The Girl Who Chased the Moon (6 page)

THE WEIGHT of Julia’s unhappiness took her breath sometimes when she was sixteen. It had been building for years, brick by brick: adolescence, her father remarrying, her unrequited love for the cutest boy in school, the misfortune of having Dulcie Shelby as a classmate. Still, up until she entered high school, she’d always had friends. She’d always been a good student. She’d always been able to
function
. But then a gradual depression settled over her like someone flipping out a bedsheet and letting it float down to cover her. By the time her sophomore year rolled around, she’d given up on trying to compete with her stepmother, Beverly. Her pink hair and black makeup were attempts to fight the overwhelming sense that she was disappearing. Her friends started avoiding her as her appearance changed and she became more sullen, but she didn’t care. She would gladly lose them if it meant her father would just look at her.

It didn’t work.

Sometimes she would hear Beverly tell her father not to pay her any attention, that it was just a phase, that she would grow out of it. And of course, he did exactly as Beverly suggested.

Then the cutting started.

Her unhappiness and self-loathing got the better of her one day when she was in her World History class. Mr. Horne was writing something on the whiteboard and Julia was sitting in the back of the room, Dulcie Shelby a few seats in front of her. Julia looked up from doodling in her notebook to see Dulcie whisper something to one of her friends, then take something out of her purse. Seconds later, a small canister of flea powder rolled down the aisle and stopped at Julia’s feet.

Dulcie and her friends laughed and Mr. Horne turned around.

He demanded to know what was so funny, but no one in class said a word. Julia kept her eyes down, staring at the canister touching the toe of her Doc Martens knockoffs.

Mr. Horne finally turned back around, and as soon as he did, Julia took the sharpened pencil she was holding and dragged it heavily across her forearm. She didn’t realize what she’d done at first. She simply watched the pebbles of blood form on her skin with a weird sense of satisfaction, of release.

At first it was random, using whatever she had on hand, but it soon became more deliberate and she started using razor blades she hid under her mattress at home. Every time she cut herself, it was intense and dramatic, like being jerked from the gaping maw of nothingness and back into life. It not only made her feel, it made her feel
good
. At one point she realized she couldn’t stop, that she couldn’t get through the day without cutting herself, but she didn’t care. She truly didn’t care. It wasn’t long before her forearms were covered in angry spider-webs of scabbed-over cuts, and she wore long-sleeved shirts even on the warmest days.

She’d been cutting her arms for months before Julia’s father and stepmother found out. It was Beverly who first saw the marks. Julia had just stepped out of the shower one morning and had wrapped a towel around herself, when her stepmother tapped on the door and waltzed in, saying, “Don’t mind me. I’m just getting my tweezers—”

She stopped short when she saw Julia’s bare arms.

When Julia’s father got home from work that evening, he came into her bedroom. His face was pinched and worried and he approached her cautiously, as if trying not to crush her with the weight of his presence. He wanted to know what was wrong, and Julia resented the question. How could he not know?

Her sophomore year ended not long after, and her father and Beverly never let her out of their sight that summer. Instead of feeling like she’d finally gotten what she wanted, she hated that they were trying to stop her from doing the one thing that made her feel better.

The entire summer was one long power struggle. She actually started looking forward to the school year so she could get away from them. And of course, the new school year meant she would get to see Sawyer. Beautiful Sawyer. But just a few days before the start of school at Mullaby High, Julia’s father told her that he was sending her away to boarding school. It was a special school, he said. For troubled teens. They were supposed to drive to Baltimore to the school the next day. He’d given her only one day’s notice.
One day
. He’d been planning this behind her back all summer!

That night, she crawled out of the laundry room window and ran away. If her father didn’t want her around, fine. But she wasn’t going to some stupid school. The problem was, she had no idea where else to go. So she ended up on her favorite perch on the high school bleachers.

She’d been there a few hours when Sawyer showed up. It was after midnight, but suddenly there he was, walking around the track. The moon was out and he was wearing white shorts and a white polo, so she could see him clearly from her seat.

She didn’t move, so she didn’t know what made him look up. But he did, and her breath caught, as it did every time he looked at her in school.

They stared at each other for a long moment. Then he crossed the track and walked up the bleachers toward her.

Sawyer had never approached her before, but he had always watched her at school. A lot of people watched her, so that in itself wasn’t unusual. But he was always so deliberate about it. She’d often wondered if that was why she had these strange feelings for him, because she thought he really
saw
her.

He came to a stop in front of her. “Do you mind if I sit?”

She shrugged.

He sat, but didn’t say anything more for a while. “Do you come out here at night a lot?” he finally asked.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. I’ve walked around this track at night all summer, and I’ve never seen you, like I do during the school year.” She wondered why he walked the track at night. She was too nervous to ask. “Are you ready for school to start?”

She suddenly stood. Being this close to him made her heart feel lighter. He made her whole world seem lighter. But it was all a horrible illusion. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where are you going?” he asked as she clomped down the bleachers in her heavy black boots.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll walk you,” he said as he stood and followed her.

“No.”

“I’m not going to let you walk alone at this time of night.”

She stepped off the last bleacher and walked across the track to the football field. She looked over her shoulder. “Stop following me.” Once she reached the middle of the field, she looked back again. “I said, stop following me.”

“I’m not letting you walk alone.”

That made her stop and turn to him. “What is the matter with you? Stop being so … so …”

“What?”

“Nice to me.”
She lowered herself to the ground and sat cross-legged. “I’m sitting here until you go away.” This didn’t exactly have the effect she wanted. “Don’t sit beside me. Don’t …” She sighed when Sawyer sat beside her, right there on the fifty-yard line.

“What is the matter with you?” he asked.

She looked away. “My dad is sending me away to boarding school tomorrow.”

“You’re
leaving?”
he asked incredulously.

She nodded.

He pulled at some of the grassy turf around them. Finally he said, “Can I tell you something?”

“Not unless it’s goodbye.”

“Stop being such a smart-ass.” That made her swing her head around. Her father and Beverly had been treading so lightly around her all summer that it was surprising to hear someone willing to call her on her attitude. “This past year, sometimes I would get up in the mornings and actually look forward to going to school because I knew I would see you. I would wonder what you were going to wear. I loved lunch because I could sit in the cafeteria and look out the window and see you up there on the bleachers. I’ve been looking for you all summer. Where have you been?”

Her mouth gaped and she felt like punching him on the arm. He had a girlfriend named Holly who, despite being in Dulcie Shelby’s group Sassafras, was mostly nice. And they’d been going together forever. People even referred to them as a single entity. Sawyernholly. “What is
wrong
with you?” Julia said. “You and Holly belong together. You match.”

“I’m just saying I’m sorry I never talked to you. I’ve always wanted to. I’ve always wanted …” His eyes went to her lips, and she was suddenly very aware of how close they were, of how he was leaning in toward her.

His lips were inches from hers when she turned away. “Go away, Sawyer. Go back to your nice, perfect life.” She felt tears come to her eyes, and she wiped at them with the back of her hands. They came away streaked with her thick black eyeliner. The tears kept coming and she kept wiping her face, knowing she was making it worse. God, why didn’t Sawyer just go and leave her to her ugly misery?

Sawyer very calmly took off his white polo shirt and handed it to her. “Go on. Use it.”

She reluctantly took it and scrubbed her face with the shirt. It smelled like something green and fresh—like flower stems.

When she finally stopped crying, she looked at the shirt in her hands. She balled it up, embarrassed. She’d ruined it. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care about the shirt. Are you going to be okay?”

“I don’t know.” And her eyes started watering again. “I don’t want to go away to school. But my dad doesn’t want me anymore. He has
Beverly
now.” The school had been Beverly’s idea, of course. Why couldn’t she have just kept her mouth shut about the cuts?

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Sawyer said.

She just shook her head. He didn’t understand, after all.

He reached over to her and hesitantly pushed some of her crisp pink hair behind her ear. “I forgot what you looked like without makeup.”

“I disappear.”

“No. You’re beautiful.”

She didn’t believe him. She
couldn’t
believe him. “Go to hell, Sawyer.”

“You can believe whatever you want. But I don’t lie.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re perfect.” She paused, then turned to him. “You think I’m beautiful?”

“I’ve always thought that.”

“What about these?” she said, drawing up the sleeves of the button-down she was wearing. She showed him the lines on her arms. Her father and Beverly had emptied her room of any sharp objects, like she was a toddler, so many of the deeper cuts were healed over, but she would still use her fingernails when she got anxious. “Do you think these are beautiful?”

Sawyer actually recoiled, which was exactly what she wanted him to do. It was proof. She really was unlovable. “Christ. Did you do that to yourself?”

She pulled the sleeves down. “Yes.”

She expected him to leave her then, but he didn’t. They sat in silence for a long time. Finally she got tired and leaned back so that she was stretched out on the ground. He watched her, then slowly lowered himself back beside her.

The sky was incredible that night, the moon nearly full and the stars littering the sky like tossed stones. She’d never been away from Mullaby before. Would the sky look like this in Baltimore?

When Sawyer’s stomach growled, he laughed. “I haven’t had anything to eat since the cake I had for lunch,” he said sheepishly.

“You had cake for lunch?”

“I’d have cake all the time if I could. You’re going to laugh at this, but I’ll tell you anyway. You know how some people have a sweet tooth? Well, I have a sweet
sense
. When I was a little boy, I could be playing across town and know exactly when my mother took a cake out of the oven. I could
see
the scent, how it floated through the air. All I had to do was follow it home. I will fiercely deny that if you ever say anything.”

It was such a surprising thing to admit. She turned her head and saw that he was staring at her again. “You’re charmed,” she said. “But you probably know that already. It’s even in the way you look at people.” She stared at him for a moment, gorgeous and bare-chested in the moonlight. “Yes, you know exactly what power you have.”

“Do I have a power over you?”

Did he honestly think she was immune? “Of course you do.”

He lifted up on one elbow and looked down at her. What she wouldn’t give to see what he saw, to know what made him look at her that way. “Can I kiss you, Julia?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

She was confused when he carefully pushed her long-sleeved shirt off her shoulders. Even though she was wearing a tank top underneath, her arms were exposed. She squirmed and tried to cover them again, but then he did the most extraordinary thing.

He kissed her arms.

And she was done for.

He not only saw her, he accepted her. He wanted her. At that time in her life, at that moment, she couldn’t think of any other person in the world who felt that way about her. Only him.

They made love that night, and stayed on the football field until dawn. He walked her home and they made promises to stay in touch, promises, it turned out, only one of them meant to keep. She left for Collier Reformatory in Maryland thinking she might be able to get through this, after all, because she now had Sawyer to come home to.

Looking back, she found that she could forgive him because it had been her fault for putting her happiness in the hands of someone else.

It had been so easy to do, though. He’d made her feel true happiness for the first time in a long time that night. How could she not have succumbed to it?

But sometimes she wondered if she’d
lost
true happiness that night, as well.

And she’d been looking for it ever since.

Everywhere but here.

Chapter 6

T
hat afternoon, with nothing better to do and no one to talk to—Grandpa Vance was holed up in his room again and Julia wasn’t home—Emily started cleaning. She dusted until she looked like she was covered in hoary frost. She tackled her room first, cleaning everything but the chandelier because she couldn’t find a ladder to get up to it, then she went to the other rooms, opening blinds and shedding light into corners that looked like they hadn’t seen the sun in years. It was an adventure at first—apparently chasing the light last night had given her a taste for it—exploring the unknown, learning the story of the house. But she soon realized the story was a sad one. There was a room that had obviously once been a little boy’s room. There were blue sailboats on the wallpaper and safety rails still on the bed. Maybe it had been Grandpa Vance’s as a boy. Or did he have a brother? If so, what happened to him? Then there was a room with a bed that was twice as long as a normal one. There was a vanity table in the room, too, a feminine touch. Grandpa Vance had obviously shared this room with his wife. Where was his wife? Where were all the people who had once lived here?

She started to feel claustrophobic, overwhelmed by the history of this place. She wanted to feel a part of it, but her mother had told her nothing.
Nothing
. Why?

She went to the balcony outside her room for some fresh air. She kicked at the leaves, and decided to sweep them away. She swept until she had a large pile of leaves pushed against the balustrade. She set the broom aside and gathered some leaves in her arms, then tossed them over the side. They smelled mulchy and looked like someone had cut them out of craft paper. She scooped up some more and tossed them, stopping this time to watch the leaves fall. It wasn’t until they hit the head of the person standing on the front porch steps that she had any idea someone was there.

“Julia!” she called. “Hi!”

Julia smiled up at her, leaves in her hair, and said, “Bored, are we?”

“I’m so glad you’re here! I have something to tell you.”

She ran downstairs and out the front door, thrilled that she had someone to discuss last night with. Julia was standing on the porch with two large brown paper bags in her arms and leaves still in her hair.

“I saw the light again last night!” Emily said excitedly. “It’s not a ghost, Julia. I chased it, and it had
footsteps
.”

This revelation didn’t garner the reaction she’d wanted. Julia looked dismayed. “You
chased
it?”

“Yes.”

“Emily, please don’t do that,” Julia said gently. “The Mullaby lights are harmless.”

Before Emily could ask why Julia didn’t think this was a huge discovery, the screen door squeaked behind her and Emily turned around to see Grandpa Vance duck under the doorway.

He’d changed clothes since she’d last seen him that morning, when she’d followed him to breakfast, like he had designated morning clothes and evening clothes. She’d hardly slept at all last night after chasing the light through the woods, and she’d been awake when she’d heard him leave. She’d intended to wait for him outside the restaurant and walk home with him again. But then Win had distracted her. She’d followed Win to a diner, where she’d watched him go in and vanish in the crowd. She’d gone home after that and waited for Grandpa Vance there, but when he’d gotten home, he’d disappeared into his room after leaving an egg sandwhich for her on the kitchen counter.

“Julia,” he said. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“I brought you a gift.” Julia handed the bags she was holding up to Vance, who looked like he’d been given the Holy Grail of foodstuffs. “With this heat, I thought cooking dinner would be the last thing either of you wanted to do today. Maybe the two of you could eat together,” she said with a significance that wasn’t lost on Emily. She was trying to get them to spend some time together. Emily appreciated the effort, but didn’t think it would do much good.

But Grandpa Vance nosed around in the bags and surprised her with his zeal. “You’re in for a treat, Emily! Julia’s barbecue is the best in town. It’s all because of her smokehouse. Electric smokers just aren’t the same. My mouth is watering already. Will you join us, Julia?”

“No, thanks. I have to be going.”

“You’re right neighborly. Thank you.” Vance disappeared inside, leaving Emily on the porch with Julia.

“That’s the first time he’s been out of his room since this morning,” Emily said, amazed.

“Barbecue gets him every time.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Listen,” Julia said, “how would you like to go to Piney Woods Lake with me on Saturday? It’s
the
place for kids your age to go in the summer. Maybe you can meet some people you’ll be going to school with.”

It felt nice to be included. Those elderly ladies this morning had to be wrong. She could fit in here. “Okay. Sure.”

“Great. See you tomorrow. Now go talk with your grandfather.” Without another word about the lights, Julia gave her a backward wave and jogged down the front porch steps.

Emily turned and went back into the house. She thought about just going to her room and letting Grandpa Vance eat in peace, but then she decided to give it one more try. When she reached the kitchen, she heard the dryer door close and Vance came out of the attached laundry room. He’d been looking in the clothes dryer again. He was inordinately preoccupied with it, which was strange because just that afternoon, someone from the dry cleaner’s had come by to take a bag of laundry he’d left on the porch.

Vance stopped when he saw her. “Emily.” He cleared his throat. “So, um, has the wallpaper in your bedroom changed yet?”

“Changed?” she asked.

“It does that sometimes. Changes on its own.”

It sounded like something you would say to a child. The moon is made of cheese. Wish on a star. There’s magic wallpaper in your room. He probably thought of her as a little girl, she realized, and he was trying to make her smile. “No, it’s still lilacs. But I’ll be on the lookout,” she said to humor him.

He nodded seriously. “All right, then.”

In the silence that followed, Emily looked around and found where he had set the bags on the table in the breakfast nook. “Are you going to eat now?” she finally asked.

“I thought I might,” he said. “Would you like to join me?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Not at all. Have a seat.” He took plates and utensils out of the cabinets and put them on the table. They sat opposite each other, and together they unloaded the contents of the bags, mostly Styrofoam containers of various sizes, plus a few hamburger buns and two slices of cake.

Vance took the lids off all the containers. His incredibly long fingers were clumsy and his hands shook a little.

“What is this?” Emily asked, looking in the largest Styrofoam container. There was a bunch of dry-looking chopped meat inside.

“Barbecue.”

“This isn’t barbecue,” Emily said. “Barbecue is hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill.”

Vance laughed, which automatically made Emily smile. “Ha! Blasphemy! In North Carolina, barbecue means
pork
, child. Hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill—that’s called ‘cooking out’ around here,” he explained with sudden enthusiasm. “And there are two types of North Carolina barbecue sauce—Lexington and Eastern North Carolina. Here, look.” He excitedly found a container of sauce and showed her, accidentally spilling some on the table. “Lexington-style is the sweet sugar-and-tomato-based sauce, some people call it the red sauce, that you put on chopped or pulled pork shoulder. Julia’s restaurant is Lexington-style. But there are plenty of Eastern North Carolina–style restaurants here. They use a thin, tart, vinegar-and-pepper-based sauce. And, generally, they use the whole hog. But no matter the style, there’s always hush puppies and coleslaw. And, if I’m not mistaken, those are slices of Milky Way cake. Julia makes the best Milky Way cakes.”

“Like the candy bar?”

“Yep. The candy bars are melted and poured into the batter. It means ‘Welcome.’”

Emily looked over to the cake Julia had brought yesterday morning, still on the counter. “I thought an apple stack cake meant ‘Welcome.’”

“Any kind of cake means ‘Welcome,’” he said. “Well, except for coconut cake. You give coconut cake and fried chicken when there’s a death.”

Emily looked at him strangely.

“And occasionally a broccoli casserole,” he added.

Emily watched as Vance picked up the container of barbecue and forked some chopped pork onto the bottom hamburger bun. He poured some sauce on it, then topped it with coleslaw. He capped it all with the top bun and handed it on a plate to Emily. “A barbecue sandwich, North Carolina–style.”

“Thank you,” Emily said, smiling as she took the strange sandwich. He really was a nice man. She liked being around him. And he made her feel so small, like there was so much more to the world than just her problems, her grief. “This was nice of Julia to do.”

“Julia is a wonderful person. Her father would have been very proud of her.”

“I was just talking to her about the Mullaby lights,” Emily said, hoping he’d be more interested in what she’d discovered than Julia had been. “I’ve been seeing them at night.”

Vance paused in the middle of handing her the container of hush puppies. “You have? Where?”

“In the woods behind the house,” she said as she reached over and took the container from him.

“I’ll only ask you to do one thing while you’re here, Emily,” he said seriously. “Just one. Stay away from them.”

“But I don’t think it’s a ghost,” she said. “I think someone is doing it on purpose.”

“No one is doing it on purpose. Trust me.”

She wasn’t usually an argumentative person, despite her mother’s love of passionate debates. But Emily had to bite her tongue to keep from pointing out that leaving her a box of Band-Aids last night seemed pretty intentional.

“Your mother would get that same look on her face when she was a little girl,” he said. “She was stubborn, my Dulcie.” He hastily looked away, as if he’d said too much. Suddenly that old awkward tension was back, joining them at the table with apologies for being so late.

Emily toyed with the hush puppies on her plate. “Why don’t you want to talk about her?”

Still not looking at her, he said, “I get all confused about it. I don’t know what to say.”

Emily nodded, though she didn’t really understand. Maybe, like everything else about him, his grief was larger than anyone’s, so big that no one could see around it. Vance’s relationship with his daughter must have been a complicated one. But then, her mother’s relationship with everyone had been complicated. She’d been a hard woman to know. High-spirited and mercurial, she’d been like the mist from perfume. You had to be content to let a little of it sprinkle over you. And then, eventually, it went away.

She wouldn’t push him. And she would try not to be hurt by his avoidance. He’d taken her in when she had no other place to go, after all, and she was grateful. So she would talk to other people in town about her mother, find out more from them. Maybe she could find other members of Sassafras. Maybe she’d even see Win Coffey again and ask him about the relationship his uncle had had with her mother. He’d said next time he saw her he’d tell her about their history.

She liked that thought. Seeing Win again.

They ate in silence. Afterward, Grandpa Vance again checked the clothes dryer, as if something might have appeared during dinner. But again he found nothing, so he went to his room. Emily went upstairs and finished sweeping, then she sat on the balcony and waited for the lights.

And so ended her second full day in Mullaby.

LATER THAT evening, when Vance ducked out of his room to check the dryer one last time before bed, he paused to look up the staircase. He didn’t hear any more shuffling. No more scraping of a broom. Emily had settled in for the night.

It was a peculiar thing, he thought, having someone in the house again. He’d almost forgotten what it was like. Emily made the air different, vibrating, as if there were music close by but he couldn’t quite hear it. He was surprised by how much fuller he felt with her near, and he didn’t know how to handle it. Being needed was a lot like being tall—it was never really an issue until other people were around.

Vance had towered over all the other kids in kindergarten. That was his first memory of truly understanding how tall he was. Up until then, while he was certainly big for his age, he was still the shortest member of his own normal-sized family. Some kids in school teased him at first, but there a came a point when they realized that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick a fight with someone who could knock them over with only the wind he caused by walking past them.

His family was gone now. Vance was the only one left of the Shelbys, and he had inherited the existing fortune. He knew he wasn’t supposed to have it all. It wasn’t supposed to all come down to him—the Shelby legacy, the Shelby name. There were supposed to be brothers and sisters who would do great things. There were supposed to be normal kids in his family. For a while there were. But his older sister, for whom the wallpaper in her room was always pink candy swirls, drowned in Piney Woods Lake when she was eleven. And then there was his younger brother, who died from a fall out of the tree house in the front yard when he was six. His parents tried for more children after that, but to no avail. They were stuck with Vance. Vance, who was so tall his feet reached the bottom of the lake, so he could never drown, and his arms reached all the way to the limbs in the trees, so he never had to climb and fall.