Cassidy St. James turned eleven two days before she went missing. No one seemed particularly surprised when she didn't make it home the night she didn't make it home. Not at first, anyhow, not with the way her momma and daddy purportedly paid no attention to her, nor her brothers and sisters. The St. James brood was reputed to be insular, the children veritably feral; child services had more than enough work on their hands just getting the youngers to attend school with any sort of consistency, and nobody was surprised when some new baby showed up on the hip or at the breast of Glory, the eternally weary matriarch of the family, when she made an appearance at the Sav-A-Center to pick over that week's groceries. Lindell, her husband (legally if not necessarily in practice, if the rumors were true), worked odd jobs—not so much odd in the sense that they were off and on, a series of irregular gigs, but odd in that they were literally weird. He'd do just about anything anyone would hire him to do. Though the man maintained a sense of mystique amongst the less sordid residents of Surette, Louisiana merely because they attempted to temper their gossip (at least publicly), it was no secret that Lindell St. James had been in and out of prison at least twice, not to mention locked up locally many a night for lesser infractions, several of which surely involved meeting up with the wrong people in the hopes of making easy money by answering a post he'd found on Craigslist.

In any case, regardless of the faults of her people, Cassidy's disappearance did cause a stir, after it became widespread news. Kim St. James, her fifteen-year-old sister, reported her absence first, nearly twenty-four hours after the girl had been expected home, apparently. Seemed that no one had been keeping too close an eye on her. And while the first suspicions had centered on the family itself (particularly Lindell, who'd been known to get physical when under the influence of anything, licit or otherwise), the case had taken on sinister fringes leading clear away from Cassidy's parents.

For one thing, there'd been four—four!—reliable eyewitness reports of the child's whereabouts, placing her farther from her homestead each time. And for another thing, the message left behind more than convinced law enforcement that whatever brand of monster they were dealing with, it wasn't Mr. or Mrs. St. James, neither of whom could read or write proper enough to save their lives, let alone quote the Bible meaningfully.

Well, and they'd had solid alibis, both of them. No. Glory and Lindell couldn't have done in one of their own. Not Cassidy, anyhow. Circumstances didn't fit.

Didn't stop people from speculating, of course, as they do. Six weeks into the child's investigation and not a peep, but every one of those St. James kids was suddenly back in school, what with all the eyes now on them. Kim, a sophomore at Surette High, was leaving her last class of the day, getting ready to meet her brother for a ride home, when a clutch of typically unattractive but small-town power-wielding girls tripped her up as she walked down the hall.

"Does your daddy fuck you, too?"

The words were predictable enough, as were the laughs that followed it. Kim kept on her path, eyes on the linoleum, curtains of brown hair like blinders. Just keep walking.

"You next, then? He gonna murder you, next?"

"Wouldn't be much loss."

"How many of you are there, now, anyhow? Ten? Eleven?"

"Seventy-five."

"Who's counting, anymore?"

"Don't your parents know what birth control is? Jesus Christ! They're at it like animals!"

Kim's cheeks burned as she picked up her pace. The rubber sole of one of her knock-off Keds, which was peeling apart at the toe, caught the tiling, and she stumbled, would've fallen clean to the ground in an embarrassing display had not someone gripped her arm and steadied her before the calamity occurred. She was relieved, at first, even grateful, and swept aside her hair, clutched her belongings to her heart to thank her savior, but then she recognized his face and hers fell in return.

"Ew! I knew it!" clucked one of the gaggle of girls, which was now visible. Kim's blinders swept away. She darted a terrified animal glance in their direction, was mortified by their disgust, their hideous perfection and belonging.

One of them with glossy lips and mango breasts under her fitted vee-necked top (she probably smelled like fruit, too) added, "The whole family does incest!"

"Get a room, you freaks!"

Whatever jibes followed, Kim was deaf to them, the blood rushing between her ears and flushing her face drowning them out. She jerked out of her brother's grip and stormed from the building. At least the girls didn't follow, even if Tyler did.

For a mid-spring afternoon, the skies were particularly overcast, but then, it'd seemed to Kim that the sun hadn't shone most of her life, anyhow. Oh, she knew it physically had, and yet something about her short fifteen years had always felt sort of cloudy, sort of gray. Not as if there were anything melancholy about her days but more as if her world were just kind of colorless. She didn't even know that she felt that way; it was more an overall seeping sensation, a backdrop that'd fallen across her existence slowly, surely, since the day of her birth. Really, since the moment of her conception. Destined for insignificance—that's what Kim St. James's fortune would've read, had she ever had the opportunity to crack open one of those Chinese cookies.

"Hey, you all right?"

Kim attempted to outpace her brother without running, felt that anything quicker than a brisk hustle would look stupid, draw attention, but of course that enabled him to catch up to her.

At least three inches shorter than his two-years-younger sister, Tyler never seemed to notice the snide remarks his diminutive stature garnered. Might've been that he played varsity football, was one of the only siblings consistently in school because of that, because he loved the outlet and because he found a loose if not genuine camaraderie in it. In any case, not even his athleticism could override his blood; his family was different, knew all of Surette, and so, by default, was he.

Keeping her focus on the path ahead, the path toward Tyler's piece of shit vehicle, Kim sucked in her lips. Her chin quivered. "I told you I'd meet you at the car."

"Yeah, and? You were taking a while, so I thought I'd see if you needed the help."

"Well I don't," the girl snapped, stopping and whipping to face her brother's uneven brown mop, his dumb puppy-dog eyes. Kim nearly gagged as the image of those eyes catching her watching him in the most disgusting act, just a few nights prior, flashed through her mind. She found she had to turn away.

"Kimmy—"

"Don't call me that!" She spun back to him. "Just let's get to the car and get home."

He acquiesced, put up his hands in a show of mollification and slouched past, led the way to the Celebrity, squealed open the door for his sister, and slammed her inside.

Neither of them spoke as Tyler steered the car through the cleaner parts of town toward the edges, toward home, where the swampy tributary of the Atchafalaya behind their house, tended to overrun its banks a minimum of six or seven times a year, extending the bayou and flooding the properties of the few folks still too poor or too stupid to move. The boy allowed the silence to fester a bit before sticking a pin in the swelling. "You know, what you saw—it was normal, Kim."

A slight choking noise caught in the girl's throat.

"Nothing wrong about it."

"Shut up." The command came quietly, through gritted teeth.

"I know it's confusing, and there's things it made you feel—"

"Shut up shut up shut up!"

He kept right at it, neglectful of his own skin, or maybe just oblivious. "I didn't mean for you to see. We were just gonna make out, but things got a little, well . . . they just went a little far, and I should've made sure nobody could bust in on us."

The girl had begun to rock slightly, had shut her eyes against the world and her brother and was maybe even praying at that point for him to stop talking.

"But what you saw me doing to Brianna—it feels good, sometimes for a girl, you see, for a guy to use his mouth—and it was different, cause she was okay with it—"

Kim let out a banshee screech, flung open the passenger door, and hurled from the car. Lucky for her, Tyler had been slowing to yield onto a two-lane road, anyhow, or she might've found herself worse for the wear. As it was, she ended up floundering into an overgrown rain ditch, spraining both ankles and twisting an arm but still managing to get to her feet and hobble off toward a fringe of trees—anywhere to get away from her brother's insufferable disgusting prattling. What she'd seen, she never wanted to remember, wished she could scrub from her head with a brillo pad, scour it from her mind with a blow torch, and yet there it was, that image, along with the other handful of scarring visions she'd witnessed over the years: a horror film depicting a monster wearing a mask of someone's face, eyes oozing in ribbons down the meatless skin; her father breaking a bottle over her sister's head and embedding a piece of glass in Cassidy's cheek; the neighbor's awful dog with its erect little penis, like a petrified worm, trying to work its way up against her leg when she was too young to understand what it was doing or how to get away; the head of the youngest St. James child, Maggie, crowning between Momma's legs that night a few summers ago, in the tub, when Daddy was too drunk to get her to the hospital and she'd had to run grab the neighbor, Miss Mariana, to help get the baby out. So much blood, that'd been. So much blood.

And now Cassidy gone several weeks and Daddy and all that was happening . . . ! Kim's brain couldn't process much more, especially not from Tyler. She'd used to like him, but he'd changed too much.

"Kim! Stop! Where are you going?"

She knew he'd killed the engine, that he was probably flinging through the weeds after her, but she wasn't stopping for him. They were close enough to home, now, she could walk. Sure, it'd take another twenty minutes if she wanted to avoid the swampy beginnings of the bayou, but she'd roundabout if she had to, just to avoid him. No way she was getting back in that car with Tyler. Not if someone paid her. In fact, Kim began to run, the instinctual terror of being pursued kicking in. The overgrown grasses and thistles scratched her bare legs, left burrs in her socks, and her canvas shoes squelched into muddy patches more than once, but she kept on, and when she reached the cover of the trees, only then did she pause to look behind her.

Tyler was visible, but he'd stopped some distance back, stood swearing at his feet (likely he'd found the mud that hadn't stopped his sister), and Kim knew she was safe, now. He'd not keep after her. Even as she watched, before she turned away, she saw him throw his fists up to the sky in anger and head back up the incline toward the shoulder of the road, where he'd parked the Celebrity.

With a sullen frown, Kim swung her hair out of her face and strode determinedly through the foliage, keeping careful to avoid the earth that'd become swampy from recent rains. She bemoaned the state of her life, mostly the forced schooling. Hadn't she been doing fine reading some books and growing her vegetables and helping Momma with the babies on her own at home? She'd been to school off and on over the years, enough for her parents to avoid too much trouble from child services, but Kim had never learned anything that was worth shit in her daily existence. What mattered to Kim St. James was how to cook oatmeal or other easy, non-choking meals for her younger siblings, or how to clean forks and knives and toothbrushes and cups and hands and assholes so that the people in the house weren't getting sick all the time, or how to talk in the right ways to the various sorts of authorities that might show up to question Momma and Daddy about the former's health and ability to care for her children or the latter's extracurriculars and whereabouts. These and so many other things—well, they didn't teach them in school, and so what good was school to Kim? What she learned in school were things like how to hide her lisp, how not to end up in a bathroom with other girls, how to disappear into her desk so the teachers wouldn't see her . . . how different her world apparently was from everyone else's.

If Cassidy hadn't gone and gotten herself kidnapped or whatever, Kim could've continued to evade high school the rest of her life. But not now, dammit. Not until the furor died down a bit, anyhow, and when what would happen was anyone's guess. The town seemed to hate them for it, not-so-quietly whispered it must've been her Daddy done it, in spite of the evidence against him, in spite of the police verifying his alibi and moving elsewhere in their search. Once a town had made up its mind, didn't matter whether the truth came down out of the sky on a shining scroll unfurled in the hands of an angel of God! The collective mind was made up. Her Daddy was a pervert, and he'd done something unspeakable to his own daughter.

Kim found herself biting her lip so deeply she'd drawn blood. Trembling, she licked her mouth, wiped away the fluid that'd pooled there.

The trees had thickened on either side of the girl, gathering the shadows in bunches around her. Water tupelos with thick, fanning bases, currently growing from the visible earth before their kind eventually dipped roots into the distant but nearing bayou, stretched up from the moist, mossy, leaf-rotted soil. New life consistently sprouted here, though it was more prolific now that winter had given way to a sodden spring. The earth was black as tar, rich and wet, staining Kim's already filthy shoes. She'd given up on trying to keep much of anything visibly clean, hadn't cared for stains much until she'd had to return to school, anyhow. Now, though . . . people were unkind.

There were eight of them—eight St. James children. Aaron and Micheal were the oldest brothers, but they'd left home a long time ago, the moment they'd been old enough. Kim barely remembered them. Then there was Tyler, a good six years younger than Micheal and eight younger than Aaron. She was next after Tyler. Then there'd been Cassidy. And three little ones afterward—Trent, Mae, and Maggie. Even Kim had trouble remembering their ages, as they'd come in such quick succession, but they were all somewhere between three and seven. She'd had much of the bulk of childcare until she'd gone back to school; now that Momma was alone with the children, Kim worried for them. Momma hadn't been well, since Cassidy had disappeared, and Daddy had never been well. Not in the head, not in the heart. He hadn't hurt Cassidy, though, not like people believed. He hadn't done something unspeakable to his daughter. Not to that daughter, anyway, Kim thought. Not that one. That's where they got it wrong. People were stupid. If they only paid a little more attention.

Her lip began to bleed as her teeth sank into it once again, and the tupelos clasped like hands around her darkening form as it turned toward home.

Not to that daughter.