by Allison Flory
Adelaide Cooper wasn’t a fixture. She’d never been rooted to the Texas soil the way we all had, calloused hands and leather tans and a fear of not leaving before you got left. But she liked to say she was in those first few days after her family arrived in town. The Cooper’s came to Parish like a circus to train tracks, set up overnight in the caravan that tugged a camper we all suspected was not a home.
Nothing about Texas was a home to Adelaide, not like it was to us. She grew up in Florida, she told us once, but she called it a swamp and said she didn’t miss it one bit. And then there was Kansas, and she pretended to gag when she said it like any of us knew St. Louis from St. Augustine. Everything was an inside joke with her, and all of us were still waiting outside. We pretended to gag along with her because when Addy did something, you were expected to follow in order to not get left behind. She was always moving through our lives and our town and each new day like a tornado that wasn’t due for a few more months.
But she couldn’t have been a tornado arriving early for tornado season in glossy red cowboy boots and a baby doll dress because she was always late. To everything. Late to our lives, late to her shifts at the diner, late to first period — proclaiming something about a plumbing issue in the camper in front of the entire class like she had nothing to lose. Perhaps she did have nothing to lose.
I visited the camper once. I wasn’t ever allowed back — it was a private, one–time only, once in a lifetime, blink, and you’ll miss it showing of the Cooper Carnival — but I don’t think I would have returned anyway. There was one bedroom shut off at the end of a hallway that wasn’t supposed to be a hallway, exactly, but the entire rest of the house. The bedroom was for Adelaide’s mom, and her dad when he wasn’t out drinking with the rest of the town’s dad’s at the local bar. Addy herself slept on a not-pullout regular couch just an arm’s reach away from the kitchenette and didn’t complain, even though she did complain when she opened the minifridge and realized there was no orange juice. She nearly lost it then, the first time I had ever heard her raise her voice, and all it took was a case of missing juice.
“You’re always supposed to have citrus in your house. It wards off spirits.”
I think she made that one up. She made a lot of things up, referred to them as her Addyisms. To us, it was the word she used when she didn’t want us to call something a lie. I don’t think we would have ever questioned her, anyway. She said things with a confidence and surety we had never known, had never felt for ourselves until it started to rub off on us, the way so much of her did.
She came with me to buy my first pair of red cowgirl boots. Glossy, like hers, because flat leather was “boring and bad for the environment.” She had a way of saying things by dancing around them, dressing them up in sequins until you could hardly recognize them anymore. Until you didn’t think about what she wasn’t saying. Like the fact that some boots were made of dead cows, and the glossy ones were just plastic. She liked animals too much to think about the before. That rubbed off on us, too, hating the before. Adelaide made all of our lives more interesting, like when she drove Tucker’s truck straight into his family’s chicken coop because he trusted her too much when we were trying to teach her how to drive. I still see wild chickens roaming the highway like hitchhikers sometimes, when I drive slow enough and remember to look, creating an ecosystem for themselves where once there was only road.
She wove her way effortlessly into our befores without any of us even realizing. I found myself remembering she was with me when I learned how to ride a bike, a feat my dad had struggled with for the better part of my tenth year, long before I’d ever heard of an Addyism. She talked about the field trip our class took to the waterpark like she had been there, articulating so earnestly our horror and then relief when Grant fell out of his innertube. It always left me with this head–pounding, breathless feeling, like I was waking up from a dream and trying to pick apart reality.
She became the integral glue our friend group had apparently always been missing. I felt as though we didn’t exist without her. It felt like a healthy dependency, not having to plan anything because Addy would take care of it, not having to worry about being alone because she was always there. There was never a boring night, never a lick of downtime. I think she must have hated being at home in the caravan more than she ever let on; four walls that had always been too small to hold all of her.
I couldn’t remember a single house party, all crammed together in Victoria’s tornado shelter with a case of warm beer, without Addy.
There was no late–night drive, spent passing a joint and listening to whatever country music the radio had taken to playing, without her sat shotgun directing us downside road after side road.
No class cut without her leading the charge, no sleepover without her taking up space on Heather’s queen bed, no movie night where she didn’t pick the movie (her favorites were the cheap horror movies; she liked to laugh at the bad acting and fake blood).
All too quickly, it felt like our lives were being held together by a bright yellow thread, and Addy didn’t believe in fate or a higher being, but she “believed in believing.” The most sacred Addyism, to be held above all the others, spoke like a commandment and regarded like a constitution. We didn’t understand what this meant until late July, our brains fried and delusional, beaten dry by midafternoon Texas sun. We lay sprawled across each other like sardines while she danced with our shadows across the pavement, immune to the melting heat. Ethereal, this girl from Florida who had never seen the ocean. Who moved to West Texas and whose home was pulled by a truck and still couldn’t drive stick. Feet adorned in expensive boots and donning a different dress every time we saw her but didn’t even have a room to call her own, sleeping on the couch of a trailer that hadn’t seen maintenance since Kansas.
Her only complaint that blistering day in July was that we hadn’t had a bonfire yet, and like eager to please disciples when Adelaide asked for something from us, she got something from us. She made us fearless, willing to disobey our parents’ rules like we had never been before. Rebellion became a calculated game, with Addy at the mast. Stealing liquor from locked cabinets and “just replace what you took with water, they won’t taste a difference.” Spending an afternoon collecting firewood and “let’s make a game of it. Whoever finds the biggest log can light the match.”
We worked quickly and tirelessly, like a pack of wild dogs, feral for something we couldn’t name. Siphoning gas from Tucker’s truck, pulling out lawn chairs from Heather’s shed — we all pitched in whatever we had, like offerings. The bonfire went up that same night. Adelaide lit the match, even though Sarah Grace found the biggest log.
“Doesn’t it look beautiful?” she screamed, and everyone in town was listening. God was listening, too. “It’s reaching for the heavens!”
We were just kids. How were we to know how to tame a fire that pushed too hard, feeding off of everything that got too close? And perhaps we should have known that alcohol will feed it, too, that if the tip of your dress catches flame, you can roll on the ground until you’re put out and that grasping at fiery tendrils will only succeed in scars.
Some people are like a fire: ravenous, uncontrollable heat. All–consuming in the way they touch every part of your life, reaching for you before you even realize you’ve been pulled in. Impossible to put out once it’s found kindling. It became clear to me that night why the Zoroastrians worship fire, why temples were erected in its name. Sometimes people don’t know when to let go, don’t see that they’re holding on too tight, that fire takes and takes and takes but when it’s all over, there’s rebirth.
In high school biology, I learned that every thriving, natural ecosystem begins with disaster. A great flood, a volcanic eruption, a catastrophic event that lays waste to the roots that needed pulling, and the rotting trees that had to fall. Even the barest landscapes will grow fruitful if nature does its job. The algae will come, and the soil, flowers and trees, and animals that follow. Colonization takes time: the lava has to cool — building blocks of life stacked one by one on top of each other until you’re left with something worth looking at. Alive. No one ever cares to mourn the before.
We all watched the field burn that night, and with it, our future rewrote itself.
But that isn’t quite true.
Our future had diverged the moment we met Adelaide. The day she went around town knocking on front doors and ordering any of us who answered to accompany her to the drive–in. She’d never been to a drive–in, except the time, she confided in me, she set off fireworks in one when the lot was empty. There was a fire then, too. Roaring in the grass lot, dry in Kansas, she explained, just like Texas. “Everything’s always so dry compared to the swamp.”
I think she liked things that explode, the adrenaline rush that came with it. She liked the way things disappeared, the way she could make herself disappear if she painted herself in ash and found new roots to grow. New soil to sink into. We had been that soil once. Without Addy, we would learn to be that soil again.
The truth about Adelaide Cooper is that she was scared and sad and wanted someone to save her. So she grew ten feet tall. Her undressing was her armor, she let us all think we knew her inside and out, and we would never look closer. Fit into the friendship so completely, that there was nothing left to question. She pulled the strings, and we followed, and it was comfortable for everyone involved. With her gone, we felt directionless.
I spent a lot of time outside her camper, in the after, talking to her parents. I asked questions none of us had ever needed to ask when she was still around, filling the silence of our thoughts with color and purpose. You didn’t question something that felt like it would disappear if you looked too hard. Why had you moved? (Some families had pasts they needed to run away from.) What was Adelaide like as a child? (We never dreamed she would have friends like y’all.) Where did you live after Kansas? (On stranger’s couches, relying on kindness. Oh, sorry, mostly in Louisiana.)
They gave me her diary, more a collection of Addyisms than anything, claimed none of it made much sense to them anyway. It read like a bible, like a textbook, like fact and fiction and origin. “Addyism #108: Ash is our purest form. Addyism #12: Chameleons bring good fortune. Addyism #348: Love is something that looks you in the eyes and doesn’t look away.”
I learned a lot, reading through their half–answers until I could put together a picture that looked something like Adelaide, but it would never be enough.
There are two classifications of ecological succession. Primary: the creation of something from nothing, when life blooms from lifeless soil. An Addy comes to town, and teenagers who have been doing nothing but sleepwalking, finally open their eyes and take their first haggard breath. She was always going to change our lives. She did it without even trying. Secondary: the replacement of an environment already erected, born of fires and floods. Without all the starting over, with so much of the work already tackled for the species that will bloom from the whatever’s-lefts.
Some of us got out of Texas, eventually. Left the farms and the feed stores and the ashen field behind. “It’s what Addy would have done if she could,” Sarah Grace had told me, towing two bags and headed for California. She would never be an actress, but she’d grown fond of living on a whim in the after. I think we all picked up the pieces of her she’d left behind, clutching onto them like we could mold them to fill the empty parts of ourselves.
Heather got her recklessness, taking to jumping out of planes like one day she might not hit the ground. Grant claimed her affinity for oversharing when he published the memoir no one read. I couldn’t blame him for writing it. We all had things we needed to shove off our chests, burdens that over time became too heavy to bear.
For so long, I didn’t understand what I had held onto myself. What I had gained from all of the loss, the people–sized craters that etched themselves into my skeleton. I should have realized when I eventually married Tucker, the love that had looked into my eyes and never looked away. I should have felt her in the way we never talked about that night. Never talked about her at all. I had taken the most from Addy, her essence, her Addyisms, and her tendency to keep secrets. The chameleon skin that broke apart, dripping with new life, my life. Ecological succession.
Some nights, though, when I’m lying in bed, and I haven’t done enough to clear my thoughts, filled my head with the distractions like Adelaide would have (I didn’t get her strength), she creeps back in. The night that Victoria died, caught up in something none of us could put out. The night Addy had started the fire, fed it until it spread and spread, and there was nothing any of us could do except run. Leave all of our pasts behind so they could be ash, too. Bury our dead and bury our old selves with them.
We still keep in contact, those of us who were left behind in the after, though it feels like we have nothing in common anymore. That our futures were severed the day, the yellow thread was cut. None of us have even visited her, Inmate 3368. Don’t let ourselves wonder if she still worships her fires, plays God in her own head.
But I think I might one day, so I can tell her about how I still see the chickens on my way out of town.