away on a job, so his physicality could go unchallenged. Confronting his younger brother—less vicious but powerful in his own way—was more than he’d bargained for.
“What’s going on?” Tyler repeated. He eyed Shawn, inching forward as if approaching a rattlesnake.
Mother stopped crying. She was embarrassed. Tyler was an outsider now. He’d been gone for so long, he’d been shifted to that category of people who we kept secrets from. Who we kept this from.
Tyler moved up the stairs, advancing on his brother. His face was taut, his breath shallow, but his expression held no hint of surprise. It seemed to me that Tyler knew exactly what he was doing, that he had done this before, when they were younger and less evenly matched. Tyler halted his forward march but he didn’t blink. He glared at Shawn as if to say, Whatever is happening here, it’s done.
Shawn began to murmur about my clothes and what I did in town. Tyler cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want to know,” he said. Then, turning to me: “Go, get out of here.”
“She’s not going anywhere,” Shawn repeated, flashing the key ring.
Tyler tossed me his own keys. “Just go,” he said.
I ran to Tyler’s car, which was wedged between Shawn’s truck and the chicken coop. I tried to back out, but I stomped too hard on the gas and the tires spun out, sending gravel flying. On my second attempt I succeeded. The car shot backward and circled around. I shifted into drive and was ready to shoot down the hill when Tyler appeared on the porch. I lowered the window. “Don’t go to work,” he said. “He’ll find you there.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, WHEN I came home, Shawn was gone. Mother was in the kitchen blending oils. She said nothing about that morning, and I knew I shouldn’t mention it. I went to bed, but I was still awake hours later when I heard a pickup roar up the hill. A few minutes later, my bedroom door creaked open. I heard the click of the lamp, saw the light leaping over the walls, and felt his weight drop onto my bed. I turned over and faced him. He’d put a black velvet box next to me. When I didn’t touch it, he opened the box and withdrew a string of milky pearls.
He said he could see the path I was going down and it was not good. I was losing myself, becoming like other girls, frivolous, manipulative, using how I looked to get things.
I thought about my body, all the ways it had changed. I hardly knew what I felt toward it: sometimes I did want it to be noticed, to be admired, but then afterward I’d think of Jeanette Barney, and I’d feel disgusted.
“You’re special, Tara,” Shawn said.
Was I? I wanted to believe I was. Tyler had said I was special once, years before. He’d read me a passage of scripture from the Book of Mormon, about a sober child, quick to observe. “This reminds me of you,” Tyler had said.
The passage described the great prophet Mormon, a fact I’d found confusing. A woman could never be a prophet, yet here was Tyler, telling me I reminded him of one of the greatest prophets of all. I still don’t know what he meant by it, but what I understood at the time was that I could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.
But now, as I gazed at the shadow Shawn cast on my wall, aware of my maturing body, of its evils and of my desire to do evil with it, the meaning of that memory shifted. Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered. It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.
I looked at my brother. He seemed old in that moment, wise. He knew about the world. He knew about worldly women, so I asked him to keep me from becoming one.
“Okay, Fish Eyes,” he said. “I will.”
* * *
—
WHEN I AWOKE THE next morning, my neck was bruised and my wrist swollen. I had a headache—not an ache in my brain but an actual aching of my brain, as if the organ itself was