The Sugar House

Fu

A string of popping sounds and a girl’s high, thin wail jolted Tess out of Billy Baker’s basement. Once, she might have mistaken the strangely hollow sound for gunfire, but Tess knew the kind of noises guns made. Yet the girl’s cry was clearly a distressed one, almost involuntary. The sequence repeated itself-pop-pop-pop, the thin, keening wail.

Tess jumped to her feet, but the source of the noise was hard to track in the open park, where sound bounced erratically, competing with the chatter of seagulls and the traffic along Fort Avenue. Tess began to walk swiftly in what she hoped was the right direction. She climbed a small rise, so she was now looking toward the Patapsco River ’s Middle Branch. The day was cold, but bright, and the water appeared darker and bluer than it normally did, with diamond-bright froth on the breakers. Three boys ran into her line of vision, tossing something. She heard the pops again, saw long thin lines of smoke rising above their heads. Firecrackers.

Another scream, and there was Sukey, well ahead of the three boys, but steadily losing ground, perhaps because she was ru

“Jesus, drop the book, Sukey,” Tess muttered to herself, even as she found her own legs sprinting across the park. “You can always get another goddamn book.”

She was ru

The bottom line was, she had nothing.

Except her mouth. A stray piece of poetry flickered through her brain-All I have is a voice-and she found a banshee cry rising in her throat. If it startled her, it flabbergasted them. The boys stopped, taking in this strange apparition, this Amazon of the Patapsco, this Valkyrie, ru

“What the fuck?” one asked, while the others merely gaped, open-mouthed, providing an excellent view of South Baltimore dentistry, or the lack thereof.

Now just a few feet from the boys, Tess slipped her backpack from her shoulder and began swinging it by the strap, screaming all the while and continuing to run straight toward them. She thought, to the extent that she was thinking at all: They’re going to stop in their tracks from sheer shock, and then run away, or they’re going to attack me instead of Sukey, and she can run for help.

Instead, they began screaming and laughing, pointing their fingers at her and chanting, presumably the same chant they had been using to torment Sukey.

“Fat pig, fat pig, fat pig, fat pig.”

The words hurt, nonsensical as they were, or would have hurt if she hadn’t been almost blind in her rage and fear. How could anyone tell children that only sticks and stones caused pain? Tess felt as if she were thirteen again, ru

She saw the tallest boy pull another firecracker from the pocket of his denim jacket and light it with a Bic, holding it aloft with a snarky grin. Twirling her knapsack like a bolo, she swung it forward and landed it in his midsection, knocking him to the ground, the burning firecracker still clutched in his hand.

“Let it go, Noonie, let it go,” one of the others screamed as the stu

The boy uncurled his fingers and the firecracker rolled away, but only a few inches. One of the other boys then kicked it with his foot, just before the fuse burned out. Set off in the grass, it seemed so i

Noonie clambered to his feet, still breathing heavily. All three looked at Tess uncertainly. Logic must have told them she was no threat-she was alone, and a female at that, armed with nothing more than a knapsack.

Then again, what kind of adult acted this way? They smelled something crazy on her. They backed away, sneers in place, but just barely.

“Fat pig has a dyke friend,” said the one she had knocked down. Noonie, the group’s alpha male.

“Dyke,” the others echoed. “Ugly dyke.”

They turned and ran, Noonie calling back over his shoulder. “Too bad for you. You have to be a boy to get the fat pig to drop her pants. Not that any boy wants her.”

Tess didn’t bother to reply. The adrenaline was begi

“What was that about?” Tess asked, then realized what a stupid question it was. What was it ever about? It was about being an adolescent, about needing to make someone else as miserable as you were.

“They do it all the time,” Sukey said, her voice casual and grown-up, as if she were trying to deny the tears on her face. “They steal firecrackers from the rail yard, throw them in people’s yards and back porches. They don’t like me because I won’t…go with them. We’re in the same class, and I do better ’n them. That’s all.”

Tess knew it wasn’t close to all, but she let it go.

“Let me walk you home.”

“I don’t need a babysitter.” Sukey’s usually sweet voice was fierce.

“Well I do. Walk me to my car?”

Those were terms Sukey could accept. They began walking. Tess noticed the girl was studying her in a sidelong glance, trying to match her stride for stride, although her legs were so much shorter.

“Were you scared?” Sukey asked, as they waited to cross Fort Avenue.

“Petrified. But I was angry, too. So angry I didn’t have time to think. I shouldn’t have hit the one boy, Noonie, but I couldn’t think of anything else. It would serve me right if there was a cop on my doorstep tonight, ready to take me in for assault.”

“It was self-defense,” Sukey said. “And everyone knows Noonie is an asshole.”

“Strangely, being an asshole is not considered a mitigating circumstance. Besides, it’s not up to the cops to sort out whether something is self-defense. That’s why it’s a better idea not to resort to violence. Luckily”-Tess gri

Sukey laughed. A little shakily, but she laughed.

“Are you a dyke? I mean-a lesbian?”

“No. You know, someone calling you a name doesn’t make you that name.”