With heavy legs, Helen headed back toward the school, slipping between the middle portion of the split-rail fence. By the time she sidled in front of her teacher, Tom and the other boys had edged away, eyes averted and sniggering, but they dawdled, anticipating the scolding everyone knew was coming.
“You’re far too old for these shenanigans, Miss Stephens. Start acting like a lady. Tomorrow I expect to see you walk home with the girls.”
The girls? Helen almost choked. The girls wanted nothing to do with her. The boys didn’t care much for her company either, but at least they valued her abilities. Racing, ditch jumping, and games of ball had won her a good dose of respect from them, respect that she sorely missed from the girls. Helen looked up to Miss Thurston’s face in time to see a flash of pity in the woman’s dark eyes.
“I mean it, Helen,” Miss Thurston murmured. “If you keep up with the boys, you’re going to find yourself in trouble. Nothing good will come from this. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Helen angled her head down, but annoyance surged through her ten-year-old brain. What did Miss Thurston know anyway? She had straight teeth, wore pretty dresses, knew how to wear her hair in a fashionable style. How was it that someone purported to be smart about books could be so ignorant about people? Did adults forget the battlefield that was childhood when they left it behind?
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, while everyone else dawdled, gathering their things and gossiping, Helen took off out the front door at a sprint and cleared out of the schoolyard, eager to avoid Miss Thurston’s wrath. It wasn’t until she passed the school’s outbuilding by the front gate that she slowed, her lunch pail banging into her thigh with the change of pace.
“Hey, Hellie!” a voice called.
She turned to search the shadows of the outbuilding, her vision spotty with the sudden shift toward the afternoon’s brightness. There, standing in the doorway, her sixteen-year-old cousin Jimmy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone had come out of the schoolhouse but no one appeared to have left. Silently, she congratulated herself on getting out of school without any trouble.
“C’mere,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Helen had seen him doing odd jobs around the school, but they never spoke. Like many of the kids from the surrounding farms, his attendance at the local high school had become more and more infrequent with every passing year. Curious, she picked her way through the scrubby grass toward him. He waved his hand at her to follow him and disappeared into the building.
Helen entered the outbuilding and blinked a few times for her eyes to readjust in the low light. Streaks of sunshine edged through the cracks of the building walls, creating veils of dust motes in the air. Jimmy stood at the far wall and pointed at a pile of hay bales next to him. She neared him, wondering what he had found. Perhaps a dead snake? One neighboring farmer had even found an unbroken bottle of moonshine in one of his hay bales. When she reached Jimmy’s side, she examined the bales but saw nothing out of place. She glanced at him. His narrow, tanned face studied her. Grubby hands held on to the snaps of his overalls, revealing bare arms, ropy with lean muscle. He wore no shirt under his overalls.
“Wanna see my pecker?”
Helen considered this. Farm life necessitated a certain familiarity with all things pertaining to reproduction. The animals on their farm revealed their various anatomical features without shame and even engaged in the business, often violent, of procreation in public spaces, but aside from the little worm on her younger brother, visible when he bathed and dressed, she hadn’t seen anyone else’s. A small pulse of warning began at the base of her neck, but before she could say a word, he had unfastened his dungarees and the dirty clothes fell to the floor with a sigh. She took a long look, unimpressed.
That was it?
She had seen the thing on her neighbor’s stallion Nero. Now that gave her pause. But Jimmy’s pecker was exactly that—a strange, chicken-necked thing poking out from his dirty fist. She moved her gaze up his body to his narrow chest, usually covered by the bib of his overalls. There, his tanned skin paled into a milky white. Blue veins ran underneath his chest in a crackle pattern that reminded her of her grandma’s china tea set.
“Now let’s see what you got,” he said, and without waiting for her reaction, he tugged at the snap on her overalls and, like his, the straps gave way. He then bobbed his chin at her once-white underpants, now more of a gray color from frequent laundering. “Pull those down.” She did as instructed and when she straightened back to standing, he frowned at the unremarkable cleft between her legs. Without any warning, he stepped toward her, pushed her into the rough-hewn wall, and thrust himself into her. The back of her skull banged into the wooden board behind her with such force that stars danced across her vision. She gasped.
Her chin was held in place by pressure from his shoulder, and the earthy combination of his sweat, grass cuttings, and wood shavings pressed upon her with sickening intensity. Rendered silent with shock, she hung limp as he pumped himself against her and a white flash of pain shot through her. Good God, how could that measly pecker create such a godawful feeling? It felt like time had stopped, but then, he grunted and stepped away, reaching down to pull his overalls up over his narrow hips. The skin along her spine burned from being pressed against the splintery surface behind her. Dazed, she shifted her hips from side to side in search of some way to ease the raw ache pulsing deep inside her. He reached forward and brushed some dust off her temple in a way that struck her as both awkward and tender at the same time.
“Let’s do that again tomorrow,” he said, looking pleased.
She stared at him, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
He took her silence as agreement. “Go on, better get dressed ’fore you leave.”
She looked down at her clothes on the floor and pulled them up slowly, wincing against the pain between her legs. He slapped the hay off her overalls and pointed at the door for her to leave ahead of him. She turned to him, searching for something to say, but he was whistling a tune, a piece of hay stuck between his lips like a cigarette, and he gave her a wink. She hurried out, eager to push what had just happened from her mind.
OVER THE NEXT few days, a dull headache plagued Helen. She struggled to focus on her lessons. When classes ended each day, she considered leaving the schoolhouse in a knot of students. Nothing would happen with Jimmy if her classmates surrounded her, but then she pictured the condescension of the other girls. The way they would eye her overalls, uncombed hair, and dirty fingernails and then whisper about her, cruelty glimmering in their viper eyes. No, thank you. But she didn’t dare risk falling in with the boys and riling Miss Thurston again either.
So she was stuck. She continued to meet Jimmy in the barn after school and knew these meetings were wrong, but the other options felt bad too. At least Jimmy seemed pleased with her.
Each time she saw him standing in the doorway, she looked backward, hoping a classmate would be near enough so that she couldn’t go to the outbuilding unnoticed. But each time there was no one. It always felt like she was being pulled on a rope, a fishing line of sorts, as she moved over the clumps of grass to enter the outbuilding. At the door, he always patted her shoulder and she wanted to pull away, but for reasons she couldn’t explain, she followed him.