In the cave, while Eddie splashed in the not-so-shallows at the edge of the rocks and Ju lingered in the shadows along the wall, Trudi kept reaching into her pocket and checking her phone. She didn’t need to look at it to know there weren’t new messages; she’d become as attuned to those vibrations as the twitching of her own muscles. The gesture was more reflexive, conversational, the equivalent of her Bellingham Harbor friend Eliana pursing her lips and blowing her forever-damp hair out of her eyes.
After the first few times, she even stopped pulling up that last text from Jess just to make sure she’d read it right. She had, she knew. And it was definitely Jess who’d sent it, because everyone else with Trudi’s number actually understood how to use a cell phone, and why not to disable autocorrect.
StaywhereyOu are wher e ver yo are don’t come back illsay when stay eddiehiden hide
The fuck, Jess?
On the back of her neck, Trudi could feel Ju’s gaze lingering. Meanwhile, in the not-so-shallows, Eddie kicked up spray and chattered to his hands or whatever he had in his hands. Shells and stones. Trudi knew those conversations too well and respected them too much to interrupt.
She also knew, somehow, that she wasn’t supposed to text Jess back. She was supposed to stay right here—whereyOu are—and wait. She’d feel the vibrations signaling whatever she was meant to do next when they came.
What the actual fuck, Jess?
Then vibrations did come, and she fumbled the phone out of her pants so fast that she almost spilled it into the Strait.
The texter wasn’t Jess, though, but Raj, doing his signature Frog Prince backward-text babbling, today.
Langing hoose. In hy mouse. Quinking thietly. Trere, oh Trere, is Whudi?
Trudi’s laugh seemed to burst from her throat, startling her all the way back to herself. She used the phone to snap a quick pic of Eddie hunched over and murmuring to the cave water as though summoning more orcas. Reversing the camera, she framed her own anxious face, angling the phone to catch at least the shadow of the new girl—Jew? Joo? Named, perhaps, for or by some green-eyed, Swedish owl?—lurking just a little too far up the cave wall, weirdly still, like a spider or a stalactite with really remarkable hair. She snapped that. Then she fired both pics back to Raj with the words:
Tru Through the Looking Glass. Episode 16,338.
When she lowered the phone, she found Ju studying her again. Not just looking, but full-on examining, as if Trudi were a particularly colorful shell, an octopus that had scuttled up out of the Strait. As if Trudi were the first black girl she’d ever seen.
Or first girl, period.
God, she’s really beautiful, Trudi thought, positively heard herself think, and realized she was probably looking at Ju the same way Ju looked at her. Beautiful, in a twilight-in-twinflowers-on-the-hills-above-those-weirdo-barracks sort of way.
Definitely not in a come-down-off-that-wall-and-bring-your-fairy-mouth-to-my-mouth sort of way.
Not really.
“Fuck!” Trudi burst out, shaking her head hard, stumbling before she’d even started moving. She dragged her gaze from the girl and back around to Eddie, or halfway around, anyway. She couldn’t seem to get herself fully turned, but at least her feet were in motion. She half staggered, half splashed into the water, which was freezing and woke her further, still. With a pop she could almost hear and definitely felt, her eyes wrenched free of whatever had held them, and she turned her full attention to the kid.
Only then did she realize how far out on the rock shelf Eddie was. He stood almost knee-deep in water, so close to the edge of the ledge that his toes had to be dangling over the abyss where the cliff fell away into bottomless blue deep enough for orcas. Blue enough that Trudi could see his face reflected on its surface, even in cavelight, as though he were already draining into it, becoming part of it.
“Eddie, Jesus,” she snapped, too loud. Echoes ricocheted like gunshot, and Eddie jerked and slipped, flinging a glance over his shoulder as his feet scrabbled for purchase.
Ignoring the shock of cold in her ankles, Trudi plunged forward. By the time she got close enough to seize the kid’s wrist, he’d already regained his balance. He laughed as she yanked him to her.
“Ow!” he complained.
“Quiet.”
“I wasn’t finished.”
Whatever that means, Trudi thought. But in truth, she understood, at least in essence. He hadn’t finished reprimanding a crab, maybe. Telling some krill it couldn’t talk to him like that, not if it wanted its screen time later.
Eliana and Raj were right, she decided as she turned and tugged Eddie back toward dry rock. It was time to get the hell out of Wonderland. Maybe she could take Eddie and Rebecca and any of the rest of her Stockade-mates who were whole enough to come along with her. Instinctively, she kept her eyes averted. That was why she didn’t realize where Ju was until her reflection surfaced upside down in the water right in front of her.
For a wild, panicked second, Trudi thought the girl was over their heads, hovering on the cave ceiling. A gasp escaped her mouth before she could stifle it.
But Ju had simply come down off the wall, and now she was maybe three steps away, separated from Trudi and Eddie by a barely there lapping of inches-deep inlet.
Which is what’s saving us, Trudi thought nonsensically, the thought bumping repeatedly against her brainpan like one of those wind-up toy trains she’d once aimed into walls in the common room at her first orphanage, the one with beetles infesting the carpets. She can’t cross running water. She clutched Eddie’s hand, and for once, for some reason, he clutched hers back.
Ju didn’t even seem to be looking at them. Not at first. She stood so still. Only her hair seemed to wave, slightly, like kelp in shallows, stirred as much by the light filtering through the cave as by current or breeze. When she did look at them, first Eddie, then Trudi, her eyes were green and full of shadows. Deep enough for orcas. Trudi could no longer keep herself from looking at that face.
Then, with a sort of mourning-dove coo, Ju stepped down into the water. Her whole body rippled, and her hair swept in front of her eyes. When it slid aside again, she was smiling.
“Cold,” she said. “Sooooo cold.”
“No shit,” said Trudi. Suddenly, all of them were laughing, Eddie too, their voices caroming around the cavern. Dazed, or maybe dazzled, Trudi watched Ju shake, watched her gaze trail lazily all over the cave before gliding back down on her. Trudi could feel those eyes on her forehead, cool as a cave kiss.
She also felt a pang of something very like jealousy when Ju’s gaze slid to Eddie.
“Little boy,” Ju said. “Come here.”
And Eddie—the fickle little shit—just up and went. Like he already knew her. Stupid, trusting baby, who’d been unlucky enough to have people who loved him around him for every second of his life, and was therefore utterly unprepared to live in the world.
Shivering in the ankle-deep wet, but unable to move or imagine where she’d go if she did, Trudi watched Ju stroke Eddie’s head. Her hair floated around him like jellyfish tentacles as she leaned down to whisper. There was her beautiful mouth by his ear, hovering near his throat. For no good reason, Trudi wanted to launch herself, barrel into the girl and drive her back. Hurl her down on the rocks. Get her off and away from Eddie.
So I can get on her??
What. The seriously actual. Fuck.
“I think we should go back,” she said, the words spraying from her mouth like a BB-gun blast.
For answer, Ju ran a pale, long-fingered hand through Eddie’s hair. The boy shuddered but didn’t pull away. If anything, he wriggled closer. When Ju finally looked up, she was sporting that strange, shy smile. “I think we should go to the barracks. You know that place? Those … old bunk buildings, or whatever?”
“Hornby Camp!” Eddie yipped, like a little puppy.
“They remind me of home,” Ju murmured.
“Me, too,” Trudi heard herself say even as she wondered.
Home. As in, a room full of bunks for other girls without homes. Which meant Ju was an orphan, too? Was that what Trudi had been sensing?
“I think maybe we should stay here,” she said, though she couldn’t think why. Without meaning to, she smiled. She also seemed to be swaying on her feet. Jealousy and nervousness and unexpected recognition and something else she didn’t even want to think about flickered through her, yet she felt a little removed from all of it. As though none of these sensations were actually hers, or real. As though this were all just another conversation with her sock puppets. As though she’d magicked her sock puppets into walking at last.
“I think we should go to the camp,” Ju said again. “But let’s wait until dark. How about that?”
“Until dark,” Trudi murmured. Heard herself murmur. This time, when Ju smiled, Trudi sighed, or maybe whimpered. Way down in her brain—deep, deep down where she’d buried it under even her fragmented memories of her parents, the smell of tea and towels at Amanda’s worktable at the Halfmoon Lake house, the sound of bitch-queen Danni’s spine snapping on the night the Sombrero Man came—something rolled over and sat up.
That smile. Ju’s smile. That shiny, sweet, sparkling thing with needles in it.
She’d seen it before!
Hadn’t she?
On Ju? Not on Ju. Not on the Sombrero Man, either, God knew, so why was she thinking of him?
For a split second, she had it, almost had it, almost knew.
Then Ju said, “Good,” and gave the sweetest, sexiest little shrug, her hair sweeping over her face past those wet, winking eyes. “Then I can introduce you to my…” Her smile got even sweeter, a little confused, a little helpless, and then she gave up and flat-out giggled. “Mom.”