Sexual abuse

The Night Skiers

Joanie Beaver told Seema that she could talk anybody’s mother into anything, so when Seema’s mom pulled up outside the roller rink, Joanie cracked her knuckles and said, “Watch me work.”

Seema lingered just out of earshot and watched Joanie approach the car, teeth bared and hands waving as she smiled in toward Seema’s mother and spoke. Joanie Beaver was so much older and never talked to anyone at the rink, and yet Joanie picked her. Standing in her puffy pink fake fur coat, the tips of its tufts tinged brown from use, Joanie Beaver looked like a sugary treat on a stick, her bare legs poking down toward the frozen ground from under her purple skating skirt. Now she would be telling Seema’s mother about the birthday party she had planned for tomorrow and how she had invited Seema to stay after the session and help decorate. When she finally stepped aside, allowing Seema’s mother to make eye contact with her daughter, Seema’s mother miraculously called out, “So, I’ll come back at 9:30 and pick you up.”

Joanie stepped between them again, teeth flashing. “No need, Mrs. Sood. We can drop her off.” And then Seema’s mother was putting the car in drive. She gave Joanie Beaver a nod and then smiled at Seema with a wave. “Be good.”

Seema stared at Joanie, awestruck.

As soon as the car crossed out of sight, Joanie grabbed Seema’s hand and ran for the hedge that bordered the rink’s property. “Come on.”

“What about the decorations?”

“There’s no party, silly.” Joanie crunched across the gravel toward the break in the bushes.

“Then where are we going?” Seema followed Joanie across the parking lot.

“Your mom said you could sleep over.”

A sleepover with Joanie Beaver! “But I don’t have my night clothes.”

“Don’t worry. I got you covered.”

The night was clear and the moon lit up the cornfield beyond the hedge. Frost glistened on the stalks. As they walked between the rows, the ears reached out and wiped their arms, leaving thin trails on their jackets. The snow was deep and Seema hadn’t worn snow boots to the rink. She placed her feet into the cavities Joanie’s feet made.

On the other side of the field, the girls stamped their feet on the shoulder of Route 11, and Seema felt a sense of adventure as they faced the headlights, and Joanie stuck out her thumb.

“Doesn’t your mom pick you up?” Seema asked.

“Pfft,” Joanie said. “I can get around by myself.”

Just one car passed them by before the second veered off the road, braking hard and slamming into reverse.

“Don’t say anything in the car,” Joanie said as they ran to catch up. She yanked the front passenger door open. “You’re in the back.” They slammed their doors and the car lurched forward.

Inside the car the climate was moist and clammy, like the changing room at the town pool. The man driving looked oldish to Seema, but Joanie turned her smile on him just like he was another kid at the skating rink. He was thin but paunchy, wearing a floppy suede hat with a tassel at the back. He looked at Joanie hungrily and glanced over the seat towards Seema.

“Where you girls headed?”

Joanie smiled and slit her eyes at him. “Berwick.”

Seema sat up quickly, but Joanie shot her a look, and she sat back, heart pounding. Berwick was fifteen miles up the highway.

“Can you take us all the way?” Joanie asked, flashing the same smile she had used on Seema’s mother.

“I might could,” the man said. “Whyn’t you slide over and give me a little company?”

Joanie slipped across the seat, gave Seema a sly wink, and turned her back to her. The man pushed an 8-track into the deck. Guitars licked out and voices crooned, “Sweeeeeeeet emoooootion…” He stretched back like he was on his couch at home and arched his free arm around Joanie’s shoulders. She wriggled down until the only part of her visible from the back seat was a puff of her frosted hair bracketed by pink fur.

Seema watched as the man split his attention between the road and Joanie. The two of them exchanged a series of looks, a wordless conversation that negotiated something outside of Seema’s eyeline, and soon the man let out a sharp breath and pressed back into his seat. His hat squashed between his head and the headrest, and when he released his head forward it slid down behind his neck and he didn’t seem to notice at all. Seema turned her attention out the window to wait out the ride.

Little lay between Seema’s town and Berwick except fields and silos. Outside the rushing car, the county road ran parallel to Route 11—the old highway to Berwick. It ran along the crest of the hill, and between the upper and lower roads were only cow pastures, the horse paddocks, the pumpkin and squash fields, and the occasional house or barn: the slow road, the scenic road, the one Seema’s family always took, where you could stop at a stand selling apples and honey butter on the way if you needed to take a breath.

Now Seema traversed that route on the fast road at an hour her family would never travel, and the snow covered the fields and the cows stood out in stark relief in the moonlight, like reverse stars in a backward universe.

Every few miles, a perpendicular lane joined the two roads, marking the boundaries between properties, gray and slushy against the glare of the fields. When the fourth lane appeared, Seema knew the two roads were about to lean together like a divining rod and enter the town of Berwick. The only landmark she knew in Berwick was the children’s clothing store they visited because there wasn’t one in her town, but once off the highway, they didn’t turn in that direction.

A few blocks off the highway, Joanie directed the man into a sleepy street full of houses with dark windows. A desiccated Christmas tree lay abandoned on a dirty snow pile.

“Pull over here,” she said. “No, don’t go in the driveway.”

The man sidled the car to a stop along the curb.

“You want me to come in for a while?”

Joanie gave Seema another one of those sidelong winks before answering. “My mom’s waiting up for me,” she said, subtly emphasizing the word mom.

The ruddy shine went out of the man’s cheeks. “Okay, then,” he said. “You girls have a nice night, now.”

They piled out of the car and nudged the doors closed, trudged up the unshoveled driveway as the car crunched away. As soon as it turned the corner, Joanie caught Seema’s sleeve and dragged her past the house and across the backyard.

“Aren’t we going in?” Seema asked.

“You don’t think I wanted him to know where I live, do you?”

They slipped through a row of trees into another yard and hid behind a shed.

Joanie put her finger to her lips. “We have to be really quiet.”

They tiptoed across the snow and Joanie drew open the screen door. Ancient patio furniture littered the screen porch: a lime green glider, one side off its runner so its two-seated bench lay on a diagonal; tangerine plastic-upholstered chairs, legs bent; an oval braided rug, colors gone.

They passed through the back door into the kitchen and padded across the linoleum. A faint smell of mold and stale urine permeated the air. Down the hall, a light shone in the living room, and a half-visible black-and-white television showed a couple in shiny costumes skating together in a giant stadium filled with crowds. The girl did a spin like those Seema had seen Joanie do at the rink, only faster, and on ice skates. The man on the screen caught her, and they smiled into each other’s eyes before gliding out of view. Seema stopped to stare, but Joanie took her arm and pushed her up the stairs.

Joanie’s room was like a narrow closet. She closed the door and pulled the string of the light. On one side, a crocheted afghan in green and maroon zigzags lay crumpled on a twin bed. On the other, a battered dresser with makeup containers strewn over its top stood next to a metal rack filled with clothes. The bare bulb in the sloped ceiling cast a dim yellow light over everything. The only place the girls could stand upright was by the dresser. A small window at the back, broken but covered with plastic film held up with Scotch tape, let in a slanted shaft of moonlight.

Joanie brought Seema close and looked into her face, holding Seema’s chin and tilting it this way and that. Rummaging through the paraphernalia on the dresser, she plucked out an aqua eye shadow and applied it to Seema’s eyelids.

“I don’t really wear makeup,” Seema said.

“You can do it this one time.”

She took an eyeliner crayon, swiped it over Seema’s lids, licked her thumb, and smudged it in. Then came mascara, cream blush, and a Lip Smacker. She leaned back and took stock, frowned.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirteen,” Seema said.

“Oh.” Joanie paused for a moment, surprised. “Well, you’ll say you’re sixteen if anybody asks. Don’t give your real name. Say something like Claudia or Jennifer. Don’t say ‘Sonya.’”

“Seema.”

“Definitely don’t say that.”

They pulled extra layers from the clothing rack. Joanie dropped her skating skirt and tugged on jeans. Balled-up items heaped high on the floor under the rack. Joanie gave Seema a pair of socks to put on her hands.

“How old are you?” Seema asked.

Joanie looked at Seema. “Seventeen,” she said, but she narrowed her eyes before speaking just as she had to the man in the car. “Okay, let’s go.”

Before Seema could ask where, Joanie put the light out and opened the door.

Halfway across the screen porch the light blared on, and they turned to see a woman in a pink bathrobe and curlers filling the entire kitchen doorway. Seema couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the fuzzy pink bathrobe and Joanie’s bushy coat.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Out,” Joanie said.

“Who’s this little tramp you have with you?” The woman wore slippers to match the bathrobe, the kind with a thin foam sole and a fat puffy band over the top of the foot. The toenails that poked out were thick and crusty, like the edges of the slippers themselves. “Get out of here,” she said to Seema.

“Wait outside,” Joanie said. “I’ll meet you behind the shed.”

“You walk out that door,” the woman said, “this is the last time. You don’t come back from this one.”

Seema looked to Joanie. Her heart raced as she imagined herself locked outside in the snow and Joanie retreating into the house, never to return.

“Go on,” Joanie said. “I’ll be right there.”

Seema hesitated.

“Get off of my fucking porch!” the woman said.

Seema pushed through the screen door. It banged shut behind her as she bounded across the snow. From the shed, she watched Joanie and the woman scream at each other, caught a phrase here and there as the night air carried their voices. “…bringing your sluts…drinking and whoring…”

The house next door had a back light on, and when the voices grew louder, the light clicked off.

After a while, the woman grabbed Joanie’s arm, yanked her into the house, and there was quiet. A few minutes later, the voices started up again, muffled now that they were inside. Then they died away again and everything fell silent.

Seema started shivering.

A streetlight overhead began buzzing.

Seema’s breath lit up in the moonlight. She put her hands in the socks and breathed into the acrylic, flooding the knit fabric with warm air. She had not thought to pay attention to all the turns they had taken once they left the highway, but now she tried to reconstruct them in her mind. If Joanie never came back out again, she could find her way home if she could get back to the highway. Fifteen miles walking. How long would that take? Her feet were already cold.

The screen door slammed, and Seema peered around the corner to see Joanie springing across the snow toward her. The woman loomed on the threshold of the screen porch, her head blocking the overhead light so that a huge shadow reached across the snow of the backyard, a dark funnel Joanie ran through as she escaped the house.

“And don’t you never come back!” the woman yelled before slamming the inside door and cutting off the light.

Joanie arrived at the shed with a face that, other than some smeared eye makeup, looked as rosy and cheerful as it had outside the skating rink.

“I thought you weren’t going to come out again,” Seema said.

Joanie snapped her chewing gum and laughed. “I said I would, right?”

The girls passed back through the line of trees past the stranger’s house to where the car had dropped them off. Snow had started to fall. Joanie shook her fluffy coat like a dog and a burst of snowflakes discharged off her like a firecracker. “This way,” she said, heading up the street.

“Where are we going?” Seema asked.

“Some friends are picking us up.”

“Where?”

“Up the road.”

At the end of the neighborhood, the houses dropped off, and the road ran up a hill between fields. Seema’s feet felt numb, and she slipped when the frozen slush crumpled under them.

Soon the houses were nothing but a twittering of lights at the bottom of the hill, and Joanie and Seema were the sole moving things under the moonlight.

“I need to rest,” Seema said.

“Okay.”

They crunched across the snow to the fence that bordered the road, climbed to the top rung, and sat looking out over the landscape. The hill curved down below them, and beyond a series of fields they could make out the semitrailers on the highway, made tiny by distance, passing left and right, headlights boring a tunnel ahead of them, carrying their loads to other towns in the middle of the night.

“Aren’t you cold?” Seema asked.

Joanie looked at Seema. “I never get cold.”

Seema wrinkled her nose up and let it relax again. The unwrinkling was slow, as if the cold were freezing her nose into place. “I think it’s below zero,” Seema said.

“Could be,” Joanie said.

The keening of the passing trucks floated up to them.

“If we sit still for too long,” Seema said, hands between her thighs, “we could freeze to death.”

Joanie seemed to be weighing something. She looked at Seema the way she had when she put the makeup on, then shook it off. “It shouldn’t be too much longer,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”

At the top of the hill was a snow-covered church, all by itself, a low stone wall surrounding it and a small graveyard at its side. Even beneath the thick layer, the headstones clearly stood at all different angles, like dominos trying to fall but held up by the snow.

Past the church, the road sloped down again: another set of fields identical to those they had just climbed, and far below, another twinkling town. The highway flanked the town, passing it by, and stretched into the darkness beyond. From so far away, the trucks were like fireflies.

“There they are!” Joanie said.

Seema turned to follow Joanie’s look. From the bottom of the hill, a pair of headlights began winding their way up.

“Who is it?” Seema asked.

“Friends. I see you at the rink. You could use somebody, right?”

The vehicle maneuvered up the switchbacks, turning back on itself as it made its way closer. Finally, it cruised to a halt in front of them. Two shadowy figures huddled inside.

Seema hung back, but Joanie headed straight for the car. When Seema started for the back door, Joanie shook her head. “It’s your turn in the front seat.”

The front door opened by itself, and a man leaned across the seat to look at Seema.

He appeared younger than the one who had brought them to Berwick, close to Joanie’s age, maybe even younger, with a broad, pockmarked face and glittering blue eyes.

“Come on in,” he said. “The water’s fine.”

Joanie got into the car with the man in the back and closed the door.

Seema stood on the frozen road for another moment, rubbing her hands over her arms. There was no other car in sight, no other structure than the closed, darkened church.

“I don’t bite,” the man said. He looked at her another moment. “My name’s Greg.”

He smiled, and Seema saw he had a kind face and got into the car.

They drove down the hill toward the distant town. Seema stayed squarely on her side of the car as the man named Greg navigated the switchbacks. Halfway down, he turned off the road and maneuvered the car onto a dirt road leading into the fields. They bumped along for a while, then turned onto another road, and another, slowly making their way down until they pulled up next to a barn and shut the engine off.

The only sounds were the smacks and breaths of Joanie and her companion in the back seat, but Seema barely heard them. Greg looked at Seema and cleared his throat. He undid his seatbelt and swiveled to face her. He had on an army-green T-shirt and a jean jacket with a POW/MIA button on the pocket. He cleared his throat again and turned the collar of his jacket up before speaking.

“You want some music?” he said.

Seema nodded.

He turned the key, the dash lights came back on, and he rotated the radio dial. A melody floated out between them and a man sang, “My eyes adored you…”

“You sure are pretty,” he said.

Seema smiled.

From the scuffling in the back seat came a grunt and Joanie’s voice. “Geez, watch your knee.”

“Sorry.”

Seema wrapped her hands around her elbows.

“You cold?” Greg asked.

Seema nodded again.

“I could warm you up,” he said.

Seema stared at the button on his jacket and tried to figure out what it meant.

He patted the seat next to him.

Seema unlatched her seat belt and inched across. He put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. The two of them turned to look out the window.

The barn next to the car was the only structure to be seen in any direction. The fields stretched up and away without obstruction, empty of animals or vegetation, a blank white expanse almost blinding in the moonlight, no trail or path in sight.

“This is my cousin’s uncle’s farm,” Greg said. “There’s some horses in the barn. I thought maybe you’d like to see them later.”

“Me?”

“Sure.”

Seema looked over. The sliding doors were too close together to see inside, but there were a few threadbare prize ribbons pinned to the side of the barn.

“Would it be okay if I kiss you?” he asked.

Seema didn’t answer.

He leaned over and touched his lips to hers.

She wrinkled up her nose.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Cigarette.”

“Oh, sorry.” He reached down between the driver’s seat and the door, retrieved a half-drunk bottle of beer, and took a slug. “You want some?”

“No, thank you.”

He leaned down again and pressed his mouth to hers. She jumped back as his tongue popped into her mouth, but he put his hand behind her head. The tongue was soft and probing, like a question, and she watched it in her mind like a movie. It moved from one part of her mouth to another, searching. The beer had made it cold and slick, like an ice cube in her mouth.

Then he took it out and turned his attention outside the windshield again. “One day, I’m going to have a farm of my own, and some horses. Then we could go riding. Would you like that? We go riding horses together?”

“I don’t know how to ride.”

“It’s easy. I could show you. I used to watch the lessons. We could ride through the woods.”

“That sounds nice,” Seema said.

“We’d go over creek beds and streams,” he said. “Horses are good at that. Let’s lie down.”

He laid Seema back on the seat and squeezed down next to her, gliding his hand over her stomach.

“What’s your name?” he said.

She hesitated. “Seema,” she said.

His hand paused, then resumed roving. “What kind of name is that?”

“Punjabi,” Seema said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s from India.”

Greg’s hand stopped completely. “Really?” he said. He backed off a few inches and examined her face.

Seema nodded.

“Wow,” he said. “That’s so wild.” He smoothed the edge of her shirt down over her body. “That’s okay, though,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

His voice was smooth and comforting, like the DJ on the station she could get on shortwave two after midnight, when the airwaves were clear and sleep was elusive.

He looked at the smooth shirt and cupped a hand over her chest. “That feel okay?”

Seema shrugged.

He began to squeeze and massage, finally taking the nipple into his fingertips.

“They’re so tiny,” he said. “I like that.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

He started to slide his hand under Seema’s shirt, but she held his hand down with both of hers.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything.”

He inched his hand up a little farther. Then he was running his hand over her bare chest.

Seema looked up to the roof of the car. The fabric that was supposed to line the ceiling drooped down, held up only from the sides of the car and the dome light in the center. It looked like a big sofa cushion with a single giant upholstery button in the middle.

“What kind of car is this?” Seema asked.

“Nova,” Greg said. “You know what a nova is?”

“Stars,” Seema said.

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s like a big explosion.” He took her hand and pressed it onto his jeans with a sharp intake of breath.

Seema gasped. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Greg breathed. He pushed his jeans against her hip and rubbed her hand on him. “You?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay, then.”

He lifted her shirt all at once and attached his mouth to her nipple.

“Ow,” she said.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, releasing his teeth. She had let her hand drift off, and he took it and put it back. “Rub it,” he said. “Squeeze it.”

“Rub what?” Seema asked.

Greg opened his eyes and looked at her. “You ever been fucked before?”

“No,” said Seema.

He paused for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s just relax.”

He released her hand and sat her up. He got back in the driver’s seat, lifted her up like a doll, and turned her to face him. She sat beside him, legs folded next to her like a mermaid. He petted her hair and smoothed it away from her face. “You warm enough?”

Seema nodded.

“How old are you?” he asked.

Seema weighed this question. Sixteen felt too old. “Fourteen and a half,” she said.

He kept petting her head like she was a cat.

“How old are you?” she asked.

He laughed a little and shook his head. “Nineteen,” he said. “Sounds old, doesn’t it?”

She nodded. He laughed. Seema smiled.

He kissed her again, this time warm and fervent. Her head felt swimmy and delicious, like she’d had too much ice cream. Then he pressed lightly on the top of her head. She tried to keep her lips in contact with his.

Suddenly, he swiped his hand under her hips and swept her sideways till she lay with her head in his lap. His jeans were open and a little column poked out at her. She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It has a face.”

Greg laughed. “Do you want to touch it? You can.”

She put one finger out, like pointing at a goldfish. It jumped when she touched it. They both laughed again.

“You can kiss it,” he said.

She leaned down and brought her lips near. It smelled like a cross between a tangerine and a skunk. She grazed her lips over it. It was smooth and slick and sprung back and forth as she touched it.

She was about to sit up again when he put his hand on the back of her head and squished her closed mouth against the column. One arm lay caught under her body. She put her free hand on Greg’s hip and pushed upward to release her head, but Greg’s hand kept her there.

Her lips were squashed, and she pulled them back so the column jammed against her bare teeth. Greg eased off some but then took her head with both hands and guided it gently back and forth. The column slid along her teeth with little bumps, as if searching for something, and when he bore down cautiously, its top dented inward from the pressure against her teeth. Seema relaxed her mouth a little, and Greg took that moment to press more, and she worked to keep her teeth clamped shut. Her eyes watered.

And then, there was only this. No Greg, no car, only the labor to keep her teeth closed and her head buoyed up. Her arm was wobbly from holding her body up and the back of her neck fatigued. If her attention lapsed, the column slipped into the pocket of her cheek and her face billowed out like a blowfish until she rebalanced the column on her teeth again. Her lower arm remained pinned beneath her. Her body coiled like a snail, legs curled up, feet against the passenger door.

Seema couldn’t tell how long this went on. Her lips grew tired and achy. Greg seemed to be straining for something but not reaching it, lifting his hips toward her head and then lowering back into the seat until he did it again. She thought of asking him if he was okay.

Then suddenly the column softened and Greg released his hold.

“Shit,” he said.

Seema looked up. His gaze was turned outside the car, through the front windshield.

She sat up and looked out.

Far in the distance at the top of the hill blazed a single pinpoint of light—like the glow from the tiny trucks on the highway, except way out in the fields amid nothing but acres of snow. The light jerked into motion, inching down the hill in their direction. It turned and curved to one side, a cone of light leading a black speck silhouetted against the snow. After a moment, it turned and curved the other way, swinging across the field in a wide arc. Then it turned again, and again, crossing the field in broad swathes like Greg’s car in the switchbacks, slow and rhythmic, like the heavy pendulum of a giant clock.

“What is it?” Seema asked.

“My cousin,” Greg said. “He thinks he’s Franz Klammer.”

“Who’s that?”

Greg stared at her. “You aren’t watching the Olympics?”

“We don’t have a television.”

“Downhill World Cup ski champion. Just took the gold last week with some crazy-ass run. My cousin is obsessed. Made his own skis a few years ago between shifts at the Mills. Thinks he’s going to the Games in ’80. Comes out here in the middle of the night to practice when the moon is full. Loony as shit.”

Greg pulled Seema close and curved his arm around her again. Together they watched the cone of light carve its way back and forth across the hill, its cadence alternating between sharp and lackadaisical, ticking off increasingly longer measurements of time.

Finally the figure came close enough for his dark form to show against the snow. Seema followed the movements of his arms and legs shifting peacefully under his headlamp. As he neared the bottom of the hill, the swish and scrape in the snow became audible as he cut from side to side. Closing in on the barn, he headed straight for the Nova, and Seema involuntarily pressed back in her seat as against an oncoming train. As he sped by the car, he reached out one arm and banged on the car with his gloved fist—three hard raps: hood, roof, trunk—like a wave of hail passing over the vehicle.

“Asshole,” Greg said.

Joanie and her companion sprang up in the back seat.

“Him again?” Joanie’s companion said.

“Yep,” Greg said, expelling his breath in a sigh. “Thinks that’s gonna get him the hell outta here.”

Joanie hooked her elbows over the passenger seat. “Fat chance.”

She rested her chin on her forearm and glanced at Greg and Seema. “You two look comfortable.”

The field outside the windshield stood empty again. Seema looked over to Joanie and shrugged.

Joanie looked the two of them over. Greg tugged up his underwear and zipped his jeans. Seema pulled her shirt down and rubbed the spit from the side of her mouth with the back of her hand.

Joanie smacked her gum and grinned. “How was it?” she asked Seema.

“Lay off,” Greg said. “Nothing happened.”

“Nothing?” Joanie gave them her sly, knowing look.

“No,” Greg said. “Nothing happened.”

Joanie looked at Seema for confirmation, who said nothing.

“Okay,” Joanie said, retracting her elbows back over the seat. “Whatever you guys say.” She glanced at the dashboard clock as she pulled her shirt over her head. “Hey, can you take me home?”

“Sure,” Greg said and turned the key in the ignition. He drove them through the country roads, first dropping Joanie’s companion at a farmhouse buried between fields and then climbing up and over the hill to deliver Joanie back to the street parallel to her own.

When Joanie opened the car door, her frosted hair and the tips of her furry pink jacket lit up under the dome light. Her face was flushed and shiny, and she winked at Seema.

“See ya next time, kid. Thanks for playing.”

She got out and closed the door, passed up the driveway of the stranger’s house, and was gone.

Greg and Seema sat in silence for a moment.

“You need a ride home?” Greg asked.

Seema nodded and told him where she lived.

He gave a low whistle at the distance and put the car in gear.

They took the slow road, the Nova cresting over each of the tiny hills that made up the old highway, the new highway dipping in and out of sight below the fields. The same cows dotted the fields in black blotches. The moon hung low over the horizon and gave everything a yellowish glow. It was too late for even the trucks now and Route 11 was just a dark band running along the bottom of the hill. The movement of the car was like a boat’s, rising and falling with repeating waves, and Seema felt lulled toward sleep. She leaned her head onto Greg’s shoulder and he petted her hair absentmindedly as they drove.

Seema woke as the car slowed down in her neighborhood.

“Where is it?” Greg said.

Seema thought about it for a moment and then directed Greg to a house on the other side of the pond. He pulled over and put the car in park.

“I guess this is it,” he said.

Seema nodded.

“We could still go riding horses sometime,” he said.

“Sure,” she said.

She waited another moment and then opened the car door and got out. “Good night,” she said.

“’Night.”

She closed the door quietly and walked up the driveway of the neighbor’s house.

When she heard Greg’s car drive away, she started running. She ran right past the neighbor’s house and down their yard toward the bridge at the end of the pond. She leapt over the ice-topped stream into her own backyard. At the top of the yard, her house was all in darkness. She couldn’t wait to be curled up warm in her bed, covers tight to her chin. She gasped for breath as she ran, panting now, her dash slowing to a trudge up this last hill, and by the time she reached the house, her feet felt heavy as cinder blocks. The back lights came on.

Seema’s father, turbanless and in pajamas, hair streaming down his shoulders and flip-flops on his feet, stepped out into the snow on the back porch and grabbed Seema’s arm.

“Where have you been?”

Seema’s mother crouched in her nightgown, watching with teary eyes from the doorway.

Her father pulled Seema into the dining room and turned on the light. The two of them bent over her, scrutinizing. As soon as Seema entered the warmth of the house, heat flooded into her face. Her lips were raw and her cheeks throbbed. She squinted her eyes against the blaring light and felt her heartbeat pounding in her skin.

Her parents each grasped one of her arms and leaned over her in the light, their eyes darting over her face, her clothes, her body.

“I came back to the roller skating rink at 9:30, and it was all closed up,” her mother said. “Nobody was there. Nobody.”

“Where did you go?” her father said. “What have you been doing?”

“Nothing,” Seema said.

They were bending her backward to look at her. Seema’s head dropped back. She closed and opened her eyes. The dining room light appeared and disappeared, like an approaching headlight blinking in warning.

The voices of her parents muddied together in a distant din, and she caught just bits of phrases. “…what you’ve been doing…slut…what happened?”

Seema let her eyes roll back and closed them completely, and she was perched at the top of the fields looking down on the tiny car at the bottom of the hill, its lights off. She pushed off into the air, landed with a spring on the powdery incline. Her body was strong and balanced, tilting easily back and forth as she sliced down the hill. She drew symmetrical grooves into a raw, featureless field, blazing a trail where none had been before, both arms free and wielding metal poles like pikes in each hand, thighs and knees pressed tight together.

“What happened?”

Seema coasted down the hill, feeling the pendulum of her body ticking away as she neared the car.

“Nothing,” Seema repeated. “Nothing happened.”

The crack of her father’s hand across her face came just as she reached the car, and she lost control, slamming into the Nova at top speed. The Nova exploded into smithereens and Seema was thrown through the air into the field. She lay on her back, the snow propping her arms and legs up at odd angles. When she opened her eyes, the moon was gone and the million shards of the Nova were flying across the black sky, scattering in all directions like the headlights of a million tiny trucks carrying their payloads out of town.


Kiran Kaur Saini is a recipient of the Henfield Prize in Fiction and has been a Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. A 15-year veteran of the Los Angeles film industry, Kiran has been caring for her mom in North Carolina throughout the pandemic.