She switched on a flashlight and did a sweep. Then I saw beyond all those thin panes of glass: spiders, some of them as small as a speck, some of them bigger than the palm of my hand. I’ve never been squeamish about bugs, but it turned my stomach.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“Spiders,” she said calmly, as though I couldn’t tell.
“But . . . what for?” Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the darkness was full of glittering eyes. She kept doing the back-and-forth with her flashlight, and I saw knitted clouds; webs sewn tightly against the glass; small dark blurry shapes, bound in pale thread. I wondered whether she hand-fed them.
“I like spiders.” She shrugged and clicked off the flashlight. She seemed disappointed, like she’d been expecting me to cheer. I was relieved when she turned back toward the stairs and I could follow her up and out into the sun. “Spiders are prophetic, don’t you think?”
That was another thing about Cissy. Even though, like me, she thought school was a load of bull and was nearly flunking her classes, she was smart. She was a reader, too, and always using words I didn’t know.
“Spiders are nasty,” I said.
We sat outside looking out at the swamp. I smoked a cigarette, and Cissy had three in a row. She smoked like she wished she could eat the cigarette instead.
“There’s something else I want to show you,” she said, after a while. She transferred her cigarette to the corner of her mouth and started unbuttoning her blouse, squinting a little. I thought maybe it was some lesbian thing, like she was going to show me her tits and ask me to rub them. I’d never heard her talk about a guy, never seen her primp or fix her hair or worry about whether she would get a date to such-and-such dance. She knew she wouldn’t, anyway. She was too tall, too skinny, and too weird.
She was wearing a white cotton bra, I remember, and her tits were small and pointy and proud, like the stiff-backed peaks of whipped cream. It wasn’t until she inched her blouse down her shoulders that I realized I’d never seen her without her clothes on. Never in a bathing suit, never changing in the locker rooms before gym class, never even on the rare occasion we had a sleepover. She always went into the bathroom and came out in her pajamas.
Her spine was so pronounced it reminded me of sketches I’d seen of certain dinosaurs. She leaned forward, hugging her knees, still puffing away on her cigarette with no hands, and I saw her back and arms were blotchy with fat bruises, blue and black and purple as a twilight sky, and ragged red holes like where she’d been burned with a cigarette.
“What happened?” I said, or something idiotic like that. Funny how in really serious moments people always say the stupidest things.
“My stepdad,” she said, straightening up again and almost immediately shrugging her blouse back on over her shoulders. She seemed like she was going to say more, but then she stopped herself.
It was clear enough what she meant. Her stepdad had done this to her—twisted butts out into her skin, paddled her with a belt or a switch or maybe just one of his big, meaty hands. I thought of the local TV advertisements that showed his face, big and red as a balloon, smiling in front of a room full of baseball mitts and footballs, and felt like spitting.
“Why doesn’t your mom do something?” I said.
Cissy ground her cigarette out carefully in the gravel. “My mom hates me,” she said matter-of-factly.
“That’s not true,” I said. Another stupid thing. How the hell could I know? All I knew about the woman was she smoked Virginia Slims and wore high heels to the store.
Cissy didn’t say anything, just lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes against the sun. Wreaths of smoke went up around her hair, and I thought of the webs I’d just seen inside, the way they obscured the glass, made it difficult to see.
I kept pressing it. “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m not going to do anything,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “I just . . . I felt like showing you. That’s all.”
“Why don’t you split?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Run away,” I continued. “Just pack up and leave. I’d go with you. We’re old enough. There’s nothing for us here, anyway. New York or Chicago. Las Vegas even. Leave everything behind.” It wasn’t just talk. I’d been planning my escape for years. I figured as soon as I could get together cash for a train ticket and first month’s rent, I’d be out. That’s pretty much what I did, too. Left three months shy of graduation and spent my eighteenth birthday crashing with a bunch of junkies in a freezing tenement on Grand Street watching a guy even younger than I was puking up his guts in the single working toilet.
Cissy smiled. She looked old: her skin stretched as tight as a corpse’s, already crisscrossed with faint lines. “You can’t leave it behind,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.” She stood up. “It’s like the spiders,” she said, and even though I didn’t know what she meant, I let it drop.
I was angry at her, I’ll admit it. She wasn’t a great friend but she was my only friend, and she wouldn’t stand up for herself or do anything.
I wasn’t the one who let the friendship drop. After that day with the spiders, Cissy acted like nothing had happened, and I was happy enough to pretend with her. But something had changed. She was never the most talkative, but when I saw her after that, she was even quieter than usual, more prone to long stretches of silence and to disappearing for days at a time. There were fewer dares, and more cigarettes. I couldn’t help but feel like she was judging me for something I’d done.
Or something I hadn’t done.
By junior year she was hardly coming to school and I’d got my first boyfriend—a dipshit named Barry, but he had a Chevrolet Impala and a decent laugh and a nice way of touching my lower back when we were walking—and Cissy and I barely saw each other until we didn’t see each other at all.
One time I passed her when we were driving in Barry’s Chevrolet; she was walking on the side of the road away from town, away from her house, toward nothing I could think of: just swampland and crowded forest, fat mosquitoes and wild hogs as big as heifers. Maybe on her way to get more spiders. Our eyes met for a second, and on impulse I raised a hand to wave. Maybe she was going to wave back—but Barry had just finished his beer and chucked the can, and instead she flinched and had to sidestep to avoid getting hit. I reamed him out for that one.