The Unraveling of Mercy Louis by Keija Parssinen Page B

announced the Purity Ball. Someone else to help save her .

I LLA

    A S SOON AS Mama is in bed these summer nights, Illa flees the house. She gets in the car, cranks the AC, and heads for the seawall. She turns over in her mind the conversation about Charmaine, the knowledge of her mother’s friendship with Mercy’s mom warming her. But it also makes her sad. If Charmaine had stayed, maybe Illa and Mercy would have grown up playing together. Maybe instead of Annie, Illa would be the friend Mercy couldn’t live without.
    She wanders without a particular destination in mind, her school-issued Canon tucked comfortingly in the passenger seat. Dozens of times, she parks the Accord and scrambles outside to capture a promising shot: brown pelicans in V-formation cruising low over the water, watermelon-colored thickets of oleander tall as houses, the abandoned Pleasure Pier ablaze with a violent sunset, a fisherman in a floppy hat casting line from the end of a jetty, a smoky bank of thunderheads piling up at the horizon, the Gulf churning from the pull of a coming storm. The photo contest deadline is still a couple of weeks away; she probably won’t be able to get a great shot, but she hasn’t given up entirely. It’s something to do, at least.

    One evening, Janis Joplin singing about heartbreak on the radio, Illa ventures away from the coast into the industrial maze that is downtown Port Sabine. Blighted, a magazine had dubbed the downtown after the explosion. The word stuck with Illa so that whenever anything bad happened, she blamed it on Port Sabine. Like the terrible fight she had with Mama after Jay left them. “Good riddance,” Illa said of her stepdad, a pit bull of a man, all shoulder and no hip. Her mother snarled: “You don’t have any idea what it means to be just another bitch without a man in this town.” The bite of the curse lingered in the air, shocking Illa because her mother usually spoke with a hushed gentleness, as if inside a library or church. She shook her head, a thin line of snot dangling from her reddened nose. “I was alone when your daddy died. I’ve seen what that life is like. You know what I remember about those days? Food stamps and bad men and a job so hard it nearly killed me.” She paused. “You’re thirteen, though. You’ll understand soon enough.”
    To escape, Illa went for a bike ride through the neighborhood. After a few minutes, she was pedaling down deserted streets, darkened windows like eye sockets in the wan faces of paint-peeling homes, grass grown knee-high over concrete paths leading to locked front doors. Even the streetlamps stood lightless in some places, the city having cut power to the empty blocks. Illa stopped pedaling, brought her feet down on either side of the bike. For a minute, the sounds of her breathing filled the air, but soon even that faded against the silence. In the months since the explosion, to cope with the fines, the refinery had laid off hundreds of workers. Illa’s eighth-grade class had shrunk to half its size. She looked down the street and counted the real estate signs that had popped up on lawns: eleven in total, the families gone before the houses sold because the market was bust. Everyone was leaving, not just Jay, and Illa had the feeling that she and Mama were being left behind.

    How did Janis manage to get out? Illa wonders as she steers the Accord farther inland. Did it require months of saving and planning, or did she just steal some of her mama’s money and get on a bus? Maybe she’s not the best model for escape, though, her tragic end somehow foretold by her bad beginnings in these swamplands.
    Driving past Park Terrace with her window rolled down, Illa sees people playing ball on the park’s old cracked court. When she rolls to a stop at a traffic light, she looks closer and sees that it isn’t just people but Mercy Louis, summoned from an overactive