Chapter I

January 5, 2011. 11 Years Old.

He watched my face. He licked his lips. He waited. He swallowed. His left hand moved to the head of his yellow tie, pushed the knot back and forth over a prominent Adam's apple, gripped the tail-end, and firmly tugged it straight. His eyes flared for a moment like a dog jerked back on a leash, but he didn't look away. He kept his hand there for another second, watching me watching him. Then I was following his thin, jointed fingers as they pressed the length of his silk yellow tie smooth, lingering to pick at the pointed tip for a moment before joining his other hand and folding carefully, neatly back together in front of his stomach.

"Miss D'Arcey, what did you do after leaving your bed that night?"

He watched me with unseeing eyes, like he was trying to hold his balance and using me as a fixed point to concentrate on. Yet, I felt as though I were the one teetering off-balance, and his stare was the only thing holding me down to this hard, cushioned seat. I shifted. He waited. A slab of sunlight cut through the dim and carved a crooked shadow across his profile.

Mr. Spence's eyes were small and blue, with concise, pinprick pupils in each center. The bags under his eyes were filled with financial stress and childhood fears and late nights studying for the bar exam. His eyes seem pressed into his face like the m&m's Caitlin and I used to stick into the bottoms of raw sugar cookies when Dad wasn't looking. It wasn't Dad who minded, though. It was Mom who wouldn't allow it. Too much sugar, she said, you'll rot your teeth, and I won't be the one to pay for new ones. So Dad told us no, he was sorry girls, you heard your mother. But when all the cookies were set out on the baking sheet in asymmetrical lumps, melting from the heat of our fingers shaping and molding the dough, he would ask us to put them in the oven while he went to the bathroom. He was always surprised when the sugar cookies came out with m&m's clumsily stuck in their backs. How did that happen? he would ask. It was the fairies, I would say on cue. Fairies? He would raise an eyebrow. He didn't believe me, I knew that. He didn't believe in the ghosts either. Better keep those face up, and he would flip an errant cookie onto its base. If you can't see it, nobody has to know. Then he would slowly push the whole cookie into his mouth and smile, little bits of red and yellow m&m visible between his teeth. And Caitlin would smile. And I would smile. And it was our secret.

Mr. Spence seemed to understand he was losing his audience. He took one step toward me, faltered and stepped back. Once. Then twice. He hesitated again, still watching me. He was blinking too much. Looking at him felt like trying to look across the train tracks near my house when one of those long, long oil trains was going by. I didn't like running on the train tracks. It wasn't easy; the parallel wooden bars were uneven and asymmetrical, and the stones layered between the old crooked sleepers were sharp and slippery under my converse. I always ended up with my toe hooked into a crooked iron screw and came back with bruises and scrapes across my knees. I had only done it because Caitlin did it too.

Mr. Spence made me feel cold and aching. The pressure building in my stomach made me need to pee, or puke, or both. His heel raised slightly. He was thinking, evaluating, but, perhaps at my expression, he decided against it, stopped. Heel met floor with an inaudible click I imagined I could hear. I could still feel him pushing forward into the silence though. It was a steady, consuming pressure. His shoes looked recently shined and re-laced. The narrow, glossy toes pointed at me across the courtroom.

"Miss D'Arcey?"

I wished he would stop saying my name.

He waited, then, "Miss D'Arcey, could you please answer the question?"

I apologized. I asked him what the question was. His face twitched, which made his eyes look impossibly smaller, swallowed up by the sleepless bags. His cheeks seemed to bunch up like they were full of cherries. Caitlin could tie cherry stems before she lost all her baby teeth. She said it was part of growing up. We went through hundreds of jars of cherries. It didn't matter what kind. Black. Red. Seeded or seedless. Every drink she ordered – Could I get that with extra cherries, please? I never actually liked cherries in my sodas but I always had to order them so Caitlin had two more victims to knot. The day she tied her first cherry stem was the day she became a woman.

Mr. Spence turned his back to me. I could feel the frustration. Why was I being difficult? Hadn't I been prepped? Hadn't we gone over exactly what I was going to say just an hour ago. Hadn't I told him exactly what my story would be? Whose side was I on?

I stared at the narrow expanse of his back. My fingers found a loose piece of thread in the right knee of my jeans. I twisted it tightly until the tip of my finger turned cold and bulbous and white. "Why don't we start again," he said finally.

"Could you tell the court exactly what you saw on the night of November 18th of this year?"


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