Ever since my dad went on hiatus, Mom’s been getting up before five o’clock every morning, no matter what’s happened the night before. This means by the time she has to wake me for school at seven, she’s had two cups of coffee and taken a run down to the lake and back again. So when she sticks her head into my room to wake me up this morning, she’s too wired to gently rouse me from sleep with sweet cooing and a loving tug of my big toe. Instead I have my dreamless, perfect sleep split in half by Mom’s full-volume voice saying, “WELL, ARE YOU GOING TO SCHOOL OR AREN’T YOU?” There are no words for the rage this fills me with. It’s actually what gets me out of bed, which I think is why she does it. I’m following her down the hall before my eyes are even fully open, before the memories of yesterday can pull down on my arms and hang like a weight from my neck.
“Mom!”
She glances at me over her shoulder and nods approvingly. “Going to school. Good choice.”
“Mom!”
“What?” She gives a wide-eyed smile that could make me spit hot lava. “I whispered.”
“Are you sure you want to go to school today? You look tired,” she says.
“Of courshe I’m tired!” I yell. I yank out my retainer and throw it into the bathroom sink. “I was down the hill all night!”
She inhales sharply and grabs my chin. “Is that a bruise? Did somebody hit you?”
“Yeah, Mom, I totally got beat up by my psychic vision.”
“Dylan,” she says, and at first I think it’s a low warning I hear in her voice. It’s something else, though, something closer to pleading. She wants me to forget.
It takes me a second to find the energy to play along. I do, though, because I know if I make my body play along with It’s just another normal morning at the Driscoll house, my heart will eventually believe it.
“And it’s cold in here!” I say, stomping my foot. “And it was freezing in my room last night,” I grouch, remembering waking up for a moment to a bedroom so cold I imagined I could see my breath in the moonlight. “When can we start using the woodstove?”
“Tonight,” she says, smiling. “If it stays this cold. Especially if it finally snows.”
She hugs me and I can feel her heart racing faster than her happy smile is letting on. She’s playing along too.
“You’re just so loud!” I say into her shoulder.
She laughs and squeezes me. “I just wanted the day to start, darlin’, and it wasn’t going to start with you in bed.”
This is the closest she’ll come to acknowledging what happened last night. She won’t tell me what the deputy says to her today when she’s “briefed.” She won’t ask me if what I’ve seen scares me, or if I think about those little kids and what it looks like when their faces go still. She’ll do the same thing the whole mountain did about the Drifter, the same thing she did about my dad. She will ignore the fact that something bad has happened until she’s so used to ignoring it, it’s like it never happened.
“Why can’t you do this when you wake me up?” I say, wrapping my arms tighter around her waist. “Why’s there have to be so much yelling?”
“I didn’t yell. And we’re hugging now. And you’re out of bed. Two birds, one stone. You need to get ready for school,” she says, pulling herself out of my arms and walking into the bathroom.
“So hugging me is like throwing a rock at a bird and killing it?” I ask, following her. I’m totally playing for time now, and she knows it.
She picks up her brush and runs it through her hair. “Do you want to go to school today or not?” she asks, not looking at me.
“No!”
She stops brushing. “Because of last night, or because you’re sixteen?”
“I’m sixteen and a half,” I say.
She reaches behind me and turns on the shower. Sometimes I wish she’d sit on the edge of the tub and dump warm water over my soapy hair with a plastic pitcher, like she did when I was a kid. Instead she holds my face in her hands, gives a little gasp and a wide smile, and says, “You’re growing into your face!”
She’s impossible to stay mad at.
But then she says, “You look more and more like a Driscoll every day.”
I know she means to be sweet when she says this, like, You’re one of us, but there’s another us I want to be a part of too. My mom kept her last name when she married my dad, and when I was born, she insisted that I get her last name too. It took me a long time to realize that my dad’s last name wasn’t Driscoll, and even longer to realize that it must have really bothered him. When he corrected people on his name, he’d laugh without humor and say, “No, no, I’m not a Driscoll. I’m just the donor.”
I remember a fight they had about it, right before he left. My mom said he could change his name to Driscoll if he wanted us all to have the same name so badly. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she yelled. “To be part of this family of freaks? Except you can’t handle it. You can’t handle what she can do….”
I wasn’t supposed to be listening to them fight. I was supposed to be in my bedroom, playing “pool party” with my dolls and the big iron pot we used to make popcorn, filled with water. I never asked my mom what she meant when she said family of freaks. I didn’t want her to know I was listening.
“Go on in and get ready or you’ll miss the bus,” my mom says, trying to playfully nudge me toward the bathroom. I don’t move. I can’t move. Sometimes the things unsaid between us make the air so solid that my chest can barely expand to breathe.
“Mom,” I say, almost pleading.
“What?”
Our eyes are flicking over each other’s faces, each one of us begging, but for the exact opposite thing. In the end, I give in.
“Nothing,” I say, going into the bathroom and closing the door. It’s a full thirty seconds before my mom makes the wood floors creak by walking away. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror.
When I was born, Mom’s relatives looked at me through the Plexiglas window of the just-born baby unit, nodded at one another, and murmured their approval. I was a really ugly baby. I had the face of a full-grown woman planted on the body of a newborn. I was what Mom called a true Driscoll woman-to-be, with wide-set eyes, heavy lids, cleft chin, strong jaw, and high forehead. It was a face that would look fine on a grown-up, but on a baby, on a little kid, even, it looked completely ridiculous. It didn’t help that I had a baby-size mono-brow. I think even Mom, with all her “Now stop it, you were a beautiful baby” talk, was glad when my face got big enough to separate the fuzz that grew straight and dark across my forehead. It wasn’t till puberty that things began to even out, that my face stopped looking like it was too big for my body.
If you look through my baby book, there’re no pictures of any of those ugly-loving relatives holding me. That’s because as soon as the doctors let Mom go from the hospital, she and my dad wrapped me in the blanket from the baby ward, hopped a cross-country bus, and took off. They ended up here, on Pine Mountain. I don’t know what that trip was like for the other passengers on board the bus, but I know from Pilar’s little sister, Grace, that newborn babies are pooping machines, and that when they’re not pooping, they’re crying. Mom says it wasn’t that long of a trip, only a couple of days, but I’m guessing that it was a long couple of days for everyone involved.
It’s not until the hot water has steamed up the mirror that I admit I’m having some sort of major malfunction involving getting my body into the shower. It’s the sound of the water pelting the tile that’s keeping me leaning against the sink, staring into the shower through the hot fog. The sound is like sand, whipped up by the wind and peppering against a blue plastic barrel.
I stick my fingers into my ears, close my eyes, and step into the shower.
I spend most of the shower sitting down, leaning over my legs, my fingers still in my ears, letting the hot water stream down my back, watching it swirl around my feet and down the drain.
Through my plugged ears I hear the muffled sound of Mom knocking on the door. She says that Dottie just drove by on the way up the hill.
Dottie’s my bus driver, and my nemesis. She’s been driving my bus to and from school since my very first day of kindergarten, which you would think would make her at least a little fond of me, but no. She lives to torment me. And the fact that she just drove by means that I have exactly six minutes before she gets to the dead end at the top of our street, turns around, and heads back down toward our driveway. And if I’m not standing there waiting, she’ll drive on, leaving me in the dust. If she’s feeling especially evil, she’ll beep as she goes by.
I do a two-minute wash of the parts I imagine are particularly stinky, and hope Mom’s pricey perfumed lotion will take care of the rest. I try to save time by not using a towel and depending on the absorbing power of my clothing, but the combination of water and lotion has somehow turned into a glue that makes every bit of clothing I put on adhere to the exactly wrong body part. I run down the stairs, trying to yank down my sweatshirt from where it’s wrapped like a scarf around my neck.
“Are those your same clothes from last night? You need socks!” Mom says, as I shove my bare feet into my high-tops. “It’s going to rain again today!”
The telephone rings and Mom and I both lunge for it on the end table. I get to it first.
“Hello?”
There’s only silence on the other end.
“Hello?” I say again.
“Do you know who this is?” At first I think it’s my aunt Peg, but even though there’s the familiar slow lilt, there’s a teasing tone that I know doesn’t belong to my straight-laced aunt Peg. “Who is this I’m talking to? Is that my niece, sounding all grown-up?”
“Yep, it’s me, Auntie.”
“Who is it?” Mom asks loudly, reaching for the phone. “Peg or Ruby?”
I swat at her hand and mouth the word “Ruby.”
“Give me the phone,” Mom mouths back.
“Tell your mamma,” my aunt says slowly, “to let you talk to your Auntie.”
I hold the phone to my chest. “For your information, she wants to talk to me.”
“You’ll be late for school,” Mom says, “and you need socks.”
“How are you, Aunt Ruby?” I ask, while jumping up and dodging Mom’s hand as she tries to grab the phone.
“Oh, I’m fine, darling, I’m just fine. How are you?”
I run upstairs to my room and open my sock drawer. Empty. “I’m good,” I say. “Just getting ready for school.”
“Oh, that sounds nice.”
I kneel down to look under my bed. No socks. I check under my bureau. Underwear, but no socks. Finally I jump up and grab a balled-up pair from the clothes hamper and head back downstairs.
“What are you doing, Auntie?” Even though we don’t get to talk often, I know that Aunt Ruby always has the best answer to that question. Aunt Peg will just say, Oh, I’m doing the laundry or Oh, just setting the dinner table, but Aunt Ruby will always say something interesting.
“Oh, darling.” Aunt Ruby laughs. “I’m just setting here on the front porch filling that pickle jar.”
Most of the time I have no idea what she’s talking about. Like now. Is she peeing in the pickle jar? Putting actual pickles in it? Catching spiders? I bet she catches spiders; she seems cool enough to do that. I sit back down on the couch with Mom.
“What do you mean, filling the pickle—”
Mom chooses this moment to have a silent hissy fit.
Aunt Ruby laughs quietly. “Tell your mama not to worry herself. I’m not coming anywhere near her girl.”
Mom finally succeeds at unpeeling my fingers from the phone.
“Dylan has to catch the school bus, Ruby,” she says firmly into the phone. She points to the front door.
“Fine,” I grumble, pulling on my socks and shoving my feet into my high-tops. As I close the front door behind me, I hear Mom ask, “How’s Mama?” and then, “Because I want to talk about Mama, not nonsense, that’s why.”
Mom says she hasn’t told either of her sisters about the things I see. I wish she would. It’d be easier, I think, if at least one of us told somebody.
Oh, crap. I see Dottie as soon as I close the front door. She’s doing a slow roll by our driveway, but as soon as she sees me, she floors it. I launch myself off the porch, landing in a run that sends me tearing out of the driveway, chasing the bus down the street toward Ben’s, the second stop on her route. It’s midway through this run that Dottie and I share our special morning moment of Zen. I fall into a rhythm, running directly behind the bus, and every once in a while Dottie will glance at me in her rearview mirror and I’ll think, That’s right, you old crank, I’m still here. And in her eyes I can see her thinking, You will never catch me, you smug little turd.
For a moment it seems like me and Dottie and the bus are linked, that none of us could exist without the others. Then there’s a faint squeak as Dottie steps on the brakes, and the bus and I begin to slow as we near Ben’s driveway.
When I get to school, my best friend, Pilar, says hello by sneaking up behind me and cheerfully hip-checking me away from the locker we both share.
“Where were you last night, Professor?” she asks, pulling out her books. “I called your house and your cell and no one picked up, and I e-mailed you and sent you a text message and five IM’s.” She takes a deep breath. “Plus I sent a carrier pigeon, a singing telegram, and a robot.”
Her bangs are cut into a blunt line low across her forehead. The rest of her thick black hair is pulled firmly into a braid that hangs heavy and straight down her back.
“Bad cheese,” I say, ducking down underneath her arms and inserting myself in the exact space she was just in, using my butt to bump her out of my way. “I spent all night in the bathroom.”
“Gross,” she says, stepping away, and motioning for me to take my sweet time gathering my books. I forget about the bruise on my cheek until Pilar grabs my chin. “Is that from falling off the can yesterday? Holy crap.”
“I’m all right,” I say, pulling away.
“Whatever you say. So can you still come over to babysit Gracie with me tonight? The professors have one of their special parent-teacher conferences.”
“Totally.” Gracie is Pilar’s year-and-a-half-old sister. She was a souvenir from the Midwest, where Pilar and her parents went the summer after our first year of high school. Her parents were teaching a summer program at a college out there, and at the very end of the summer, right before they were supposed to come home, Pilar’s mom got pregnant. Pilar called to tell me that her mom was having a “tough” pregnancy, and that they’d be staying out there for the whole school year. It was the first time I’d talked to Pilar in weeks, and I cried when she told me she wasn’t coming back, not for our entire sophomore year. “You’ve barely e-mailed me or called or anything! And now you’re not even coming back?” I had to repeat it two or three times before she could understand, because I was crying so hard. That was the longest year of my entire life, and no matter how much MayBe and even moody Thea tried to include me in everything they did, I could always feel the emptiness of not having Pilar beside me. Sometimes, between Pilar and my dad, I felt like there was more space being taken up by people who weren’t there than by the people that actually were.
We’re almost to homeroom when a blur of skintight jeans and layered flannel skirts comes sliding by us on the linoleum floor.
Its cry, as it passes, sounds something like, “EEEWWW-UUURRRRLLL!”
Pilar and I stop and wait for MayBe (hippie skirts, hemp slippers, beaded necklaces) and Thea (skintight jeans, blue Mohawk with rattail) to untangle themselves from each other, and from our homeroom teacher, Mr. Mueller, who managed to stop their slide by yelling “Ack!” and trying to jump out of the way, but not fast enough.
“There’s going to be a new girl!” MayBe says.
“Yeah! A new girl’s starting tomorrow, or maybe on Thursday,” Thea says. She gasps at my cheek. “Dude, is that from your faceplant in the bathroom yesterday?”
I shrug her off.
“Ladies,” Mr. Mueller warbles, straightening his tie and retaking his station at the classroom door, “please enter and take your seats.”
When we imitate Mr. Mueller, we usually just end up saying “gobble wobble yobble mobble” because that’s what it sounds like when he talks.
“There’s a new girl?” Pilar asks him.
“You seem to have that information already,” he warbles.
“Yeah, but what do you know about her?” I ask.
“All will be revealed in due time. Please, take your seats.”
We file into the classroom and settle into our usual seats in the back row. The four of us always say that we were alphabetically fated to be friends, from the very first day of kindergarten, when our teacher lined us up next to one another, our first and last names written on stickers in Magic Marker and stuck to our chests.
“Benjamin Franklin and Cray!” we hear Mr. Mueller call from the hallway. “Please stop pretending to be looking for books in your lockers, and come to homeroom!”
A few seconds later Thea’s boyfriend, Frank; her brother, Cray; and my neighbor Ben walk into the classroom and file into the row in front of ours to take their seats.
“Are they sauntering? Oh my God, they’re so cool,” Pilar whispers to me as the boys take their time getting into their seats. “Sauntering rocks!” she says loudly enough for the others to hear.
“Eat me,” Frank replies, leaning back in his chair so Thea can lean forward and kiss him. His chair smacks against Pilar’s desk.
“With salt!” Pilar says, kicking his chair forward again.
“Neighbor,” Ben says, nodding at me.
Cray sits quietly in his seat, only meeting his sister’s eyes for a moment. For as much as they look alike—the stretched-out, lanky frames, the light brown freckles sprayed over their noses and across their cheeks—their personalities are just way different. Thea’s all fast-moving parts, and husky laughter, and plans to hitchhike to New York City after high school. She lives with MayBe’s family most of the time, sharing MayBe’s “space” behind a Strawberry Shortcake curtain in their giant dome-shaped house that has no walls and where you are allowed to use only organic bath products because the family uses the old water from the shower to water the vegetable garden.
Thea and MayBe have been best friends forever, just like Pilar and me. When she was a little kid, Thea tried to be exactly like MayBe. She’d wear MayBe’s hippie sundresses and love beads and hand-printed dancing-bear T-shirts. She’d go with MayBe’s family to Rainbow Gatherings and full-moon drum circles in the woods, where they’d sleep in teepees, volunteer to peel potatoes by the fire pit, and be called “Little Sister” by all the grown-ups. Pilar and I cried and threw giant day-long hissy fits, begging our parents to let us go too. We wanted to come to school on Monday still smelling like campfire after a weekend away, with cracked and peeling berry-based face paint and singing songs about the earth mother.
One summer there was going to be this giant drum circle at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. MayBe and Thea said thousands and thousands of people were going to go, and that the drums would be so loud you could hear them from the rim of the canyon. There’d be dancing and singing, and cute little babies named Sunflower and Echo whose moms would let Thea and MayBe babysit, strapping the baby to one of their backs in a sling, “like the native Americans,” MayBe said, “or like Swedish people.” They were going to sleep in a tent, just the two of them, and they wouldn’t have to take a bath for five whole days.
That was the first time I ever felt like I might die of want. Now I know that I didn’t even know what want was. Because back then, we still had my dad. I thought that wanting was what Pilar and I did for the weeks before the Grand Canyon drum circle. We would lie on the braided rug in my room, the loose hardwood floor beneath poking into our backs, and we would plot and plan and scheme and declare the general meanness of parents. We would borrow her parents’ lab coats and make presentations about the “scientific proof that girls who are allowed to go on camping adventures to the Grand Canyon are more likely to succeed than girls stuck on this stupid old mountain for the whole summer.”
MayBe’s parents even came over to our house one night, to talk with Mom and Dad, and with Pilar’s mom and dad, about why it was perfectly healthy for little girls to run around the woods and dance around campfires. Mom and Dad, though, were not having it. Neither were Pilar’s parents. Pilar and I lay on our bellies and listened from the top of the stairs, whispering into the phone to MayBe and Thea, who were at MayBe’s house. We still think the deal breaker was the fact that we would have had to poop in the woods. At first I thought that was the part that really offended our parents, especially the leaves-as-toilet-paper part.
Of course, it wasn’t about the toilet paper. It was about Clarence, and the fact that the sheriff had never caught the Drifter, and I bet Pilar’s and my parents were having a hard time letting us out of their sight to go to school, never mind letting us drive three states away in a converted school bus to hang out in the woods with a bunch of grown-up strangers who called themselves Moonbeam and Pine Tree.
That’s what it came down to. “How can we see this as an acceptable risk for our children?” Pilar’s mom asked MayBe’s mom. “How can the benefits of fresh air and community building outweigh the possible risks of our children being murdered while they sleep?”
MayBe says her parents fought when they came home from our house. They started locking the front door and wouldn’t let wandering hippies camp on their land anymore. They stopped going to the drum circles and Rainbow Gatherings and put up a gate with a video camera at the end of their long dirt driveway. Sometimes, when we’re back in the woods behind MayBe’s house, we see other cameras her dad put up, high in trees, their motion detectors set into action by our walking, their one blank eye following us as we move.
MayBe’s the only one who kept the flowered dresses and hemp necklaces. Thea dresses like me and Pilar, except she chooses fierce high heels over Converse high-tops. Practice, she says, for when she moves to New York, where everyone wears spike heels, all the time, even to take out the trash.
Cray, though, is, like, the absolute absence of energy. He barely talks, or laughs; he barely even moves. For some reason he reminds me of oatmeal. Tasteless, lumpy, boring oatmeal. I’m guessing he has some sort of personality that comes out when it’s just him and Frank and Ben, because they never complain about the fact that 99 percent of the time he just … sits … still. Maybe that other 1 percent of the time he’s like an acrobatic circus clown, and that makes it worth it to put up with him.
He never makes eye contact either, which is why the fact that he’s pointedly turned around in his seat to stare at me with his stupid expressionless face has made me go cold. He couldn’t have seen me last night, in the deputy’s truck. It was dark and I turned away from the window to hide my face.
“I heard you rejects f-ed up the Willows sign again last night,” Pilar says to Frank.
Cray raises his eyebrows at me and then turns away.
“Where’d you hear that?” Frank asks, grinning.
Pilar snorts. “Oh, I’m sorry, was that supposed to be a secret? Maybe you should shut the heck up about it and stop asking everybody if they ‘saw anything interesting on the way to school this morning.’ You’re so fricking obvious.”
Frank laughs, and then glances at Ben, who’s staring hard at him. “It was a last-minute thing,” Frank says to him in a low voice. “We’ll come get you next time.” He turns and winks at Thea. “You too, babe.”
“That’s not my name,” Thea says, with a glance and a smile at MayBe. “And don’t bother, because I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Seriously, Frank, leave her out of your extracurriculars,” MayBe says.
Frank ignores her.
“Sure seemed like that was your name yesterday afternoon,” he says to Thea, a not-exactly-friendly smile twitching at his lips. “And you’re already a part of it. And, MayBe,” he says to MayBe with the same twitchy smile and a nod toward Thea, “she is my extracurricular.”
“Dude,” Ben says under his breath, “really unnecessary.”
“Yeah, jackass,” Pilar says, kicking Frank’s chair again, “totally unnecessary.”
“Hey, Frank,” I say loudly. “Don’t be such a fartknocker, you fartknocker!”
“You guys.” Thea laughs. “It’s fine. He was just joking.”
“He shouldn’t talk about you like that, Thea,” MayBe says.
“True,” Pilar and I say in unison.
There’s a sort of classroom-wide breath-holding as Thea climbs over her desk and slips onto Frank’s lap.
“Oh, Jesus, somebody say something quick so I don’t have to hear them kiss!” Pilar practically yells. “I hate that sound! I hate that sound! It sounds like Dylan eating cereal.”
“Hey!” I say, just as loudly. “It tastes better when you slurp!”
“Oh, holy barf!” Pilar yells.
“Dude.”
We all look to where Cray is still facing toward the front of the classroom.
“Did Cray just say ‘dude’?” I stage-whisper.
“That’s enough, Frank,” Cray says.
“Hey.” Thea stands up. “You don’t get to decide what’s enough.”
Cray looks at her. “That’s enough.”
“Shit head,” Thea says, but she doesn’t sit back down with Frank. She squeezes between the desks to sit in her own seat.
I can hear MayBe’s whisper as she leans toward Thea. “Your body is a temple.”
“Shove it,” Thea says, tipping back in her chair.
“Lala!” Grace yells my nickname when I follow Pilar into her house that afternoon. Grace reaches up for me, opening and closing her hands and stomping her pudgy bare feet until I scoop her up and give her perfectly fat cheek a loud kiss. She squirms in my arms and reaches out for Pilar, who holds Grace comfortably in the crook of her left arm, while her right hand runs quickly over Gracie’s body like she’s checking to make sure it’s all still there, finishing by gently touching a finger to Grace’s nose.
“Dylan, hello!” Pilar’s dad puts his hands on my shoulders and looks into my eyes. “Are you taking care of your mother? We worry about you, up there all alone.”
Pilar’s parents are scientists. Not just scientists but some sort of bigwig scientists who show up in public television documentaries and in scientific journals and newspapers because of the work they’re doing to find a way to stop the nasty little beetles that are eating a lot of the trees up-mountain.
“We’re okay,” I tell him. And then add, “We have the Abbotts right down the slope from us.”
“You know what I’d like to do—,” he says.
“I like your suspenders,” I say quickly, before he can make me his monthly offer to find my dad and “bop him one, right on the nose.”
“Why, thank you!” he says, hooking his thumbs under the suspenders and stretching them forward. He’s wearing his school suspenders today, which have “A+” embroidered in different colors all over them. They are the bane of Pilar’s existence. Her dad puts his hands back on my shoulders and says, “If I ever see that old man of yours again, I’m going to pop—”
Pilar puts Grace down and ducks under her dad’s arms so she is squeezed between him and me.
“Hello, pumpkin,” her dad says.
“Daddy,” she says pointedly, “why are you wearing the suspenders?”
“Because you are my A-plus daughter and I want your teachers to know that I know how smart you are.”
She laughs. “You are an A-plus big dork.” It’s weird, being this close to a father-and-daughter moment. We’re still pressed against one another, cradled by her dad’s arms, so when Pilar leans a tiny bit forward to give her dad a peck on the nose, my body has to shadow hers, and it’s like a split-second heartbreak, leaning in to kiss someone who’s not there. I step back, out of the circle, and pick up Gracie again. I hold her for only a moment before Pilar’s mom comes downstairs and takes her from my arms.
“Dylan,” she says crisply, and I know that’s about as much of a greeting as I’m going to get.
“Hello. How are you?” I ask.
Pilar’s mom doesn’t respond, she just sets Grace down on the floor. Pilar rolls her eyes at me. Her mom’s outfit is almost comically the opposite of Pilar’s dad’s. She’s dressed head to toe in black, looking like a big-city art critic, with her artsy, clunky jewelry and owl-eye glasses. I would love to see Pilar’s parents at parent-teacher conferences, their version of good cop-bad cop involving her dad’s dorky suspenders and her mom’s exact and somehow terrifying pronunciation of words like “potential” and “institutional inadequacy.”
I love Pilar’s house. It’s an A-frame like mine, but the first floor is basically just one big wonder of a room, with no walls, the kitchen and dining area and living room just flowing into one another. It feels like the room has taken a really deep breath and stretched out to take a nap. The wood-plank ceiling stretches up fifty feet to the very top of the A, and the side of their house that overlooks the mountains is made entirely of windows.
After Pilar’s parents leave, we color with Grace for a while, and then Pilar brings her upstairs for a nap, switching on the radio on her way back into the kitchen. At Pilar’s house it’s always either folk or jazz, although occasionally I’ll come over and her mom will be dissecting a bug while listening to triumphant metal. This time it’s the scratchy recording of a raspy-voiced old man singing about a mountain. Not our mountain, but we know what he means.
“Let’s make cookies,” Pilar says.
I wrinkle my nose.
“What?” she asks, laughing.
“I just … don’t know if I feel like having cookies … that you make.”
“Oh, come on!” Pilar says, stamping her foot. “They’ll be fine.”
“All right,” I say, obviously unconvinced.
“You’ll see,” she says, in the voice Mom used to use when I’d ask her what Santa had gotten me for Christmas. When she used that voice, it was always something good.
I lean against the counter as Pilar pulls ingredients out of the cabinets. Dry oats, raisins, brown sugar. Brown sugar!
“Oooh!” I say, lunging forward and grabbing the sugar. “Sweet stuff!”
“I know!” Pilar crows. “We only have it because it’s organic and farmed by minority workers who own shares in the company.”
Usually any sweets we cook at Pilar’s house taste suspiciously like something that’s good for you and that will “keep you regular.”
“Yuuuuummmm … ,” I say, sticking my finger into the box and licking off the tiny grains. Even though I have a house full of sweets at home, five minutes at Pilar’s house and I’m already feeling seriously sugar deprived.
“Are you helping or eating?” she says, handing me a measuring cup.
“Yes,” I say, scooping out the sugar into the bowl, so Pilar can add the other ingredients and mix the batter together.
“Okay. Taste this,” she says, holding out a bit of batter on the wooden mixing spoon. “Sweet, right?”
It has that sort of tame sweetness that every dessert has at Pilar’s house, the kind that makes you think, Maybe I don’t actually need to consume eight pounds of sugar every day. At least, that’s what you think till you go home and eat a bowl of pudding and remember how sugar is the best substance on earth.
“It needs chocolate chips and a slab of ice cream, but other than that, it’s perfect.”
We spoon the cookies onto the cookie sheet, and Pilar puts them into the oven. I follow her into the living room, and we assume our favorite positions on the couch—feet hanging over the back, heads hovering above the floor. It’s getting dusky outside, but we don’t turn on the living-room light. We like the half dark, Pilar and I.
“Professor,” Pilar says.
“Professor,” I answer.
“Two things,” she says.
“Okay. Number one?”
“Number one. What do you think is going on with Thea and Frank?”
“I don’t know, but he really pissed me off today in homeroom.”
Pilar laughs. “I could tell.”
“I just hate the whole thing. The way Frank talks to her, the way Thea so obviously hates it but totally backs down instead of standing up for herself, the way Cray steps in like some hero to get Frank to stop manhandling his sister. I’m sorry, but the whole thing just creeps me out.”
“I’m glad Cray said something,” Pilar says, after a moment. “Anything to stop the kissing sounds. And she is his sister. Frank’s lucky Cray didn’t bust his stupid blockhead open.”
“Cray would never do that. Frank is, like, his leader.”
“You think?” Pilar says. “I mean, I know it seems like that, and Frank is totally Ben’s leader, but I feel like Cray maybe just plays along. Like maybe when the three of them are alone, Cray’s the one who talks all the time and tells them what to do.”
“What do you think they’re up to?”
“You mean with the Willows sign? They’ve always done crap like that.”
“Yeah, but it seems different now, right? Like, they’re always bragging about it, right, but you can tell they keep some stuff secret. Because you know it was them that sugared the gas tank on that tractor at the Willows, right?”
“It totally was them. Idiots.”
“But they didn’t tell us. Usually they can’t shut up about that stuff, but that time they said nothing.”
“So?”
“So, what if they’re going to lead Thea into a life of crime? MayBe will have to bake a nail file into an organic cake so Thea can bust herself out of jail.”
“We’ll all have to sit in a car with the lights off outside the jail all night—”
“Will we have snacks?”
“What?”
“While we’re waiting? Can we have snacks? You could bring your oatmeal cookies!”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll bring chips, and root beer.”
“And Sour Patch Kids.”
“Correct. So we’ll be hunkered down—”
“Hunkered?”
“Yes, hunkered down in the car outside the jail—”
“In the total pitch dark—”
“And then all of a sudden—”
“The search lights will go on, and we’ll see scrawny little Thea—”
“Running!” I do an upside-down imitation of a frantic run. “Across the giant lawn in front of the prison!”
“She’ll yell, ‘Go! Go! Go!’” Pilar laughs. “And we’ll start driving, and then she’ll—”
“Cut through the fence with MayBe’s nail file—”
“And run alongside the car and—”
“MayBe will hang out the car window and pull Thea in.”
“It’ll be awesome,” Pilar says, “because then we’ll totally be outlaws, and we’ll have to drive cross-country and be tough girls that solve crimes against women every town we go to.”
“I was just thinking about that!” I screech. “We’ll be, like, the hottest, brassiest, sassiest girl gang EVER.”
“Until we get caught.”
“Well, you’re the one who leaves a trail of green Sour Patch Kids.”
“I hate the green ones,” she says matter-of-factly. “They taste too green.”
“So we’ll be hightailing it across some desert plain, and there’ll be, like, fifty cop cars right on our tail.”
“And we won’t—,” Pilar says, raising her eyebrows at me.
“We wont—,” I agree. And then we say together: “Drive off a cliff.”
“Because we’re not going to off ourselves,” Pilar says.
“Just because the world isn’t ready for our unstoppable female superpowers.”
“Thelma & Louise is, like, the best movie ever.” Pilar sighs. “Except for the shit box of an ending.”
“And how!” I say in agreement.
We stay upside down, in happy silence for a long while. The sun has started to dip, and in the purpling light I study the thick wooden beams that run crosswise up the slope of the ceiling. If I stare at this certain spot, right between two beams, where nothing else but the white ceiling and brown beams are in my line of vision, it totally feels like I’m floating.
“Whee,” I say.
“Floating?”
“Yep.”
“Professor?” Pilar asks.
“Yes, Professor?”
“Number two.”
“Okay, number two.”
“Did you hear about that little girl?” Pilar asks me in a low voice. “The one from the flatlands who got killed?”
I can feel her looking at me, but I don’t turn my head. “I think I heard something about it on the news this morning. That was all the way in the desert, though, right?”
“It’s sort of freaking me out,” she whispers. “I mean, if anything like that ever happened to Grace …”
“Pilar, that was hours away from here,” I say quickly. “They’ll probably catch the guy who did it by the weekend.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she says darkly. “That’s what they said about the Drifter. They kept saying it was just a matter of time before they caught him, but they never did. I heard it on the news, you know. They think he’s the one who got that little girl in the desert.”
“Wait. Who?” My voice is shaking. What is she talking about?
“The Drifter,” Pilar says. “They think he’s come back and that he’s the one who killed that little girl in the desert.”
“Where did you hear that?” I ask. I’m finding it hard to keep my body from going limp, from slipping sideways off the couch into a pile on the floor. Why didn’t Deputy Pesquera tell me? Why didn’t I know? I think back to my dream, the one I had on the way home from Salvation. The person whose footsteps I could hear behind me. It couldn’t be. I would have felt it if it were him. Wouldn’t I?
“Mom and Dad heard it at the university. Some of their students commute over from Salvation, where it happened.”
“It’s not the Drifter,” I say, and even though I mean it to sound reassuring, it just sounds dismissive.
“But what if it is?” Pilar asks, the tightness in her voice a sure sign that she’s about to cry. “What if he’s back? I swear to God, Dylan, if he ever came near my Gracie, I’d tear his throat out with my teeth.”
“It’s not him!” I finally let my body collapse onto the floor. I move to my knees, and hold on to the edge of the coffee table, my eyes closed, waiting for my head to stop spinning.
Pilar sits up too. “They told us they’d catch him, and then they told us he’d never come back. They lied to us, Dylan. Everyone on this mountain is walking around with their eyes closed.”
I open my eyes, and see that she’s watching me.
“I’m just …,” I say. “I don’t want it to be him.”
Outside the wall of windows the sun has set, and the darkness has come.
“I should get Grace up or she’ll never sleep tonight,” Pilar says, standing. “Take the cookies out in five minutes, okay?”
I wait till she’s upstairs before I go into the downstairs bathroom. I lock the door, and sit on the edge of the tub.
The deputy picks up on the fifth ring. “Pesquera.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask.
“Dylan?”
I pick a rubber butterfly bath toy up off the floor and squeeze it. It squeaks. I toss it into the tub. “Last night. Why didn’t you tell me you thought it was him?”
I can hear the creak of her office chair as she stands, and the soft click as she closes her office door.
She clears her throat before she speaks. “We don’t know anything for sure.”
I slide down until I’m sitting on the bath mat and resting my head on my knees. “But you think it might have been him?”
Deputy Pesquera sighs. “We’re not sure of anything right now, Dylan.”
“You know how this works, Dylan. I can’t tell you anything.”
“Oh, but I have to tell you everything?” I ask sharply.
“Did you tell me everything?” she asks.
I stand up. “What is that supposed to mean? Of course I told you everything! I always tell you everything!”
“You call me,” she says, “if you remember anything else.”
“What did I say in the truck last night, in my sleep?”
She clears her throat again. “You said, ‘It’s you.’”
I listen to the dial tone for a long time before hanging up.
I hear Pilar calling from upstairs, “Are they out?”
“Yes!” I yell, opening the bathroom door and dashing to the kitchen.
When Pilar comes downstairs, I’m blowing frantically on the cookies before the deep brown on their edges turns black. Pilar hands me a still-sleepy Grace, and starts using the spatula to put the cookies onto a cooling rack.
“I was going to do that,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I just … I’ll do it.”
“Are you all right?” I ask. She doesn’t look all right.
“I just got really tired all of a sudden. I don’t like the dark,” she says, looking out the window into the early night. “It makes me think about things. Don’t you ever think about things, Dylan? Don’t you ever think about Clarence?”
Instead of answering I get soy milk out of the fridge and pour some into a sippy cup for Grace. Pilar hands me a cookie. I sit down with Grace on my lap, her head resting against my shoulder, her breath evening back into sleep.
“Hey, Gracie,” I whisper, breaking the cookie in half and blowing on it till it cools. “Wake up and eat your cookies. They have a magical ingredient called sugar”
Grace yawns, stretches out her legs, looks at me, and says, “Lala.”
“I think about Clarence sometimes,” I say to Pilar.
“Me too.”
“It’s good, though, to think about him.”
Pilar smiles. “So we can keep him in our hearts?”
That’s what Fran, who was the elementary school secretary when we were in kindergarten, said to us on our first day back to school after Clarence was buried. We all liked her because she would come out and play games with us during recess, and because if she wore her magic snowflake earrings during winter, that meant it was going to snow that day. She changed schools, right along with Pilar’s and my class. She was the school secretary for the middle school and is now for the high school. I don’t think she could let us go.
“Can we please talk about something else?”
For a second Pilar looks completely deflated, but then she smiles again and says, “Sure. What’ll we do if the nail-file-in-a-cake doesn’t work?”
“Hmmm. Smuggle Thea out of prison in a basket of dirty laundry, like in Annie?”
When Pilar’s parents get home from the conference, the kitchen’s been cleaned, dinner is started, and we have Grace painting at the kitchen table.
Pilar’s mom insists on paying me, like she always does.
“Really, it’s fine,” I say. “I’m happy to help out.”
“Don’t be silly,” her mom says, pushing a ten-dollar bill into my palm with the tips of her blood-red nails. “Take it!”
She’s not a lady I can argue with. I pocket the money, and pretend to be intensely interested in putting on my book bag as Pilar’s mom takes out another ten and tries to hand it to Pilar. “Here you go, for babysitting.”
“Mom. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why? You worked as hard as Dylan. You deserve this.”
“I don’t need to get paid for being part of this family.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.”
Pilar’s dad is suddenly just as interested in my book bag. He helps me put it on, and then we make small talk over its uninteresting zipper.
“Family meeting,” Pilar growls, and that’s my cue. Just in time, Mom’s truck pulls up to the driveway.
“Bye, guys. See you tomorrow, Pilar.”
Pilar’s family is big on family meetings. Since she was for most of her life an only child, she and her parents made a lot of decisions by committee. There’s never been a lot of “Because I said so,” from her parents. When Grace came along, they all started raising her the same way, by committee, and I know it drives Pilar crazy when her mom tries to treat Pilar like a child, instead of someone with full voting rights, as Pilar puts it.
“God, this rain,” Mom says, wiping away condensation from the inside of the windshield with her glove. “It makes it feel colder than when it actually snows.”
“Mom?”
“The damp, I guess, chills you right to the bone,” she says, taking off her gloves and pressing her hand up close to the heater vent. “I can’t wait for first snow.”
“Mom?”
“Hm?”
“When the deputy briefed you on what happened, on that girl in Salvation, what did she say?”
Mom puts the truck into reverse and pulls out onto the street. We’re back on Lakeshore Drive before she answers me.
“Let’s see,” she says. “She told me basically the same thing you told me. That you had a vision of the little girl being trapped inside a barrel. A blue barrel, out behind their little downtown area. She told me you two almost got in a wreck, which I didn’t like hearing about.”
“Did she say anything else? About who did it?”
“Nope. Why do you ask?”
“They just haven’t caught him yet,” I say. “And I wish they would.”
“Oh, they’ll catch whoever did it, baby. They always do.”
“They didn’t catch the Drifter,” I answer.
“You kids still call him that?” she asks.
I shrug. “What else should we call him?”
“Long gone,” Mom says. “You should call him Long Gone and Never Coming Back.”
“Are you talking about the Drifter or Dad?”
She doesn’t look at me, just makes a shocked sound in her throat that sounds like “Oh.”
“Because Dad’s not coming back, is he?”
Mom fiddles with the heating vent. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” I say. “You know he’s not coming back. We don’t even know where he lives.”
“He knows where we live,” she says sharply.
Sometimes I forget that my mom must still love him. Sometimes I even forget that I’m the reason he left.
The night my dad didn’t come home after work was three days after my ninth birthday, and three days after I had a vision of the very last moments of a little kid named Wesley’s life. I didn’t know it then, but that ended up being the first vision that my dad ever knew about. Mom and I ate meat loaf at the table alone together, with the phone sitting next to her plate. I said, “Mommy, you know he really likes your meat loaf, right?” I said it ten different ways, so scared that her feelings were hurt and thinking of what I’d say to my dad when he got home. She kept saying, “Oh, I know.” Like they were playing a joke on me together. I let myself think he was out getting a late birthday present for me. A pony that I could keep at Ben’s, most likely.
After dinner Mom let me watch a movie while she made another round of calls to his cell phone, his office, his boss, and his friends, anywhere she could think of. By eight o’clock I could tell she was really worried. We kept the phone on the counter in the bathroom while I took my bath. She let me sleep in her room that night.
Sheriff Dean was on our couch, across from Mom in her armchair, when I came downstairs in the morning. For a second, from behind, I thought he was Dad. Sheriff Dean is bald, and the first thing I thought was that Dad had gotten cancer and lost his hair overnight. I scrambled over the back of the couch onto Sheriff Dean’s lap, yelling, “Dad!”
Sheriff Dean jumped out from under me, holding me by my shoulders and pushing me away, hard. I don’t know what made me cry more—that he wasn’t my dad or that he’d handled me so roughly. It was the first time I’d ever felt how strong grown-ups were, compared to little kids, and it’d scared me half to death. Sheriff Dean didn’t handle it too well either. His hand was over his heart now, his other hand on the butt of his gun, like it might fly out of its holster. “Dylan! You don’t jump on someone who has a gun!” His booming voice made me cry even harder. Mom picked me up off the couch and held me. I clung tight to her neck, tighter still when Sheriff Dean leaned forward to say softly, “I’m sorry I shouted, Dylan. I just got scared you’d get hurt.”
I always liked Sheriff Dean and hated the way flatlanders treated him like a walk-around character at an amusement park. His pudgy belly, good manners, and the fact that everyone called him “Sheriff Dean” made the weekenders get all cackle-laugh and say, “Bryce, get the camera and take my picture with the long arm of the law.” They’d think he was really charming, until one of their minimansions got vandalized. Then they’d insult him while he took the police report, and usually call the down-the-hill police to see if they would take care of it. That’s why they wanted all their minimansions to be behind a gate, so they could hire their own security detail.
Mom was holding me against her, stroking my hair. She was crying, and at first I thought it was because Sheriff Dean had yelled at me. I looked at him and thought, Boy, are you gonna get it. But she didn’t yell back at him or kick him out of the house. She sat down in the armchair and pulled me onto her lap. I let my body go slack against her, my back snug in the warm triangle of space between her ribs and arm.
“And he didn’t call last night?”
Mom shook her head. “I spoke with him at lunch and asked him to pick up ketchup for the meat loaf at the market on his way home.”
“At Sheboa’s?”
“Oh,” Mom said, looking helplessly at Sheriff Dean. “I didn’t tell him where. Just asked him to pick it up.”
Dean nodded and said, “We’ve contacted the boys down the hill. Maria, I think we should make an announcement. Ask folks if anyone’s seen anything.”
Mom started crying harder, shaking her head. “It’s a small mountain, Dean. I’ve made calls, and everyone knows he’s missing.”
“Still, Maria, I think a press conference might do some good.”
Mom sniffed. “Okay.”
Sheriff Dean stood. “I’ll set it up. Can Sarah Abbott come stay here with you?”
Sarah Abbott, I knew, was Ben’s mom.
Mom nodded. “I’ve called her already. She’ll be here soon.”
I stayed home from school that day. Dottie came by after she’d dropped all the kids off at school. She just showed up at the door. She sat me down to color at the kitchen table while Mom was in the living room with Ben’s mom. Dottie even made lunch for us all, though Mom barely ate anything. At one thirty Dottie said she had to go, and Mom took me upstairs so I could have a nap.
Mom was on the phone with the sheriff when I woke up and came back downstairs. My dad was not on the couch. Mom was looking with scared eyes at Ben’s mom and saying into the phone, “Why do you need that? Sheriff Dean, you tell me right now why you need that.”
Mom flipped through our address book with a shaky hand. “It’s Dr. Wigham,” she said, “but that’s a damn scary piece of information to ask me, even as a precaution, and you know it.”
Dr. Wigham was our dentist. I imagined my dad having a mouth full of cavities, too afraid to come home and face Mom.
The next day Dr. Wigham was one of the people standing behind Mom, along with Sheriff Dean and Deputy Pesquera, when Mom gave a press conference on our front steps. She held me in her arms. TV reporters from down the hill were there, and their microphones hovered like a swarm of metal bees in front of Mom’s face. I closed my eyes and hid my face against her shoulder so I wouldn’t see them sting her.
She told the bees she missed my dad and wanted him to come home. She said, “And if anybody knows where he is, they should call … They should call …” Before we’d gone outside, Sheriff Dean had written a telephone number down for my mom, so she could read it out loud to the bees. But instead of reading the number from the paper crumpled in her hand, my mom froze.
“Five-five-five …,” I said, and the metal bees all turned their heads and crept closer to my mouth. One of the soggy-shoed reporters said, “What did you say, honey?” And I said slowly, so they would be sure to hear it, “Five-five-five-three-four-five-eight.”
Then Sheriff Dean stepped in and said a few words, and we all filed back into the house, the reporters outside filming intros that all sounded like, “Where is Martin Moran? The Pine Mountain man disappeared two days ago …”
Deputy Pesquera went into the kitchen to make coffee for the grown-ups, and hot chocolate for me. Mom set me in the armchair and tucked a blanket around me, telling me to close my eyes for a little bit. She sat on the couch and pushed her palms against her face. Sheriff Dean sat next to her and patted her back, making soothing noises. Dr. Wigham paced behind the couch. He’d been there since early in the morning, cutting his vacation short to bring us pictures of my dad’s teeth from his office. Every time the phone rang, Dr. Wigham would pick up the file with my dad’s name on it, looking like he was ready to dash out the door. I didn’t know what the pictures were for, and no one would tell me. In the kitchen Officer Pesquera was talking quietly to someone on our phone. She hung up and signaled something to Sheriff Dean.
“Maria,” he said to Mom. Mom looked at him and then at Officer Pesquera.
“Who were you on the phone with?” Mom’s voice was shaking. “Who were you just talking to?”
“Maria,” Sheriff Dean said slowly, in the way he would talk to our class about stranger danger. “They found his car.” Dr. Wigham stopped pacing. “At the bottom of the hill. It’s been burned, stripped. There was some blood, Maria.” Mom sobbed, pulling me out from the chair and sitting back on the couch with me, saying, “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Was it his? Was it his blood?”
“We don’t have a DNA match yet, but it does not look good.”
Then the telephone rang, and Dr. Wigham leaned over the couch with my dad’s file and held it in front of Sheriff Dean’s face as the sheriff reached for the phone. Mom yelled, “Damn it, Wigham!” and grabbed the file and pitched it across the room, where the black-and-white shiny translucent pictures of my dad’s teeth scattered across the floor. The phone was still ringing and Mom grabbed it out of Sheriff Dean’s hand.
“Hello?” she said, and her voice was like a string pulled tight. She looked at Sheriff Dean, her eyes wide, the color gone from her face.
“Martin?” she said, her voice shaking. And then she screamed, “Martin! Where are you? Are you okay?”
There was a pause as she listened, her brow furrowed. “A note?” she asked.
Dr. Wigham was across the room, stooped over and gathering the photos. He stood up, holding a piece of paper, and said, “This note? It was under the coffee table.” He started to read the note out loud, even as he handed it to Mom. “My darling Maria,” he read, before Mom grabbed it out of his hand, her wild eyes scanning it like she could read it all at once.
“My darling Maria,” she said, her words running into one another. “I have started this letter a thousand times, but there is no easy way to say what I have to say.”
Mom stopped reading out loud, her voice lowering to a wordless murmur as she read the next lines.
“You’re leaving us?” she screamed into the phone.
That scream was like a sharp knife, lopping off a part of my body that I couldn’t even see, that I didn’t even realize was there until it was gone. By now, though, all these years later, you can barely even tell I’m limping.
The dream comes again and I find myself standing in the moonlit desert, the cool air pushing through the fabric of my sweatshirt, the low buildings of downtown Salvation outlined in the distance against the night sky. The hole in front of me is dark. I’m standing too close to its edge, and I step back, knocking into the blue plastic barrel. I don’t want to touch it, but I have to hold on to it to steady myself, to keep from stumbling, from falling into the hole. The wind dies down and I hear the footsteps again, rushing up behind me. Who are you? I ask in the dream, my hand still on the barrel, my heartbeats tripping over themselves, pounding against my chest. I turn around again and again, but I end up looking in the same direction, the footsteps behind me again, coming closer. Wake up, I say, wake up, wake up, wake up.
A chill draft licks at my cheeks and the tips of my earlobes, and I snuggle more deeply into the warmth of my bed, peeking out from under the covers to see if I’ve left my window open. The window is closed, but the air in my room has gone frigid, its moist chill as sudden and sharp as stepping outside in just pajamas to see a snowstorm. I pull the blankets up over my head, letting my breath warm my face, and vowing once again to convince my mom that we need central heating—floor vents that, like in Pilar’s house, gust out floods of hot air. I kick my feet, trying to warm the cold sheets. My right foot bumps up against something. Am I really scrunched that far down? Far enough to kick the bed frame? I keep my head under the blankets, lifting them from underneath, until in the murky darkness I can see my foot resting against the underside of a blanket that is pinned from above, by something that is definitely not my bed frame.
“MOM!”
I play ostrich for the ten seconds it takes her to dash into my room and tear the covers off me. She finds me curled in a ball, my eyes squeezed shut, and my fingers in my ears. I open one eye wide enough to make sure it’s her, and the other wide enough to make sure there’s no monster sitting at the foot of my bed, and I sit up.
“I had a nightmare.”
Mom yawns. “I’d say so. What about?”
I shrug, now convinced that it really was my bed frame that my foot bumped against. “Monsters?”
She pulls the covers back over me. “It’s freezing in here.” I lie back down, pulling the blankets to my chin. Mom sits on the edge of the bed, and yawns again. “Are you sure it was about monsters?” she asks. “It wasn’t about Tessa?”
“I don’t dream about Tessa,” I lie. “I don’t dream about any of them.”
She nods.
“You know that,” I say, more harshly than I mean to. What I want to say is, You’re the reason I don’t dream about them. I block them out, for you.
My mom studies me. “What if you did dream about them?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think you would see?”
“I don’t know.” I close my eyes, faking sleepiness. “Probably the same thing I saw the first time.”