In the summer of 1994, Audrey's mom worked at the pizza factory. A lot of local people worked there, streaming in and out of the factory all day and night in startling white pantsuits and hairnets. I imagined them scattering strips of cheese on the frozen round crusts, neatly arranging reddish circles of pepperoni hour after hour, standing over a network of gleaming metal machines and conveyor belts; some giant Rube Goldbergian-contraption that spat out fifty million pounds of frozen pizza. Or so I imagined. When we were in high school, the workers went on a month-long strike, pacing the factory parking lot with bold, angrily scrawled signs, and my Dad brought them donuts from the little bakery on Main Street. Teenage boys drove past at top speed and flicked pennies out of their windows, aiming at the sluggish picket line, laughing as their tires spun tracks in the gravel.
The plant workers received a plum deal on pizzas, so that summer Audrey and I spent most of our time swimming and eating discounted pies – chlorinated water dripping from the ends of my hair and spicy-sweet tomato sauce on my fingers. Audrey's legs stuck out skinny and white from her pink and purple swimsuit. She didn't have a dad, a fact which was endlessly fascinating to me, and lived with her mom in somebody else's pre-fab, vinyl-sided white house – that is to say they rented it; renting as a concept was foreign to me at that point. The yard was full of scrubby grass and spindly saplings, but there was an above-ground pool in the backyard, plopped down on top of the brown lawn like an afterthought, surrounded by a circular deck made of half-rotted grayish wood. We floated across it on cheap blow-up rafts, and I would press my face to the warm plastic, looking through my own breath to the pale blue pool bottom, where silt and and dead, mushy leaves collected in the wrinkles of the lining. Beside me, Audrey's blonde, wavy hair fanned out over her puffy pillow like yellow-white seaweed.
Audrey's mom was a ghostly figure to me. She was rarely home, and when she was, she stayed
moodily in the house, seated at the kitchen table with an ashtray full of Kools and her head in her bony hands, papers and bill envelopes scattered all over the Formica surface. She was spectrally thin with an ashy pallor; on the rare occasions that she spoke, her voice was rough and raw, never at a pleasing decibel. We would come in to get Cokes from the refrigerator, and that menthol stink rushed up my nostrils and stung my eyes.
Audrey's mom had a friend called Veda. Veda was short and round, loud and brash, with a network of pock marks on her face and tight platinum curls crusted with gel; she smoked the same toothpick-thin cigarettes as the old ladies who went to my mother's golf dinners. She was always around, sipping from beer cans and piping up when Audrey's mom did not, to ask about boys or school. Audrey liked Veda; she liked the attention, I thought.
Veda always gave me suspicious sidelong glances, her eyes narrowed like a cat's, distrustful and wary. “I hear you have a real nice house,” she drawled without warning.
Such comments were always lost on me; I didn't see what my house had to do with anything. Veda would sort of snort and shake her head when I didn't respond, my eyes searching for anything else in the room but her. Had I been older and raised differently, I might have called Veda a bitch.
There was a field behind Audrey's house, and it was bordered by a creek – just a shin-deep trickle of water, really, but we liked to pretend that it was something pretty, out of a fairy tale or the fantasy books we read in school. There was a long stretch of trees behind the creek, with a little worn-down path snaking between the branches – it was exactly the width of a bicycle tire, which more than likely was what created it in the first place. In the summer we walked our bikes across the field to wade in the jaundiced water; in high school, when Audrey began stealing her mother's cigarettes, she would drag me by the wrist and run to her refuge, thick hair flying over her ears and face like a wild thing.
The first time we biked over the trail, it was late May and there were trilliums everywhere, covering the grass like a white-and-green bedsheet. My dad cautioned me against picking them, because they were protected, or something to that effect. Whatever the warning, I listened, because I always did. Audrey wasn't one for rules (she didn't have any), and made great big wreaths out of the white petals.
“Who's going to know?” She shrugged it off.
At the end of the path the woods got thicker, a maze of weeds and brambles, and the little worn tire track trailed into nothingness, silently giving up.
“Let's turn around,” I said resignedly, ever the skeptic.
Audrey laughed. “It's no big deal.” She pushed her garlanded handlebars further into the greenery, and I looked up just as the ground dropped off into a wide ditch; Audrey went down in a tangle of trilliums and snapping sticks, tires spinning over her head.
“What the hell?” She screamed, laughing, trying out her newly minted profanity. She liked to shock me with the words she heard from her mother and Veda.
I reached down into the tangle to pull her up, and the rough, dark green leaves scraped my hand, leaving red marks like a cat's scratch. The fierce plants burned our skin, and when I'd finally gotten Audrey out we stood over the ditch, silently hoping that it wasn't poison ivy.
“Maybe your mom will know what it was, “ I offered when we were sitting by the creek, pouring handfuls of coppery water on the hot scratches. The afternoon was warm for May, and the sun threw burnished gold over the field.
“She's not home.” Audrey's face darkened, and she set her jaw in a a way that told me I shouldn't mention her mother again.
“She is too, I saw her ca -”
“Shut up!” Audrey's voice was unusually sharp and bounced off the treetops. She didn't say anything else and kept on dumping handfuls of water over her bare legs. She stretched her freckled arms out to the sun, squeezing her eyes shut.
I didn't know what to say, so I stared at my dirty fingernails, trying to scrape them clean with a small stick. I didn't like being yelled at, especially by Audrey. It stung like the red lines on my skin.
The marks on my legs were from stinging nettles, my visiting grandma said.
“We used to call them 'burning metal'.” She remarked, holding my calf in her wrinkled hand and peering over her bifocals.
Excited over my newfound knowledge, I rode my bike to Audrey's house. I always wanted to please whomever I was with, and pleasing Audrey was at the top of my list. It filled me with an odd sense of joy.
But when I got to her house, Audrey was in the driveway, stepping into Veda's rusty Chevy, one long, denim-shorts clad leg already in the car. Lately she was getting taller and thinner and sporting smaller clothes. She was wearing pink sunglasses and smelled like strawberry lip gloss. She shielded her hazel eyes from the glare on the blacktop.
“We're going to the mall. Want to come?”
I glanced at Veda, sitting squat and toad-like behind the shuddering steering wheel, looking for a country music radio station with one hand and spewing gray cigarette smoke from the other. In fifteen years she would be dead, crushed mercilessly in a car wreck, and I would barely remember her. But then, I shook my head and pushed off from the hot road, standing up and pumping my legs. The car idled noisily in the drive for a minute longer, then lumbered past, steadily picking up speed until it made the turn at the end of the street.
Feeling jilted, I circled the block and came back around Audrey's house again, this time bearing down hard on the bike pedals, pushing through the ruts and grass clumps of the field. The bumps rattled my bike frame and my teeth. Dozens of killdeer ran from their hideouts at the sound of my approaching tires, screeching their familiar “aah-ee!” noise and racing away on their skinny bird legs.
The little kingdom by the trees was covered in green and yellow, the ground a dark jade carpet now that the trilliums had gone. The warm creek water ran quietly over my outstretched hand, smoothing over slimy moss that coated the dove-gray river pebbles, and making tiny swirling patterns in the dark sand. Audrey now parroted her mother, who said that we were too old to be playing in the woods like little girls. Thirteen was too old for pretending, she said. I didn't think thirteen was too old for anything.
When August approached, raspberry bushes appeared in clumps among the trees; sad, overgrown tangles that were probably a holdover from some farm that had long since disappeared. I ferreted them from their shadowy hiding places, popping the largest ones in my mouth and feeling the red sour explode on my tongue. The farther I went, the more berries there were; fat, round bites leading up to the cluster of burning metal. They hid amongst the stinging leaves like thick rubies.
I stood at the edge of the ditch and I thought about Audrey going right into the stinging nettles, not even afraid to find out what was behind them, or find out if it would hurt to discover what was behind them. Audrey and her Barbie dolls last year, short shorts and tank tops this year. Before that, we would play mermaid games in the swimming pool, diving and splashing, flapping our ankles like fins under the water. Laughing as our heads broke the surface, bursting up into the air, the sunlight flashing on our wet hair and faces. That thought pleased me; thinking about Audrey or anyone else being upset left a feeling in my stomach like fire, or a cold ball that rolled endlessly, sending fear through my body with icy fingers.
I walked back across the field, pushing my bike over the ruts and dirt, my palms sweaty on the black rubber handlebar grips. The afternoon was winding down lazily, turning the sky a deep, dark cornflower blue. The air smelled like charcoal and lighter fluid; children shouted and low adult voices murmered from backyards.
Audrey's mom was drifting in the swimming pool, stretched out on a raft, a Diet Coke can in one hand, the long pink fingernails of the other trailing over the water. I stopped instinctively - I didn't want to go past because she would see me, but a chain-link fence ran angrily around the property, cutting me off from the street with an almost calculated cruelty. My throat grew hot, but still I pushed nearer to the pool.
“Hey!” She raised a head from the plastic lounge, and with one hand, waved me over, nearer to her. She rolled off into the water and propped her thin arms onto the deck. “Audrey ain't here.” The wind pulled at the hair in her tight ponytail, freeing a few renegade strands and tossing them around her sun-browned face. In the street, a car went by; her head snapped towards the noise, pulled by an invisible marionette string.
I came slightly closer, and was about to respond politely, when I heard a faint buzzing, almost a summer drone. There was a gray papery nest under the wooden beams, and two wasps were circling the opening. Their wings were transparent, rimmed with black, as if I had outlined them with my India ink pen. Their striped bodies were long, ending in one fearsome point. I kept my eyes fixed on that spot, ready to bolt.
“Do you know where she is?” Audrey's mom raised her voice, as if I were stupid, or deaf, or both.
“No.” There were five wasps outside of the nest.
“Figures.” She snorted, wiping her hands with a towel, reaching for her Kools. She had a tattoo inside her forearm, a faded flower that I'd never noticed before. It looked like a bruised orchid, and it's petals flexed with each movement.
“I suppose you told your mother where you went.” Her voice was peppered with sarcastic italics.
“Yeah.” Now there were nine wasps circling the nest. One floated up near the water, and she swatted it away with her smoking hand.
“Audrey needs to go live with her father. You tell her that when you see her.” Her voice was light with laughter, but I couldn't tell if she was joking; I couldn't see her eyes behind her sunglasses. She looked small and fragile standing in that pool, wearing a worn pink bandeau bikini that was too tight in the wrong places and sagged in all the rest. She kept looking out towards the street, darting her neck at every little noise, like a bony, weary bird.
When I was halfway home, a rusty car swerved past me; by the time I recognized it there was a blonde girl whooping and hollering my name out the passenger window. She was all arms and shrieks and pink sunglasses. I felt suddenly sad for Audrey, because I knew there would be more times that she would have to go into the burning metal, and even more – many more – that I would not follow.
