Normally, it wasn’t a difficult walk home. Boredom and heat and dust. That’s what Charlotte had been telling her mom since she was nine. Back then, it had been home. Not Mom’s house or Dad’s on weekends. Back then, she’d bike home, listen to the click-clacking rain of plastic beads sliding down the spokes when she slowed. Back then, Jason might’ve walked with her instead of sweating it out at practice, hoping for a scholarship. Back then, she’d be home already.

This time, Charlotte was only a few blocks away from Mom’s house when a battered white truck, a Tacoma or something, slowed, grinding dirt and rocks into the asphalt, and turned off Adobe and onto White Sands Road.

Charlotte’s bike was in Dad’s garage, leaning next to his company van. So she could “enjoy” it on weekends, like all the nice stuff he took with him, just not her or Jason. Mom had been promising to buy her a Razor scooter all summer. 

Mom would’ve recognized the white Tacoma as an early 2000s model, known the exact year by the daytime running lights. She used to be a mechanic before she started teaching auto-tech at Copper Mountain community college. She met Dad when he took one of his HVAC trucks into the shop.

Charlotte hated asking about the scooter, about anything. She could wait until she turned twelve in November. Anyway, Jason still needed new baseball cleats and his glove was starting to wear. His coach kept saying that San Diego State had expressed some interest. A scout was supposed to stop by practice sometime. Dad said his coach was an idiot for not getting somebody out there sooner. She could tell that Jason didn’t think his coach was an idiot, but that’s how it was with Dad. Like he said, “You’re either an idiot, or you’re not. Most people are.” Mom said that was an idiot thing to say.

Charlotte wasn’t thinking about any of that on her walk home. She was thinking about putting an engine in one of those recycling bins so she could ride it the rest of the way. It’d be like those motorized coolers the mascots rode during halftime at Jason’s games. She toed a rock out of the dust and side-armed it into a bin that was tipped up on a prickly pear. 

Charlotte was pretty sure her motorized recycling bin idea fell into Dad’s “idiot” category, so she picked up another rock and winged it at a trash can. She wiped her hand on the leg of her shorts, her favorites, dull red outside, a little baggy at each leg. She liked how they set her apart from the other girls in her class. Secretly, she liked the swish of their silver-colored lining against her legs, the backs of her thighs. 

Maybe that’s what caught the driver’s eye, a flash of silver and leg in the California sun.

“Hey! You, girl! Your dad home?” 

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t really thought he was talking to her at first. It wasn’t until she heard the, “You, girl!” that she felt her spine yank tight. Her guts twisted and thrashed as though they’d suddenly become unhinged, violent like the baby gopher snake her dad brought home from a jobsite one Christmas. He told Mom that he’d gotten her a fresh pair of boots, tilting the Tupperware container so we could all hear the scratch and slide of scales inside. Mom told him to keep the damn thing out of the house. Jason just settled back to the couch and the TV, but Dad held the snake still for Charlotte, gripping the tail and pinching its head while she rubbed a finger along its back, feeling the ridges, the rough and smooth of it.

They’d let the snake go, driven it a few miles out of town that night and tipped it out in the scrub brush off the side of the road. A few months later, she’d found a dry skin wrapped around some small rocks in their yard. Jason said there was no way it could be from the same snake. He said it wasn’t even the right size. Still, she’d torn off a piece and shuffled it in with all the old movie tickets she kept in a little wooden box in her nightstand, a memory to rub between her fingers when she was supposed to be cleaning her room in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

The driver had flecks of silver hair along his jawline, one greased strand fell from behind his ear to curl under his right eye when he leaned across the console toward the open window. There was a car seat behind him, just like the one her mom used to put her in when they drove to see Grampa in the city. She and Jason would try to spot different car models from the backseat: Altima, Camry, Jetta. Mom weighed in as the judge if there was a dispute. She glanced back up into the man’s face, his pupils dark black and open wide. She looked back at her feet, pretended she hadn’t heard.

Her dad wasn’t home. He certainly wasn’t at her mom’s house. No one was home there, not even her. Before he moved out, Dad would sometimes pick Charlotte up or they’d hang around the bleachers watching Jason practice and listening to the ring of aluminum. Jason got home from practice a few hours after she did, but everyone had been fine with the idea of her walking the half-mile home from school. Mom had been more concerned about the fact that Charlotte would have to cross a busy road like Adobe than she was about the walk itself. Twentynine Palms wasn’t that busy, especially before the tourists came streaming back into Joshua Tree. 

“I’m a friend of his. Your dad’s. He home?” The truck crept along, slowing even further once it pulled up right next to her. The man swiveled his head up the road and scratched at the side of his face before turning back to her. She followed his eyes up the empty street, the only movement, a garden pinwheel turning in the sluggish breeze.

Between A/C repair and coaching tee ball, her dad knew almost everyone in town. At least, that’s how it seemed to her. Even when it was just them and Jason at Arturo’s, there was always somebody knocking a fist on the top of the booth and stopping to talk. How’s business? How’s the little baseball star? And your little princess here? Still causing trouble? Takes after her mother? No, no, I don’t want to interrupt your meal, just saying, “Hi.”

Had this guy stopped by their booth before? Is that how he recognized her? Was it her shorts, rolled up along the waist because they were a little too long? Is that why he stopped? Like everything she owned, they were a hand-me-down from Jason.

She sped up, still half-pretending she hadn’t heard though she’d looked straight at him. She was looking straight down at her toes so the truck was just barely visible from the corner of one eye.

“C’mon, Princess, don’t be rude. I asked you somethin’!”

At that, she pulled up short, feeling like a giant hand had pinched behind her neck and held her there, twitching. She looked over, looked fully at him as if she didn’t have a choice in it. He had one arm curled through the top of the steering wheel. There was a crumpled McDonald’s bag crammed into the corner between the window and the dash. She thought about how her dad smiled whenever she introduced herself to one of his friends, how he’d taught her to make a firm grip around their calloused hands and say, “I’m Charlotte. Can I interest you in any air conditioning products today?”

Dad would wink. “Not a princess, a born saleswoman, this one. Better watch out.”

He never taught Jason to do that. They would spend hours doing hitting drills and lifting weights, but he never had Jason introduce himself like that, just her. 

“There ya go. Your dad’ll be mad if I can’t meet up with him.” The man in the truck smiled at her, recognizing that her attention was finally on him.

“Sorry,” she said, “my dad’s not home.” She strangled the foam of the backpack straps against her palms, hating that she sounded nothing like herself. She felt a dry itch at her shoulder blades, the feeling of skin pulled tight to cracking across her back. Feeling that tightening, that swell of herself beneath her skin, she begged inside her head. Please. Please.

“Yeah?” He flicked the curl of hair away from his eye with one thumb, but didn’t look particularly disappointed at the news that her father wasn’t around.

“My older brother’s waiting for me though, so I better get going. He’s uh…he’s in the Marines, but he’s back for now.” She shoved the lie out in a rush. His gaze was flat and black, digging at her and making that itch between her shoulders go sharp.

 “Yeah, ‘course. Can’t leave him waiting.”

Rather than releasing her, his agreement left her feeling more pinned, less sure. Did he really just need to talk to her dad?

“Well, here. You’re a responsible girl, right?” He paused and looked over the inside of the cab, dug around and grabbed an envelope from under the McDonald’s bag, seemingly at random. He jabbed it toward the open window and waited.

Idiot, she mentally hissed, but she’d already taken a step toward the truck. You, Charlotte, are an idiot. She heard it just the way Dad would say it, but it was Jason’s voice this time, not Dad’s, so real that she looked behind her, thinking he’d left practice early.

It was her momentum that carried her close to the truck window. There was a viper-quick movement out of the corner of her eye and then the man had her hand in both of his, worn palm stuck to the back of her hand with sweat. He squeezed her knuckles to grinding, crinkling the envelope against her fingers. She was a thing, trapped and thrashing. She thought of that snake her dad brought home, the way it had curled and hissed while she held the Tupperware tight in her lap, the lights of town fading to black desert as he drove.

The man yanked her arm and her ribs banged against the passenger door, the handle digging into them. The guy was laughing. With her other arm, she shoved against the side of the window, jerking and trying to pull herself away. Scream, she thought, you should be screaming, but she kept on grunting and tugging at her trapped fingers, her eyes rolling up and down the empty street. She felt the man kiss the back of her hand, a dry press of lips and stubble that scratched and ripped her open. It didn’t seem in her nature to scream. Would Jason scream? Would Dad? The panicked itch spread from between her shoulder blades and burned across her whole body and into the tips of her fingers.

She flew back, loose and free with a shock of a world defined by before and after, a world of what-ifs. The envelope flew free with her, launched into the air with her hand, and tumbled back into the dirt next to the road. 

“Easy. Easy. Just a joke.” The man was still laughing, low hacking chuckles from the back of his throat. He rubbed the fingers of his hand together like he was remembering the touch. “As firm a grip as ever. Definitely a born saleswoman. Make sure you give that check to your dad.”

She didn’t say anything. Whatever he was saying didn’t make sense. Charlotte couldn’t process it. She was shaking. It was as if she’d kept thrashing, only now the thrashing was deep within her. She found herself backing away from the truck. She stepped on the envelope then picked it up as the man nodded, encouraging. 

Gripping the envelope in a fist, she took one step, two, started to run. The truck stayed put, even when she turned the corner. She didn’t look back long enough to see any more than that, but she imagined the man sitting there, groping the steering wheel and smiling to himself.

She swiveled her head up and down the street in front of their house before walking up the concrete path, climbing the stairs, and flinging the screen door open so she could unlock the front door and slip inside. She locked it behind her and leaned back against the wood, waited for its sturdiness to seep into her, hold her up.

Instead, she again felt that dry itch at her shoulder blades. It swept through her, all of her, and she fell to her knees, unable to even make it to her bedroom. She hugged herself, trying to scratch at her back. This itch, this one last thing, after the walk home and the truck and the man, was too much to bear. Still on her knees, she folded forward, mounding herself on the mat next to her brother’s flip flops and her mom’s nice boots.

She felt it then, a crack and pop of relief, like the pressure of a button finally snapping. She felt a slice of cold air on fresh skin travel along her spine. She tugged at one sleeve of her shirt, then the other, carefully slipping out of her clothes before hugging herself again and feeling the papered edge of skin that had pulled loose along her spine, still not perfectly dry, a pliable husk. Like pulling off a backwards jacket, she held one edge of skin and pressed herself up through the crack, pulling back a shoulder, yanking free an arm, ducking her head and feeling the split travel along the back of her neck. Charlotte felt the skin beneath pull taut, the sharp release of the top layer coming loose. She hissed at the moments it stuck and drew blood. She felt it peel and tug at the curve of her hair as the mask of her face pulled loose from her eyes, her cheeks. The skin from her right hand was already gone and she thought back to the man in the truck rubbing something between his fingers as she backed away. Her new skin wasn’t bright and shining and pink, but marked and bleeding in the spots where she’d pulled too hard, as if the new layer was tender, already scratched by the nail-grip of the world’s desire. 

When she was done, she crunched the drying husk of herself into a pile, still mostly in one piece except for one leg and the shells of her fingers on her left hand. 

She grabbed her clothes and her backpack and tossed them into her room before getting a broom and a garbage bag from the kitchen closet. She thought about the lines of the man’s face, the dust coating his truck, what she should’ve said. She stuffed the shed skin into the garbage bag then swept up the flaked-off pieces.

When Jason got home, she was sprawled on the couch, a Dodgers game on in the background while she worked on geometry homework.

“What’d I miss?” he asked, dropping his practice bag onto the floor with the sound of aluminum bats ringing against one another.

“A few ground outs, weak pitching on both sides. Nothing spectacular.” She felt like she should have to fake the normal tone, but it came naturally to her, to this other self that she was now. Back at the truck, it had felt like her heart was punching at her breastbone, like there was acid in her throat.

“You alright?” he asked. “You’re bleeding.” He pointed to a spot halfway down the swell of his bicep. Looking at her own arm, Charlotte saw a sharp line of blood a quarter inch long.

“Yeah. Fine.” She grabbed a takeout napkin from the end table and held it to her arm.

Jason sat down and they watched a few more innings before Mom came home and set some water to boil while they washed up and set the table.

That weekend, while her dad was playing catch with Jason, Charlotte left the check and the envelope on the kitchen table, like someone had brought it in with the mail. Afterward, she went into her room and laid on her bed, staring at her palms. Something itched behind one ear. Scratching, she felt a papery crunch against her nail and went still. After a breath, she traced a finger along the curve of her ear, found the edge and pinched. Pulling the bit of skin free from its tangle of stray hairs, she saw it was a small thing: a scab—shaped almost like an outstretched wing. Charlotte held it, let it glow red, pierced by the evening sun. With one hand, she pulled open the drawer of her nightstand and, flipping up the lid on the wooden box, dug through the movie tickets until she felt the rough crackle of the old snakeskin. When Dad sent Jason to ask if she was getting up for dinner, she just rolled over and kept rubbing the two scraps of skin between her fingers, feeling the ridges, the rough and the smooth.