The Deepest Roots Read online

  Morgan nods. “Thanks,” she says. “I’ll keep texting.”

  My throat is too tight to say anything else.

  Jett strolls in with his backpack on one shoulder, looking like he just walked off the set of a men’s-wear commercial, with his perfect hair and his slightly windblown blazer and button-down shirt. He gives me his big grin and I can barely manage to twitch my lips in response.

  I’m angry, and hurt, and lost without Lux. And Mercy is going to kill me when she hears this. She won’t cut me out completely like Lux, but she’ll freeze me out for a while nonetheless. And it will never be the same between us now that Lux and I have broken apart. I have betrayed them both in different ways. Lux by not keeping a promise, and Mercy by keeping a secret from her.

  And Jett just grins like the happiest guy in the world with his buddy in the front row and his baseball team and his fancy car and his mom who has goats.

  I really hate everyone right now.

  I manage to squeeze out of the room after class while Miss Strong asks Jett and his friend about their baseball game tonight, and dodge Morgan, who’s summoned the courage to start pelting me with questions about Lux again.

  But it’s not a complete escape. Mercy finds me on the mezzanine in the library.

  Her eyebrows are arched to a knife-sharp angle, and her dark eyes lock on me.

  “What happened to Lux?” she hisses, seizing my arm in what feels like an iron vise grip. “Mrs. Levinson just asked me if I would collect Lux’s homework assignments for her because she might be gone for a while.”

  She’s strong for someone so small.

  Mercy grabs the other chair at the little table and scoots it next to mine, bashing into my legs in the process.

  I wince but take the pain, because it feels like all I deserve right now. And it’s better than feeling nothing, anyway. Mercy slams herself down into the chair and repeats, “What happened to Lux?”

  “Her stepdad beat her up. And Tina. Last night.”

  “Wait, were you there?” Mercy asks, leaning forward in her seat.

  “I found them . . . afterward.”

  “Is this the first time?” Mercy asks, but she’s already calculating the days, the moments that we shared. “The sleepover on a school night.” Mercy’s face changes slightly. “The dowry chest.” I watch her expression shift as she puts all the pieces of the puzzle together. She knows Lux as well as I do, and there were so many telling signs that we’d missed. “That’s why she wanted it. She wanted her mom to kick him out, but they were worried about money. It was never just about my dad cutting his hours.”

  I nod miserably. Why hadn’t I read the signs that were everywhere?

  Drive away, she had commanded. Far, far away.

  I can smile without putting a spell on someone, you know, she had said softly. I couldn’t control it so much when we were younger . . .

  I don’t want to be home all day, she had whispered.

  I’m cursed and so’s my mom, I don’t care what the book says, she had said.

  Mercy pulls me back to reality. “You did put the bleach in his tank, didn’t you? That’s why you were so weird and saying maybe Aaron deserved it. You knew he’d hurt her and you didn’t tell me.” Mercy’s eyes are shiny with tears, and I need to find the words to make her understand, but I don’t know if they will be enough.

  “She made me promise, Mercy.” A promise is sacred for us. The girls from Cottonwood Hollow don’t have much, but we’ve always had our word.

  “She made you promise not to tell me?”

  “She made me promise not to tell anyone.”

  But I haven’t even told Mercy the worst part yet. I try to get it out fast, as if maybe it will make me less guilty. “But that’s not everything. I guess Aaron was trying to . . . force himself on her. I didn’t know until last night.” The words make me gag. “She was afraid the police would think she was using her talent as a Siren on him. That’s what he kept telling her. He told her that it was her fault. That she was making him touch her.”

  Mercy’s mouth falls open, and for a second I think that she’s going to be physically ill. After a few shallow breaths, finally, she can form words. “That fucking sicko. I’m going to find him and kill him myself. Why did you only put bleach in his gas tank? Why didn’t you light his stupid truck on fire?”

  “I didn’t know about everything. Otherwise I would’ve.” That’s probably the truth.

  “Well, there’s still time,” Mercy says, looking like she’s ready to form a search party right now. “We can probably find him around Evanston somewhere.” I’ve never seen her so angry.

  “Mom talked to Rick early this morning and he said they can’t find Aaron. I guess Aaron did get his truck repaired, and that’s how he was gone last night before I got there.”

  “Do you think they’ll believe him? That Lux used her Siren talent to lure him?” Mercy asks, and I know she’s thinking about the algebra teacher, too.

  “I hope not,” I say, my voice nearly breaking. “But look around you. If Lux and her mom press charges, the county seat is in Evanston, and this is where they’d have a trial. And this town isn’t exactly sympathetic toward girls from Cottonwood Hollow. Aaron’s from Evanston, too. It’s hard to say who he knows or has connections to.” The logical part of my brain knows that Aaron is the one at fault for what happened last night. But I wish I’d told Lux’s secret long before—anything to have kept her from getting hurt like she did. Even if it’s the knife that severs our friendship forever.

  “I just can’t believe this, Rome. Maybe you didn’t know about everything, but you knew Aaron hurt her. Why would you ever keep a secret like that?”

  “Because she wanted me to.” My voice breaks. “And I thought if she could keep her secrets, then it would be okay to keep mine, too.”

  “What are you talking about? The bleach in Aaron’s gas tank?”

  “Not just that. I mean everything.” The truth comes spilling out, everything I’d sworn to myself that I’d never tell. “I’ve been helping Mom pay the rent for a year now. Things have been so hard, Mercy. That’s why I needed all the hours at the shop. Selling the Mach was just a last resort, to keep my mom from offering other things to keep Garrett from kicking us out. . . .” I can’t even put into words what she had almost done to keep a roof over our heads. “But I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t want to be some charity project that you had to feel sorry for.”

  “If that’s what you think, Rome, then you aren’t my best friend. And definitely not my sister. You can’t just go through life never asking for help because you think it makes you weak. Do you know what weak is? It’s keeping secrets like Lux’s when you know she’s in danger.” She looks away, and I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so ashamed.

  Tears sting my eyes. “Lux is never going to forgive me for this.”

  Mercy just gets up and walks away, and then I realize that she might not either.

  Oh, Emmeline. Maybe it was a curse after all.

  Seventeen

  I STAY IN THE LIBRARY for the next two class periods. I find the book Mercy had at home with the information about the Remingtons and Maisie Truett, the one written up by the Cottonwood Hollow Historical Society. It’s regular copy paper bound with one of those plastic spines, the front covered in clear plastic. I’m surprised the school even has a copy. It must have been donated by Cottonwood Hollow.

  I flip through the pages, and when I get to the story about Emmeline, I notice that it simply says she and her husband built the Remington homestead. There’s nothing else in it about John Remington. Nothing about where he was born or if he had any family around. Nothing about the small dugout he’d lived in before he traveled back East and married into Emmeline’s money. There’s not even mention of when he purchased the land. But the diary had made it seem like he had some sort of past. Was he planning to give up farming? What was his motive for finding a wealthy bride?

  I turn the pages until I find the map
Mercy said would be here. The book says it was hand drawn by Emmeline. It does look like an exact copy of the one we found in the chest in the homestead. All the little flowers are there around the houses. Cottonwoods stand near where our trailer is now. The eighty-acre Remington plot is demarcated with small hatch marks. The creek. The homestead. But no hills. The land where the ruins are now is completely empty, save for a small cluster of flowers where the hills should have been, as if Emmeline was planning to fill in that area with something else.

  Why would she leave the hills off one map but draw them on another? And why doesn’t the book include information about John Remington’s life before he married Emmeline?

  “This is the first time anyone has ever checked this book out,” the librarian informs me at the front desk as I stuff the book into my bag.

  All I can think is that I want to tell Mercy and Lux about what I’ve found, and neither of them is speaking to me.

  I move my body around the school purely by muscle memory. Everything I see here reminds me of Lux and Mercy, and the other students are starting to whisper when I walk by, like news of what happened to Lux has made its way to Evanston.

  At lunch, I run into Jett just outside of the cafeteria. “Hey,” he says, giving me his big grin. “Can’t wait to see you tonight. Do you want to ride to the party with me after the game, or were you planning on having your own ride?”

  “My own ride?” I ask dumbly. It’s as if all the cogs in my brain are rusted and slow.

  “I mean, are you going to drive yourself? I didn’t know if you were planning on bringing your friends. Lux and Mercy. Did you know Mercy goes to the same church as my mom? Yeah, Mom’s other latest thing is religion. The goats are getting old, I guess.”

  Lux and Mercy’s names trip a trigger that might as well be a nuclear bomb. I should have told Mercy the truth, and I never should have fought with Lux so that she felt she had nowhere to turn from Aaron.

  But he doesn’t know any of that, this handsome, wealthy boy from Evanston who is worlds apart from me.

  “No,” I reply, my mouth moving in ways that seem strange to the rest of my body.

  “No, you’re not riding with your friends?” Jett asks, his dark eyes wide and innocent.

  “No, I’m not going.” I know it’s not Jett’s fault, but I can’t stop myself. Suddenly he is every Evanston boy, every person who’s ever pointed their finger at Lux or me or Mercy and called us names. The words tumble out like spilled ball bearings, rolling faster and faster as I go. “I’m not going to your stupid ball game. Or anything that has to do with this stupid school. The Evanston students hate us. They’ve always hated the girls from Cottonwood Hollow. They think we’re weird. They call us freaks. Sluts. Why should I go to your stupid game so they can hate me there? I get enough as it is.”

  Jett’s face is a storm of confusion, and I don’t even care enough to clarify things for him because nothing’s going to change the fact that he’s an Evanston boy, and I’m one of the peculiar girls from Cottonwood Hollow. We were never meant to be together in the first place. I thought that if I gave him a chance, a real chance, we could make things work between us. I showed him my job at the shop and my high-school dropout mom and our ancient, narrow trailer on the edge of town. I gave him every reason to turn away with my sharp words. And it seemed like he was going to pass every test, jump every hurdle.

  But it was me. All this time it was really me. I’m the one who can’t clear the hurdles. I can’t accept that he’s different, and I can’t get over who I am and where I come from.

  I leave him there, walking away from lunch and class. I walk straight out to the parking lot, get in Mom’s Ford Focus, and drive to Red’s Auto. I just want to hide underneath the hood of a car and feel only metal and grease. I want to Fix things until my body is so tired and heavy that it drowns out everything else. I enter the office, where Mom and Red are taking their lunch break together.

  “Rome?” Mom says, surprised to see me as she holds her peanut butter sandwich made with the heels of the loaf.

  “I need to work,” I say, my voice quavering.

  Red stands up. “Is everything okay? Aren’t you supposed to be at school?”

  “Please. I just need . . .” I don’t know how to finish. I don’t know how to explain what I need right now. I am a Fixer, but there’s no way that I can Fix this.

  “Why don’t you take the car and go home? You’re tired. I’ll meet you there after work,” Mom says.

  I open my mouth to argue that she can’t come home if I have the only car between the two of us, but Red answers for her, “I’ll give your mom a ride home. I know you had a rough time of it last night, Rome. Get some sleep. You got a shift tomorrow.”

  And strangely, his kindness almost breaks me.

  “I’ll send your paycheck home with your mom,” Red says when I don’t ask about it.

  I drive the county roads home to Cottonwood Hollow at seventy, waiting for the speed to make me feel alive like it always did when I drove the Mach. Instead I’m chugging around the curves and over the hills, cursing the stupid four-cylinder engine. This car doesn’t fly like the Mach. It doesn’t sing around corners or burst up over hills. It’s just a big, dumb hunk of metal and plastic and rubber.

  I park the car in front of Lux’s house. She still hasn’t answered any of my texts. I stomp up to the front stoop, fists clenched like I’m going into battle. I swing open the screen door and try the door handle. It’s locked. I check under the ceramic toad for the spare key, but it’s gone. I knock on the door, hard enough to bruise my knuckles before changing to the flat of my fist.

  “Lux!” I call through the door. “I know you’re in there! Let me in!” There are no sounds. I imagine her on the other side, her cheek pressed against the door.

  “Damn it, Lux! Let me in! Please! Don’t do this!” I sound pathetic, even to me, but I don’t care.

  I pull away from the front door and scurry around the house to Lux’s bedroom window. I push through the shrubs, the branches scratching my bare legs and snagging my skirt, but I’m too frantic now to care.

  When I peer through the lavender curtains, I see exactly what I feared. All of Lux’s dresser drawers have been pulled open. One is pulled all the way out and thrown next to the bed. It’s empty. All the pictures taped to her vanity mirror are missing. There’s a pair of old jeans on the floor still folded, as if at the last minute Lux decided she couldn’t fit them in her suitcase.

  I put my hand against the screen like we did that night we promised to keep her secret between us. But she’s gone.

  Eighteen

  I’M TOO SCARED TO BE alone, wondering what happened to Lux. Did she leave with her mom? Did she go on her own?

  I park the Focus in front of Flynn’s. Inside, it’s smoky and dark. I find a stool at the bar. Wynona sees me, struts over with her wide hips swinging. “No school today, sweets?” she asks, giving me a wink.

  “No,” I tell her. Wynona is a Strong Back, and once I saw her pick up a guy twice her size and toss him out into the street. She waitresses here for Flynn when her trucker husband’s not in town.

  “How about some lunch?” she asks.

  “Can I get some onion rings and a Dr Pepper?” I ask.

  “Sure thing.” She whirls around and fills a glass with ice and soda, slides it across the scarred wooden bar, and then disappears back into the kitchen.

  I look around. It’s mostly old farmers having lunch here. The stage where Flynn has bands on Friday and Saturday nights is empty. Country music plays low over the speakers.

  Flynn emerges from the apartment above the bar. He’s got a daughter a year younger than me. Vidalia. A Sight.

  “Rome,” he says. “What are you doing here?” He’s big, even bigger than Jett, with a flannel shirt and a beard that makes him look like a lumberjack. But now I’m thinking about Jett, and how guilty I feel for telling him off in the middle of the hallway at school. I was angry about what I did to L
ux and Mercy. Jett was just an easy target.

  I’m supposed to be a Fixer, but it seems like everything I touch lately breaks to pieces.

  “Just having some lunch,” I say.

  “Saw your Mach,” Flynn says, leaning against the bar. “Garrett was driving it around. He was bragging that he’d got it off you in some steal of a trade.”

  I take a drink, letting the clink of the ice be my response.

  “Well, with any luck you’ll be able to buy it back at auction,” Flynn says. “He’ll have to sell everything off before you know it. Probably get that car back for pennies on the dollar.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “His business is about to go under. Made some bad real-estate investments in Evanston. Bought a couple of old slummy houses near the college thinking to turn a quick buck, but the city just passed an ordinance banning rental dwellings with more than three separate living spaces in that zone. He’s up to his eyeballs in debt now. Can’t rent those places out since they’ve each got five or six little crappy apartments in them. And he doesn’t have the cash to renovate them.”

  I guess that explains why he was down our throats looking for the rent money this month.

  Wynona swings out of the kitchen with my basket of onion rings. “Here you go, sweets,” she says to me. She eyes Flynn. “Why do you look so serious?” she asks.

  “Garrett.”

  Wynona sighs. “I told you I’d call him again.”

  “Don’t bother,” Flynn says. “We’ll just call his tab a loss. Lance Johnson was in last night saying Garrett’s business is going under.”

  Wynona smiles. “Well, I won’t cry about it. I know he’s supposed to be descended from the Remingtons, but I still think he’s a creep.”

  When I finish eating, I try to pay Flynn. “It’s on the house,” he says. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about an auction.”