy curls. Sometimes she wore a sweater set the color of orange sherbet or a skirt so fully pleated that she resembled a flamenco dancer. On her wrist dangled a charm bracelet Mr. Pickerton had given her for her birthday—a silver heart, a small key, and a little cross studded with seed pearls, just like the one he’d given his real daughter. When Serena Jane moved her arm, I could hear the charms jingling. I would close my eyes and pretend it was a secret code Serena Jane was sending just to me. During lunch and recess, Serena Jane was immediately swallowed by a phalanx of admirers—girls who cooed over the fringe of her new kilt and boys who wondered how her eyelashes had gotten so dark while her hair was still so blond. Even Miss Sparrow flickered around her, returning Serena Jane’s essays tattooed with soldierly exclamation points and warm words of encouragement. Mine only ever had the letter C curling into itself on the last page, as if it were giving up.
Amelia and I ate together alone on the big rock shaped like a turtle, peeling the waxed paper off our sandwiches silently and eating glumly, hunkered into our own separate miseries. Soon, however, I noticed Marcus staring at us from his perch across the schoolyard, muttering nonsense to the air. I nudged Amelia. “What’s his problem?” She just shrugged and bent back over her soggy bread and tuna fish. I glared at Marcus, making my eyes bulge until he turned scarlet and beat a retreat inside to pester Miss Sparrow some more with his endless facts about Russian space dogs, the chemical properties of curare poison arrow tips, the physics of the curveballs thrown by Yankee Mel Stottlemyre, and anything else that struck his fancy.
One afternoon, though, he either decided he’d had enough of my eyeballing him or he was full up to bust with information, but he abandoned his bench across the yard and sidled up to our rock with his rucksack, settling so closely to me that his leg touched mine. Amelia and I were just finishing the sandwiches that Brenda had packed for us, chewing the chalky slabs of government cheese as slowly as possible to make them last.
“What do you want?” I scowled, bracing for a comment about my butt being heavier than stone or some other such nonsense.
But Marcus merely reached into his rucksack and withdrew a bunch of comic books, fanning them out on the rock between Amelia and me. “Want to see these? Some of them are really good.”
I shrugged and picked up a copy of Spider-Man. On the cover, Spidey was throwing a web out of his wrist big enough to swallow an entire apartment building.
Marcus tapped the page. “Really, it should be coming out of his abdomen because that’s where spiders spin their silk. Did you know they make different kinds? Sticky for traps, and smoother, stronger pieces for moving around on. They weave both kinds into their webs so they can cross them without getting stuck.” Marcus squinted. “What kind do you suppose Spidey’s using here?”
I rolled my eyes. “The sticky kind, obviously. Because he’s catching bad guys.”
“But there aren’t any bad guys in the picture.”
Across the yard, I could see my sister telling an elaborate story, her head thrown back in laughter. I put the issue back down and pushed it toward Marcus. “Okay, so maybe the other kind. Who cares?” It was nice to have company, I thought, but I was like Spidey. I worked alone. I stuck my chin in the air. “Don’t you know that no one ever talks to Amelia and me?”
Marcus flipped a comic page. He was small, but I could see he didn’t scare easy. He shrugged. “No one ever talks to me, either. They don’t want to know all the things I know, like about spiders. Did you know they can live underwater? One type even weaves a waterproof web.” He ducked his head. “It’s shaped like a bell.” Next to me, her forearms resting on the boulder, Amelia leaned over the cover of a vintage Superman comic, enthralled by mousy Clark’s transformation from spectacled milquetoast to man of steel. Marcus jutted his chin toward the magazine. “Superman’s okay, but I like Spider-Man better. I just collect Superman for the resale value. So far, my collection is worth ten dollars, but I only paid two.”
I crossed my arms. “If you’re so smart, maybe you can tell me how Superman manages to change his clothes so quick.”
Marcus blushed and without asking began gathering up his comic books one by one, his pale fingers worrying the corners of the covers like light-drunk moths. A brace of clouds overhead buckled and began spitting out snow. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said as if it were the saddest thing in the world. “Some things are just pretend.” He leaned in close to me. His eyes were very, very blue. Just then, Miss Sparrow appeared on the steps with her bell, ringing it with grim precision. “But not everything,” he whispered. I bent close to hear what he was saying, and as soon as I did he planted a quick kiss on my cheek. I looked over at Amelia, but she was absorbed by the falling snow and hadn’t noticed a thing. I tugged her wrist, my face scarlet. Suddenly, going inside was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Come on,” I said. “We better head in.”
After school, Marcus was waiting silently for Amelia and me by the coatroom door, and he proceeded to trail us the whole length of town, waiting for some kind of signal to come closer. “What’s he doing?” Amelia said, twisting her neck around, and I had to confess that he’d kissed me earlier.
The sun came out briefly from behind its frill of clouds, making Marcus’s shadow coast along like a bat. I pointed it out to Amelia. “Look at that.” She twisted her head and smiled one of her rare smiles. “Stop it,” I hissed. “If you keep encouraging him, he’ll just follow us forever.”
Amelia kept smiling, though, as if she knew something I didn’t. In front of us, our three shadows danced and jigged—Amelia’s a happier version of herself, Marcus’s elongated and elegant, and mine so big, it slid off the cement and into the street, where it morphed and stretched until I couldn’t tell anymore where I stopped and the rest of the world began.
“He must be in love with you,” Amelia whispered, kicking up a light dusting of snow. Even after all of Miss Sparrow’s instruction, her tongue still stumbled over her consonants, so that it took me a minute to figure out what she was saying. When I did, I scowled.
“Don’t be ridiculous. He wanted to show me his comic books, that’s all.”
Amelia shrugged, as if love were no big deal. “Sometimes,” she said in her funny drone, “that’s all it takes.”
The only things I bothered to bring with me when I moved to the Dyerson farm were my mother’s tortoiseshell mirror, a wedding photograph of my parents, and my half of my father’s winnings from August’s horses. They were only three items—not very many to keep count of—but over the course of my life, I would manage to lose them all. I started with my mother’s mirror. Of all the things my mother had left behind her in this world, the tortoiseshell mirror was one of the few possessions Dad hadn’t given away. Year by year, the silk slips, the dresses in my mother’s closet, her round-toed shoes, had leeched into charity bins and the garbage.
“They’ve got moths,” Dad would bark, coming down the stairs with an armful of sweaters. “It’s frayed all along the seams,” he explained when he gave away her coat. “No one wears this style anymore.”
I never knew why he kept the mirror. It wasn’t particularly valuable—in fact, there was a crack running down its back and handle, and the glass was speckled and hazy, giving anyone gazing into it the semblance of a pox victim. Still, the tortoiseshell was genuine, and even after years of neglect, it shone with a gentle luster that reminded me of well-oiled wood. Sometimes I used to sneak into my father’s room and pull the mirror off the bureau, twisting it around and around in my hand or tilting the glass so it caught the light and made a little circle of luminescence on the ceiling. After each of my father’s purges, I would creep to the chest of drawers and check that the mirror was still there, and it always was, facedown on a yellow linen runner.
One rainy afternoon when I was about six and Serena Jane was eight, we decided to play May Queen—just like the real May Queen that Aberdeen crowned every spring. I assumed that Serena Jane would make herself the queen—she always did—but that afternoon, she just smiled and said, “No, Truly, let’s make it you this time.” And so I let myself be swaddled in a toilet paper sash, crowned with a tinfoil tiara, and given the mop to hold for a bouquet. I’d felt silly until Serena Jane’s breath tickled the back of my neck and she whispered, “Look, you’re a princess.” She held up the flecked oval mirror in front of my square jaw and bulbous nose, and for once, I believed her.
At night now, tucked up in my cot under the dormer window in Amelia’s room, I listened to Amelia’s ragged snores and thought about Serena Jane’s rose-sprigged room at the Pickertons’. Amelia’s bedroom had old horse blankets thrown on the mattresses and flour sacking for curtains. When darkness fell, we would light the stub of a candle to see by, the same one for days, until it was little more than a nub. Even in the dark, it wasn’t a room that inspired fantasies of tiaras and ball gowns. Neither was it a room that required the glossy sheen of a tortoiseshell mirror. I could see plain enough what was around me without it. I wasn’t like my father, however. I couldn’t just get rid of things.
“Why don’t you give the mirror to Serena Jane?” Amelia suggested one night after I’d told her a Bugaboo story. Earlier, she’d come in the room and caught me staring miserably at my reflection. “I bet Serena Jane would like to have something from your mother.” She didn’t say that she thought Serena Jane deserved to have the mirror more than I did, but she didn’t have to. Between my sister and myself, Serena Jane was the pretty one, with the pretty life. She’d have a better time staring at herself than I ever would.
I rolled over and slid the mirror back under my bed. It was the last piece I possessed of my mother, but maybe Amelia was right, I thought. Maybe if I gave it to Serena Jane, the gift would tie us together again. I slept badly that night, tossing and turning but resolved. Before I set off for school, I wrapped the mirror in an old scarf and stashed it in the bottom of my satchel, carefully doing up the straps.
All morning, through a tedious math lesson, I squirmed, eager for recess when I could give Serena Jane my present. I watched my sister bend her head over her paper, then straighten up and stare out the window, bored. Beauty didn’t need long division, I thought, a stump of pencil clenched between my fingers. Beauty had its own system of partitioning up the world.
The bell rang, and Miss Sparrow glanced up foggily at the class, as if surprised to find herself standing at a blackboard in front of twenty-odd children. Time was not being particularly kind to her. Tiny lines were starting to colonize the spare skin around her eyes, and her lips, once as plump as summer berries, were beginning to thin along their edges. She still bought herself a new pair of high-heeled spectator pumps every year, though, even though she always complained that her toes were killing her and that all the sidewalks in Aberdeen were cracked to kingdom come. She blinked now and clapped her chalk-tipped fingers together dryly. “Recess, children,” she called. She fisted one hand, held it to her mouth, and cleared her throat.
I waited until everyone filed out of the room, then reached into my satchel and withdrew the mirror. Slowly, I unwound the moth-eaten scarf I’d tied around it. Serena Jane was outside, laughing at something a boy was saying and showing off her new skirt. I planned to leave the mirror on her desk, where Serena Jane would see it and understand. She would wait for me after school, and walk with me to Hinkleman’s to slurp sodas, our heels hooked up on the stools. Here, she would say, and slip off the tinkling charm bracelet. You can have this. She would know how badly I needed something small and frivolous with which to decorate my life.
I had just laid the mirror facedown on Serena Jane’s desk and was turning the bulk of myself around when I heard Miss Sparrow chirp from behind her desk, “What have we here, my dear?” Her heels clicked in my direction and stopped at Serena Jane’s desk. She picked up the mirror, pinching the palm of her hand in the process.
“Oh!” she cried, and dropped the mirror at her feet. A spidery crack spread across the surface of the glass, and one jagged shard fell next to her shoe. “What’s this?” She sucked the skin of her hand and nudged the broken glass with her foot. “Don’t you know you’re not allowed to bring things like this to school?” She pulled her hand away from her mouth. A red welt was blooming in the center of her palm.
“You see what’s gone and happened? Now, what if that had been your sister? I’m afraid I’ll have to take this.” She tucked the handle of the mirror into her waistband, careful to avoid the crack and the raggedy edges of glass, then scowled like a displeased empress. “Now, run along outside.”
I ducked my head. Arguing with Miss Sparrow was always a losing gamble. “Yes, ma’am.” I hesitated, the tip of my tongue protruding between the buttresses of my lips, then hung my head and shambled out to the schoolyard. Miss Sparrow watched me go, her own lips pinched shut like an old lady’s purse. She waited until I was all the way out the door before she pulled out the mirror and held it in front of her, twisting the glass this way and that in order to catch all the angles of herself.
“Mirror, mirror,” she whispered, her eyes briefly spreading wide as a girl’s. She caught a flash of Serena Jane’s flaxen hair framed in the window, then sniffed and tossed the mirror headfirst into the trash. Outside, I heard the thump of the mirror hitting the metal trash can. Morosely, I reached into my pocket, withdrew the deck of cards August had given me, and began to thumb through them. I turned over the six of spades, the three of diamonds, and then the unlovely queen of clubs, her face bloated with a surplus of smug regality. In a round of poker, I knew, that card could be worth gold. It could win you the game, if everything else in your hand cooperated. But in a game of twenty-one, the queen could send you bust with a flick of the wrist as fast as she could win it for you. That was the thing about playing games of chance, I was learning—even when you were losing everything, there was always another suit to turn over, always another facet of the die, where things could add up. It was simple. August had told me so. You just avoided clubs, fished for diamonds, and when in doubt you always, always played the joker.
Outside, Amelia and Marcus were waiting for me on the turtle- shaped rock. “Did you put it on her desk?” they asked, then shut up as they looked more closely at my face.
I shook my head. “Miss Sparrow took it away.”
Amelia frowned and stamped at the dirt in frustration. It was Marcus who said the right thing. “Don’t worry, Truly,” he soothed, “mirrors are just a device for throwing light back at you, and light is just thousands of photons—little bitty particles. Miss Sparrow didn’t really take anything from you. Whatever you ever saw in that mirror left it long ago and became a part of you. No one can steal that.”
He held out his hand, and I accepted it, choosing—for that moment, at least—to believe him.