The
Lost Boys meets Wilder Girls in this supernatural feminist YA
novel.
It's 1987 and unfortunately it's not all Madonna and cherry lip balm. Mayhem Brayburn has always known there was something off about her and her mother, Roxy. Maybe it has to do with Roxy's constant physical pain, or maybe with Mayhem's own irresistible pull to water. Either way, she knows they aren't like everyone else.
But when she gets wrapped up in the search for the man who has been kidnapping girls from the beach, her life takes another dangerous turn and she is forced to face the price of vigilante justice and to ask herself whether revenge is worth the cost.
From the acclaimed author of This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back, Estelle Laure offers a riveting and complex story with magical elements about a family of women contending with what appears to be an irreversible destiny, taking control and saying when enough is enough.
Buy this book:
https://wednesdaybooks.com/galaxies-and-kingdom/mayhem/
Excerpt
“Trouble,” Roxy says. She arches a brow at the kids by the
van through the bug-spattered windshield, the ghost of a
half-smile rippling across her face.
“You would know,” I shoot.
“So would you,” she
snaps.
Maybe we’re a little on edge. We’ve been in the car so
long the pattern on the vinyl seats is tattooed on the back
of my thighs.
The kids my mother is talking about, the ones sitting on
the white picket fence, look like they slithered up the hill out
of the ocean, covered in seaweed, like the carnival music
we heard coming from the boardwalk as we were driving
into town plays in the air around them at all times. Two
crows are on the posts beside them like they’re standing
guard, and they caw at each other loudly as we come to a
stop. I love every- thing about this place immediately and
I think, ridiculously, that I am no longer alone.
The older girl, white but tan, curvaceous, and lean, has
her arms around the boy and is lovely with her smudged
eye makeup and her ripped clothes. The younger one
pops some- thing made of bright colors into her mouth and
watches us come up the drive. She is in a military-style
jacket with a ton of buttons, her frizzy blond hair reaching
in all directions, freckles slapped across her cheeks. And
the boy? Thin, brown, hungry-looking. Not hungry in hisstomach. Hungry with
his eyes. He has a green bandana tied across his
forehead and holes in the knees of his jeans. There’s an A
in a circle drawn in marker across the front of his T-shirt.
Anarchy.
“Look!” Roxy points to the gas gauge. It’s just above
the E. “You owe me five bucks, Cookie. I told you to trust
we would make it, and see what happened? You should
listen to your mama every once in a while.”
“Yeah, well, can I borrow the five bucks to pay you for the
bet? I’m fresh out of cash at the moment.”
“Very funny.”
Roxy cranes out the window and wipes the sweat off her
upper lip, careful not to smudge her red lipstick. She’s been
having real bad aches the last two days, even aside from
her bruises, and her appetite’s been worse than ever. The
only thing she ever wants is sugar. After having been in
the car for so long, you’d think we’d be falling all over each
other to get out, but we’re still sitting in the car. In here
we’re still us.
She sighs for the thousandth time and clutches at her
belly. “I don’t know about this, May.”
California can’t be that different from West Texas.
I watch TV. I know how to say gag me with a spoon and
grody to the max.
I fling open the door.
Roxy gathers her cigarettes and lighter, and drops them
in- side her purse with a snap.
“Goddammit, Elle,” she mutters to herself, eyes
flickering toward the kids again. Roxy looks at me over the
rims of her sunglasses before shoving them back on her
nose. “Mayhem, I’m counting on you to keep your head
together here. Those kids are not the usual—”
“I know! You told me they’re foster kids.”
“No, not that,” she says, but doesn’t
clarify. “Okay, I guess.”
“I mean it. No more of that wild-child business.”
“I will keep my head together!” I’m so tired of her saying
this. I never had any friends, never a boyfriend—all I have
is what Grandmother calls my nasty mouth and the hair
Lyle always said was ugly and whorish. And once or twice
I might’ve got drunk on the roof, but it’s not like I ever did
anything. Besides, no kid my age has ever liked me even
once. I’m not the wild child in the family.
“Well, all right then.” Roxy messes with her hair in the
rear- view mirror, then sprays herself with a cloud of
Chanel No. 5 and runs her fingers over her gold necklace.
It’s of a bird, not unlike the ones making a fuss by the
house. She’s had it as long as I can remember, and over
time it’s been worn smooth by her worrying fingers. It’s like
she uses it to calm herself when she’s upset about
something, and she’s been upset the whole way here,
practically. Usually, she’d be good and buzzed by this time
of day, but since she’s had to drive some, she’s only nipped
from the tiny bottle of wine in her purse a few times and
only taken a couple pills since we left Taylor. The with-
drawal has turned her into a bit of a she-demon.
I try to look through her eyes, to see what she sees.
Roxy hasn’t been back here since I was three years old,
and in that time, her mother has died, her father has died,
and like she said when she got the card with the picture
enclosed that her twin sister, Elle, sent last Christmas,
Everybody got old. After that, she spent a lot of time staring
in the mirror, pinching at her neck skin. When I was
younger, she passed long nights telling me about Santa
Maria and the Brayburn Farm, about how it was good and
evil in equal measure, about how it had desires that had to
be satisfied.
Brayburns, she would say. In my town, we were the legends.
These were the mumbled stories of my childhood, and
they made everything about this place loom large. Now
that we’re here, I realize I expected the house to have a
gaping maw filled with spitty, frothy teeth, as much as I
figured there would be fairies flitting around with wands
granting wishes. I don’t want to take her vision away from
her, but this place looks pretty normal to me, if run-down
compared to our new house in Taylor, where there’s no
dust anywhere, ever, and Lyle prac- tically keeps the cans
of soup in alphabetical order. Maybe what’s not so normal
is that this place was built by Brayburns, and here
Brayburns matter. I know because the whole road is
named after us and because flowers and ribbons and
baskets of fruit sat at the entrance, gifts from the people in
town, Roxy said. They leave offerings. She said it like it’s
normal to be treated like some kind of low-rent goddess.
Other than the van and the kids, there are trees here,
rose- bushes, an old black Mercedes, and some bikes
leaning against the porch that’s attached to the house. It’s
splashed with fresh white paint that doesn’t quite cover up
its wrinkles and scars. It’s three stories, so it cuts the
sunset when I look up, and plants drape down to touch the
dirt.
The front door swings open and a woman in bare feet
races past the rosebushes toward us. It is those feet and the
reckless way they pound against the earth that tells me this
is my aunt Elle before her face does. My stomach gallops
and there are bumps all over my arms, and I am more
awake than I’ve been since.
I thought Roxy might do a lot of things when she saw her
twin sister. Like she might get super quiet or chain-smoke,
or maybe even get biting like she can when she’s feeling
wrong about something. The last thing I would have ever
imagined was them running toward each other and
colliding in the driveway, Roxy wrapping her legs around
Elle’s waist, and them twirling like that.
This seems like something I shouldn’t be seeing,
some- thing wounded and private that fills up my throat. I
flip my- self around in my seat and start picking through
the things we brought and chide myself yet again for the
miserable packing job I did. Since I was basically out of my
mind trying to get out of the house, I took a whole package
of toothbrushes, an armful of books, my River Phoenix
poster, plus I emptied out my underwear drawer, but totally
forgot to pack any shoes, so all I have are some flip-flops I
bought at the truck stop outside of Las Cruces after that
man came to the window, slurring, You got nice legs. Tap,
tap tap. You got such nice legs.
My flip-flops are covered in Cheeto dust from a bag that
got upended. I slip them on anyway, watching Roxy take
her sunglasses off and prop them on her head.
“Son of a bitch!” my aunt says, her voice tinny as she
catches sight of Roxy’s eye. “Oh my God, that’s really bad,
Rox. You made it sound like nothing. That’s not nothing.”
“Ellie,” Roxy says, trying to put laughter in her voice.
“I’m here now. We’re here now.”
There’s a pause.
“You look the same,” Elle says. “Except the hair. You
went full Marilyn Monroe.”
“What about you?” Roxy says, fussing at her platinum
waves with her palm. “You go full granola warrior?
When’s the last time you ate a burger?”
“You know I don’t do that. It’s no good for us. Definitely
no good for the poor cows.”
“It’s fine for me.” Roxy lifts Elle’s arm and puckers her
nose. “What’s going on with your armpits? May not eat
meat but you got animals under there, looks like.”
“Shaving is subjugation.”
“Shaving is a mercy for all mankind.”
They erupt into laughter and hug each other again.
“Well, where is she, my little baby niece?” Elle swings
the car door open. “Oh, Mayhem.” She scoops me out with
two strong arms. Right then I realize just how truly tired I
am. She seems to know, squeezes extra hard for a
second before letting me go. She smells like the
sandalwood soap Roxy buys sometimes. “My baby girl,”
Elle says, “you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting
to see you. How much I’ve missed you.”
Roxy circles her ear with a finger where Elle can’t see
her.
Crazy, she mouths. I almost giggle.
A message from the author
Dear Reader,
Like Mayhem, I experienced a period of time
when my life was extremely
unstable. I can still
remember what it was like to
be shaken so hard I thought my head would come off, to watch the
room vibrate, to feel unsafe in my own
home, to never know what was coming around
the next corner.
I wanted to run. I always wanted
to run.
I
ran to friends, but also movies and books, and although
girls were more passively portrayed in movies like The Lost Boys back then, that feeling of teenagers prowling
the night, taking out bad people, being unbeatable . . . that got me through it.
I guess that’s
what I tried
to do here. I wanted girls
who feel powerless to be able to
imagine themselves invincible. And yes,
I used a rape as the seed for that fierce lineage, not without
thought. For me, there is
nothing worse, and I like to think great power
can rise up as a result
of a devastating trespass.
Please know I took
none of this lightly. Writing this
now, my heart is beating
hard and my throat is dry. This is the first
time I not only really
looked at my own past, the pain of loss, the pain of the loss of trust that
comes when someone
puts hands on you without permission,
the pain of people dying, the shock of suicide,
and put all of it to paper
in a way that made me feel victorious, strong, and warrior-like. It is also terrifying. I know I’m not the only one who had a scary childhood, and
I know I’m not the only one who clings
to stories as salve to smooth over burnt
skin. I am so sick of girls and
women being hurt. This was
my way of taking
my own vengeance
and trying to access forgiveness.
Thank you for reading
and for those of you who can relate,
I see you and you are not alone.
Estelle Laure
Short author bio:
This Raging Light and But Then I Came Back believes in love, magic, and the power of facing hard truths. She has a BA in Theatre Arts and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and she lives in Taos, New Mexico, with her family. Her work is translated widely around the world.
Estelle Laure, the author of 
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