7

I pressed the code on the Condo’s garage keypad—0501, my birthday—and stormed in. I toed off my soaked Converse and yanked off my socks. My feet were cold red. I hung my parka from its hook. I marched upstairs to Mom and Dad’s room. To their wedding photo on their dresser. In it, they faced one another and held hands with their heads steepled close. They stood a few hundred yards from Emerald West’s ski-patrol office, where I’d waited in my sled for Dad to ski me down.

In the picture’s background loomed Phantom Peak. It was named for how its ridge cast an afternoon shadow on itself that resembled a face. According to legend, that face used to hold a distinct willful expression, but these days, it was open to interpretation. Chuck Murphy, Justice of the Peace, stood before Mom and Dad, holding their vows. Those vows now hung, framed, on the wall beside the dresser. I studied Chuck Murphy’s jolly face and longed to gouge my fingernails into whatever face—God, fate—had stolen Mom.

Mom’s wedding dress was creamy and knee-length, and matching roses lined the fold of her hair’s French twist. I pressed my thumbnail against the thin crescent of scar on her left eyebrow. She’d gotten it tree-skiing with Dad on her first day of ski-patrol training. According to Mom, it had bled a ton, and as Dad applied the bandage, she’d felt an actual spark at his touch.

Even on this wedding day, Mom was just pretty. Thank God you got your father’s looks, she always joked. Yet Mom’s personality gilded her lovely, and at times she stole my breath. She stole Dad’s, no doubt, and it was obvious from the way he looked at her in the photo. He was stunningly handsome in a black tux. The photo didn’t show the two hundred guests watching them speak these vows. I’d have given anything to have sat among them.

I took the photo to Mom’s side of the bed and lay down in her place. I ran my finger over her image. Just half an hour ago, the vision of her had seemed so real.

“Help, Mom. Are you out there?”

Insanity. That’s what was going on. Gage + nicotine withdrawal = me over the edge. I felt myself soar over Pride’s edge, counted—one, two, three, four, five, six—and laughed that desperate kind of non-laugh.

The picture fell to my chest. My left hand was tired from doing everything. I tilted up my palm and scanned its lines. Was my life’s path graphed out there? Did a hash mark show where Mom died? Could there be another hash marking her return? I turned my head into Mom’s pillow and sniffed, but a year of laundry had erased her honeysuckle scent.

“Help, Mom. Anything?”

It felt like my ears bled, I listened so hard. I heard Gage instead: I miss you. I shook my head. Gage represented all the wrong things I’d done over the last year. Gage + me = hurting Dad. I had to move on. I concentrated on the photo again till Mom and Dad turned blurry and sleep took me.

My sophomore year, Handler told Mom he thought I was gifted in math. All I knew was that right after Mom died, the patterns I’d seen my whole life turned intense. As a junior, I was taking Advanced Placement Calculus, which was the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2 in college. The next year I’d take an online Calc 3 class Handler found at Stanford.

“You could have eight college credits,” Mom had said when he’d first laid out the plan.

I’d scowled at her. Just the word “college” summoned a vision of me flailing through a maze of books. But I took Calc after all because, well, math was my thing. It structured life into vivid sense. I hoped, wherever Mom was now, this one talent made her grin.

The first day I walked into Calc, Gage had already claimed my seat in the middle. Only two open seats remained: the first row, or directly in front of him. No way was I sitting in the first row, so I slid into that dangerous desk. His scrutiny singed my back, but I was too proud to move.

The first month, we didn’t talk, but each day Gage turned me molten. In reality, I was probably just a narrow back with unbrushed hair. Then Kenowitz caught me doodling as he solved a problem on the SMART Board. Handler had sent out word to keep an eye on me, for sure. All my teachers were watching me close.

“Sovern, are you getting this?” Kenowitz said.

Mom’s absence had been practically pulling me under that day, so I glowered and nodded. I’d already gone through the entire book the first week of class.

“You can solve this problem, then?”

I shrugged.

“Will you show us?” Disbelief laced Kenowitz’s smile. He was a cool teacher, really; I just have this way of confounding people. Of catching them off-guard and making them act ways they don’t usually act. Ways they’re ashamed of later. I don’t mean to, and it’s kind of hard to watch. Friendships are a struggle. I avoid people mostly.

Kenowitz handed me the black marker, and I stepped to the SMART Board. About two minutes later, I’d solved the problem, skipping a step by using a different approach than the clunky one taught in the book. When I turned around, Kenowitz’s mouth hung open. In fact, fifteen zero-shaped mouths faced me. And one smirk: Gage.

The quest over, I lost my composure. My cheeks flamed. I sat down.

Kenowitz stepped to the board, considering me. He pressed his lips and scanned the room. “Well, people,” he said. “Let’s try the next problem using the method Sovern has shown us.”

He turned to the board. Everyone started writing. I felt a pencil—a finger maybe—rustle my hair’s ends along my back.

“Genius,” Gage whispered.

The next day, when I sat down, he said, “Briggs. You’re named for a two-masted ship. Me, Brogan, I’m named for work boots. The lace-up kind.”

I turned in my desk, disbelief all over my face.

“Yeah, a ‘brig’ is a jail, but it’s also a wind-driven ship. A beauty.” For once, he wasn’t wearing his hat, and his blunt fingers tucked his shoulder-length hair behind his ear. A lock of it fell forward, showing his ear’s tip, and something about that blunt-fingered movement and that sliver of ear was so alluring I actually salivated. My zigzag smile must have looked ridiculous. A sliver of ear + agility with words = I don’t have a chance.

The doorbell woke me with Mom and Dad’s wedding photo a rectangle weight on my chest. I rubbed my face. The clock read 3:02 p.m. I knuckled my eyes as I descended the stairs. Big John filled the skinny window beside the front door. I blew out my breath and opened it.

“Hey, Sov.”

Silence.

“Your dad sent me to check on you.”

Handler must have texted Dad that I’d ditched. Again. I swallowed against what Dad must have thought. If I hadn’t seen Gage, I’d have gone back to school after lunch. This wasn’t his fault. But then I considered the vision—seeing Mom—and I couldn’t regret ditching.

Big John watched my face with interest. I spun on my heel and walked down the hall. He closed the door and eased off his boots and jacket. I drew a glass of water in the kitchen. He entered the room and stood across from me, the breakfast bar a thick line between us. I avoided looking at his good-natured face. We listened to liquid rush down my throat.

“Your cheek looks good.”

I shrugged.

“I wonder how many folks in the world have had a jowl full of quills. Dogs, sure. But humans?” He grinned. “How the hell’d that happen, anyway?”

Nobody had asked me that. It seemed like the sort of thing a person would want to know.

I shrugged.

“Still not talking? Word is, you’re saying a little.” Big John sounded hurt. He was like that, always wearing his heart on his sleeve.

“An impasse.” I shrugged.

He chuckled. “With a porcupine?” He scanned the room. “Haven’t been here much lately.” He focused on the yellow tulips in the table’s center, and he smiled sadly. I thought how he had twin sons in kindergarten. Big, grinning, tow-headed boys I hadn’t seen in a while. I pictured them towering over the other kids.

“Time was,” Big John said, “I’d come over here and you’d be at that table with headphones on. Or the couch. Those things were pretty near part of your head. Remember?”

I nodded. Before Big John had fallen in love and married—all in about a month—he’d been here almost as much as Wash. Those big headphones had etched the patterns and vocabularies of stories in me, and that made people believe I was smart. Till they saw me write or heard me read, that is. I hadn’t worn those headphones in years—earbuds had replaced them—so I knew he was remembering me little, like his boys. Placing himself in Dad’s position.

“Thanks.” I said it like Please go, and then wished I could rewind the word.

“Talking, indeed.” He looked at his hands, turned, and lumbered back down the hall. The set of his shoulders was like a mirror of all my faults. He scuffed on his boots and shrugged on his jacket. “How ’bout you call your dad?”

I nodded.

“Maybe next time, tell him before you leave school. He’s not your mom, but he loves you just the same.” Big John stepped onto the narrow porch. “We all love you, Sov.”

Shame pressed my chin to my chest as I shut the door. I slumped on the stairs. If this was a movie, the audience would itch to slap me. I pictured myself in those headphones like Big John had. Where had they gone?

I trudged upstairs and searched through my desk, under my bed, on my closet’s top shelf. No headphones.

Inspiration hit, and I walked to Mom and Dad’s room. My body’s indent on Mom’s side of the bed stopped me cold. It looked like she’d just taken a nap. That Mom/me vision came right back, but I shook my head. I opened Mom’s top dresser drawer, leaning back a little like something might jump out. There, right at the front, lay those headphones.

I slid them on, saw my kindergarten self in the mirror over the dresser, and bit back a laugh. I reached out to that young reflection, but when my fingers touched the cool glass, it was me. I ground the freckle that rode my upper lip. The only one on my face, and I hated it. I drew the cord from the drawer, coiling it around my hand, and there was that business card from the New York guy who’d said I could model. I shut the drawer.

Still wearing the headphones, I smoothed the covers on Mom’s side of the bed, fluffed my head’s dent from the pillow, and put back the wedding photo. In my bedroom, I smashed my cheek against the wall to see along my dresser’s back. I got a broom from the kitchen pantry and retrieved my voice recorder. Coated with dust, its corner had a blue scrape that matched my bedroom wall, but I put in new batteries, pressed the play button, and it worked.

Like Mom had shown me a thousand times, I turned on my laptop and opened the library’s website. I meticulously typed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings into the catalog’s search engine. It didn’t work. I looked closer, dove my fingers into my hair, and tried to fix the spellings.

I was in luck: the library owned an audio version, read by Angelou herself. I downloaded it onto my phone, and downloaded the visual book onto my Kindle so I could read it with bigger font. Then I headed for the kitchen table, to sit where Big John had seen the kindergarten me, and realized I still hadn’t called Dad. Gage wanting to get back together + me ditching school = Dad hurt. I paused on the stairs, held my phone awkwardly in my sling-hand, and texted I’M HOME AND FINE, TIRED, autocorrect fixing my spelling.

My homework was to read the memoir’s first two chapters. I sat at the table and started the book. Angelou spoke deep-voiced and slow, enunciating each syllable like the voice of destiny.