The morning sun was gentle. Kelsey Lou’d had the good sense to wake up and get to tending the garden before Ma could holler at her ’bout it. The birds were just waking up, singing to let their partners and friends know they’d survived another dark night of uncertainty.

Upstairs, Karly Lynn was just waking up, too. She’d slept a startlingly long time after going to bed early without supper the evening before. When Ma had asked, Karly Lynn just said it was “that time of the month,” and no further questions were asked. Ma dismissed her growing young lady from the table to spend most of the evening in the bathroom feeling sick.

Kelsey Lou had questions, though, as she pulled weeds from between the rows of vegetables and beans, intermixed to hold nitrogen in the roots just right. What was really going on? The reason Karly Lynn knew she was pregnant was that she hadn’t been having periods. Why would she say she’s having one now? Morning sickness? Would it be like this every day for the next six months? Sometime or other, Ma was gonna have to know. Kelsey Lou couldn’t have asked in front of Ma just yet, though, so she waited now for her sister this morning, pulling weeds in the plain sight of God.

“You got big plans for Spring Break?” An obnoxious, Southern tenor yelled, comin’ up the drive toward the garden on foot.

“Junior,” Kelsey Lou sighed with a roll of the eyes so heavy it coulda knocked down a bowling pin. She didn’t have to answer him. She could just pretend not to have heard him. She could keep weeding, minding her own work, and not give Junior the time of day.

“Awww, come oooooon now, Kelsey Lou Faye Farmer!” Junior hollered, kickin’ his Justins in the dirt to scuff up some dust. “We got a whole week off from school, and best you got fer me ain’t even a ‘Why hello, Junior. Mighty pleasant to see you today‘?”

Junior threw his arms up like an umpire had just denied him the score of his lifetime, and said to his imaginary version of Kelsey Lou, as if she herself were not mere feet from him, there in the flesh: “Why, Miss Farmer, thank you so kindly for askin’. It’s just a lovely mornin’ out, and I’m ever so grateful for your invitation to come work in the garden with ya today. Mighty obliged I get to be of service to such a fine young woman as yourself.”

Kelsey Lou felt as stunned and perplexed as she was curious. What trap had she just wandered into — and how could she have been the one to wander into it, when Junior was the one wanderin’ into her garden, at her home?

“What are you doing here, Junior?” Kelsey Lou reluctantly asked.

“Makin’ good on a debt to a friend,” Junior answered. “Three hours of labor in the garden to pay for the history homework you let him have a look at.”

Dear God almighty, Kelsey Lou thought. This is why I can’t date anyone. They are all insufferable buffoons. Every. Last. One of them.

“That wasn’t the deal,” Kelsey Lou responded bitterly. “Samuel Bybee needs to pay his own debts like he agreed. I said ‘weekend,’ and I didn’t ask for nobody else to come in his place. Today is a Monday, and you ain’t the same sack of shit he is.”

“Aww, you tryin’ to flatter me with your pertty compliments now, huh?” Junior laughed, reaching his hand uninvited to brush Kelsey Lou’s cheek. She retracted and swatted at him with the trowel in her hand.

“You’re a different sack of shit, Junior. At least I gave Bybee a chance to become fertilizer with his,” she answered. “You can’t pay this debt for him. It’s his, and his alone.”

“Maybe it started out his debt alone,” but it stopped bein’ his alone when he let me copy the same answers you gave him,” he admitted with an aggressive wink and a spit of the wintermint-smellin’ dip cloggin’ up his lower lip. “Thanks for the ‘A,’ professor.”

Yonder up the porch a ways, Karly Lynn ambled easy out the house to find her sister. She was feeling better, but she wasn’t sure what “better” meant, under the circumstances. Seeing Junior was standin’ awful close to Kelsey Lou in the garden gave Karly Lynn the same startle as a copperhead too near. She didn’t mind him so much herself, but her older sister was repulsed by Junior Jackson, and there wasn’t nothin’ decent could be happenin’ ‘tween the two of ’em this early in the day all alone.

“Thanks for stoppin’ by, Junior,” Kelsey Lou said, turning her attention toward her younger sister approaching the garden. “Don’t let the donkey kick ya on the way out.”

Junior ignored the advice and waved to little miss Karly Lynn. Polite as always, she waved right back.

How many times do I have to tell you, Kelsey Lou thought, do not be polite to men who make you feel creepy. Just don’t even be polite to them. Don’t wave. Don’t smile. Don’t move aside for them. Don’t light their cigarettes. It’s a game for them, and you’re the prize, Kelsey Lou wanted so urgently to say. She knew she couldn’t, though. Might as well kick the copperhead right in the face, to do that. She did not want her sister giving herself over like a won-and-claimed prize to a man-child who thought basic respect was a game in the first place.

“See?” Junior smiled, gesturing toward Karly Lynn as he addressed Kelsey Lou. “Even your kid sister knows how to be civil toward a guest. Shows a smile. Why cain’t you be more like her? I walked all the way out here to help you with your garden, and this is the thanks you give me for my selflessness? Tellin’ me off like I don’t even matter? “

Whatever she had walked into, like a copperhead nest, Karly Lynn didn’t see any good way to walk herself right back out of it.

“I need to spend time with my sister this morning, Junior,” Kelsey Lou stated with a matter-of-factness that about straightened Junior right up. “You can go wherever you’d like, except here.”

Both girls released a sigh of relief when Junior nodded with sharp understanding. He tipped his hat to be on his way, and wished them well.

Then, he walked right up onto their porch and sat himself down in the kitchen to have breakfast with Ma. The kitchen, after all, was a place that wasn’t the garden.

“No!” Karly Lynn shrieked as he neared the porch. It was too late. By the time the girls knew where he was headed, they couldn’t stop him.

“He can’t!” the younger sister urged, looking at Kelsey Lou for direction. How could they stop him? How could they — anything?

“Look,” Kelsey Lou said, bending back down with her trowel and jamming it into the ground like it was Samuel Bybee’s spleen. “You can control what you can control, and boys ain’t somethin’ you can control. Best you can do is not let them control you.”

“So you’re just gonna let him go sit inside our house and say whatever to Ma?” Karly Lynn probed.

“That’s ‘tween them. I take the bait, I’m playin’ his game then. Life’s too short to play games like his. I’m here for the long win,” Kelsey Lou answered. “I want you to be in it for the long win, too. Gotta learn to control yourself in the ways he obviously ain’t learned how. The best way to never be an asshole like him is to be fully and completely true to your own heart and self.

“Do you even like boys?” Karly Lynn asked, seemingly out of nowhere.

Getting no reply, little sister tried again. “You ever had sex?”

Kelsey Lou thought about the question a full ten seconds before deciding to answer her sister.

“I wouldn’t really call it that.”

Karly Lynn’s raised eyebrows waited for the rest of the answer with a nudge of the head. Kelsey Lou didn’t particularly want to answer. She also didn’t particularly want her baby sister to be pregnant. What she wanted didn’t seem to matter a whole lot right this moment.

“I was your age,” Kelsey Lou said. “He screamed at me a lot, was real demanding. I broke up with him in October of seventh grade, but a few days later, he showed up at the house with roses and chocolate.”

“I remember that!”

“Ma told me to stop being such a bitch and give him another chance. I told her he wasn’t good for me, didn’t make me feel good. She said he was still young and learning, and ‘boys don’t start out perfect, you gotta make ‘em that way.’ I took my first pregnancy test by the end of December that year.”

Karly Lynn gasped. “Did she know?” she asked.

“I wasn’t as smart as you,” Kelsey Lou chuckled. “I just asked her for a pregnancy test outright. That’s why they took my door off the hinges. Tried to make me go volunteer at an anti-abortion clinic, but the clinic said I was too young to be volunteering. Policy.”

“Weird, how we’re too young to volunteer,” Karly Lynn said with the emptiest voice her sister had heard in months, “but not too young to get pregnant. They told me the reason they took your door off the hinges was ‘cause you were doing something bad in there. I always thought maybe it was drugs. They said you lost your right to privacy ‘cause you done bad. Why didn’t you ever tell me the real reason?”

“They told me if I talked to you about it, then you might get ideas and it would happen to you, too,” Kelsey Lou confessed, choking back tears as much as rage. “I didn’t want you goin’ through what you’re goin’ through now. But I was just thinking on the way back from the Hoggs’ house yesterday, I guess it was just another lie.”

Kelsey Lou lost the battle against four tears, but wouldn’t let her voice crack when she said, “My silence is what hurt you, not my story.”

“This aint your fault, Kelsey Lou. You didn’t hurt me.”

“The bastard next door has been on you a year. We could have had this talk when it happened to me, and maybe you would have said something sooner.”

“So you never been with any other?” Karly Lynn asked, trying to make the conversation easier for her sister. “Never wanted to?”

“Oh I want to, plenty. But the options in Old Homestead County are like being offered a variety pack of leftovers that McDonald’s threw out into the dumpster at the end of their shift. I ain’t eatin’ ‘em just ‘cause I’m hungry. I’ll wait for somethin’ that don’t give me food poisonin’, thanks.”

“What kind of man would you go for, Kelsey Lou?”

What a doozy to answer. Kelsey Lou stabbed the trowel into a small patch of green sprigs of persistence, reaching for the sun at the expense of a precariously growing bell pepper plant, and leveraged them up roots and all.

“You do like women. I knew it.”

“No,” Kelsey Lou answered. “No, I mean, I like them, but I don’t like like them.”

“So what kind of man you like, if not women?” Karly Lynn tried again.

Kelsey Lou sighed, then chuckled, then gave her sister the most over-the-top, absurd answer she could think of: “I like the gay ones. Big, hairy, gay men who can walk into a room and don’t even have to be wearin’ leather to know they’re the one everyone is gonna answer to. The kind of man who can wear a t-shirt that says ‘I’m a faggot’ with as much confidence as a fancy three-piece suit. The kind of man who asks questions first, and never makes assumptions, unless he’s assuming the reason I’m following him into the bathroom is so we can fuck in the stall like Brian Kenny on Queer As Folk.”

“Queer As Folk?” Karly Lynn asked, otherwise stupefied by her sister’s reply. What, exactly, was she supposed to say to this anyway?

Kelsey Lou let out a patronizing laugh and said, “It’s a real old show. Before either of us was born. But it was a big deal at the time they made it.”

She realized her little sister had taken every word at face value, and felt suddenly very uncomfortable to have stated the truth so casually.

“It’s just a show, Kar,” she said. “I’m givin’ you crap. It’s an old show, and I don’t really want to have sex with Brian Kenny in a bathroom stall. It wasn’t even funny, ’cause you ain’t seen the show yourself. You’d know it was all a joke if you had.”

Karly Lynn nodded. She didn’t understand why her sister would make a joke like that instead of just answering the question. Why the distance? Hadn’t she been honest enough with Kelsey Lou? Maybe her older sister just really wasn’t into guys.

Or, maybe, she considered, her older sister was into exactly the kind of men she’d just described. If that were so, she reckoned it been a real long time ‘fore Kelsey Lou found happiness with a man, if he had to be gay to be attractive. Not a lot of gay men were gonna be too thrilled to date Kelsey Lou, she imagined — but she also hated the thought that her wonderful older sister, who deserved love and affection to make this world a less lonely one, might pass up dating anyone at all who’d date her back, on account of livin’ in this fantasy world where the only date-able men by Kelsey Lou’s standards existed only in the glowing LED shadow of the TV.

“Don’t you ever want romance?” Karly Lynn finally asked after a good few minutes of silently helping her sibling dig a little deeper.

“I want to know what got you sick last night,” Kelsey Lou answered. She was done havin’ her love life, as it were, picked apart.

Of course Kelsey Lou wanted romance. But she couldn’t imagine how to tell the story of such a romance in the Ozark English vernacular — not even in the vernacular of Granny Moses, mother of Jed Clampitt, who never took her husband’s name when she married, just before she got the right to vote.

Kelsey Lou wanted a romance full of kind, gentle men who only shot at food and fascists. She wanted a romance with banjos and square-neck dobros, mountain dulcimers and spoons, playing late into the night under the light of a full moon among men who knew themselves so unflinchingly that they felt no shame in knowing one another just as well.

Since none of this desire made any more sense than tellin’ her sister she aimed to marry a pond of frogs, there wasn’t no sense talkin’ nothin’ ’bout it at all.

“I guess I got a period last night, real sudden,” Karly Lynn answered.

“You think ’cause you been missin’ the last couple months, it might could just be all at once? Your body figurin’ it all out still?”

Karly Lynn shrugged and nodded. “It was real heavy. Definitely three months of bleeding all in one waterfall just poured right outta me last night. I woke up a couple times on the toilet. Don’t know what happened. I was feelin’ dizzy, and then I woke up some time later leaned up ‘gainst the sink. Lot of blood came out,” she whispered only loud enough for Kelsey Lou to hear. “So much blood.”

The front door slammed open as Ma came out with Junior and yelled from the porch, “Girls! Girls, clean yourselves up and come in this house to be cordial! We have a guest! My heavens! What manners have I not taught you? Come inside and clean yourselves up right this minute. We’re having breakfast with our guest.”

The siblings rinsed and sat their trowels out in the sun to dry. What choice did they have? To work in a garden is to work hand in hand with God. Junior thought he was more important than God, and he’d done convinced Ma he’s right on that count.

“The men,” Kelsey Lou mentioned to her little sister on the trudge toward the house, “could never have so much control, could never override our consent, could never amass the obscene amounts and types of power they have, if not for women like Ma who are so much more concerned with making boys feel manly than she is in making her own children safe.”

Her words rang flat, out of tune, in a sudden way that felt jarring. Ms. Maines’ history lesson echoed in her mind as she moved non-consensually in the direction of a boy she hadn’t given permission to steal her answers.

“White boys,” she added, eliciting a puzzled look from her younger sister. “Ma is so concerned with making white boys feel manly, she ain’t even able to think about making our safety a priority over that.”

“This aint got nothin’ to do with race,” Karly Lynn said. Does it?

“I don’t know why it does, sis. But it seems true, just lookin’ at the evidence. If you see I’m wrong, let me know what you see that tells you so,” Kelsey Lou shrugged.

“But all I see right now is this white boy on our porch controlling Ma like a puppet, and we’re just like dolphins tied up in those puppet strings like it’s a net. I don’t reckon she’d call us in from the garden for the kind of boy who’d’ve helped us out there ‘stead of givin’ us a hard time.”

Karly Lynn took her sister’s hand and squeezed it twice, like they used to do when they were little, to let each other know: I’m okay, and I know you don’t feel okay right now, but I still love you and you’re not alone.

“I guess I can see why it’s hard to want romance anymore, by the time you get to be your age.”

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