What The Hell America!

It was damp down under the blackberry bush, but Margaret liked it there; she was cozy, like a rabbit. It smelled clean—it was funny how dirt could smell so clean. She couldn’t see in the dark which berries were ripe, but she nibbled on one anyway, puckered, spat. She rested her cheek against her arm and looked across the yard.

A whoop and a stampede—the boys were running by. They must have spotted Biddy. The bright spot of the flashlight whirled. It made her dizzy trying to follow it. Hammock, grass, basketball net, grass. The flashlight made a photograph each time it hit something—little circles of backyard, punched out of time.

The light lit the door of the toolshed and stayed there, wobbling. She couldn’t tell which boy was which in the dark, but one held the flashlight, one went for the door. Tactics, she thought, impressed. They shouted and knocked over some rakes and buckets, but the shed was empty. Margaret laughed into her elbow. The boys stopped to scheme. They had to be more strategic, she could hear Neal, her own brother, saying.

She played with a stick in the dirt, making up notes for the fairy people who would come out later, telling them who she was: Here lay Margaret, child of man. The fairies would have tangles in their hair and see-through wings of dusky violet and the pointed toes of Barbies. She didn’t believe in fairies, but she liked to pretend.

The light came again, straight into the blackberry bush. For a second it was like being inside a room when someone flicks the switch. The world got solid and sharp-edged and jumped at her—leaves and thorns and shadows of thorns, the dirt so close to her face and suddenly, specifically, dirty. She cringed her eyes shut tight so no one could see them shining like an animal’s. When she opened them again, the boys were on the other side of the yard.

They’d given up on the ground and were looking into the trees. Biddy would be in a tree; Margaret could have told them that. And it took only a few more minutes before the light found her best friend, pinned her up against the branches. Biddy swung down to the victorious brothers.

But they would never find Margaret. She had known as soon as she burrowed down under the blackberries that no one was going to find her. She was too low to the ground, too good and hidden.

It was fully dark out now. She couldn’t see the bats against the sky anymore, the bats that lived in the attic and weren’t all bad because they ate the mosquitoes. If she was outside after her own dinner, looking up, she could catch them sometimes sluicing out of the house, so many wings so close together it was like one streaming body, like the house was a factory churning out black smoke. They were up there, eating, but she couldn’t see them. She tried pretending them away, but that never worked; you could pretend things into existence but not out of it.

The damp had soaked through her shorts and she shivered. She was bored of flashlight tag. Elbowing her way out from under the brambles, she shouted, “I win, I win,” and, linking arms with Biddy, skipped toward the lit-up house.

The parents were on the porch, around the glass table. “Ice cream’s inside,” Biddy’s mom called to the oncoming children.

“Bring me a bowl too, would you?” Margaret’s dad asked her. The fathers were handsome in their off-hours polo shirts, but Margaret’s father was handsomest. And in the doorway her mother, in the hot-pink sundress—Elizabeth, commanding the screen. Elizabeth oversaw the children tramping through, but when Margaret reached the threshold, she put an arm out and stopped her.

“You’re filthy,” she said.

Margaret looked at her mother’s face to see how she meant it. But it was safe, she didn’t look angry; she looked as if she was thinking of a cute word, like ragamuffin. Margaret glanced down. Her knees were brown, but filthy? Elizabeth was always exaggerating. Besides, this was clean dirt, blackberry dirt. She toed off the heels of her sneakers and lined them up beside the door the way she was supposed to. She said, “I’m not filthy.”

A mistake. Dumb, Margaret. “You are literally,” Elizabeth said, “covered in mud.”

I’m not, she thought again but did not say.

“Look at yourself.”

Elizabeth pinched at her T-shirt as if she had to touch it but didn’t want to. The shirt lifted away from her chest and the air came in. “Take your clothes off here and give them to me. I don’t want you tracking that mess through the house.”

Margaret looked around the porch, at the parents, at the brothers on the other side of the door. “Here?”

“Don’t be a princess.”

Elizabeth took the hem of her T-shirt and pulled. Automatically Margaret’s arms went up, like she was still a little kid who was used to being undressed by her mother. The shirt covered her face, and for a moment it was safe, she was back in the blackberry bush, in the good dark, but then the air was on her. Elizabeth had said she’d buy Margaret a training bra when she started fifth grade that fall. She didn’t need it for support or anything yet, but you could see that she would soon; you could see already that she wasn’t a child or a boy. “Skin a rabbit,” Elizabeth said, reaching for her shorts.

Then Margaret was through the door and up the stairs in her white underwear, moving fast so she couldn’t see anyone seeing her. Behind her, Elizabeth was her good mother again, bundling up the dirty laundry, saying to the other kids, still gathered by the door, “Don’t forget to put the ice cream back in the freezer. I don’t want ichor all over the countertop.”

Icker? Margaret repeated the word as she climbed up on the bathroom sink, contorting her knees under the tap. It was a new word. Ick, ick, icker. It meant “filthy” too, she guessed. Her mother had many words for that, and she was right: Margaret was filthy. The dirt ran down the sink in pleasing long, brown lines. But Elizabeth wasn’t mad that she was filthy; she was mad that Margaret had said she wasn’t filthy. Icker on the countertop, she said to herself, liking the sound of the words.

Biddy’s nipples were a pale ballerina pink, but hers were much darker, almost brown, an ugly color. It meant her boobs, when she got them, would be bigger—that’s what Biddy said. You always feel sadder when you look into a mirror. It’s because to the sadness in yourself is added the more generous sadness you feel for another person. Poor thing, Margaret thought about her reflection. The girl in the mirror looked like she was suffering from something much worse than whatever was bothering Margaret. It was weird how the ins and outs and shapes and holes clustered at the front of a head made up something this nakedly expressive of thinking and feeling—the face. All that thinking and feeling, Margaret knew, was what Elizabeth was talking about when she said, Stop making that face. Stop making that face, Margaret thought now at the girl in the mirror.

She wrapped a towel around her chest and started to leave the bathroom. She needed to get dressed; Biddy would be waiting for her. But she stopped at the door and went back. Carefully, with wet toilet paper, she wiped everything down, each thing she’d touched: the sink, the hot tap and the cold, the honey-colored marble that she’d sat on. She had turned the bar of soap brown. Under the clear water, she cleaned the soap itself.

She would never again know so little or have so little to do. Neal had Model UN camp all summer and Biddy had swim team, but Margaret wasn’t doing anything. She emptied and loaded the dishwasher, took out the trash, emptied and loaded the dishwasher. She read, endlessly, in the yard, books about special children doing magic. She daydreamed about Danny, and about JTT from Home Improvement, and about Calvin O’Keefe from A Wrinkle in Time.

She owned a book of poems called A Child’s Garden of Verses. It had a red fabric cover and had belonged to her mother growing up. On the inside cover, in a schoolgirl cursive significant as a celebrity autograph, she had written the name Elizabeth. Margaret knew a lot of the poems by heart, and sometimes they played in her head like pop songs. She liked even better a poem that her teacher had read to her: Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving? That was a tree. She said that to herself a lot. Margaret, are you grieving? Oh! It was beautiful.

Her historical education came primarily from the American Girl books, which is why she associated the Revolution with redheads climbing trees. About slavery, she knew that it was very bad and long ago; about politics, she knew only the president’s name. She knew about abortion, or at least that people carried posters about abortion. She knew who Kristi Yamaguchi was. The family had one computer, in a corner of the living room, which she had to use to play a game that taught typing and the multiplication tables. Twice with Biddy she had braved the alarm of the dial-up to go on the internet and been equally bored and disturbed by what they’d found there. In health class she had colored in diagrams about puberty but had no idea what it would feel like when her own body changed. They made it sound like it was all little things, hair and pimples, pores and follicles. But she knew it was a bigger deal—more like disappearing, cell by cell, until you were replaced by a whole new body.

She often wondered: What was the point of her? She was 10 years old.

One morning, as usual, Margaret was lying in the yard when a car pulled fast into the driveway and Mrs. Ricci from down the road tumbled out. Mrs. Ricci and her mother were friends, but not really. If Elizabeth was watering the flowers by the road, Mrs. Ricci would slow down in her car and say, Your roses are bliss. But the families had invited each other over only a few times. The Riccis lived in a giant brick house behind an iron fence with a driveway that went in a circle around an actual fountain, which Elizabeth thought was very ostentatious, but that was not to be repeated.

“Margaret, get your mother. It’s an emergency.”

She ran around the corner, shouting, “Mom!” Elizabeth was in a flower bed, putting things in or taking them out. Elizabeth strode down the driveway; she would take care of what was wrong.

Margaret stopped on the porch steps, a polite distance away. “Lost,” she could hear, “… sometime last night …”

Something must have happened to one of the Ricci boys, some gruesome injury, because Elizabeth was hugging Mrs. Ricci, pressed her tight against her chest. One of Elizabeth’s hands was on Mrs. Ricci’s back, rubbing up and down. Margaret watched in wonder the mother in her mother’s arms. The only adult she’d ever seen cry before was Elizabeth.

“We’ve looked everywhere,” Mrs. Ricci said, pulling away. “What if she was stolen?”

Stolen? She who?

Elizabeth, having given comfort, was all action. “Have you called Animal Control? Don’t worry, she’ll turn up.”

It was an emergency, but it wasn’t the boys who were missing. It was Gambol, their pet pygmy goat.

Gambol lived in a pen in the Riccis’ backyard and in theory ate sugar cubes and peppermints out of the palm of your hand, though the few times Margaret had been over to the house, the goat had refused to come anywhere near the fence. They had the goat because Mr. Ricci was allergic to dogs and cats but it was important for children to grow up knowing how to take care of animals. Mrs. Ricci said that as if the goat made the house a farm, like the boys were up at dawn with a bucket in each hand, though everyone knew that this was New Jersey and only pretend.

The goat had a pink collar that read Gambol, and her name was also on a gold plaque on the gate of her pen, the gate that Mrs. Ricci was saying now had been mysteriously opened in the night. The goat was so tiny—only as tall as Margaret’s knees—not just tiny but freakishly so. People wouldn’t expect it. They would run her over in their car before their brains said, “What was that? Was that a little goat?”

Now an old man Margaret didn’t know waved from the end of the driveway. He walked toward them. He had gray curls, like her dad’s would someday be, and work boots, and a big, hard belly.

“Daddy,” Mrs. Ricci said.

“Saw the car from the street,” the man said. “I walked the road from the back and didn’t spot her. Expanding the search party?”

He shook Elizabeth’s hand. “I’m Stu Elkins, Jeannie’s father. Visiting from Maryland.”

Elizabeth called Margaret over. “Why don’t you help Mr. Elkins look around on foot while Mrs. Ricci and I drive,” she said.

She didn’t want to. With a stranger? She wanted to stay with the mothers. But it wasn’t a question.

“I’ll bet you’re a kid who knows all the secret spots around here. That right?” he asked as they started walking. It was already too hot, the sun stunting their shadows.

“I guess.”

“Now. If you were the world’s tiniest goat, where would you go?”

“I would find somewhere with lots of grass …”

“Yup.”

“Or clover. Somewhere cool.”

“I’ll bet that she’s barely made it off the property. Let’s do another sweep, yes?” He led her back to the Riccis’ house, and around the side. There was the stone patio and the barbecue grill. There was the goat’s pen, with its suspiciously wide-open gate. There was the wall of hedges that encircled the pool, and then beyond it the industrial-size lawn. The house and the yard were too big, she thought, like the goat was too small. They were made not for function or survival, but for something else—to make an impression, to overwhelm or endear. Only someone very rich could have things so frivolously big and small.

“I’ll take the right side, you take the left?”

“Okay,” she said.

What was the goat’s name again? Something dumb. Glitter? “Here, goat, goat, goat,” she called, clicking her tongue like for a cat. She looked through the flower beds, under all the landscaping. The more she looked for the goat, the more she wanted to find it. She would bundle it into her arms and present it to the mothers. She was proud to have a test, a quest, a purpose. The dads and the boys had gone. The goat would bleat, and she would find it, save it, keep it safe.

But it wasn’t there. Maybe it didn’t want to be found. She had gone all the way down to the end of the lawn and all the way back up again, and she was thirsty. She wanted to go put her feet in the pool; she couldn’t get in trouble for taking a little break. She went through the hedges and kicked off her sandals. She swished her legs up and down so the cold got in around every toe. Then she looked up. The goat was lying under one of the deck chairs.

In the slats’ striped shadows, it looked weirder and wilder than she’d remembered. She’d imagined it a sweet lamb, all silky wool and soft, rooting nose, like the lamb that sat in Mary’s lap in The Secret Garden. But it wasn’t a lamb, it was a goat, and not just a goat, a pygmy goat. She had thought that being small and fragile would make it cute, but up close it wasn’t cute at all. It had dirty gray hair and odds-and-ends-looking legs, joints that made her think of tangled-up bone, and staring yellow eyes too far on either side of its face.

She did not want to bundle the goat in her arms. It didn’t look like a creature that could be bundled. It looked like it might bite or die. She felt no desire to protect it. If anything, she felt the opposite: repulsed and somehow threatened. The animal kept looking at her, without fear or curiosity. The pupil in its eye was a thick horizontal line, like someone had drawn a strike through the eye, tried to cross it out to start over.

There was something wrong with the goat, or something wrong with the world to have made it. Its defenselessness was a kind of test, a test that everyone was going to fail or had already failed. The fact that it was so easy to hurt made her feel that someone, maybe Margaret, would have to hurt it. The sun caught the gold on its collar and glinted. Silently, she crept out of the hedges.

The old man had been the one to return the goat to the pen. He didn’t pick it up. He just hooked a finger under its collar and tugged until it came. He gave Margaret full credit. “Of course it would have been lounging by the pool, like every other kid in this family.” He winked, because “kid” was a pun, and getting the pun was almost as good as finding the goat.

Mrs. Ricci ran to it and fell on her knees and nuzzled its weird face. The goat just stood there, tolerating the caresses, the flat line in its eye never wavering. Margaret and her mother stood together at the fence. Elizabeth’s mouth looked funny, like she was moving something gross around inside it, something that tasted terrible but she wasn’t rude enough to spit out. A heavy, satisfied feeling settled over Margaret’s head and shoulders. She and her mother had something in common: They felt the same way about the goat. They could never have loved it like Mrs. Ricci loved it.

As a thank-you for finding the goat—the poor thing could have drowned!—Mrs. Ricci invited them all for a swim after Neal and the Ricci boys got home from their camps. So in the early evening they went back, Margaret heroic in her navy-blue Speedo. The younger boy, Philip, was nice about it: “We heard you found Gambol. Mom must have been freaking out.” His brother Jeremy held his palm up and wouldn’t put it down until she submitted to the high five.

The boys were throwing around a Nerf football while Margaret bounced on the diving board, delaying the moment of entry. The water was so clear, it might have been a sunk pool of nothing at all. She was just up there, mindlessly boing-ing. It was nice to be sprung into the air, to jump without trying. At the top of each bounce, she could see over the line of hedges, over the prestigious lawn, and down to the road at the bottom of the hill with a tiny stop sign at the end of it as if to say: That’s it, you can’t see any farther. Then down she would go and then up again, ever so slightly higher.

She noticed suddenly that the pool was quiet. The boys had funny expressions, like someone had made a joke. They were looking at her, watching … what? She came down from the bounce—it seemed to take forever to come down—and twisted her ankle on the edge of the board in her hurry to get off it. Water everywhere, water up her nose. Stupid pool water, why did it have to be so clear? There was nothing to hide behind but her own exhaled breath. She brought her knees to her chest in cannonball position and floated there, refusing to surface.

But suddenly, underneath her, two hands on her ass. She had never thought the word ass in relation to her own body before, but now for the first time she did, and just thinking the word seemed to change her body, as if the muscles there tensed into a new shape and would not relax again. Two hands on her ass lifting her up, up through the water and flinging her out of it into the air. The air stripped the water from her skin and her legs flailed open and so did her eyes. She was up in the green landscape of the hedges again, but not high enough to see above them. The black sheen of the boys’ heads went by below her, round as river stones. And then down: She hit the surface halfway to the shallow end.

She had always loved being thrown in the pool. Her dad would toss her and she’d buoy up laughing, demand to be thrown again. But this was different.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Just messing around,” Jeremy said.

She looked at Neal. “Chill,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he was talking to her or to Jeremy.

“Hey, catch,” Philip called, and held the football up in one hand, cocked it back, mimed the spasm of an arrested pass. But his brother ignored him, and so did hers. “Hey, Jeremy,” Philip tried again. “Let’s play.”

Jeremy lowered himself so that only his nose and eyes were above the surface.

“I don’t want to be thrown,” she said.

He ducked his head under and swam. Something about his too-broad white back coming toward her freaked her out. It was like a shark but grosser. The ripples made the edges of the colors wiggle, the blue of the tiles penetrating the skin and the skin penetrating the tiles. He just wanted to play. What was the big deal? But she couldn’t bear for him to touch her again. She kicked backwards, but there was nowhere to go; she was trapped between the pebbles of the pool wall and the smooth, rubbery wetness of his body.

“What the fuck did you do?” Jeremy shrieked. Now Jeremy was the one sputtering out of the water like something had shocked and hurt him there. Across his chest and shoulder were red lines, dark with blood, each scratch surrounded by spreading, stinging, valentine-pink, as if trimmed with a border of ribbon. She lifted a dripping hand out of the water and turned it around, inspected her fingernails. A lot of his skin must be under there.

Right then the mothers walked up. Margaret swished her hand underwater. Mrs. Ricci had a pitcher and cups on a tray, Elizabeth a pile of white towels in her arms. The mothers looked young in an ancient way, Margaret thought, like in a painting. She looked hard at the mothers so she didn’t have to look at Neal or Jeremy. It had something to do with their bare shoulders, and the miniature green leaves of the hedge behind them, and the white stone under their sandals. They looked like temple serving girls painted on a wall. Behind them came the empty-handed old man.

Elizabeth placed the towels down on a chair, and then she saw Jeremy. She looked from the cuts to Margaret and back again.

“Margaret! Did you do that?” She looked at Neal, and he shrugged: Yeah, it was her.

“Why were you playing so rough?”

“He threw me,” she said.

“So?” asked Elizabeth, genuinely baffled. “Apologize to Jeremy. You hurt him!”

Whatever credit she had gained was gone. She had saved the goat but scratched—perhaps scarred—the boy. He heaved himself out of the pool and the mothers bustled around him. They pressed a white towel against his chest, as if they needed further proof that the blood was real. When it came away red, they looked even more surprised.

The old man had sat down on a lounge chair, and he was looking at his daughter, who was looking at her son. Margaret couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was wearing swim trunks and his white legs were skinnier than she’d expected. Under his chair, the shadows lay in jungled stripes.

Elizabeth stepped to the edge of the pool. The sun was behind her. “Apologize,” she said. Her hands twitched, but she couldn’t reach Margaret; she was too deep in the water. “Come here right now and say sorry.”

Margaret took a step forward but then stopped. No. She wouldn’t come.

“Come back here this instant. Come back here or you’ll be—”

Margaret had reached the other end of the pool. She reached her palms behind her on the edge, and ascended, and scooched her new ass backwards.

“Margaret, don’t you dare.”

She wouldn’t come. She wasn’t sorry. She was running, running away, not bothering with a towel. She had made those marks in the surface of the world. She had not been thrown again. She ran through the hedges and down across the lawn, grass clippings sticking to her feet and legs, knee-socked in the cut-down green.

This story has been excerpted from Honor Jones’s forthcoming novel, Sleep.