By: Halle James
I was younger then. The crease of my brow was not yet set, and I had only ever been my own. The roads ahead were murky and untrodden, and life, hazy and eternal, was my only certainty. I wasn’t sure if I was happy even then. The dusty roads of the town held everything I had ever known until that summer. As I walked along them in the buzzing twilight, I heard echoes of myself, flashes of every me I had ever been. The full, exuberant laugh of my six-year-old self crashing through the undergrowth after my sister in a never-ending game of tag. The sharp, disingenuous laugh of my thirteen-year-old self in reaction to something that wasn’t very funny, not at all. I shuddered as this memory passed over me, amplified by the echoes of my forced and painful cackle.
The girl we were laughing at was called Claire Elliot, a scrawny girl with timid eyes and old, baggy clothes. She had a rust-colored backpack filled with 99-cent paperbacks, and one of the boys had snatched and thrown it into the murky part of the pond on the last day of school. Claire yelled and cried when they did this, and everyone else had laughed. I don’t remember too much about the girls whose laughter was so discordant against my own. They were beautiful and cruel, the sharpest daggers adorned with the most exquisite hilts. They walked in the radiance of their mothers’ beauty, the certainty of their own, and the knowledge of the ease and wealth which lay before them. Golden lives for golden-haired girls.
The wind rustled the leaves overhead, and a new memory came into focus, accompanied by a new soundtrack: the sounds of my deep, racking sobs after they found Claire. “Miss Elliot drowned in the lake while retrieving her belongings,” said the newscaster, the sorrow etched across his face not quite reaching his eyes. “A vigil will be held at George Wallace Middle School on the evening of June 16th.” I bowed my head as he said this, the lump in my throat making it difficult to swallow. “Claire Elliot?” said my brother. “Isn’t her father the one-?” “Later,” said my father. The clinking of china and the clattering of utensils, the yellow glow of the porch light with its halo of moths; they were all too ordinary, too real. The lump stung as I swallowed, and a tightness grew in my chest as I thought of Claire. Quiet, shy, someone who wished to be invisible. Someone who averted her eyes and walked away quickly when the laughs came, as they always did. “Dusty Claire!” they would crow. “Do you even know how to shower?” They were relentlessly cruel, every day a barrage of new attacks. Her tattered clothes. Her greasy hair. The way she always ended up ten minutes late to first period, her hands caked with mud.
Claire’s father was, as the ladies in town would say, “a mean old drunk” and “a right weirdo.” Damien Elliot, the outcast of West Sulphur. He walked the streets with a limp, gnashing his craggy yellow teeth at any child who stepped in his way. People crossed the road at the sight of him, and an empty sidewalk was a sure sign of his presence in town. Claire’s mother was something of a folktale; as the more vulgar men would say in the darkest, stickiest corners of the bar, “She was nothing but a greased-up penny whore.” She was cheap, they said, a one-night romp for the old creep. Nobody had ever seen her, of course; They only knew what they chose to believe, and they wanted another reason to shit on Damien Elliot.
Around nine months after Damien’s trip to Kansas, the fruit of his quick, grunting labor found its way to his doorstep. He fed and raised her, and he gave her five dollars a week: three to buy food with, and two to do with what she pleased. Hers was a childhood of canned vegetables and secondhand paperbacks, of rust and grit and sharpness. She grew and learned there, a dandelion sprouting from a crack in the asphalt. Claire was a fixture in the town’s library, often sitting at a corner table with a pile of books until the streetlamps clicked on and the librarian asked her to leave. Though she lived in the town, she was not allowed a library card; the Elliot home – little more than a plywood shack on an unclaimed lot – did not have an address.
My mother took pity on the Elliots and often tasked me with delivering things to them. A bag of old clothes here; a pair of shoes there; leftover baked goods; the occasional book. None of these things were very good. Any pants were often grass-stained and threadbare at the knees, but I would always see them on Claire the next day. She would always smile at me. I would smile back, but I’d always look away first. I didn’t want anyone else to notice. One of the more eagle-eyed girls spotted one of my old shirts, overlarge on Claire’s skinny frame, and accused her of taking it. I corrected her quietly, but news of my “generosity” spread around the class, and I was the target of cruel interrogations for a couple of days. “Why are you giving things to her?” “Awww, is she your friiiiend?” “Don’t get too close, she’ll get grease on you!” I tried to laugh this off, but I was fuming inside. As soon as I got home, I ran up to my mother and demanded that she stop making me deliver things to the Elliots. She wasn’t happy. “Now hon, the Elliots are less fortunate than us. I knew Damien Elliot when we was your age, and he was a good, kind kid. We grew up on the same side of town, him and I. Your father was lucky with his business, but we was on the same footing as the Elliots until then. I never forgot where I came from, and neither should you.”
I cried into my pillow that night, and the next morning, in the gray, misty time before the sun crested the treetops, I carried a package of food, clothing, and books to the Elliot shack and set it by the door. As I was halfway back to the road, I was startled by a voice. “This here too nice for the likes o’ me.” I jumped and turned around to see Claire sifting through the package, confusion on her face. “I mightily ‘preciate all you’ve done left here for me, but this ain’t right. ‘S too good.” She held up a light blue shirt with “Miami Seaquarium” written across it in pink bubble letters. Various sea creatures were screen printed below it. There was a crack through the turtle from its time in the dryer the night before, but the shirt was still one of my newer ones. I smiled at her. “Keep it.”
The school day was long. We were in the last week of classes, and every moment dragged by painfully. The class buzzed quietly all throughout the day, and most of this was directed at Claire. Her grass-stained jeans and tattered sneakers were offset by her shirt, an object of admiration by many of my classmates the first day I had worn it a few months ago. I was happy I had given it to her.
On my way home from school, I walked with the golden-haired girls. They laughed and chatted easily, always in perfect harmony with one another. Though I walked alongside them, I knew I could never walk with them. They were too certain, too perfect, too connected. I knew I wasn’t one of them, and they did too. I agreed with them enough to blend in poorly, and I walked alongside them, hoping they wouldn’t notice me falling out of step.
On this particular day, we heard a smattering of footsteps behind us as we trudged up the dirt road behind our school. “Hey! Wait!” We turned around. Claire Elliot was dashing towards us, her hair flopping behind her loosely as her overlarge shoes smacked against the compact earth: plap PLAP plap PLAP. “Here,” she panted. She held a book out to me, a tattered paperback copy of The Last Unicorn. “I don’ know what I can do to repay ya, but I thought I’d give you this. ‘S one of my favorites.” I looked at her cautiously. Her eyes were hesitant, but they held something else: a glimmer of hope. “…Thanks, Claire. You don’t need to repay me.” I mumbled, deeply aware of everyone watching me. “‘Course I do! Please. Jus’ take it. Tell me how ya like it.” I took the book. “Jes one more thing… cen I walk home with y’all?” I looked at the golden girls, expecting surprise on their faces. Instead, I saw shock and disgust. “Buzz off, Claire. Keep away from us. And she don’t want your greasy book, throw it away!” I glanced at Claire guiltily before I dropped the book on the side of the road and turned to catch up with the others. As we walked around the bend, I glanced back. Claire still stood there in her Miami Aquariam shirt and overlarge shoes, the dog-eared book still sitting in the dust next to her feet.
Claire didn’t wear the Miami Aquarium shirt for the rest of the week. She walked to and from school behind everyone else, the way she always had. As the class filed out on the last day, the teacher called out, “Claire? Could you come see me for a minute?” I glanced back at this exchange, but summer overcame me, and I raced from the class in a surge of euphoria. I had almost forgotten Claire until the group had rounded the bend by the pond. “Hey!” crowed one of the boys. “Claire Elliot has all the trash books!” “Trash books” were the ripped up and graffitied books meant to be tossed at the end of the year. The teacher, it seemed, had wanted Claire to have them. She carried a stack, and the others were crammed into her backpack. The boy raced down the road, snatched Claire’s backpack, and raced towards the pond, Claire screeching at his heels. “Give it BACK!” “No, grease ball! I’m gonna deliver it for you. Now it will smell like you!” And he lobbed the backpack with all his might. It landed with a sickening squelch in the muck near the edge of the pond. A seam split at the edge of the bag, and several books popped out. One of them was forced outward and floated lazily toward the center of the pond. It looked sickeningly familiar.
I regret laughing with the group that day. I remember the pain in Claire’s eyes, the pain that I was too scared to try and stop. I regret that I didn’t accept Claire’s book, and I regret that she had never learned to swim.
The next day, after everyone had heard, I carried a basket of baked goods to Mr. Elliot’s house. He was standing by the door, and when he saw me, he smiled. “You’re Claire’s friend, huh? Th’ one who gave her things?” The lump in my throat was sharp and my eyes stung, so I simply nodded. “She ‘preciated that. N’ I did too. She was a good girl. A damn good girl. Sh’ deserved better’n me as a pa, better’n the life I gave her. I regret that.” I could only look at him. He told me to hold on, and walked back into the house. “Reckon I’d give you this. It was her favorite, it was. I never learned to read m’self, so I figured someone should have n’ read it. Keep her memory alive, yknow? Meant to give her a new copy for her birthday next week…” His words were drowned by rasping sobs, and he couldn’t speak any longer. I took the book from him: a new copy of The Last Unicorn.
I stopped walking alongside the golden-headed girls once it happened, and I grew comfortable with only the sounds of nature as I walked home. My mother and I started to visit Mr. Elliot a few days after it happened. It was my idea. I can never make what I did right or change what I didn’t do, but I can try to make it better. I read the book to him, and watched his face brighten for a moment as he thought of his daughter, and the wonder the story held for her. I kept up with the visits after I finished that book, and he always smiled and thanked me for coming. I read through all of the books left in Claire’s room, and when those were done, I brought some of my own. I read to him regularly until I left the town for college, and then I read to him occasionally when I was home on breaks. I rarely read to him once I had left college, but I still made it a point to visit when I could. The visits stopped once I received the call which brought me home, back to the place I grew up, back to the roads covered in dust and shrouded in the echoes of who I was.
Halle James is an environmental engineering student at the University of Maine. She uses writing as a way to distract herself from math, and considers it a valuable way to keep her mind well-rounded.