The Sky Below by Stacey D'Erasmo Page B

to me, I might be stuck in the swamp, petrified, for eternity. My arm was beginning to quiver, but I didn’t give in. I could stay here as long as she could, longer, as long as it took. I squinted, held my breath. They were so close. Caroline’s branch was inches from mine. Their cheeps were like small tears in the night, shreds of bright noise from another world very close by where it bent briefly, recklessly near to ours. I wanted to see it so badly. I needed to sneeze, but held it back for fear it would scare them away. I was pierced with jealousy, because I knew now that this was where Caroline had been going. She’d been practicing with her relentless fervor, and she was way ahead of me. I knew both that she was doing me a favor, giving me her best gift, and that I might never, ever catch up.
    I concentrated as hard as I could on keeping my arm steady. At last there was the tiny pressure of a bird’s foot, a few quick pecks. Then gone. The memory of the unbearable brightness. My empty hand. Caroline opened her eyes and smiled at me, and in a rush, as if a bell had rung, all the birds rose and flew off, a few with strands of Caroline’s wavy black hair trailing from their beaks. Caroline exhaled loudly, wiped her hands on her jeans, and pulled her hair off her forehead into a rough knot on top of her head.
    It was over. She was her usual weird self again. I realized that we were both covered in swamp dirt and tree junk and whatever that sticky homemade crap was, that we were sweaty and filthy and bitten to shit by mosquitoes that had feasted on us along with the birds. When I scratched my arm, I scratched up skin and mud together, indistinguishable. There was bird shit on one of Caroline’s thick eyebrows.
    â€œSee?” she said. She was so happy.
    I nodded. I did see. And it was already gone. Leaving just a bright spot, like a mirror, in me, waiting for the reflection to return, like the sun sliding into view across the mirror’s face. I knew it might be a very long time, with all the trouble I was in. Fucking fat Jenny. My fucking bad luck. But the bright spot: I could live there until they came back for me.
    â€œOkay. Look out climbing down. That’s when I always slip.”
    I clambered down ahead of her as fast as I could, swinging from branch to branch, monkeyish, letting go of the second-to-last one too soon and slamming heavily into the swamp dirt.
    â€œGoddamnit, Gabe,” said Caroline, making her way down carefully, back to being the peculiar nerd she was. “I told you.”
    I just laughed, lying on my back in the swamp. My knees and my spine were banging with pain by the time we made it back out in the dark, but I was calm.
    The motel was quiet when we got home. My mother had locked me out of my room, but I didn’t care. I let myself into an empty motel room and slept on top of the scratchy covers. I dreamed that my light was sliding in and out of a large darkness. The next morning, Caroline and I didn’t talk about where we’d been. Our mother didn’t ask. When she let me back into my room, it had been swept clean. Nothing under the bed at all.
    And then the way it worked was this: since Jenny was the one going to the dealer, and since she was older (which I didn’t
know until then, that they’d held her back more than once, she was actually almost eighteen, her real name was Genevieve, who was she?), if I testified against her she’d be under more pressure to turn in the Fort Lauderdale guys. Which I did. And which she did. The court sent her to juvenile detention. It sent me to a different high school, where I had to talk to an ugly counselor every day for a month.
    I was a man in exile.
    I didn’t go to the bus station anymore. I wondered if they missed me, my kneeling men. Who did they kneel for now? Who had they knelt for before?
    The cops took everything that was in the shoeboxes. I’d still like to know what they did