Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

I was fifteen, I had just ended someone’s life, and I was happy.

The week started out on a crap note to begin with. Some cheerleader named Hope – why not call her Glass Half Full, you unsubtle helicopter parents? – picked a fight with me before class and of course I was the one who got suspended, not pom-pom girl. Dad was somewhere on Lake Ontario and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, so I spent the week roaming Lincoln Park with all the badassery of an unsupervised spring ninth grader. I walked the train tracks, stole Twinkies from the gas station, and finally decided to break into an abandoned warehouse, where I ran into two guys smoking weed.

Their names were Derek and Rex and they called themselves D-Rex, or rather Rex did and Derek put up with it. I’d seen them around before. They’d just gotten into town and had hung around the fringes of our group for the last month or so. One was short, the other fat. I didn’t think I had anything to worry about from some short, fat rookies, even if they were a lot older than me, so we spent the afternoon wandering the neighborhood together. Rex, the fat one, kept wanting to find things to eat. Derek, the short one, played music on his iPhone and scrolled through the crappy pictures on my old flip phone. One of them was a picture of a ­picture – a shot of me and my mother standing in front of the cabin. When he asked, I shrugged off a few details, touching the agate necklace I wore beneath my shirt. Yes, that was me. My mom used to take me up north every summer, before she left us.

‘I swear to God I saw her the other day. Rex and I came from up north.’

‘From Ely?’ I spun around.

‘Yeah, Ely.’ I didn’t even register the glance between them at the time. ‘You still have the cabin, right?’

I didn’t think; I reacted. Rex knew how to hot-wire cars, so we found a rusted Ford parked in an industrial lot with no surveillance cameras. Before I knew it, we were driving out of town and it felt… right. Even though I’d always thought of the cabin as our place – hers and mine – it made perfect sense that she would have retreated there. The place had been in her family for generations, it belonged to her, and my dad had refused to take me there since she’d walked out. I’d just assumed he couldn’t stand the memories, but maybe they’d made an agreement without telling me. Maybe she’d been living there all along.

The sun was setting by the time we arrived and my heart practically beat its way out of my throat. I had tears in my eyes as I crept up the front walk and felt ten years old again. I’d taken the agate necklace off and clutched it in my hand for most of the drive. I didn’t know what I was going to do, if I’d clasp the pendant around her neck, throw it at her, or break it into a thousand pieces on the doorstep. The Earth took violence and decay and made agates, she’d said, so maybe I’d take agates and make violence and decay. There weren’t any lights on inside and I didn’t know the security system code, so I went to ring the doorbell, thinking the guys would hang back and let us get our angry reunion on. They dogged me right up to the door, though, and kept asking about the code. ‘Maybe you’ll remember , ’ Rex prodded. ‘ I’m sure one of your parents told you.’

I looked from one to the other and slowly the veil of stupidity lifted. They couldn’t quite hide it in their faces and I knew then that no one was on the other side of the door. They’d never seen my mother in their lives.

‘Wait,’ I said, feeling a different kind of tremor taking hold. ‘I think they hid a copy of the code in the boathouse with the spare key.’

The walk took forever. I scanned the horizon with every step while they flanked me the whole way down to the water. Our lot was large and wooded. The nearest neighbor, a recluse name Harry, spent most of his time fishing and probably wasn’t even home. There were no boats on the lake when we approached, only a single loon bobbing like a black speck on the sunset orange waves. Our boathouse was a creaky shack on the beach and I threw open the unlocked door, knowing right where to look. A loose piece of plywood covered not a key, but the gun my mother had always hid out here because this was bear and wolf country.

I dug underneath the plywood, scraping against studs and cobwebs, finding nothing. Where was the gun? One of the guys stepped into the doorway behind me, blocking the little light that trickled inside, and I spun around and kicked him right in the stomach, sending him flying. I ran out of the boathouse but didn’t get four steps across the beach before the other one – Rex – tackled me. He flipped me over and said not to scream, that if I told them how to get in the house, they wouldn’t hurt me.

Derek walked over, bracing his gut and smiling. He wanted me to scream.

As they grabbed me I didn’t think about why they were doing this or why it was happening to me. Those were questions Dr Mehta gave me later, the kind of questions people had when they believed their lives were worth something. It didn’t even occur to me to question them. They were animals being animals. The only refrain playing in my head was what an easy mark I’d been.

Stupid, I kept thinking. So stupid.

Rex, the fat one, held me down as Derek tried to take my clothes off. I fought and yelled at him, which was what he’d been waiting for. He started hitting me, close-fisted, over and over until even his friend told him to stop.

‘Leave, then,’ Derek said. ‘I’ll teach her a lesson by myself.’

Rex stayed for a little longer, nervously checking the horizon before he slunk into the trees. As he left, I heard him tell Derek, ‘Shut her up, for chrissake.’ In response, Derek flipped me onto my stomach and clamped his hand over my face, cutting off my voice, and that’s when I saw it. It was tucked among the other rocks forming a circle around the lakeside firepit, the place where we had built bonfires and roasted s’mores and watched the sunset over the water – heavy, jagged, the exact size of my hand. It didn’t belong in that firepit and I knew instantly what it was and who had put it there.

When I went quiet, Derek released his grip on my face so he could yank my jeans the rest of the way off. Then I grabbed my mother’s prized, four-pound agate and smashed it into his temple.

His hands flew up and I kneed him in the groin. When he dropped I rolled up and drove the rock into his head again and again until I heard his skull break. There was a gurgling sound, his muscles seized, and then nothing. I stood over the body, cradling the bloody rock in my hands, and cried tears of absolute gratitude.

I knew the answer. I understood what my mother had been telling me all those years ago. Agates can only form when something in you is destroyed, when the hollows of grief or depression can never find the light, and the sediment that accumulates inside them is dense. Their power changes you. She had changed into something that wasn’t able to be my mother, but she’d left me a way to survive. As clearly as I knew I was standing on a shore next to a dead man, I also knew she’d wanted me to find this rock.

The pool of blood spreading underneath Derek’s face seeped over the sand until the water got at it, pulling it away in streaks of deep red shot with amber. I dipped my fingers into the blood and painted it over my forehead and cheeks in a fortification pattern. Then I walked back to the cabin.

Rex was waiting by the car. As soon as he saw me with the rock in hand, blood mask congealing over my face, and murder in my eyes, he jumped in the truck and gunned it out of the driveway. I never saw him again. I kept walking until I got to Harry’s cabin and sat in front of his door, waiting for it to open while new minerals formed deep inside me, filling the hollows with a type of strength she’d never had.