WHEN I OPEN MY eyes, I’m in a strange room, and my heart jumps. Not my bed, not my blanket, not my clothes, not my walls, not my—
And then it floods back over me. It wasn’t a bad dream after all.
She’s still gone.
The wet cement feeling settles on me again. It’s hard to breathe.
I’m in a strange house.
My mother is dead.
I have no home.
Everything I knew is gone.
I start to cry.
“You want us to get LaLa?”
I look down from the top bunk.
Two Black kids, one super tiny and scrawny, and one stick-thin and tall, stare up at me with suspicious eyes, next to my open suitcase. My underwear and bras, everything Cake packed for me, spread all over the floor. The little girl, she’s the one who spoke. I can tell. Her eyes are worried, even as she stands there, my underwear in her hands.
Jesus, first Brownie and now them. Is that what foster kids do? Rifle through each other’s suitcases all the time?
The tiny one, the boy, says, “We didn’t find any candy.” He has a blue basketball jersey on and matching shorts. His knees are as round as baseballs. “The hell you come here without candy for?”
“The hell,” says the skinny one, the girl, only her “hell” is whispered, like she’s trying it on. It’s Sarah. I can see how expertly cornrowed her hair is in the light. I’ve never been able to do anything with my hair. I’m all thumbs.
“Don’t you mess with me,” huffs the boy. “I’ll kick your ass.” A bubble of green snot balloons from his nostril, but he doesn’t notice. He punches his fist into his other hand.
Sarah repeats, “Don’t mess.” She tries to punch her hand, too, but misses.
They’re just kids who’ve been abandoned, but I’m still a little mad they’re going through my stuff. I should be nice, but what does it matter now? These kids are me now and I am them.
I wipe my wet face with the back of my hand and lean over the bunk and snarl, “I’m a ninja. My mom died. Her brain exploded. You put my stuff back in my suitcase or I’ll take the both of you out with one kick.”
The boy and the girl squeal and start tossing my things in the general direction of the suitcase before they run down the hall.
The ceiling over my bunk has old water stains. If I had a pencil, I would write Kill me. Kill me now inside them, like words inside cartoon text bubbles. Draw a girl with crosses for eyes and a limp body in an old lace dress. Or a girl-bug in glass, fluttering her crisp wings, waiting.
This isn’t a bad dream. I am really, really, really here, and she is really, really, really gone.
It’s like lightning, what tears through me then. I bury my face in a pillow that isn’t mine, that doesn’t smell like anything I know, and cry myself back to sleep.
I sleep for so long that when I wake up, the small bedroom is dark again. Below me, the girl named Sarah snores gently in her bunk.
I climb down the bunk ladder and walk to the cloud bathroom, pee, wash my hands, brush my teeth.
It feels like it takes a million years to do all those things. It feels like it takes a million years to squeeze the toothpaste onto the red toothbrush, lift the brush to my mouth. I can’t even look at the hollow girl in the mirror; my head is too heavy.
The house is very still except for the whir of a ceiling fan in one of the rooms. I stand in the hallway, listening, my heart pounding.
Maybe LaLa is a secret drunkard, and she’ll burst from her room, hairbrush in hand, ready to punish me for leaving my bed in the middle of the night. Maybe, like Georgia, she has lists, secret lists I haven’t seen yet.
I tense, waiting. Drunkard—that’s another word I learned in Lit class last semester, along with malt-worms. Falstaff and Prince Henry and a face like “Lucifer’s privy-kitchen.”
But LaLa doesn’t come flying from her room, face ablaze. Her door stays shut, and the house stays quiet. Maybe there are no Georgias here.
In the kitchen, a note on the yellow table that says, Tiger, food in the fridge. Please eat. We have some things to do tomorrow. I crumple it up.
The refrigerator is blissfully unpadlocked and stuffed with food. Butter on a clear dish. Flats of tortillas. Grapes in a bag. Jars of sauces. This is more food in one refrigerator than I’ve ever seen, except for at Cake’s house, and if this was any other time, I’d go to town on all of it. But not now.
I wonder if I will ever be hungry again.
There’s an old-fashioned phone on the wall, the kind with glowing push-buttons that make noise each time you press them, like beep-beep-BOOP.
I want to hurt something. Someone. I want to slam the refrigerator door shut over and over and shatter the pert glass jars of sauce inside.
I grab the phone, and before I know it, I’m calling Kai Henderson.
I waited six damn months to kiss Kai Henderson. I waited practically my whole life to kiss anyone, for that matter, and he could not even stay in the hospital with me. He left me there, and drove away in his mother’s car.
On that day six months ago in Bio, when I fell hard for him? I even went home and wrote it down: 10:46 a.m. in Room 11C, Bio lab, November 13th, Kai Henderson made me feel warm and weak. I didn’t know how else to put it, and I folded that piece of paper up a zillion times until it was just a small, tight square, and hid it in the secret compartment of my jewelry box.
Kai never seemed like some of the guys at Eugene Field who deliberately bumped me in the hallway, trying to get a squeeze on my breasts. He actually listened to Cake during band rehearsals, instead of the other guys she’d tried out, who talked over her and sighed loudly and quit in a huff.
We’d never even held hands before the kiss at Thunder Park Elementary. He’d only ever dated one other girl, Ellen Untermeyer, and that was way back in the eighth grade, when all of us were just amoebas with braces and pimples.
In the playground at Thunder Park Elementary, I learned you could kiss someone for a billion hours and they would still turn around and leave you alone in a hospital, your mouth still warm from kissing.
The jewelry box where I hid that note plays “Für Elise” and the netting on the ballerina’s skirt is torn, but I still like petting it sometimes, because it’s so delicate and pretty, and I guess that’s just another goddamn thing I’ll never see again.
The clock on LaLa’s kitchen wall says 4:15 a.m. I listen to the brrring, brrring, brrring on the other end of the phone. My bones shake, electric with meanness. I can hold on all night until he answers. I have nowhere else to go.
Kai’s voice is sleepy. “Hello? Who is this?”
I say, as coldly as I can, “The heart really is like a beautiful and weird engine, Kai.”
There’s silence on the line. Then he says, slowly, “Tiger? Where are you?”
“You just left me there.”
“Tiger—”
“It’s funny that I started liking you right when we started working on hearts in class, you know? I think that’s irony, now. Is that irony? I’m not sure. I’m not really thinking clearly right now, you know? Anyway, is it ironic? Because I think you broke my heart. And what sucks the most? Is that you broke it right after it had just been broken in the worst possible way, you know? Like, you stomped on the pieces and made them even smaller. I mean, who does that?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t…”
His meek voice makes me even angrier. “All you had to do was stay. Just stay. Was that so hard? Do you even know where I am?”
I’m in a bad and mean place. I keep talking and the things I tell him make him cry.
Like: maybe he should have been the one to die, not my mother.
I want to hurt everyone right now. I want to break things so the world looks like how I feel inside: splintered into a million bloody and sharp pieces.
Kai Henderson hangs up on me.
I slide the phone back into the cradle. Through the window, the sun is rising in great pinkish waves over the sky.
Back in the bedroom, I clamber up to my bunk and wait, staring at the ceiling, my chest heaving up and down, up and down. I remember my phone and dig beneath my pillow for it.
I look at the text I sent myself the night my mom died.
My mother has now been dead for 3,294 minutes.
I can’t be this way. I can’t stay this way. I can’t be this way. I can’t stay this way.
I watch the seconds tick by on my phone’s stopwatch, still running, until my eyes blur.
“Are you there?”
I whisper it, even though I’m sure Sarah won’t wake up.
“Please do something. Show me. Anything.”
But the only answer I get is silence.