Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

tells me to get some eats, so I select giant bags of taco chips, Ritz crackers, and
Cheez Whiz and at the deli counter some cellophane-wrapped ham sandwiches and dill pickles. Out of the freezer a six-pack of chocolate ice cream bars; I’m leaning over and the frost-mist
lifts into my warm face, so cool it makes my eyes mist over, so one of the guys, I think it’s Jax, pokes his finger toward my eye meaning to wipe away a tear, I guess, saying “Hey,
li’l dude, you okay?” This guy is so tall, my head hardly comes to his shoulder. Maybe he works at the quarry; those guys are all so big, muscular and going to fat. The quarry at Sparta
was where my father was working last time I heard. Up front at the cashier’s counter there is this bleach-hair bulldog woman older than Momma staring at the five of us taking up so much space
in the cramped aisles, not cracking a smile though the guys are joking with her, calling her Ma’am, trying to be friendly. A thought cuts into me like a blade: This woman knows me, she
will call Momma. How I feel about this possibility, I’m not sure. (Do I want to be here, with these guys? Is this maybe a mistake? But girls hook up with guys at Wolf’s Head
Lake—that is what you do at Wolf’s Head Lake, isn’t it? What people talk about back at school next month? And Labor Day in another week.) The cashier woman doesn’t seem to
know me, only just regards me with cold curious eyes, a girl my age, young even for high school, with these guys who must be ten, fifteen years older, guys who’ve been drinking beers for
hours (you can tell: you can smell beer on their breath, their reddened eyes are combustible), speaking to the girl in a kind of sly teasing way but not a mean way so I’m feeling a stab of
something like pride, maybe it is even sexual pride, my flat boy-body and dark eyes and curvy mouth and my thick ashy blond hair springing from a low forehead like my Daddy’s, prone to
brooding. Ann’slee is like music in these guys’ mouths, this name that has made me cringe since first grade. Hearing Ann’slee honey, Ann’slee babe makes me
grateful now. Deek tugs my ponytail and praises the eats I’ve brought to the counter and pays for everything with a credit card.
    Next we hike through a marshy pine woods, clouds of mosquitoes, gnats, those fat black flies that bite before a thunderstorm. A sultry wind is blowing up, yet the sun is still shining, rifts in
black clouds hot and fiery so you think there might not be a storm, the clouds might be blown away. In the woods are scattered cottages linked by a rutted lane. Loud voices, kids shouting. Bathing
suits and towels hanging on drooping clotheslines. Most of the cottages are small like my uncle Tyrone’s, with shingleboard siding or fake pine or maple, crowded close together, but
Deek’s uncle’s cottage is at the end of the lane, with nothing beyond but trees, bushes grown close against the cottage so neighbors can’t see into the windows. Deek tries the
front door but it’s locked, dumps his groceries on the porch and goes around to the back of the cottage to jimmy off a window screen, Heins is excited, asking what the hell is Deek doing,
doesn’t he have a key for the cottage? “This is breaking and entering,” Heins says, but Deek only laughs, saying, “Din’t I tell you? This is my uncle’s
fuckin’ place I’m welcome in, any fuckin’ time.”
    When Deek gets the screen off the window, he turns to me, grabs me around my middle, and lifts me like you’d lift a small child, not a girl weighing eighty pounds and five feet three,
which is tall for my age, saying for me to crawl inside and open the door, I am a better fit through the window than he is. Deek’s fingers on me are so hard almost I can’t catch my
breath, squirming to get free like a captured bird, but a bird so scared it isn’t going to struggle much, and next thing I know Deek has shoved me through the window with a grunt,