Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

But damn. A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it’s easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew

all along what you were doing. Assuming you’ve ended up someplace you’re proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work

with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

shit. Usually in McDonald’s, me and

I told her nobody ever asked me that question before, about growing up and what I wanted to be, so I didn’t know. Mainly, still alive.

It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.

I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.

Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.

I didn’t feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it’s hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning.

This much I’ll give the man: he didn’t lecture me about not living up to my potential. He’d got hold of my DSS records going back to the hospital interviews of Mom’s OD, or before. I’d had one foot in the custody-removal shitpile since birth. I told Mr. Armstrong if he’d read all that, he knew more about me than I did. He said no, he didn’t, that nobody ought to pretend to know how I felt. “Here’s what I do know,” he said. “You are resilient.” I’d heard quite a few fifty-dollar words for the problem of Demon. I asked Mr. Armstrong if he was wanting to put me on meds for that. “It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.”

“You’re saying I’m lucky.” “Are you lucky, if a drunk comes at you through a stop sign and totals your vehicle?” “No.” “No, you are not. You got the wreck you didn’t ask for. And you walked out of it.”

“It’s more like this bag of gravel I’m hauling around every day of the year. If somebody else brings it up, honestly, I’m glad of it. Like just for that minute they can help me drag the gravel.”

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”

The trip itself, just the getting there, possibly the best part of my life so far.

For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.