Start of Novel Manuscript, Honey Howl

The riverbank is an all-you-can-eat buffet for the hungry, bellying critters that inhabit it. Periwinkle, acorns and wild mushrooms for the more refined palates and rotting squirrel innards for those organisms with more of a taste for the juicy and sanguine. Craggy half-trunks make multistoried motels for downy wolf spiders and funghi. The bark lays snapped and grounded from the last big storm that blew through here. Wet.

The river is swollen this morning from a heavy rain a week prior. It poured down so heavy that if you were the religious type, you might have wondered if God got tired of all the bullshit and called in the Rapture a little early. Now, six days out from the storm, the river water is still high. It swivels and puckers like stretchmarks on a thigh. Deer dip their tongues in. Snakes come to rest. Down fifteen miles or so, where the river intersects with the highway, people pay tribute with cigarette butts, half-shriveled matches and empty cans of Bud Light Strawberrita. 

Tonight isn’t Talia’s first time in this river. At 16, the river and Talia have known one another’s bodies for years. She’s cannonballed into its murky blue and Marco-Poloed and hosted imaginary tea parties at the river’s craggy base. But this time is different. This time, Talia doesn’t want to play.

EVE
July 11, 5:46 am

Let the lice live.

It’s too early. God did not intend anyone or anything to be so violently conscious at this hour of the morning. It’s 5, maybe 6 but I can already feel the lice shuttling their industrious little louse asses across my scalp. They scamper on, rudely tickling me awake like some strange cousin with eager, grimy fingers. Consciousness comes suddenly in a sticky, tense-necked start.

What a day awaits. I splash sulphuric water on my face, trying to rally. The frigid, spoiled smell slaps the sleep out of me. I blink wide into the cloudy mirror, stained still from residual powered blush as though someone slammed her cheek into the glass a decade prior. My own face is a tired one, drained and hued by greenish undertones in my skin. I look like a wax version of myself, displayed in some big tourist venue in Las Vegas or Key West.

Silently rummaging through my things, I tuck a box of lice shampoo below my armpit. It took the lion’s share of my last day off to get my hands on it so I’m precious with it. The nearest drugstore is four miles out and I walked it by myself, marching uphill past old pines and a squat, teal motel surrounded by wooden carvings of chunky, spear-toothed beavers and big-titted mermaid women. Lice shampoo isn’t cheap, but at that moment I would have gladly auctioned off my first born to stop the itch.

I check the other beds in our wood-paneled cabin quickly and easy-like so if any of my roommates should wake up right now, they’ll chalk my early rising up to needing an auroral piss. I pop on running clothes, still crusty with sweat from the last time I pretended to be a runner. Coaxing the screen door shut behind me, I’m off.

I fly down the gravel path, zigzagging between cabins. Everyone else is still asleep. Just inside each building, little streams of drool are probably trickling down little cheeks and pillows. Bunk beds are full and silent. Outside, the dark has ebbed and the air is colored a hazy morning purple. It is supremely bucolic. The whole campsite looks as though some wet-nosed, rosy- cheeked kid set up their tinker toys in the one dirt patch on a sweeping lawn. Pines and Paw Paws gird the cabins on all sides—a cavernous green. At the edge of the cabins, I breach the emerald moat of trees between the campsite and the river.

When teams of men cut down these trees to build the campsite for the WPA, they must have wiped their brows and revelled at the endless rings before them. There before them: hundreds of thick trunks that chronicled each passing year, encoding within its rings all the sights and sounds it had stoically beheld.

I imagine rings that tell of the religious sect that lived out here in the 1960s before the place became a summer camp for kids. One woman, a newer devotee named Connie Waters— rechristened “Elisheva”—headed off to the winter woods to pray and froze. The group’s leader— “Elijah Moses” or “Marvin Burghoffer”—wouldn’t let her return to the group until such a time that she was fully purified, but frostbite came before salvation. Did some tree see her kneeling in the snow that night?

Just beyond the pines, I reach a clearing. It’s a bleached stretch of thigh-high grass that seems almost like some optical illusion from a children’s picture book. Stare at any distant weed too long and you’ll swear the field is pulling you into it. Squint too hard and some spurt of wild strawberries looks like beads of blood spilling out from a skinned knee. Here, at the end of the grass, I reach my destination.

The bathhouse is the only building that seems to belong—maybe because of the years of neglect and the thousands of wet, little feet that tracked in mud on their way to the toilets. Moss nuzzles into the grain of the wood, turning it as wild green as the surrounding trees. The front door is an amalgamation of tired wooden planks, warped and green-tinted in the crevices. It smacks shut behind me.

The room is divided into six stalls: three for toilets and three for showers. The toilet stalls maintain some semblance of privacy with chunky wooden doors in front of each, but the shower stalls are curtain-less.

I check behind each toilet stall door, making my way to the farthest shower – the only one with a reliable spigot. Parting my hair down the middle in the reflection of an old compact mirror, I begin the lice demolition derby. Ass-clenchingly-meticulous, I comb through each strand. Scalp to tip, extracting the teensy white bulbs and occasional scurrying bug. They each try to scamper off, but quickly find themselves sliced through between the nails of my index and thumb. It’s as satisfying as biting down on a single tomato seed with your front teeth. Squish, slice, repeat. The lice are just doing what’s in their nature, I know, but each squeeze is a little morsel of revenge. 

The gnarled front door crashes open in a rude, two-part thud. The air is still outside. No branches bend. Each pawpaw trunk stands immobile, sedated by the morning quiet. I am alone in this place. The door hangs open. With one arm across my chest to haphazardly bundle my breasts, I inch toward the door. With steady steps and an accelerating pulse, I tiptoe forward. I’m just two feet away now and then one. My fingers grip the door’s splintered side. In, I pull, in. The door surrenders just a bit, moving back towards me as I stare out beyond at the ceaseless green.

I see him. There, where the pregnant river kisses the tree line some fifty yards away stands a teenager. He’s in the years somewhere between boy and man; he’s muscly and lean. His white-blond hair is slicked back, wet. He’s watching me, surveying me from afar as I shiver at the threshold of the mossy wooden door.

Wordlessly, the corners of his baby pink lips curve up into his ruddy cheeks. As he smiles, his bottom teeth jut out below his top and I imagine he’s breathing slowly through his mouth.

He raises two thick fingers in a measured wave, mouthing sharply, “EARLY. BIRD.”

TALIA
July 10
One Day Before

Talia found the note just after breakfast, tucked beneath her pillow. He didn’t normally leave notes, but Talia appreciated the surprise. The act was more intentional than he normally was. She relished the idea of him putting it together—scrounging up a nice sheet of paper and the kind of pen that doesn’t bleed, just to write her. No wonder she didn’t see him in the mess hall, eating thick disks of spiced sausage and cheddar grits with everyone else.

He must have peeled off from the crowd, jogged down the gravel path and slipped his hand under the cool of her pillow. Had he lingered there? Did he imagine her warm body pressing against the soft jersey sheets after a shower or a swim? Did he finger a single thread of her long amber hair, stranded there on her pillow? Talia toyed with the makeshift back of her earring made up of a dismembered pencil eraser. She slid her tongue over the slick surface of her molars, imagining him imagining her.

He could be kind of a bitch sometimes so Talia particularly appreciated this gesture. Not that she wanted him slobbering all over her, posting Facebook portfolios of them open mouth kissing with paragraph-long manifestos describing her as “my human <3 <3.” No. Talia was only 16, but she was already repulsed by that kind of cloying exhibitionism. There was a weakness in that admission of affection. It was a surrender of sorts — to reveal your heart’s position so loudly. Talia, in fact, appreciated his coldness.

There was more between them than most people would ever experience in their lifetimes. They didn’t operate in the same humdrum romantic rituals: meet-cute, feelings shared, dinner date, sex, phone-clutching insecurity, reassurance, Facebook official, etc, etc. They didn’t date. There were no special lunches at Panera Bread. No declarations of love over Southwest Chicken salad and cheddar broccoli bread bowls. No neck-nuzzling in plush red booths as sweaty plastic licked the back of their thighs. They didn’t need to speak on a Tuesday for Talia to wake up Wednesday morning knowing in her bones that he wanted her. Because he always wanted her. He made that fact known.

Talia liked the strangeness of it all. She prided herself on it even, for Talia was not a woman who needed to be accommodated, mollified. Maybe that was what he liked about her— the ease, that down-to-earth beauty, the way she was just as happy choreographing Tik Toks to Dua Lipa as she was cracking bawdy jokes with the guys. She had lots of guy friends.

Anyhow, she figured their back-and-forth was more dynamic this way. Not a stroll, but a late-night game of tag. It was a fast, adrenaline-rich affair too potent for most people to partake in or even fully grasp. Sometimes he pursued her. Sometimes she pursued him. It was a kind of game between them and where’s the sport in chasing someone standing still?

It had begun as a crush. Without any premeditation, she conceived said crush just one week in, after an unseen but acutely felt spider went to town on her legs. The day was particularly hot, that unkind kind of hot that makes gentle people cruel and shy people bold. Her shorts had become a second, stiffer skin and the pink welts were angry and searing beneath them. They were so obviously red that her counselor Lucy even let her walk to the first aid station by herself. Not that she thought she should have to ask anyhow at 16, but whatever.

Just outside the nurse’s office, a trolley held a generous basket of bandaids, ointment, and the like. A long, metal-slatted bench offered a moment of respite. Talia leaned back onto the cool painted metal and yanked her shorts up to the intersection of her thighs and crotch where a little kiddie pool of sweat had gathered. She loaded up a cotton ball with creamy, pink calamine lotion and lathered the cool, milky liquid on the raging welts.

He passed just then, escorting little June Ritters up from the river. June was a rolly-polly fourth grader who liked to tell you about The Avengers whether you cared or not. She had a tendency to muse on and on in a breathless, stream-of-consciousness about the Iron Man franchise in the way some 1970s gonzo writer might ramble endlessly about suburban conformity on hallucinations.

But not today. Today, June was uncharacteristically silent, spare a few hiccupy cries. She was drenched. Her dark brown hair plastered down her neck. He offered Talia a close-lipped smile as they entered the nurse’s office. A big window separated Talia from them now, but she could still hear them outside.

“I think we’re just a little shaken up,” he told Ms. Karver the nurse, employing that plural “we” that people use when trying to comfort or negotiate with someone hysterical. Soothing. Authoritatively mollifying. Ms. Karver led June into a back room with elephant-themed wallpaper, shutting the door behind her.

Talia watched him through the window for a moment. He turned, catching her stare. Talia jerked her head forward but she could feel him walking back outside towards her. He joined her on the bench, leaning back as she bent forward. Not knowing if it was okay to ask what happened with June, Talia concentrated on giving her bites a hefty second coat.

“They got ya good, didn’t they?” he asked. Talia looked up.

“Yeah. It’s like hot too so they’re itching real bad today,” Talia replied, dabbing the lotion around the welt’s perimeter. “What happened to her?” she asked, sensing it was alright. He asked first, anyhow.

“It was scary. I won’t lie to ya. She got too far out into the river and at first, I didn’t notice. I mean, I didn’t, but next thing I know,” he gestured a palm out in front of him as though he were pointing out a drowning girl. “But next thing I know, she’s splashing around, completely lost control and I’m just going for it ya know,” he recounted the story, shaking his head earnestly with eyebrows raised.

Talia furrowed her brow, imagining him jumping into the scene. The confusion of it all. The stillness of the bystanders up on the shore coupled with the terrified flapping of the girl’s arms. Then, finally, in the midst of all that confusion, one decisive figure burst into the water to save her. She could imagine him barking orders, collecting the weeping kid and wading back up to shore.

He continued, “I pulled her out, but she was real shaken, just shivering like a hummingbird. Poor kid.” He toyed with one of Talia’s used cotton balls from the tower she had constructed between them. “So who do we think’s the culprit here?” he asked, motioning back to the pink polka dots tattooing her thighs.

“Spider.”
“Spider?” he questioned.
“Yeah, no, seriously,” Talia insisted, feeling almost defensive about the severity of the bites.

“Sure you didn’t just scratch some mosquito bites until they stopped itching?” he returned, a smile reaching skyward at the corner of his mouth.

“Two puncture marks! See,” Talia shot back, louder than she meant to be. She wiped the calamine lotion from one of the most vicious bites on her upper thigh, stretching the skin so that the two wee bite marks glared through. He leaned in, squinting about a half-foot up from her thigh.

“Must’ve been one big spider,” he smiled, looking up from the spot above her thigh. “No, I actually think there’s a spider that lives in my bed frame, like in my bed.” “Lucky spider,” he responded.

Talia knew, in that moment, that he had said what he said and she knew what he meant by it. From that point into forever, he would have always called the spider that lived in her bed “lucky.” No takesies backsies. The way she thought of him would be different forever too.

June walked back out into the sunlight with a conciliatory bag of fruit gummies.

“Let’s get you back,” he said to June, nodding at Ms. Karver. With a hand on June’s shoulder, he walked her back to the line of cabins.

He offered no “goodbye” to Talia, but in that moment it began. The crush. And as Talia well knew, once a crush is conceived, you can only hide it for so long. She knew then, on the bench with the calamine lotion, that the crush would grow inside her until it breached into the real world and became a sticky, shrieking thing she could no longer control.

EVE

July 11

“Did you hear?” Danielle ambushes me with raised eyebrows and wide eyes as soon as I set my breakfast tray down. I scoot my paper plate of biscuits and white gravy onto the surface of the thickly veneered, faux-wooden table top. Indigo carpet runs below the tables so stomped down upon that it looks like laminate from a distance. The ceiling is high, but slouching. The creme-colored guts of the square ceiling tiles droop down, peppered with little holes that have caught many pencils and paper airplanes in their time.

“Did you hear though?” Danielle repeats, leaning in. I take the bait, interested in whatever tidbit of gossip I’ll be washing down with my Sunny D this morning.

“What’s up?” I reply, gulping down a sporkful of biscuit. “That girl from the talent show last night. She dipped.” “Huh?”

“She ran off, they think,” Danielle insists.

“Why?”

“That’s the point. No one knows why. She called one of the higher ups a see-you-next- Tuesday and dipped,” Danielle juts her neck out as she speaks, emphasizing her words with jerky motions that would make a chiropractor cry.

“Wait, the talent show?” I puzzle as I alternate between sips of the opaque orangy juice and my other cup of strawberry milk. Hydration is essential in the summertime.

“Yeah, the girl from the talent show last night with the sexy baby routine,” she clarifies. I shake my head. I didn’t go last night. I probably should have, but I didn’t. Instead, I knocked on Grace’s office door just before 6 and gently fibbed about all the paperwork I needed to do before start of day.

Alone in the staff lounge in the back of the office, I sunk into the peeling leather couch and popped a dusty DVD of Big into the old DVR. Itching my scalp in peace, I watched Tom Hanks pretending to be a child pretending to be a grown-up having sex with his adult coworker. It was, objectively, a far better use of my time.

Unlike most of the other employees at Honey Rivers, I don’t technically have an obligation to pal around with the kids. My job is largely clerical. I like the little girl who sometimes lingers at my desk talking about The Avengers, but beyond that I keep my distance. I’m afraid the little ones will ask me for some help I can’t give or the older ones will turn me into some long-running inside joke.

“I didn’t go. Would I know her from something else?” I ask.

“Redhead. Pretty. Actually really fucking pretty. It’s annoying. She runs around with all the loud, popular ones. She’s, what, 15, maybe 16? I dunno,” Danielle says. I flip past different images of teenage girls in my mind as though I were searching for a song on a jukebox.

I can see her: the teenager that cut me in line to get dinner a week back. She and her rowdy pack shoved in front of me en route to load up a plate full of chicken parm and peas. The redhead with the bracelet—I remember her. She was maybe 16 with a warm roundness to her face and body. Her hair was long—fundamentalist end-of-days cult long, but healthy. As the girl lunged past me for a hefty helping of garlic bread, her outstretched arm grazed my shoulder. On her wrist, she wore one of those personalized beaded bracelets—the kind of trinket your Aunt might have picked up for you from those massive alphabetized racks at some Myrtle Beach gift shop. It seemed too young for her, almost like an affectation picked up after one too many Lana Del Rey music videos or school-girl aestheticized Tumblr posts. As I remember now with the added detail of Danielle’s account, I retroactively emboss the neon green beads with “TALIA.” In truth, I do recall a “T” on the bracelet, but I was less concerned about her accessories than the fact that she had cut me in line. And her face. And body. The svelte ease of it. No unkind words had slithered from her mouth, but I could feel something ugly putter about within me when I beheld her startling void of ugliness. A single swoon could win her the celestial sphere. She was that kind of girl, I thought to myself. That privileged genre of girl who gets to play victim and heroine in the same chapter. How easy it must be. I had directed a glare into her big brown eyes, thinking quickly to myself the unkind things one thinks about a pretty teenage girl who gets in their way.

“Anyhow,” Danielle continues, “everyone’s near pissing themselves right now,” Danielle nods to a huddled clump of adults—true grown-ups with clipboards and furrowed brows. The Talia girl’s main bunk counselor, Lucy, gulps down anxious sobs. Even from half a room away, her protruding neck muscles broadcast her terror. “Lucy couldn’t find her anywhere and she just came in crying to Grace, just like weeping. I mean I get being stressed but Lucy is also kinda always weeping. But this time, I guess it’s legit.”

I can see Grace across the room too, consoling Lucy. Grace is my boss technically, a solid, comely woman maybe ten to twenty years my senior (hard age to gauge). I say “technically” my boss not because she’s bad at her job or anything, quite the opposite in fact. Unlike most other bosses, she’s quick with a hug and demands that you just call her “Grace.” She’s so radically friendly that I couldn’t even tell you what her last name is. Grace is attractive in that way that makes you think she’s always been attractive. With glossy red hair and an Oscars-Award-Speech-smile, she holds court in every room she inhabits with her easy laugh and up-for-anything attitude. She came here as a kid way back when before delving into the corporate world for a while.

“I lowkey feel like Lucy’s kinda playing it up a bit since it’s only been like 10, 15 minutes, but yeah it’s terrifying. They’re probably gonna call the cops if she doesn’t show up,” Danielle concludes.

Danielle might seem mean right off the bat, but she’s an exceptional friend. Gospel truth. I figured she was a bit of a bitch too until our first night off, about a week in. We had rented a room at a favorite motel with some other staff members. It’s a remote, one-storied building wrapped around a fenced-in pool. The teal and peach color scheme and wooden carvings keep it perpetually stuck in 1970s vacationland. You can easily imagine families pulling in in oak- paneled station wagons. Below an immense pastel sky, people gathered in front of their respective motel rooms, lounging on the sidewalk, curb and hoods of adjacent cars parked in front of the doors. Someone had picked up snacks from the Food Lion a town over: cheese puffs, sour straws and mysteriously, a plastic tray of chilled cocktail shrimp. Whoever made the food run probably squinted at the shrimp in the icey grocery store aisle and figured the platter was a good approximation of festive. Maybe they popped it in their plastic basket in some attempt to recreate a Christmas party past from their childhood. “This is what people like to eat when they drink together,” they might have told themself. On that night, the shrimp languished alone atop the hood of a milky white volvo. I snagged a couple, sliding the shellfish coated in a briney- formaldehyde-like substance into my mouth.

Bad call. Big time bad. The shrimpies swam about in my gut, tickling my intestines. The emulsion of Michelob, shellfish and probably a good deal of psychosomatic panic immediately did me dirty. As the crowd howled Americana-teen-anthems up at the luminous moon, growing drunker and drunker, I laid prone on one of the king beds, imagining the shrimp in my abdomen —wringle, wringle, scurm. I’d left the door slightly ajar as I flopped down on the bed and soon a group had filtered in, camping out on the bed next to mine. As I tried to sleep, they laughed loudly about someone’s ex-girlfriend, passing around a sweet mango-scented Juul. Danielle entered the room. Seeing me on the bed alone, she looked over at the others.

“Get out y’all,” she commanded, laying her cool hand on my forehead. They scurried. She sat. “Lemme steal a thing of ginger ale from Cayden’s car,” she resolved and returned moments later with a jug of the stuff. We talked for hours, sipping the effervescent sweetness straight from the bottle and watching a static rerun of Wild Things that happened to be on the TV. As Denise Richards and Matt Dillon went at it while Kevin Bacon lurked, we finished off the bottle. Having sufficiently tuckered ourselves out, we fell asleep side-by-side atop the blood red polyester blankets. We’ve been friends ever since.

Now, weeks later, I feel the scuttling and whispering intensifying around me in the mess hall as Grace and Lucy start making the rounds. They launch a tense game of telephone. Like bees sucking up and delivering pollen, they flit from staff member to staff member, spreading the message: “All support staff go look for the escape artist ASAP” By the time the message reaches me and Danielle, I’m done with breakfast, quickly refilling my plastic cup with much-needed water. The residual drops of strawberry milk mix with the water, yielding a hazy, pink elixir.

Honey River is the kind of place that makes you feel nostalgic even if you’ve never been here before. A public campsite and baptist mission venue during the rest of the year, for seven weeks each summer it transforms into a summer camp for the kids of senior consultants. The place is just on the outskirts of Gethsemane, Virginia, about an hour or so out from Charlottesville. Most of the campers hail from the big money suburbs up by the capital or make their way over from Richmond or Winchester. It is a quiet place with vast stretches of trees and wild blackberry bushes that bear ripe fruit for easy picking in late July. But all of a sudden, the trees are looming obstacles to look behind and the blackberry bushes must be scoured for a strand of hair caught in their thorns.

We’ve only just begun to search but the group is all silence and murmured questions back and forth. We walk on with the realization that our lives are all of a sudden anchored by the same haunting void, the same unknown variable: where is Talia Sharpe?

TALIA

July 10

The slight tug on the back of Talia’s head made her grit her teeth. She wove Jessie’s hair into a braid in front of her while Meghan worked her own long mane. Charli, in turn, braided Meghan’s hair while Sarah moved her tiny fingers swiftly through Charli’s, her hair left in a low ponytail secured with weary elastic.

That’s how it worked between them. If the four of them were walking down the path to breakfast, Jessie and Talia would undoubtedly claim the spine of the trail while Meghan and Charli would be largely relegated to the sides, still included but secondary. Sarah’s shoes, however, would always be slightly clammy with the dew of the adjacent grass.

As Talia wove the ends of Jessie’s hair into a singular bundle, she realized she was hairband-less. “One of y’all got an extra hair band?”

“Seriously?” Jessie questioned, twisting slightly to look back at the other girls without disturbing her perfect braid. “Sarah, give Talia your hairband.”

“I don’t have another,” Sarah whimpered, eyes-wide and surprised to hear her own name on Jessie’s tongue.

“Well it’s not like your hair’s even braided,” Jessie insisted, huffing. Then, turning syrupy sweet, she smiled at Sarah, “your hair looks amazing down anyhow.” Sarah perked up, relinquishing her hair tie and passing it forward down the braid train to Talia.

There was something exhilarating about spending time with Jessie. Perhaps it was the smell of her sweet cherry body spray or perhaps it was the fact that she always got away with it. No matter what Jessie was trying to pull off—and she was always working on some piddly little heist—she invariably got away with it. She was funny, but in that mean way that makes it clear the person has been watching, perceiving the bits about yourself you try to conceal. For instance, one afternoon, as Sarah was telling some joke, Jessie interrupted her,

“SNL,” she said, not even looking up from what she was doing.
“What?” Sarah paused.
“That’s where I heard that joke. SNL,” she concluded. Sarah defended her joke, but it

didn’t matter.
Talia tightened her neck whenever Jessie laid into Sarah like that, but she also didn’t

intervene. Talia often wondered why Jessie kept Sarah around in the first place.
Sarah was always trying. Trying to scoot closer to you on the bench with breath smelling

of steamed green beans and Texas toast. Trying to get you to be her partner for something a week in advance. She oozed desperation. Talia was always tired after an hour talking one-on-one with Sarah had elapsed.

Jessie, on the other hand, fueled Talia. She left every encounter feeling endlessly hungry. Maybe it was because she never felt comfortable eating in front of Jessie or maybe it was because spending time with Jessie made Talia feel ravenous and as tall as the water tower back in her hometown. She felt as though everyone was watching whenever they were together. Eyes and ears bent towards them no matter what they were saying.

“Ok, a minute in,” Jessie directed Sarah, nodding at the CD player Sarah was in charge of stopping, starting and rewinding. Cell phones and such were strictly prohibited for all campers so all the dated appliances seemed straight out of the made-for-TV Disney movies Talia grew up watching in the plush bean bag chair at her Mom’s.

The girls lined up in V formation: Talia and Jessie in the front row, Meghan and Charli flanking them on both sides. Sarah groaned at having to navigate the CD player again, lamenting the prohibition of cellphones at Honey Rivers.

“It’s honestly trash that we can’t have our phones,” Sarah fumed.

“I dunno. I kinda like being without it. Ya know like, disconnect,” Meghan chimed in, the resident optimist of the group.

“Honestly it’s good Talia doesn’t have a phone so can’t pull one of her Mom’s moves,” Jessie laughed. Talia hadn’t known she was walking into this topic of conversation. Her temples began to burn.

“Screw you,” Talia shot at Jessie. Jessie apparently found herself hilarious and kept on laughing, undeterred.

“Bring Bring,” Jessie made the sound of a phone ringing, holding her fingers up in the shape of a phone and waiting for Talia to pick up on the other end. “Bring Bring,” she repeated.

“Jessie stop—” Meghan offered, weakly trying to defend Talia which only pissed Talia off more. She didn’t want pity.

“Bring Bring,” Jessie repeated with a hungry smile. “C’mon, answer. I know you want too,” Jessie continued, having herself a blast,

“Meghan literally relax. It’s not a big deal.” Talia shut Meghan down. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She still thought about it enough anyhow.

Talia had been the one to answer the phone initially that day three years ago. She had immediately heard some kind of static reverberation as though her Mom was speaking both on the phone and over a microphone. Her voice quivered.

“This is your design, Martha,” a husky male voice egged her on in the background. It sounded like there was a crowd behind them from the waves of murmurs and subsequent shushing.

“Can you put your Dad on, baby?”

“Remember the realness, Martha, this is yours,” the male voice encouraged. Talia located her Dad on the back deck, sipping a Fresca and flipping through the Parade magazine pull-out. She handed him the phone.

“How’s it going?” her Dad inquired routinely, tugging at the glasses he wore around his neck. There was a long pause as he listened. Talia heard faint snippets: “merciless truthfulness” “designs of intentionality” “regenerative realness.” She recognized the phrases from the covers on her Mom’s bookshelves. They were embossed on all the book sleeves with that muscular business man who looked like a knockoff Hugh Jackman. All the titles sounded the same: “Building Wealth with Regenerative Realness,” “Unstoppable: The Marty Ryder Story.” “The Good Samaritan Drives a Benz.” “Trigger Yourself: Change Your Life & Start Telling The Truth!”

“What are you saying—no, NO, no Martha, Martha, let me talk, what are you saying right now? Are you at the conference right now?” Talia’s Dad spat.

“What did Mom say?” Talia asked with mounting trepidation. Her Dad never raised his voice. He kept on.

“Stop, stop, I can’t believe you’re doing this right now. I can’t believe it. I can’t. Is this some Marty Ryder chicken shit? Are you actually serious right now? You think this is a good idea? What kind of new age nonsense is this, huh? You tell me that!” her Dad sputtered. Talia had noticed early on that people tend to ask a lot of questions when they’re losing control of a conversation. A sort of linguistic filibuster. “What’s wrong with you? I can’t—are you serious with me right now?”

A good three months had passed before Talia learned the full truth of what her Mom had done over the phone that day. A classmate Facebook messaged Talia a video recording of the scene from YouTube. Under golden lighting of a Hyatt ballroom, her Mom locked foreheads with the muscular, suited man from the book covers and daytime TV appearances. Two massive projection screens flanked the gigantic proscenium stage, magnifying up-close shots of their two faces live. The rest of the room was chillingly still. A couple dozen iPhones glowed in the crowd, recording. Crinkled plastic water bottles, handbags and already eaten boxed lunches were shoved under stiff-backed conference room chairs. Every few rows, people who looked like staff wore “REGENERATIVE REALNESS” and “TRIGGER YOURSELF” t-shirts.

Her Mom had described a deep, unabating hollowness within her. She said she had come to the conference to grow her real estate business, but could see now that her true problem was the fact that she wasn’t fulfilled in her marriage. It had been fruitful before they settled in Virginia and had their two beautiful children, but it was “unreal” and “unintentional” now. Each day was the same: make the same jokes about needing coffee, cart the kids off to school, work, pick up a rotisserie chicken and salad at the Kroger then stale sex on her side. She said she wanted greater intimacy—or “spiritual sexuality” as her Mom described it—from Talia’s Dad. She wanted them to share the same designs and dive into a “vortex” of sensual energy each night.

After her Mom laid out her situation, there was a long back and forth about the right course of action before Marty Ryder and Talia’s Mom both resolved she needed to end the marriage then and there. A svelte, immaculately dressed 20-something woman rushed to Talia’s Mom with her cellphone and her Mom dialed the numbers she had taught Talia to memorize in kindergarten.

In the video, Talia could hear the words she couldn’t make out before. “You are not my Truth, Jared!” “Our interpersonal design isn’t grounded in intentionality,” “I have to be transparent from now on” “one day you’ll understand.” The man nodded along, his thick palm massaging the nape of her neck as she spoke with eyes shut tight. After her Mom hung up, the man embraced her in a massive hug. He whispered something into her ear that Talia couldn’t quite make out but looked as though he was whispering “Good Girl” over and over again.

The crowd erupted and some invisible DJ played an exhilarating, bassy song over the ballroom speakers. They had played the same song at the pep rallies at Talia’s school when the dance team rushed the turf field in neon blue get-ups. The song sounded tinny and grating over her laptop speakers in the condo Talia now stayed in every other week.

“My Mom says Marty Ryder is a ‘conman casanova’,” Sarah interjected, not getting the hint to stop talking about it. “Like he’s popular with women because they think he’s hot and wanna get with him,” she clarified.

“You shouldn’t bring up people’s parents’ divorces, Sarah. Like c’mon,” Jessie scolded Sarah. She turned sweet to Talia again, brushing a loose strand from Talia’s braid back behind her ear. “Let’s run it again.”

Talia would keep on. This day would slink by like all the rest. She had gotten good at distracting herself. There was no pain Talia couldn’t transmute into pleasure with a new hazy, heady, half assed adventure or dirty joke at her own expense. It was easy enough to get ahead of it with a little work. But then she’d hear those words, poisoning her cognition with the hot- tongued hiss of that big man who made her mother look so achingly small.

“Good Girl,” he had said and with that, it all fell apart.