Page 40 of The Surprise
Even so, after tromping through the foot of snow on the ground to reach the barn, and ducking inside to circle the stalls until I reach hers, petting her nose made me feel a little better. She whuffled my hand for a moment, but once she realized I didn’t have a carrot, she did what she always did, circling around so I could scratch her butt.
It wasn’t quite the face lick or the hand bump I had hoped for, but it was better than nothing.
That’s when I heard the whining sound for the first time.
My ears perked up like a hound on the scent of a fox, and I circled the barn, listening. When it came again, I was closer. It took me nearly an hour and a lot of quiet patience, but I finally found the source of the intermittent whines.
A small coyote—a pup—was pawing at a tiny hole on the corner of Dad’s barn, trying to widen the opening enough to slip inside. Its nose would appear, one eye visible, and it would whine. Then it would disappear and its paws would once again dig and dig and dig. After any significant noise, it would disappear, but a moment or two later, it came back.
I clapped my hands twice, startling it, and then I grabbed a hoe and used the sharp end to widen the opening. After waiting a bit, my patience paid off.
It returned, and this time, it squeezed through.
That pup was even cuter than I thought at first. I knew it was a coyote, because I’d seen plenty of dead ones in the past. In fact, this one was probably looking for a decent spot to weather this massive snowstorm because his mother was missing. It wouldn’t surprise me if I found out his mother had been killed by my dad.
It’s what he did.
Ranchers kill coyotes, always, without fail. It’s a rancher thing.
Except this one looked just like the pet I wanted so badly, and it wasright here, and if I didn’t let it in, it would clearly die of cold. So I decided to take care of it. My parents had no idea why I kept darting outside and spending all day every day of my Christmas break in the barn, but they didn’t really care.
I left them alone, which was a welcome break.
And if some of our choicest kitchen scraps didn’t make it to the chickens, and if I asked for a lot more beef-based meals than usual, well, they didn’t care about that either. I was happy—Nippy was the cutest pet ever, and he loved me. My parents were happy—I wasn’t complaining about anything, and I was spending more time outside. Everything was fine.
Until Dad caught me feeding Nippy the scraps I’d swiped out of the trash and lost his mind.
He shot him five minutes later.
When I wouldn’t stop crying, when I refused to speak to him, when I ran into my room and slammed the door, he didn’t yell. He didn’t bang on the door. He didn’t even apologize. He simply stood outside my door and said, “You can’t have a pet coyote. They’re killers. It would’ve eaten our chickens and been a drain on our resources.” In that moment, I wondered whether he saw me as a drain on his resources. But then he went one step further. “You’ve always been too soft.”
I wondered whether he thought Mom was too soft, and that’s why she couldn’t stop with the pills and the drinking.
That night was the first time my dad played the villain inmystory, and I still haven’t forgiven him for it. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can see it. He glared at me, tilted his head and then shook it, walked across the barn—Nippy trotting along trustingly at his heels—opened his safe and pulled out a gun, and then shot him in the head.
Right in front of me.
He made me clean up the mess, including burying Nippy’s body. I still can’t think about it without shaking. When I told my mom, she was clearly on some kind of binge, because she patted my back, said, ‘there there’ and ordered me a bunch of clothes I didn’t want.
“You’ll feel better when those arrive.” Her smile had been a little dull, and I realized later that she was totally high when we’d talked.
When I called Ethan shiny, I’m not sure he knew what I meant. I doubt someone like him can really understand what I mean when I say I’mnotshiny. He’s right, though, that I can’t really know what he’ll think about me unless I let him get to know me. But that’s the scariest part.
He likes me right now.
A very large part of me wants to keep it that way.
Messed up people can only end up with messed up people, right? There’s some kind of rule, I’m sure. Anyone who’s as bright and shiny as Ethan will surely run when he starts to see the truth of who my family really is. Knowing that someone like him likes the idea of me—that’s enough.
But I’m greedy at heart, just like my mother. As much as I want to saynoto more time with Ethan to preserve his impression of me, I can’t quite bring myself to do it. After the day I watched him eat two ground-sandwiches to spend time with me, he just texted me more. And every single text made me smile. Not a normal, lips-curling-upward kind of smile, either.
No, his texts made mebeam.
And I started looking at things a little differently.
I’ve always been in charge of photos for the yearbook, ever since my freshman year. My mom’s a photographer, and at first, I just tagged along when she had seminars. Then, around eight or nine, I started paying attention. Sometime after that, I realized that for my mom, the seminars were often a cover. Dad would relax when she was ‘working’ and he might not notice that she was high. Plus, in a new place, there were new doctors, and when she met with a new doctor, he would often write her a prescription for pills.
But even if Mom wasn’t paying attention to what was being taught, I was.
