H<\/span>er parents were both engineers, but Isabelle was the baby of the family, and by the time she enrolled in elementary school they were semi-retired and had moved to the orchard.\u00a0 People bought the fruit, or that is to say, they came and picked it themselves and paid by the basket.\u00a0 Cherries and apricots in the spring, peaches and pears in the summer, apples in the fall.\u00a0 Blackberries bushes barred the west end of the property like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and the older children picked ice cream pails full at the end of August and sold them from a stand to pay for their new school clothes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They could all earn money from their mother canning fruit for winter.\u00a0 She poured the syrup and used her rusted old tongs to lift the scalded jars in and out of the water, while the eldest children cut up the fruit and the younger ones did the peeling.\u00a0 This was hot, sticky, sickening work, especially the peaches.\u00a0 The peaches were blanched to loosen the skin, which could then be shucked off simply by rubbing.\u00a0 The loose, fuzzy, husk reminded Isabelle of the time she saw an old man trip in a motel hallway, the skin scraping off his arms just that easily, hanging in shreds.\u00a0 At first the peaches were warm, almost too warm to handle, but they quickly cooled and became slimy.<\/p>\n

The orchard was large: besides the people who came to pick their own fruit and wagons the children filled, Isabelle\u2019s parents hired some half-dozen laborers to harvest the excess to send to the Farmer’s Market in Monabee.\u00a0 Usually the pickers were women or teenagers, and sometimes they were from the Indian reservation on the other side of the blackberry scrub.\u00a0 At her old school Isabelle had Indian children in her class, or Native Americans as her teacher referred to them.\u00a0 There were a brother and sister called Bear and Sage, and also the less exotically-named Kelly, Isaac, and Melanie.\u00a0 Melanie wore dream-catcher earrings and Bear had a tattoo on his shoulder, which no one believed was real until he invited them to spit and rub it.<\/p>\n

Here the Indians had their own school, as Isabelle saw when her mother drove her to soccer camp.\u00a0 Fierce black eagles, frogs, and bears were painted over the doors, and two totem poles rose like ship’s masts out of the piebald dirt yard.\u00a0 It looked much more interesting than her school, with its babyish blocks of blue and yellow, but also a little frightening.\u00a0 She imagined the kids learned to shoot bows and arrows and skinned deer instead of taking math quizzes; otherwise why would they have a separate school?<\/p>\n

Isabelle’s siblings were older and did not attend Cherry Hill Elementary; they took the bus to the high school in the next town.\u00a0 Later she would calculate and realize what a surprise she must have been to her mother at the age of 46, but now she suffered only vague teasing from her sisters and a feeling that she had arrived late to the party, missing a lot of fun the other kids remembered, like a trip to Hawaii.<\/p>\n

She loved the orchard, and the walk to school in the ditch along the half-paved road, but she did not like the school itself.\u00a0 Her teacher was a man, a skinny bald man, very different from Mrs. Poulson at her old school.\u00a0 He seemed promising when he passed out fourteen ukuleles to the students and began to teach them to play, but the song he picked was Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley<\/em>.\u00a0 The song was sad enough, and became more rather than less so after her mother explained that Tom had killed his girlfriend.\u00a0 She supposed his retribution was deserved, but she could take no pleasure in it, and the song didn’t seem to want her to.\u00a0 It was simply two bad things, one after the other, with nothing to balance them.<\/p>\n

She had also come to Cherry Hill in the middle of the school year, and most of the girls were already paired up with a best friend.\u00a0 After a few weeks of reading in the library during recess and eating lunch alone, her mother counseled her to look for someone else who seemed left out.\u00a0 That was easy to do: it was obvious that Sarah Rose had no friends, but it seemed there were plenty of reasons why.\u00a0 She looked too fat to play games, and she tended to pick at the patches of rough skin on her arms.\u00a0 The kids said her mom was so huge that she hadn\u2019t left the house since Sarah Rose was a baby, except one time when her heart stopped and a team of eight EMTs had to man the stretcher.\u00a0 Eve LaBraun, whose mother was a nurse at the hospital, was the expert they all turned to for confirmation.<\/p>\n

\u201cUh huh,\u201d Eve said, peering loftily through her purple-rimmed glasses, \u201cMy mama said she had never smelled anything so bad.\u00a0 There was mold growing under every roll.\u201d\u00a0 This was offered with the assurance of a direct quotation.<\/p>\n

The story made Isabelle feel distinctly ill \u2013 the moist and smothering mountain of fat, the lurid green mold that surely cast its spores over the rest of the house, onto Sarah Roses\u2019 clothing, into her hair – but by this point she was becoming desperate, so she invited Sarah Rose over after school anyway.<\/p>\n

She had gotten her allowance that morning and they rode bicycles, Isabelle’s and her sister\u2019s old Strawberry Shortcake bike with the banana seat, to the grocery store to buy candy frogs and cream-soda slurpees.\u00a0 Isabelle spent the money to the last nickel and split the spoils equally; they ate as they pushed the bicycles home.\u00a0 When the candy had all been consumed, Sarah Rose revealed a pack of leftover gummy Easter eggs she’d salvaged from the clearance bin with her own money.<\/p>\n

\u201cOoo, I love the blue ones,\u201d Isabelle said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo do I,\u201d Sarah Rose said, popping a blue egg in her mouth.<\/p>\n

Isabelle waited, assuming Sarah Rose would pass over the bag, or dole out a handful at the very least.\u00a0 She did neither, and continued stuffing the gummies in her mouth.<\/p>\n

\u201cMay I have one?\u201d Isabelle said, when she saw they were half gone already.<\/p>\n

Sarah Rose fished around in the bag until she found a yellow.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Isabelle looked at the sticky gummy in her palm.\u00a0 She hated lemon.\u00a0 She ate it anyway.<\/p>\n

There were many crimes that went unpunished in Isabelle’s house, but two rules were sacrosanct: you didn’t rat, and when you had something, you shared it.\u00a0 Of course you shared it!\u00a0 This time you were lucky, but next time the treat would be in somebody else’s hands, and if you hadn’t shared when you were the favored one, you would be presented with a row of backs and greedy gulps of enjoyment.<\/p>\n

When Sarah Rose finished the eggs she dropped the empty plastic bag in the ditch and wiped her hands on her pants.\u00a0 Isabelle lay her bike down and marched back to fish out the bag and stuff it in her pocket.\u00a0 She knew it was a prissy thing to do, but she couldn\u2019t despise Sarah Rose for being a pig if she let it lie there.<\/p>\n

When the bicycles were safely stowed in the garage again, Sarah Rose said,<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess I’ll go home.\u201d<\/p>\n

She knew Isabelle was done with her, but she didn’t understand the reason why.\u00a0 Still, she was accustomed enough to rejection to meekly retreat down the road, buttocks wobbling.<\/p>\n

The next week Isabelle tried to attach herself to one of the twosomes.\u00a0 She picked Hannah and Erin, because Hannah had white eyelashes and held back her long white hair with a blue band, like Alice in Wonderland.\u00a0 Erin was small and sickly-colored and altogether a less desirable friend.\u00a0 She watched horror movies with her older brother and described the plots in lurid detail while Isabelle tried to eat her lunch.\u00a0 She ripped a page from the Playgirl magazine under her mother’s bed and brought it to school to show them: a picture of a farmer standing on a tractor with no shirt on and his hand holding his thing, which was sticking straight up.\u00a0 His thing looked strange to Isabelle; she had seen them before, she had plenty of male cousins her age, but this picture disgusted her in a way her cousins’ amiable skinny bodies never did.<\/p>\n

Erin’s main claim as Hannah’s best friend was that every day she brought a gift of four Oreo cookies in a Ziploc baggie, and gave Hannah all four.\u00a0 Hannah ate two and gave one each to Erin and Isabelle.\u00a0 These were not ordinary Oreo cookies: they were filled with neon-colored creme, neon pink or neon green.\u00a0 It was not known where Erin got them from, since the stores in their area did not sell those particular cookies.<\/p>\n

For a while Isabelle was satisfied to tag after the two girls.\u00a0 There was no pretense of equality: if Hannah or Erin were only allowed to have one girl for a sleep-over, or take one girl to the swimming pool or the hockey game, it was understood that Isabelle would not be asked.\u00a0 Other silent rules dictated that when they sat down, Hannah sat in the middle, and when they braided someone’s hair or pretended one of them had died or was getting married, Hannah was the chosen one.<\/p>\n

Isabelle thought that as the other two got used to her, she and Erin would lavish their attention on Hannah and Hannah would begin to treat them equally, but this did not happen.\u00a0 Though she spent continually more time with them, she could feel the two girls turning against her.\u00a0 Hannah and Erin whispered together and refused to tell her what they were laughing about.\u00a0 They mocked her jumpers as babyish and made gagging noises when she ate her sandwiches with their thick, crumbling slices of homemade bread.<\/p>\n

There was a short reprieve when Hannah caught chicken pox and had to stay home for ten days.\u00a0 During that time, Erin didn’t tell any horror stories and continued to bring neon Oreos, which she shared equally with Isabelle.\u00a0 But as soon as Hannah came back, she and Erin were worse than ever, running away from Isabelle when she tried to join them in puddle jumping at the far end of the field.<\/p>\n

If they had always run away she would simply have gone back to reading at recess, or tried to find other friends, but as soon as they saw she wasn’t trailing after them or caught her talking to another girl, they tried to lure her away.\u00a0 Isabelle was suspicious, standoffish, but their smiling faces, their innocent grimy hands, seemed so sincere.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy were you talking to Amanda?\u201d Hannah would say, \u201cDon’t you want to come over to my house?\u00a0 We want to paint your nails.\u00a0 We can use my sister\u2019s nail dryer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course when they got to Hannah’s house, there was no mention of painting Isabelle’s nails.\u00a0 They might decide to play Family with Isabelle as the baby, if they hadn’t run away from her before they even made it to the house.\u00a0 Isabelle was bored of these sorts of games, even when she didn’t have to be the baby, and they weren’t enlivened for her by the additions Hannah suggested such as kissing on the mouth.<\/p>\n

If she could have seen ten years ahead it wouldn\u2019t have been so bad.\u00a0 In high school Erin switched allegiances entirely – she and Isabelle became good friends, or at least very close and comfortable enemies, while Hannah grew plump and Christian and occupied the bossy and much-derided position of stage manager for all the school plays.\u00a0 Erin retained her role as procurer of exotic and illicit substances, obtaining cigarettes and fake IDs and boyfriends from distant towns.\u00a0 She dated Tommy Postham off and on, then moved on to someone older, a lifeguard at the Y.\u00a0 She disappeared mid- senior year without warning, as was so easy to do in the days before ubiquitous cellphones and social media websites.<\/p>\n

When Isabelle was in her second year of university on the other side of the country, Erin got her phone number from her parents and called her up.\u00a0 She told Isabelle she was pregnant, but she was going to have an abortion.\u00a0 Isabelle didn’t ask who the father was.\u00a0 She thought how lonely Erin must be to track her down like this, to spill her guts to someone who hadn’t thought about her at all in the intervening time.\u00a0 She couldn’t picture Erin pregnant; she could hardly remember what she had looked like in high school.\u00a0 She pictured a short child with Cleopatra bangs and savagely bitten fingernails.\u00a0 She was on her way out the door to a Guster <\/em>concert, her roommates dragging on her arm until the phone cord stretched halfway down the hallway, and Erin never called again.<\/p>\n

Of course there was no intimation of any of that at the time, and Hannah and Erin effectively made Isabelle miserable.\u00a0 Also, O’Brian started to bother her.\u00a0 His real name was Phillip, but everyone called him by his last name, even the teacher.\u00a0 He had three older brothers and they had been called O’Brian in turn as they went through the school system.\u00a0 He was a heavy, sulky kid, with the signs of premature development that can be a boon in high school, but which only elicit derision and disgust in elementary.\u00a0 He had underarm hair, or so the boys said, and dandruff, which anyone could see.\u00a0 His hair was buzzed, but that only made the flakes more obvious without any hair to catch them.\u00a0 He had scabs on his legs, not just on the knees as was normal, but all down his legs.<\/p>\n

He sat behind Isabelle, due to the similarity in their last names.\u00a0 He kicked her chair leg, just occasionally, as if he’d been swinging his legs and one happened to connect with the chair.\u00a0 When this garnered no reaction, he began kicking steadily, and harder.\u00a0 Isabelle pulled her seat forward until she scrunched against the desk.\u00a0 She was wearing her favorite blue jumper with the buttons shaped like daisies, and she was afraid he’d get mud on it from his boots.\u00a0 O’Brian slouched lower to extend his legs and continued kicking.\u00a0 Isabelle knew if she looked back he would never stop, so she did nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSnob,\u201d he whispered, and then louder, \u201cSnob.\u201d<\/p>\n

He hissed a swear word at her, then a whole phrase she didn’t understand.<\/p>\n

At this time the joke in the class was to wait until someone leaned their chair back against the desk behind them, then pull the desk away so they toppled over, chair and all.\u00a0 Students were not allowed to lean back, and if they disregarded the rule, their transgression usually overshadowed that of whoever had pulled the desk away, so the prankster went unpunished.<\/p>\n

O’Brian took a break from kicking Isabelle’s chair to lean back.\u00a0 Most kids would not have dared to pull their desk out from under him, but sitting behind O’Brian was Tommy Postham, who was nearly as tall as O’Brian and much more popular.\u00a0 Even the boys in the upper grades were glad to have him in their soccer games, and there wasn\u2019t a girl in the class who didn\u2019t have his name circled by a heart somewhere in her notebooks.<\/p>\n

If Tommy had jerked his desk back a little, he would have upset O’Brian’s balance, scared him, and that would have been amusing enough.\u00a0 But he pulled his desk to the side and O’Brian fell all the way back, hitting his skull on the floor with a funny clunking noise like a dropped coconut.\u00a0 Isabelle didn’t see it, but she heard the sound and turned around laughing, as did the rest of the class, even the teacher.\u00a0 O’Brian saw her giggling as he jumped up, face red, rubbing the back of his head.\u00a0 She knew she was in trouble, but somehow that made her laugh harder.<\/p>\n

After school Hannah and Erin walked home with her.\u00a0 They were coming over to pick blackberries.\u00a0 Isabelle had explained that the berries were nowhere near ripe, they were barely green buds yet, but Hannah didn’t like to abandon a plan or admit that she hadn’t known something, so she said they would pick them sour and see who could stand to eat the most.\u00a0 This was like something you would do with crabapples, but Isabelle felt it wouldn’t work with blackberries, they might get sick.\u00a0 She wouldn\u2019t contradict, but she hoped Hannah would think of something else on the way over, or Isabelle would have to find something to distract her.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s O’Brian,\u201d Erin said, \u201cHe’s so disgusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can you breathe sitting so close to him?\u201d Hannah said.<\/p>\n

Erin got a look on her face, and Isabelle knew what she was going to say next.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe probably likes it,\u201d she said, \u201cShe probably sits and thinks about him all day long.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s disgusting,\u201d Hannah said gleefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe loves him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. and Mrs. O’Brian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isabelle found she did not have the energy to combat this.\u00a0 She could see Hannah and Erin preparing to run off, tossing insults and gales of laughter over their shoulders, and she wished they would hurry up and go.\u00a0 She was almost home, and if they tagged along and picked the green berries, she would catch trouble from her mother for wasting them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’re going to have the ugliest baby,\u201d Erin said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a big fat head,\u201d Hannah said.<\/p>\n

Linking arms they ran back down the road.<\/p>\n

Isabelle felt relieved, not just for the berries but for the quiet.\u00a0 Now she could hear a cicada, and the wind sifting through the maples.\u00a0 Regular trees were interspersed among the fruit-bearing ones, maples, beeches, chestnuts.\u00a0 Her father said it would be a crime to cut them down; they did not need the orchard to be more profitable.\u00a0 This had been a hobby farm for a long time: the man who sold it to them said that his grandfather had bred many of the apple trees.\u00a0 There might not be apples exactly like these anywhere else in the world.<\/p>\n

Isabelle was glad to be alone, but she was also cross about the day as a whole, so she did not go into the house for a snack as she usually would.\u00a0 Instead she wandered back to the blackberry bushes.\u00a0 They were tall, over six feet she guessed, and dense.\u00a0 The thorned vines were brackish red like blood, and the delicate white blossoms only served to make them appear more sinister, a camouflage to deceive the unwary.\u00a0 Even the leaves were serrated like little teeth.\u00a0 Bees clambered heavily over the flowers and the pale, stunted berries, their combined weight causing the bushes to tremble and writhe.<\/p>\n

She wandered along the boarder of the bushes.\u00a0 They stopped so abruptly at the edge of the field; how did they know where to stop?\u00a0 The grass grew taller in the moist shade beneath the vines, speckled with buttercups.<\/p>\n

Before she knew anyone was there- she didn’t hear him, she didn’t sense a thing -O’Brian knocked her down, landing half on top of her so the air was crushed out of her lungs like a balloon released without a knot on the stem.\u00a0 It even made the same kind of silly sound, heeeeeek<\/em>. \u00a0He put his hand over his mouth so she couldn’t gasp like she wanted to, she had to slowly suck through her nostrils, her lungs struggling to lift his heavy body.\u00a0 Once her head cleared, she fought belatedly.\u00a0 She tried to bite his hand, but her teeth slid uselessly over the rough palm, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth: dirt and his sweat, and who knew what else.\u00a0 Hannah was right, he did stink, like a wet dog.\u00a0 He had pushed her partway into the vines and they scratched her face and arms, caught in her hair, helping O’Brian hold her down.<\/p>\n

He lay still, vast and unyielding, until she stopped fighting.\u00a0 Then he said,<\/p>\n

\u201cDon’t yell,\u201d and took his hand off her mouth, rearing up so he was half-kneeling.<\/p>\n

Isabelle didn’t yell.\u00a0 She was far from the house and didn’t understand the enormity of the situation.\u00a0 This was simply an escalation of the chair kicking and the swearing.\u00a0 He meant to punish her for laughing at him, and he had already succeeded: her favorite dress was grass-stained and probably torn.<\/p>\n

She tried to sit up.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon’t move,\u201d O’Brian said.<\/p>\n

She stayed where she was, propped up on her elbows.<\/p>\n

O’Brian pushed up the skirt of her jumper.\u00a0 She couldn’t see over the runched material, but she assumed he was looking at her underwear, which had little ladybugs on it.\u00a0 They were Days of the Week underwear, but instead of Monday or Tuesday embroidered in fussy script, they were printed with a different insect for each day.\u00a0 She owned another set with sailboats and trains and rocket ships.<\/p>\n

She lifted one hand to pull the skirt down and O’Brian said,<\/p>\n

\u201cDon’t.\u201d<\/p>\n

He stood looking at her for a long time, or at least she thought that’s what he must be doing.\u00a0 She was laying back, staring straight up at the clouds because she couldn’t look at O’Brian while he was looking at her underwear.<\/p>\n

She heard a sound and it was O’Brian undoing his pants.\u00a0 She thought he was going to pee on her, and she thought,<\/p>\n

If O’Brian pees on me, I will die of disgust. <\/em>It was impossible that she could continue to exist with the memory of that, the stain of that on her.<\/em><\/p>\n

Instead, O’Brian tried to crush her with his weight again, pulling at her clothes, stabbing at her.\u00a0 If Isabelle thought she had fought him before, now she really fought, she made a strange yelping sound like a puppy trod underfoot.<\/p>\n

Somebody came out of the blackberry bushes yelling.\u00a0 Their materialization from the dense vines was so startling that she for a moment she wasn’t relieved, but was almost more frightened.\u00a0 Then she saw it was a boy.\u00a0 The next few seconds had a perfect clarity, or perhaps they didn’t, she only reconstructed it later from what must have happened.\u00a0 The boy had a rock in his hand and he smashed it into O’Brian’s head.\u00a0 He didn’t throw the rock: he kept hold of it the whole time; it was still in his hand when he helped Isabelle stand up.\u00a0 When he saw that he was still holding it he tossed it into the bushes.<\/p>\n

When O’Brian was hit the blood jumped off his scalp in three or four fat drops.\u00a0 He grunted and stood up, the blood dribbling in a thin stream into his ear, following the whorls like an insect in a maze.\u00a0 He fell over, but he was not unconscious \u2013 he was still watching them from the grass, blinking slowly.\u00a0 Isabelle and the boy did not go near him; they stood watching.\u00a0 He sat for few minutes, then got up and walked away, slowly and unsteadily.<\/p>\n

Isabelle looked at the boy.\u00a0 She had never seen him before: he didn’t go to her school.\u00a0 Because he had come from the reservation side through the blackberries, she thought at once he must be Indian, though he didn’t look particularly Indian; he might simply be tanned, and he had green eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow did you get through the blackberries?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made a tunnel.\u201d<\/p>\n

He showed her the tunnel.\u00a0 He hadn’t cut many vines at the entrance and exit, so it remained hidden from either side though it was quite spacious inside.\u00a0 It was more like a cave, Isabelle thought, but she didn’t say so because she didn’t want him to think she was criticizing.\u00a0 She was deeply impressed, as much by this as by his attack on O’Brian.\u00a0 Neither of them spoke of that.\u00a0 Already it was mellowing in her mind, something that was awful, but which ceased to matter now it was over.\u00a0 Had Isabelle and the boy been a little older there would have been more understanding and more embarrassment, but as it was, Isabelle didn’t mention it to her parents or anyone else.\u00a0 To this day, only Jayman knew, if he remembered.\u00a0 That was the boy’s name, Jayman.<\/p>\n

They crawled around the tunnel for a while getting good and scratched, coming out on the reservation side because Isabelle had never been there before.\u00a0 It appeared that Jayman had come into the orchard a number of times to eat fruit off their trees.\u00a0 He said he liked the cherries best, the yellow ones with the pink cheeks.\u00a0 Isabelle told him they were called Queen Anne’s.<\/p>\n

The reservation was not quite what she hoped.\u00a0 It was pretty much like her side, except the houses were closer together and everyone had satellite TV.\u00a0 The men drove trucks and wore normal clothing: shirts and jeans.\u00a0 She knew they did that around town, but she hoped they slipped into buckskin and moccasins when they got home, the way her father put on his cardigan and slippers.\u00a0 Jayman said they did occasionally wear those things, but only for special ceremonies, and even then they probably didn\u2019t look like what she expected.\u00a0 It wasn’t what he had expected.\u00a0 He hadn’t always lived on the reservation; his mother was white and he used to live with her on the island.\u00a0 She was a lawyer for an oil and gas company, and she traveled almost everywhere there was oil.\u00a0 Sometimes she brought him along, other times she sent him here to stay with his father.\u00a0 Right now she was somewhere, he forgot the name of the place, but it was over by the pyramids.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich do you like better,\u201d she said, \u201cBeing with your mom or your dad?\u201d<\/p>\n

She was imagining the agonies of having to choose if her mother ever decided to go live in the pyramids.\u00a0 She played this same sort of game, supposing she had to choose one person in her family to die.\u00a0 She usually narrowed it down to one of her brothers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad lets me be,\u201d he said, \u201cBut some of the kids say I shouldn’t be here because I’m not full-blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’re half-blood?\u201d she had read that term in a book.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you only stay here half the time.\u00a0 So it should be okay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the half is M\u00e9tis.\u201d<\/p>\n

She didn’t know what that meant, so she nodded.<\/p>\n

After that, Jayman often came through the blackberry bushes, especially once school let out for the summer.\u00a0 Isabelle did chores in the morning and Jayman had a job spraying down the floors at a poultry farm, so they met in the afternoons.\u00a0 She waited for him to come through to her side: he said she shouldn’t go to the reservation alone because there were half-wild dogs wandering around that weren’t familiar with her.\u00a0 She liked how she could only go through with Jayman; it was a door to another world and he was the gatekeeper, like a fairytale.<\/p>\n

He was magic anyway.\u00a0 He had tricks: he could pass a quarter through a sheet of rubber, dropping it into a drinking glass underneath while she held the rubber tight and checked its un-perforated membrane before and after.\u00a0 He could pick her card out of the deck; a lot of people could do that, but he made it travel to the empty pack on the table between them.\u00a0 He did back flips on the trampoline in his yard and walked on his hands and showed her how to turn a daisy green, a color you never saw on a flower in nature, but putting food coloring in its water.\u00a0 It sucked the color right up the stem and into the petals.<\/p>\n

Isabelle was the only one who had seen him, and she liked to pretend he was invisible to everyone else.\u00a0 When Hannah and Erin showed up in her yard one Saturday, he waited until they were gone to drop out of the tree he’d been sitting in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t like them,\u201d he said, \u201cThat one looks like a pink-eyed rabbit and the other is a little brown monkey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat am I?\u201d Isabelle said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’re...you’re a pony,\u201d he said, tugging on her long pigtail.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you’re a leopard,\u201d she said, because she’d seen a picture of one and it had big round golden eyes.<\/p>\n

Isabelle’s teenage sister Marla caught them building a dam across the creek, and told her mother Isabelle was playing with a boy.\u00a0 Her mother wanted to meet him and then Jayman wasn’t a secret anymore.\u00a0 It seemed silly that Isabelle had ever thought he was, once he was sitting comfortably at their kitchen table eating a grilled cheese sandwich her mother had made him.\u00a0 He often ate dinner with them after that; he would eat anything; he had tried all kinds of food traveling with his mother.\u00a0 But he was ignorant of some common things, like the expressions Isabelle’s father used.\u00a0 He had never heard \u201cYou can’t have your cake and eat it too\u201d, or \u201cI’m in seventh heaven\u201d, or \u201cDon’t be a doggy in the manger\u201d.\u00a0 The sayings didn’t make any sense to him.\u00a0 Most astonishing, he didn’t know about dessert.\u00a0 His mother didn’t eat sweets, and his father put everything on the table at once; if there was cake it went on the plate with the salad and the steak.<\/p>\n

Sometimes Isabelle visited Jayman’s house, but not for very long and not for dinner.\u00a0 It looked exactly like the houses around it: khaki colored and so tall that you had to climb wooden steps up to the front door.\u00a0 Jayman\u2019s house had the neatest yard and was very clean inside.\u00a0 The linoleum and laminate were dingy gray, but you could tell the house was secretly clean because the vacuum cleaner lines showed on the carpet and the counters smelled of lemon.<\/p>\n

A grey husky named Lute patrolled the yard.\u00a0 He followed them up the stairs, but never into the house.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn’t get too cold for this guy,\u201d Jayman said, \u201cHe could dig a hole in the snow and sleep in it.\u00a0 He could have been a sled dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jayman’s father was very handsome.\u00a0 Isabelle had never thought that about an adult before; they looked pretty much the same, some grayer or paunchier than others.\u00a0 But he was hardly different than her oldest brother.\u00a0 Jayman showed her a picture of his mother and she was pretty too, long blond hair, cuddled up with his father under a blanket on a beach like teenagers.\u00a0 Maybe they had been teenagers when the picture was taken.<\/p>\n

Jayman\u2019s father was tall and had long hair, not long like a woman’s, just to his shoulders.\u00a0 He wore t-shirts that Jayman said bore the names of bands: The Killers, The Clash, The Addicts.\u00a0 He had a long scar down his cheek that Jayman’s mother told him happened in a bar fight and Jayman’s father said she had done herself with her fingernails.\u00a0 Sometimes he was cheerful and he let them ride in the bed of the truck with Lute to get ice cream cones.\u00a0 Other times he ignored them and drank scotch while he tinkered away at a motorcycle engine spread out on newspaper on the kitchen table, or he demanded of Isabelle how she liked his orchard.\u00a0 Jayman told her that the boarders of the reserve had been pushed back twice since his father had lived here, and Isabelle could see it was much more bare on this side of the blackberries.\u00a0 There were hardly any flowering trees.<\/p>\n

It was different playing with Jayman than with her siblings.\u00a0 They didn’t fight and they didn’t always talk.\u00a0 He was silent as he concentrated on the project at hand, and Isabelle found she liked to be quiet in those times too.\u00a0 They caught crayfish down at the creek and tried to make them spar each other, and then packed mud to make a mud-man almost as tall as they were.\u00a0 When school started again, Isabelle learned that Jayman was two years older than her and a grade ahead in school; she hadn’t guessed because he was hardly any taller.\u00a0 Even as it got colder and after it snowed, they almost always stayed outside.\u00a0 They went skating or tobogganing, and once they tried out Jayman’s father’s snowshoes.<\/p>\n

They didn’t involve Isabelle’s brothers and sisters or Jayman’s friends from school (he had friends, other boys; sometimes he stayed with them instead of coming through the bushes).\u00a0 On the days he didn’t come, she went to her cousin Cassie’s house to bake cookies, or sometimes Hannah and Erin came by.\u00a0 They were usually well behaved, particularly if she hadn’t seen them for a while.\u00a0 Somehow these interludes seemed phony, as if she were pretending to be a little girl playing with other little girls.\u00a0 What felt real was the quiet time in the orchard and at the creek, where she built things and found things and saw things she had never seen before, like a barn cat giving birth to six black kittens.<\/p>\n

As for O’Brian, he ignored her at school, he didn’t so much as kick her chair.\u00a0 Perhaps his parents had warned him; they had certainly taken him to get stitches.\u00a0 In the two weeks following the incident, the dark blue thread showed clearly on his shaved scalp.<\/p>\n

That was how it went over the year: vivid wild days when Jayman came through the blackberry tunnel overshadowing the mild, fuzzy days when he didn\u2019t.\u00a0 When Isabelle looked back on it, it seemed like it must have been much longer than a year, because the far greater part of her childhood recollections were spawned in that period, but it could not have been longer, because in the spring Jayman’s mother came and took him away to Singapore.<\/p>\n

There was not much notice, but Isabelle was there at his house watching his father load Jayman\u2019s suitcase in the trunk of his mother’s car.\u00a0 It was a small silver car with the cloth top pulled down, though it really wasn’t warm enough for that yet.<\/p>\n

Seeing his mother in the flesh was an illusory experience: from a distance she was unchanged from the smiling girl on the beach, but up close deep lines connected her nose to the corners of her mouth and the tendons showed in her neck and arms despite her tan.\u00a0 She looked expensive and glamorous, but Isabelle was afraid for her to take Jayman away in her car.\u00a0 He looked so much more natural standing beside his father, both in t-shirts and jeans worn thin and soft as moleskin.<\/p>\n

Jayman didn’t touch Isabelle or say much to her, but he said, \u201cI’ll see you,\u201d in a confident way.<\/p>\n

He climbed in the passenger seat- there were only two seats -and his parents stood off to the side for a moment talking.\u00a0 They stood close together, his mother’s face turned up to his father’s and their hands dangling in front of them with the fingers only an inch apart.\u00a0 Even after she got into the car, she held the door open as if she hoped he would squeeze in their with them so they could all drive to Singapore.\u00a0 That didn’t happen.\u00a0 She backed the car out of the dusty yard and sped off down the road, nobody waving.<\/p>\n

Jayman’s father didn’t look at Isabelle or speak to her.\u00a0 He climbed the stairs to the house and shut the door after him.\u00a0 Lute watched the car receding through the dust like a speedy metal beetle, before spotting a gopher and trotting off around the corner of the house.\u00a0 Isabelle walked home, not through the blackberries, but the long way around by the road. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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