Shine - Lauren Myracle [1]
The entrance to the crawl space was a small access door made from a scrap of plywood painted yellow to match the siding. It was all of two feet tall and two feet wide, and it blended in with the house almost perfectly. The only thing that gave it away was the rusty hook-and-eye latch that kept it shut.
Patrick didn’t much like the dark, so we snuck down candles and matches, which would have given Mama Sweetie a fit if she’d found out. We spread a tarp on the moist soil, and we set up a milk crate for a table. On any given day, we’d toss snacks through the crawl space hole and then wiggle in after them, and once we were settled, we’d just gab away. That was the magic of it, that Patrick and I could just talk and talk.
The crawl space beneath Patrick’s house held happy memories for me, so that’s where I went when I left the front porch with its spiderwebs and dying butterflies. I walked around the house and found the access door, and the sight of it sent my blood pulsing.
I sat on the overgrown lawn beside the plywood door. Aunt Tildy would kill me if I got grass stains on my church clothes, but I didn’t care. I drew up my legs, tucked my skirt between my thighs, and hugged my shins. Tiny no-see-ums nipped at my ankles. Humidity pasted my hair to my neck.
The last time I was here at the house was three years ago. I was thirteen, and I was so happy I glowed. That’s what Mama Sweetie told me, anyway. She said I was lit from within, and I believed her, because I felt it and knew it to be true.
I haven’t known that feeling for a long time.
But that last day sure was a good one. Patrick and I had biked here after school, our feet kicking up dust when we hopped off in his dirt driveway. Mama Sweetie met us on the porch and hugged first Patrick and then me, saying, “Well, hey there, Cat. Ain’t you as pretty as a picture.” Fresh-squeezed lemonade waited on the small outside table. No garden spiders or mummy-wrapped bugs that day, because though Mama Sweetie wouldn’t kill a spider, she did use her broom to clear their webs away.
I dropped into one of the sagging fold-out chairs and accepted the glass she held out to me. It had a decal of the Tasmanian Devil on it, and it came from the Hardee’s in Toomsboro. Hardee’s was running a special offer: Buy six cinnamon buns and get a free cartoon character drinking glass. Buy a dozen and get not two free glasses, but three.
Mama Sweetie went for the three. She had no need for them, since she had scores of jelly jars that did the job fine. But she couldn’t resist Hardee’s cinnamon buns. She couldn’t resist anything sugary, and she spent half her food stamps on Coke and Twizzlers and fun-size Snickers. She bought cereal and milk for Patrick, and she made him eat tomatoes and squash and crowder peas from their garden, but their house was junk food central.
She was dead now. She died last year from her diabetes. I went to her funeral, but Patrick and I didn’t talk.
Anyway, that Tasmanian Devil. I didn’t know who he was until Mama Sweetie told me. I just liked how he looked, with his wild eyes and his fur fluffed out all crazy like a puppy after a good shake.
“He’s on the show with that Bugs Bunny,” Mama Sweetie explained. She worked at the church preschool, and years ago someone donated a used VCR and a cardboard box of old videos. Some were episodes of Sesame Street. Others were cartoons. Mama Sweetie played them for the kids at naptime if they’d been good.
“I don’t know what he’s supposed to be,” she went on. “Just that they call him the Tasmanian Devil.” She reached over and squeezed her grandson’s knee. “You think there’s really such a creature, Patrick?”
“Let’s go to Tasmania and find out,” Patrick suggested. We were in eighth grade, and already he was dreaming