What Cannot Be Cured Must Be Endured

by Elisabeth Ring

They say if you take the old scarecrow out back, jam some old leaves in there to make up for some of the straw that’s fallen out, and put a jack-o-lantern on the shoulders where the head used to be, you can make it almost as good as new. And then, if you get the old pill bottle filled with your baby teeth out of your mom’s dresser drawer and shove the tiny white contents into the jack-o-lantern’s wide grin, you can make it come alive.

It won’t walk fast, but it can walk on its own, and in a town this small, walking’s fine. Because the post-Harvest Ball party is at the McKenzies’ house, and that’s less than a mile away. If you listen close, you can almost hear the rest of the sophomore class, and a few juniors, too, laughing and cheering and generally having a great time at the not-so-secret party that you weren’t invited to, after the dance that you never expected to be asked to but were. Sort of.

Hear that one laugh booming over the others? That’s Ryan Franklin, you know that’s Ryan Franklin, and he’s probably still laughing, will probably always be laughing, about how he made you think, for over a week, that you were worthy of being included.

Going to the dance required a date, and since the party is after the dance and everyone would be there with their dates, it would have been weird for you to just be there alone. That’s what Vanessa Schmidt said when you asked about coming to the party anyway. She had been the only one with the decency to look ashamed while everyone else was laughing at you, after Ryan Franklin had revealed the punchline—that you, and your gullibility, were the punchline. But she clearly didn’t feel bad enough about the whole thing to make her boyfriend, Elliot McKenzie, let you come to the party by yourself.

The scarecrow, seven feet tall and maybe a little lumpy where you didn’t get the leaves distributed right, can be your date for tonight. They can’t possibly keep you out of the party now.

They say home is where the heart is, but high school has taught you that this place is more about heartbreak. Like no one wanting to play with you in elementary school or the Little League coach sticking you out in right field while letting Amy-Jo Hanson, who was not at all better than you at catching or throwing or tagging but was the coach’s niece, play shortstop.

People talk about small-town hospitality and how close-knit everyone is in places like this, but what they leave out is how easy it is to be an outsider from that closeness. You got here when you were in the first grade, but that means nothing compared to everyone who’s known each other since diapers, who see each other at family reunions, whose last names litter the cemetery. They cling together, everyone in on the same joke but you. Your family isn’t the only one in town that’s moved here this millennium, and maybe you would have been uncool wherever you lived, but everything is so insular here that it hurts just that much extra.

But you’ve been trying so hard to change that. You’ve mowed lawns the last four summers to earn money so you can buy the right clothes. You’ve been trying to work your way into the fringes of their groups by taking the right classes and sitting in the right spot at lunch and letting people copy your notes—and, fine, your assignments—all to show them that you’re great! You’re cool! Aren’t you someone worth being friends with, let alone talking to? It was working, or you thought it was working, because Vanessa was getting really friendly with you in biology, and Elliot and Ryan have been talking to you almost every day in algebra for weeks. Amy-Jo and her sister Sarah let you sit next to them at lunch the other day.

Maybe that’s why it didn’t feel fake when Ryan kept very strongly hinting that he was going to ask you to the Harvest Ball, all like, “I can’t believe no one’s asked you to the Ball yet,” and “What do you think would be a better date for a dance, Italian and a limo ride, or steak and a horse-drawn carriage?” Maybe it felt like the culmination of all your efforts. Like you earned this. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much when he came over the intercom (because his dad’s the assistant principal) and went on about the girl he wanted to ask being someone he’s known for a long time and how amazing she has always been but he didn’t ever see it until now—and then asked Hayley McKenzie, who’s just a freshman. The laughter that tittered through the biology classroom because everyone knew what he’d been saying to you, everyone knew that you were waiting for it, was just the icing on the cake.

Yet here, beside you, is a date nonetheless. His eyes are shining bright with a fire you didn’t light. He grins at you with your own teeth. He doesn’t seem to be able to speak, and the face you cut for him is a little lopsided, but other than that, he’s not bad. The last few trick-or-treaters lingering on the sidewalks barely even notice you. You’re used to not being noticed. But that’s going to change tonight.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, and that’s fitting because by the time you turn onto the McKenzies’ street your fingers hurt and your nose is numb and you can’t even feel your toes, but it’s hard to say if that’s because of the cold or the fact that you’re doing all this in four-inch heels and the formal dress you went into the city to buy when you thought you were going to the dance. The skirt is dragging in the dirt. The “shawl” that came with the dress, in matching spangled silvery satin, is woefully inadequate for the night’s chill. Your feet were unprepared for walking almost a mile in these strappy heels, and you’re pretty sure a blister or two has already popped. You are Cinderella, minus the fairy godmother and the musical mice. Your magical pumpkin has taken another form.

Beside you, your silent Prince Charming lopes along, leaving behind him a trail of straw and leaves. He’s wearing one of your mom’s old button-ups, the denim worn threadbare in the elbows, and the jeans were a pair of your dad’s that are more patch than pant at this point. Your mom had originally added a pair of your old work boots as shoes, back when your scarecrow-thing was just a scarecrow, but they kept flopping and dragging, so you finally took them off and tied them around his neck. Your parents didn’t seem concerned about you when you left, possibly because you told them you were going to the ball with a bunch of kids from school, and possibly because they didn’t notice the living scarecrow waiting for you in the driveway.

You’re still not sure what you’ll do when you get there. You saw Carrie on TV a while ago when your parents were out. That kind of retribution was horrifying to watch, and you’re not exactly dripping with pig’s blood yourself, but you can’t deny you’ve thought about sending the scarecrow-thing after your so-called friends. He’d do it, this scarecrow-thing. (Jack; he has to have a name.) You can feel the potential radiating from him as a tug on your chest and an uncanny awareness of your gums. You’re not sure if he’ll do whatever you say, or whatever you want. You’re not sure, either, what you want or what you’ll say.

It’s a little scary, still not knowing as you stand in front of the house, but it’s also exhilarating. You can hear music playing under the ebullience coming from the back, laughing and happy screaming and a sppftz from a can of something probably alcoholic, though you might have imagined that last one. They don’t know you’re here. They don’t know that everything could change with a snap of your fingers. The chickens have come home to roost, as the saying goes, and the kids back there don’t realize they are in the henhouse and you are the fox of this mixed metaphor. When you glance at Jack, it seems the fire in his carved-out eyes is burning brighter than ever.

It’s burning brighter inside you, too, as you think of how Ryan always leaned so close that you could practically taste his cinnamon gum on your tongue. How you saw him at Hanson’s Grocery and you waved and he looked very intently at the gallon of milk in his hand. How Amy-Jo and Sarah let you sit by them, but they didn’t actually talk to you. Vanessa didn’t talk to you in biology, either, until the first test of the year that she bombed and you aced. How it was right after that that Elliot and Ryan randomly started talking to you in algebra. How stupid you were to think they wanted anything from you but your homework.

Jack is glowing like a streetlamp now, bright enough that you can see the limo parked down the street a little. (Did Ryan and Hayley enjoy their Italian?) Jack’s rage feels good in your chest. But there’s this one inconvenient memory that also pops up.

They say time heals all wounds, which cannot possibly be true, but that’s what your mom said with a shrug that one time when she ran into one of her old bullies back in her hometown. It wasn’t a lot different than this place, in a different state. You’d all gone back for a funeral for your mom’s uncle four, five years ago. One of the workers at the mortuary had looked at your mom sheepishly, then waved quickly and excused himself. You’d asked what that was all about. Your mom had been quiet for a few long seconds.

Then, she said, “He used to give me a hard time in high school.”

That was long enough back that you hadn’t known what it was like to be given a hard time in high school. The cruelty you experienced on the playground had been sharp and cold, but everyone was mean to everyone, sometimes, and it didn’t feel so personal as what you deal with now. Still, you did know cruelty, and you didn’t understand how your mom could stand there, unchanged. Maybe you asked her that, and maybe you made a joke about going to beat him up; you can’t remember which.

You just remember her saying, “It’s okay. That was a long time ago.” And then the shrug, and the adage.

Your mom doesn’t know about what happens at school, and definitely not about why you have no date to the ball you spent half of your remaining lawn-mowing money buying a dress for. You wonder what she’d say—probably something about waiting it out, blah blah, college, blah, high school is just a blip in the grand scheme of things. That might all be true, but it doesn’t change how much it hurts now. It doesn’t change how much it feels like forever.

Jack steps toward the house. Even though his straw feet aren’t on fire, they leave blackened holes in the dormant lawn. He’s right. Take care of this, take care of all the people making life miserable, and then worry about what comes after.

Something will come after, though. How did Carrie end? Your parents came home before you could find out. Something else always comes after, unless it doesn’t, and no matter how much like forever high school hell feels like, you’re not prepared to die over it. If you don’t die, it’s not like you can hide the fact that you’re at a party you aren’t supposed to be at with some demonic scarecrow tearing the place up. You’re going to get in trouble, so much trouble, and be even more of a pariah than you already were.

Unless you kill them.

Which you’re definitely not going to do, and you’re not sure you want to know if that idea came from you or Jack. He’s still making slow, dragging strides, heading toward the driveway that leads around the back of the house. The party noises haven’t stopped; they don’t notice anything’s wrong. It would probably be unreasonable for them to expect this, or guess why little patches of the McKenzies’ lawn are smoldering.

“No,” you say. “Jack. No. Come back.”

Giving up isn’t a choice that you make so much as not wanting to make a different decision. Jack doesn’t stop, though, and you know now that he doesn’t do what you say but what you want deep down.

They say as you sow, so shall you reap. The archaic words echo in your head as you pick up your skirt and run after Jack. He’s not moving very fast, but in these shoes, neither are you.

“Jack,” you hiss-yell as you go, which does nothing except potentially give something for the party-goers to hear.

Jack is rounding the front corner of the house. In the glow of lights on the back patio, you can see the frilled trains of two skirts, and you hope you don’t have to get close enough to see who’s wearing them. You catch Jack by the arm, and gasp—he’s blazing hot to the touch, even though the straw and the denim sleeve is fine. Whatever magic lets him burn without the straw and denim catching fire doesn’t extend to you. You imagine your palms as the McKenzies’ grass, all blackened and smoking, but the alternative is letting Jack go.

You can’t keep holding on, though. Your shawl, flimsy and useless as it has been, finally has its moment, and you wrap it around your hands like gloves. That just makes the polyester melt onto your already-injured palms. This new pain brings a yelp from your lips, but there’s no time to wait and see if anyone heard because Jack is still moving forward. You take up the shawl again and this time loop it around his head, right by the boots. You can knock his pumpkin head off, you think, and separate the magic from his body. Even though you didn’t secure it with anything, just set it on top of the straw shoulders, it doesn’t budge. The shawl keeps moving down, and you catch his waist instead.

You pull. The shawl holds. Jack stops moving.

You haul him back, your thin heels aerating the McKenzies’ poor lawn. You stumble when the damp earth refuses to let go of one shoe, but these are cheap shoes and the strap that has blistered your heel now snaps against the pressure. That’s enough to wrest it from the dirt, and from your foot at the same time, and now you limp and pull and stumble back toward the road.

Jack’s body is still facing the house and the driveway and the party beyond it, but he turns his head on his shoulders like an owl to look at you. The flickering light gleams in his eyes and your teeth in his mouth are silhouetted so they look like tiny headstones. By the pull in your chest and the tickle in your gums, you know he is not angry, but pleading with you.

Let me do this. Let us do this.

For a moment, you are tempted. The hurt from so many bad years does sting, and you’ve still got years of high school ahead of you. But then you shake your head and pull the shawl again.

He goes down, even though you didn’t pull that hard. Maybe he was still following your will to the end, and your will gave out.

They say all things must pass. They say good things come to those who wait.

“They” clearly weren’t picked on in high school. But maybe they were still right. It’s worth waiting to see, isn’t it?

You shake as much of the straw and leaves from the pants as you can before you slip them on under your skirt. They’re huge and stray straw bits poke you immediately in rather delicate areas, but you use what’s left of the shawl as a makeshift belt around the outside of the pants. The shirt you unbutton that and shake it out like a flag, though plenty of straw bits remain there, too. You stuff your feet in the boots. They’re way too small, but it’s better than walking barefoot, or in those heels. You retrieve the broken one, and nudge the grass it ripped up into place the best you can.

There’s still a faint glow in the pumpkin, but it dims with every tooth you pry out of its grinning mouth. Instead of rage, it radiates sorrow, and you’re crying, too, by the time you pick out the last incisor. It feels truer in your chest and in your gums and every other part of you, this being sad, than your rage did. And then, you have only a dark and hollowed-out pumpkin, a handful of old teeth, some scratchy clothes, and a pile of straw and leaves. You stuff as much of the straw into the pumpkin it will hold, and scatter the rest.

In the backyard of the McKenzies’ house, there is still music and laughter. The limo has been swallowed by the darkness. Between the pumpkin and your heels, your arms are full for the long walk home. You are unnoticed, always unnoticed. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it brings distance from them, and every painful step now takes you a little farther away from revenge.

Host Commentary

The thing I like best about this story is how well it handles the protagonist’s need for revenge. In fiction, high school bullies are an excellent target for the full fury of a magical monstrosity, hell bent on revenge. Depending on the genre, that act of revenge may or may not come about, but neither of the obvious outcomes are satisfying.  A violent act dehumanises, while magnanimous forgiveness is a different kind of negation, one that silences and glosses over our suffering. In this story, there is no shred of doubt for me that no-one gets an easy forgiveness, and the protagonist will have neither friendship nor justice by walking away from her revenge. It’s a sad piece, in that, but it’s also hopeful. It does get better, step, by step, by step.