As soon as we were old enough to be let out alone, we would go and sit in the rusted out car on the Adams Road. We were eleven by then and probably would have been let out earlier if it hadn’t been for those little girls murdered two towns away a few years before. They caught the guys that did it, but still our parents never got over it. The parents of our town were masters of not getting over things.
No-one knew who had driven that car off the road and into a fence-post. Our town was small enough that you could say for certain it wasn’t anyone local. Our town was miles from anywhere and on the way to nowhere so the car would have been cause for concern if there hadn’t been prayer beads hanging from the mirror and a plastic Virgin on the dashboard. Whoever was driving must have been someone like us. The car sat there for years before we claimed it as our own, the soil and the high grass slowly swallowing it.
We liked the car because it kept us off the ground, just out of reach of bugs that climbed up from the dry grass and across our skin. It shielded our eyes from the yellow dust that rose in gusts from the side of the road with passing trucks and wind. In the summers, the sun warmed its leather seats and, cocooned in it we could tell ourselves we were warmer than we really were in the tank tops and shorts we wore to cycle past the neighbourhood boys, the skate park, the garage that took on guys straight out of highschool. In the winters, we would bring blankets to wrap around the hand-me-down coats we pretended not to know were ugly and pile in all together on the back seat till the only sign that we were cold was the white mist of our breath and the frost sitting on the cracks of its windows. No-one else ever came out by the wreck, so it was always just ours.
It was in the car that Indy first told us about her powers, the things she could see that no-one else could. She said God spoke to her and gave her messages to give us. She said she saw angels and demons all around us, knew things we didn’t, saw the personal ghosts that trailed us.
We didn’t pay much mind at first, Indy was always telling lies. Before she had been a princess in hiding, a witch with secret powers, a shapeshifter. We’d always played along because there wasn’t much else to do around town, and Indy had an imagination good enough to make us forget sometimes that we didn’t believe her. This God story was new, probably came from her mom starting to go to church on account of her hot new Catholic boyfriend. We felt a bit old for this nonsense, but we were also at the age of turning ugly, of pimples and stretch marks and thin dark hairs under our arms and between our legs that made us leave our clothes on when we swam in the river. We were learning quick that we and the world were not as special as we’d hoped, or at least not in the way we’d hoped, and part of us wanted to hang on to that magic just a tiny bit longer. Besides, we thought, if Indy needed the attention so bad it wouldn't kill us to give it to her. We often overheard our parents talk about her home life, saying they’d pray for her.
So, when she told us all her stories we said “wow” and asked her questions. When she claimed to see the spirits move within us, we cried “We feel it! We do!”. When she told us she had been visited in a dream, we followed her on bikes past the wreck and up the rocky path to the grotto in the mountain. We claimed we saw the statue move, the lambs, the light, the son of God. We said “we cannot hear the voice, only you, Indy, who the Lord speaks to”. When she told her mother and the teachers and the black-clad priests in her mothers new church we had no choice but to agree, or reveal to her that we had never believed her in the first place. That would have been the same as saying we were more best friends with each other than we were with her, which was too cruel a thing to admit. We were also at an age where we would rather sell a fantasy than admit that we had played along with such a childish game. We wanted adults to take us seriously and were willing to take our chances.
We knew that it was wrong to lie just like we knew our parents didn’t believe us even though they badly wanted to. They drove us to the diocesan office and took us one-by-one to wood-clad rooms that smelt of polish and old carpet. We sat in leather chairs and answered questions about the vision, the bishop reminding us that lying was a sin as he made eye contact with other men over the tops of our heads. We didn’t get one wrong. We added in the details of the other times, the premonitions we could pretend in hindsight had come true, the way the centres of our palms and feet sometimes would tingle when Indy touched us, curing us of minor ills and cuts and bites. Bystanders backed us up, they had heard us tell these tall tales amongst ourselves in class and on the playground. The priests convened and nodded their heads, agreed that this could mean big things for the community. They spread the word. When the visiting clergy asked to speak to us we told them the same story. Then the pilgrims, then the TV crews.
We knew the game had gone too far. That it had slipped from our fingers and spilled like spoiled milk on a new carpet, leaving us suspended in the memory of the moment right before it fell, convinced that if we just thought hard enough we could go back in time to grip it that small bit tighter and spare the mess. But we couldn’t. When we weren’t stationed in Indy’s bedroom, we gathered in the wrecked car on the Adams Road and talked about what we should do. We had become part of the spectacle, a harem of pure white witnesses to this new virginal icon. But the visitors had started bringing money and with it, expectation. It was no longer just enough to look and have our Indy lay her hands on them, the people wanted more.
The day she told us she would fast, we all sighed in relief. She said the Lord had told her to when he visited in a dream. At last she seemed to see that we were close to getting caught, she knew she needed to do more for the people that used their paychecks to fill their cars to travel miles and line up in her shotgun hallway to see her. Trailing over the porch and down the street. Their savings clutched in hands black-lined in coal or hardened by labour, then dropped in the collection bucket that the parish representatives shook as they passed, reminding them that even that which came from God didn’t come for free. Her mothers eyes in the corner gleamed, matched the buttons on the brand new coat she’d bought to wear with the new dress, new boots, new hair-do. Her mother understood our pickle too, she counted the collection money each night. So Indy fasted.
It lasted almost four months. Indy grew thin, her bones stuck out and pimples rose on her newly furred skin. Her mother concealed what she could with makeup, but still she repelled us. We shivered at her cold, insistent touch, her broken yellow fingernails scratching at our skin. We recoiled from the sweet-rot smell of her breath, like the dust cloud in the wake of a garbage truck. The pilgrims claimed she healed their migraines, back pain, dusty lungs, that she brought prosperity to their farms and luck to their lives. The priest took daily prayers alone with Indy when even we were not allowed to enter. He drove a brand new truck. Despite how she disgusted us, we slept beside her every night and fed her blended concoctions through a straw, from bottles we concealed inside our nightshirts in case someone were to look in. But still she grew weaker.
Indy said “I can’t keep doing this” and we told her that she had to. Indy said “Fr. Peter says…” and we shushed her. Indy said “Can we tell them?” and we told her it was all of us who told a lie and all of us would suffer. We told her we wouldn’t be her friends if she told, and she went quiet for a while, until her teeth grew looser and her hair came out and then she asked again.
We gathered in our car wreck and decided what to do. We had insisted so many times, to teachers and clergy and the sheriff. Our parents were so proud that we were part of something special. The other kids at school were circling us, jealous and sniffing for weakness. The truth just couldn’t come out, we had to make a plan. We struggled with it, worked it over in our heads, but in the end we all agreed, this was the way it had to be.
That day Indy slept, because we hadn’t brought her our concoctions in a while. We told her mother and the priest that she had asked to be alone tonight, because she felt that something was about to happen. We went home and up to our bedrooms, brushed our teeth and went to bed and when we heard our parents climb the stairs and settle in with groans and creaks of the floors and their old bed frames, we rose again. We met out by the car wreck and took stock of our inventory. We crossed the dry grass fields right up to the back of Indys house and jittered up her window that we knew from years of sleepovers didn’t lock. Climbed inside. We don’t know if she woke up when we pulled the pillow from beneath her head, we didn’t want to see her face. We circled round her body taking turns holding her arms, her legs, the pillow, for as long as the library computer had advised us it would take, plus five minutes more for good measure. It was better this way because none of us would get tired. And we would never know which of us had done it, it would always be us all. Before we left we placed the bible beneath her hands and feet and drove a nail through each, puncturing the soft skin and pushing past the resistance that lay beneath it till it reached the other side. When we pulled the nails back out the smallest drops of blood ran from the wound, thick-black in the dark. We shone a hunting torch for twenty seconds out the window, so any neighbours praying towards the house could say they saw a bright white light on the night their almost-saint had died. Then we went home and slept.
We woke up early the next morning, made sure to set alarms on the plastic character clocks we kept beneath our pillows, so we could be up before our parents worked up the courage to come and wake us with the news. We tripped down to our kitchens telling them what a strange dream we’d had last night, where Indy came to us with blood on her palms and spoke to us. Our parents gasped and cried, dropped their coffee mugs that didn’t break against the lino, turned pale, then spoke. They told us of her cold, white body, the stigmata crusted in her child's hands, they called the priest. We played the part as best we could, wept and held hands in black along her graveside, crying real tears. People were so kind to us, some hopeful we’d inherited whatever powers had taken Indy, but we hadn’t. The glory died with her.
As we grew older we would think in our own private moments of how lucky we had been. Lucky that Indy’s mother didn’t love her more. Lucky that the coroner saw nothing in this world beyond whiskey and Jesus. Lucky that no-one cared about our backwards, dusty town or our strange, lonely friend. All they cared about was hope and mystery and there was more of that in the death of a girl than the slow decline of one whose touch no longer cleared their warts or saved their crop. We had thought we were such clever, clever girls, but really we were just discardable.
For years we stayed coming to our car wreck on the Adams Road, just meeting up, then smoking, then drinking. Throughout our teens we drifted in and out, pulled away by older boyfriends or new friend groups or jobs to save for colleges whose acceptance letters never arrived. But we always came floating back to each other. We never spoke about what happened. We let it blend with all the other symptoms of the psychosis of adolescence, the other deranged things we did that were excused because everyone knew teenage girls were a little unhinged, but harmless. At times we could believe it hadn’t really happened at all.
But other times it sat with us in the car, in the weight of the air when we fell silent. In the way we often picked up branches or glass or the corkscrew end of our bottle openers and worked them absently against the soft centres of our palms, broke skin. The way we let the blood well, then pause, then run down our hand, drip drip dripping through the rusted out bottom of the wreck and landing on the grass below.
