June pressed her palm flat against her left side, where a small body used to ride, and held it there until the ache came back.
Three in the morning.
The one stretch when the town came closest to not watching the scripts still ran all night, the Harrisons arguing through the wall in perfect eight-bar rhythm, the same fight they’d had for six nights running, winding down on cue for the reconciliation due in Act Three.
But the pressure eased between midnight and dawn, the broadcast that wanted her to smile and nod and play the pretty widow who’d moved on going quiet just long enough for her to hold onto what it kept trying to smooth away.
The weight of her daughter on her hip.
June pressed her palm flat against her left side, where a small body used to ride.
Four years old.
Maybe five.
The Hex couldn’t decide, kept rewriting the age up and down as though the right digit would make her let go.
But it kept forgetting the heft.
Thirty-some pounds of compact, wriggling girl who’d wanted to be carried everywhere and nowhere, who’d smelled like the cheap berry shampoo they didn’t make anymore and playground mulch and something June couldn’t name that was just hers.
She could feel it now.
The phantom pressure.
How her hip would ache after a long afternoon at the park.
The adjustment her spine made, the lean.
It hurt.
Good.
Pain was real.
Pain was hers.
The Hex wanted her smooth and content and over it, and every morning she woke up a little lighter, a little closer to the widow who’d never had a daughter at all just a too-big house and a tasteful mourning period she was coming out of right on schedule.
She’d believed, until recently, that she was utterly alone in remembering.
That no one else in this town fought the smoothing-over, that remembering was a wound you re-opened on purpose and only she was bleeding.
So June dug her thumb into the place where the ache should be and held on until her eyes watered and the room came back into focus around her.
Scripted furniture.
A vanity she’d never bought, stocked with creams she didn’t use.
Curtains in a floral print she hated, which she complimented every time Dottie asked.
A closet full of dresses the right woman would wear and June wore them, smiled, taught children whose names dissolved the moment they left her classroom.
Every night she came back to this perfect suffocating box and remembered on purpose, performing the widow flawlessly by day so she could endure in the dark.
Her name was
Static.
The name wouldn’t come.
It sat in her mouth like a word on the edge of her tongue, present and absent at once, and the harder she reached the more it slipped.
She’d had it two nights ago.
Solid.
Clear as anything.
And then she’d said it aloud, just once, testing, and the room had listened, and when she’d woken the next morning the name was gone and her hip felt lighter and she’d spent the whole day teaching fractions in a cold sweat, terrified that the next thing to go would be the weight itself.
So she stopped reaching for the name.
Kept the weight instead.
It was the worst trade she’d ever made, and she made it every night.
June sat up.
Graded papers by the gap-light coming through the curtains, because grading papers was what widow-schoolteachers did when they couldn’t sleep, and playing the part kept the part from eating her.
GOOD WORK, she wrote on an essay about George Washington that was three sentences long and historically wrong.
SEE ME.
She didn’t know the child’s name.
She’d know it tomorrow, in class, because the script would supply it, and then she’d forget it again the moment they left, and the whole exercise was a box she kept her hands busy inside so they wouldn’t shake.
The new man was awake.
She’d known it the moment he’d fumbled the casserole at Dottie’s.
The wrong kind of fumble calculated wrong, a man performing clumsy to be forgettable.
She’d watched him for weeks now, and he moved through the scripts like someone translating a language he’d learned off a tape, always a half-beat behind, always almost right.
Nobody else saw it.
Dottie thought he was charming.
The Harrisons thought he was helpful.
Walt thought he was fine.
June thought he was counting exits.
She did that too.
So either he was a fellow prisoner, fighting her same fight, or he was the warden, wearing a friendly face to catch the ones who remembered.
Either way, she couldn’t afford to guess wrong.
He smiled too much.
Helped too often.
Never said a true thing when a scripted pleasantry would do.
But at the talent showcase, when the bunting had flickered and the whole room had slipped, just for a breath he’d seen it.
She’d watched his face.
He’d clocked it exactly as she had, made the same choice: don’t react, let it pass, cover.
Two people catching the same impossible glitch.
Coordinated, or coincidence.
A guarded opening the first she’d allowed herself in months.
She needed to know.
June set the papers down.
Opened the drawer of the vanity the Hex had dressed for her, past the creams and the hairpins and the lacquered jewelry box, down to the false bottom she’d pried up three months ago.
The barrette sat inside, small and plastic and wrong.
Purple, with a cheap rhinestone flower glued to the clip.
A dollar-store clip a girl wore every single day until it broke.
The Hex hated it.
Every night June hid it.
Every morning it was gone, vanished into the same static that took the name.
And every night she found it again on the kitchen counter, in the mailbox, once in the trash outside, which had made her cry so hard she’d vomited because the Hex could take it but it couldn’t make her forget she’d had it.
Not yet.
Not while she kept the ache alive.
She held the barrette now.
Cheap stamped metal, bent at the hinge.
Real.
The new man had done magic at the garden party.
A tin butterfly that moved on its own, period-perfect, and everyone had clapped, and June had stayed after and checked.
No battery.
No string.
It had flown because he’d wanted it to, and the wanting had been enough, and he’d covered it so smoothly no one else had thought to look.
So he could do things the town shouldn’t allow.
Which meant he was either stronger than the Hex, or he was the Hex wearing a neighbor’s face.
June was going to find out.
She wrapped the barrette in a handkerchief the Hex would steal it if she left it bare and slipped it into her purse.
Tomorrow.
She’d hand it to him.
Casual.
A favor, a small kindness.
I found this, thought you might know who it belongs to.
And she’d watch what he did.
If he smiled and handed it back, scripted and empty, she’d know he was just a better puppet.
If he saw it really saw it, recognized the heft of a real object in a scripted world she’d know he was awake.
And if he tried to take it, tried to keep it as the Hex kept trying to erase it, she’d know he was the trap, and she’d run, and maybe running would be enough.
June tucked the handkerchief-wrapped barrette into the purse and closed it.
Turned off the lamp.
Lay back down in the scripted bed, in the scripted house, and pressed her palm to her hip where the weight still sat, warm and impossible and hers.
The room listened.
It always listened.
But June had decided, and deciding was the only rebellion left, and tomorrow she’d hand a piece of the truth to a man who smiled too much and see whether he gave it back or tried to smooth it away.
The Harrisons’ fight wound down through the wall.
Makeup dialogue, right on cue.
June closed her eyes and held the weight and thought: Her hair smelled like berries.
She had your eyes.
She called you Mama and you called her
Static.
The name was gone.
But the weight stayed.
June held it until she slept.
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