Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

great-granddaughter demands justice. The government might give you some part of your land back just to shut the media up. It could work, Faye.”
    Not being someone whose private life could stand a media frenzy, Faye mumbled, “I’ll think about it,” and rose from her bench. Tossing her lunch trash into a bin, she ambled over to the one remaining clear-running spring, slipped off her sandals, and plunged her feet into the water. Cyril, passing his third test—or was it his fourth?—slid off his deck shoes and dipped his own bare feet.
    They sat together, enjoying the contrast between their heat-addled heads and their icy-cool feet. Neither one spoke and it was okay. Faye figured that the ability to be companionably silent was important in a man and gave Cyril credit for passing a test she hadn’t planned.
    Why had her relationships with men been so uniformly abysmal? She liked men, even preferred their company to that of women, but her romances had always followed the same crash-and-burn trajectory.
    In high school, she’d been a quiet, bookish girl who attracted exactly no male attention until, at sixteen, she suddenly and unexpectedly became pretty. Her grandmother had observed at the time that it was better to bloom late than never to bloom at all. In retrospect, Faye wasn’t so sure Grandma knew what she was talking about.
    Oh, it had been exciting, trying to decide whether she’d had more fun at the drive-in with Mark or the beach with Cary and worrying over whether Sammy knew she was also going out with Jon. Her sudden popularity with the boys did not equate to popularity among her female classmates, but Faye hardly noticed. She’d spent her childhood largely without friends, because God had seen fit to distribute racist ignorance evenhandedly. The white girls considered her black and shunned her accordingly, but the black girls, who twenty years before would have fawned over her creamy skin, rejected her as too white simply as a matter of black pride. Even from a distance of more than fifteen years, Faye couldn’t blame her teenage self for flaunting every conquest in the other girls’ faces.
    Then, in May, it was over. The phone stopped ringing. No crowd of admirers waited at her locker after school. One day, instead of finding Sammy and Jon and Mark and Cary standing beside her locker, she found a circle of girls discussing their prom dates. The names Sammy and Jon and Mark and Cary were mentioned often and loudly.
    Faye must have flinched as she stooped to twirl her combination lock. The hyenas smelled weakness and closed around her.
    “Got a prom date, Faye?” asked a big-haired cheerleader. “Didn’t think so. Wanna know why not?”
    Being only a junior, Faye didn’t rate an upper locker. Retrieving her books would have required kneeling before the predators and she refused to do it, so she turned and faced them.
    “Going to the prom means having both sets of proud parents gush on about what a beautiful couple you make. It means having your picture made. Can you imagine anybody’s parents being proud to have your picture on the mantel?”
    Through her tears, Faye focused on the cheerleader’s mouth and its vulgar ring of orangey-brown lipstick. It was spewing venom, but it was also speaking the truth. She had noticed that her dates were all white. Jon, who was more scholarly than the usual high school boy, had pronounced her looks exotic, while Sammy, who couldn’t have been more average, had said she looked like Cleopatra.
    She had known they were attracted to her because she was different. In that moment, she realized that none of the boys had ever introduced her to his mother. And none of them ever would.
    Faye relived that moment for about the eighty-thousandth time, staring at her brown toes as the springwater washed over them. She looked over at Cyril, who was gazing at the creek running clear under its overhanging trees, and realized that she hadn’t dated a white man since she was sixteen years old.
    He saw her look at him and he said, “Did you know that the woods back there are full of springs and all of them feed this creek? Lord, I used to enjoy wading here, catching minnows and just generally having a redneck good time.”
    “You grew up around here?” she asked, knowing the answer.
    “Yeah, until I was eleven.” Something cast a shadow on his face. “That’s when Mama and I went to Alabama and never came back. It was a brave thing she did, leaving Daddy, but she