Devil’s Lake

Our mothers give us hiding clothes and cowbells for our sixteenth birthdays. They tell us not to be afraid. This is the suburbs. The streets end in cul-de-sacs. The woods are long rid of bears. The porch lights have motion sensors and the fields are caged in chain link and reserved for organized sports. If the boy is too rough, if we don’t like who finds us, if we feel lost in the dark, we are supposed to ring the bells.

We love you, our mothers tell us, and shut their doors.

We understand. Our mothers have a lot on their minds. It is the spring of stunted divorces, the basements full of cheater beds—moth balled blankets thrown over ratty couches—the back porches echoing infidelities late into the night, strained, shifting bird calls. We listen in our trees, terrified, intrigued. We are getting an education. One day, we are moving to the city.

We see you out there, listening, our mothers shout into the dark. It is early March, the ground
covered in mealy snow, our mothers in pastel nightgowns, faded vacation-town sweatshirts and winter boots. Their voices are calm lakes filled with sharks.

You can’t stay up there forever. What are you so afraid of?

And one by one, in the cold, muddy maw of the night, we slide down the rough bark, streak into the thinned woods fast as hares. In our black shirts, t-shirts, and ski masks, we look like a search party for a kidnapped kid who is already dead. We sing our favorite songs, braid one another’s hair, compliment and criticize each other’s skirts. Too short, too long, too frilly, just right, whisking the tops of your knees. We wait for the boys, for our girlhunt, to begin.

Growing up, you hear stories. Like how some girls hide stupidly behind saplings and end up found and taken right away. Or how your weird great aunt was the best climber, the best hider, so good that people said she didn’t want to be found. Now she’s the hunched crab apple on your grandparents’ lawn. You hear of a running girl from Poughkeepsie who turned into a towering oak, the rooted altar of a cop named Tim, her name engraved on all his guns. Or how your own father used the joke strategy on your mother, left jokes like crumbs on the ground so that your mother laughed herself out of a tangle of sweet briar. Waiting in the woods, kicking at dead leaves, you try to picture your stiff, sad, angry mother laughing. You try to picture your father wanting her to.

“Hey,” the boys say, emerging from the other side of the woods in their tight pack. They look nervous.swinging imaginary baseball bats, looking down at their sports cleats, already clumped with leaves and mud. They start their count to one-hundred, and for an instant you feel sorry for them, wandering the dark on their own while all you have to do is wait.

You think of your crush, counting with his brown eyes shut, his hands balled at his sides. Track runner, rail of a boy, his name rolls off your tongue like cold milk, and at first you want him to find you, find you, find you crouched inside your mother’s favorite azalea, where she posed you each spring in your ballet costume. You want him to push aside the gushy, pink blooms, pull you roughly to him, so that you come loose in a cloud of wilted flowers. You are that young, that naïve.

When at last he finds you, he is dumber than you remember him being. No matter. It is good to be found. "Oh," he says when he sees you, and unthreads you from the spindly branches in a way that breaks your heart a little.

In other ways, he is not careful. And neither are you. The kisses draw blood. Your skirt bunches awkwardly around your thighs. The ground is hard. It is cold. A new hollowness shoots through you. Your hand goes to your cowbell and rests there. What are you so afriad of?

Morning and the sky is a washed out blue. The snow is gone. You are woven into your azalea, trying to stay hidden. There is the brief clang of a cowbell somewhere out in the woods, then silence, then laughter. All over town girls are ripped from sweet briar, hooked and reeled from beneath porches, netted and lifted from itchy seas of pachysanda. They walk into the houses with their boys, tired, swaying on their feet. The girlhunt is ending. Your mother is on the front lawn, saying, This nice young man is looking for you. I don’t know who you think you are. Come out of there.

And you don’t emerge, you don’t shake a branch, you don’t call his cold milk name when he calls yours. You know you should, it is expected, but your body won’t follow. The words rise and fall back down your throat. Azalea blooms press against your skin. The hand on your cowbell tightens, moves back and forth. The rusty, guttural clang seems to come from deep inside you, the only thing you will ever be capable of saying, find me, find me, find me, rattling you, ungluing you, though you don’t know who you are calling to. Dumb, inarticulate rescue call.

You think of the novel everyone is reading, the one about the kidnapped Southern girl. The rapist kills her, buries her out in her family’s cornfield, and one day the family dog comes home with her big toe in his mouth. You wish for that kind of death, the wise, unimpeachable death of the kidnapped girl. Or you’d take the brave leaving of the runaways, the girls of the YA novels. Or the survivalist girl’s resourcefulness. The hard face she points at her loneliness. Wanapalei: Island of the Blue Dolphins.

But you are not brave, loneliness breaks you easy, and this is the suburbs. We are not lost. We are not rescued. We are not left. We don’t disappear. We only come home, one by one, stronger or weaker, night after night, on our own. And so you open and shut your azalea eyes, unfurl your stick limbs, think of a joke to make your mother laugh—you love it when she laughs—something about how you’re working on a new line of camo themed accessories for girls. Make promises to yourself, resolutions like unlit sparklers in your pockets, your heart a briary thicket of anger. One day I am moving. You have no idea that again and again, wherever you are, you will have to fight your way out of this hiding. You smile your mother’s hard smile, run a hand through the leathery leaves of your hair, and step back into the broken world.