It was early November in Winnipeg. The air was crisp, and each blade of grass was coated in frost. Morgan cut across the lawn. Eli followed. Her feet crunched against the ground, and it made her think of the blizzard all over again. She double-timed it to the sidewalk. Her breath escaped in puffs of smoke, which may as well have been coming out of her ears, but she couldn’t tell whether she was mad at Katie and James or herself. She decided that it was a combination of the two. She let out a loud grunt.
“Why are you angry all the time?” Eli asked.
Morgan glared at him for a second, and Eli recoiled, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. They kept marching towards school. Truthfully, she was kind of surprised that he’d said anything at all. She’d not yet heard him string that many words together at one time.
She tried to distract herself from her anger by observing the neighborhood. The endless run of two-story houses, each almost identical to the one next to it. The too-perfectly manicured boulevards that were more like putting greens you’d find at a golf store. The absence of graffiti sprayed on walls. There were white picket fences, basketball hoops attached to garages—even some Christmas decorations. They passed a couple of people walking dogs (all some form of doodle—Labra or Golden). The people nodded and smiled at Morgan and Eli, but Morgan just looked away.
“Could you at least slow down?” Eli asked.
He was struggling to keep up. His drawing pad kept slipping from under his arm, and every time it did, it slowed him down further.
Morgan breathed out deliberately and waited for him to catch up. “I’m not angry all the time. I’m angry now.”
“You’re—”
“You can’t just say that,” Morgan continued, cutting him off. “You can’t ask ‘Why are you angry all the time?’ when I’m just angry now. That’s like saying a clown’s happy all the time when their smile is just, like, painted on.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“Well, I’m not angry all the time, so hopefully that makes sense,” she said.
“You’re angry at home and when we walk to school and at school,” he said.
“How would you know if I’m angry at school?”
“I’ve seen you at school and you look the same way you do now—you’re just quieter about it.”
Morgan crossed her arms and sped up. He could just walk faster with his stupid drawing pad. “Stop watching me at school. That’s weird. Especially because you’re in seventh grade and I’m in eighth grade. There are rules.”
“What rules?” he asked.
“Just rules, that’s all!”
Morgan watched Eli too, though. He sat in the corner of the gym during lunch—on the floor, even though tables were set up. Every lunch hour, separate from everybody, his drawing pad balanced perfectly on his lap, scribbling away at whatever he liked to draw. It wasn’t fair that she’d told him to stop watching her, when she watched him. But she felt obligated to keep an eye on him, just as she usually felt obligated to walk him to school (except for trying to ditch him this morning). He’d been around for only a week, but she felt like she knew him better than that. He reminded her of herself, when she was younger. At a new house, before new houses became part of her life. The irony was that while Morgan watched Eli draw, sitting by himself in a corner of the gym, she’d be sitting by herself at a corner of a table.
“I’m not angry at school. I’m shy at school, okay?” she said. “There’s a difference.”
Eli shrugged. “Why are you shy at school, then?”
“Because I don’t like talking to anybody and I don’t think anybody likes talking to me. We have an unspoken agreement to avoid each other. Me and…everybody else.”
“If you don’t talk to anybody, then how do you know if they don’t like talking to you?”
“I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” Morgan said. “Plus, you’re not exactly a chatterbox at school yourself, or anywhere for that matter.”
For a while they just kept walking.
“It’s not just that people wouldn’t like talking to me; I don’t think they’d like me period,” Morgan said, as though they’d been talking the whole time.
“I like you,” Eli said.
Morgan stopped abruptly, forcing Eli to stop too. He almost dropped his drawing pad.
“You hardly even know me.” Morgan reached forward and flicked his drawing pad with her index finger, gently. “Plus, you’re always drawing in that thing, so how do you even have time to like me?”
Eli held out the drawing pad out and flipped to a page. It was a picture of the lunchroom, in pencil, full of kids eating their lunches, and there was Morgan, off to the side, sitting on her own, looking at the ground.
“Oh,” Morgan said. “Eli, wow.”
Eli closed the pad.
Morgan kept walking. Eli followed.
“How’ve you been to so many homes?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Stuff happened.”
“What kind of stuff?” he asked.
“I run away,” she said, “or they don’t like me. Or I run away because they don’t like me. I get older and, you know, they want a cute Native kid. And I can tell, so, I don’t know…I guess I act like a jerk. They’re saviors, you know. Like, all of them. Katie and James too. They want to save kids like us.”
“I like them,” he said.
Morgan took a deep breath, then half smiled. “Yeah,” she said under her breath. “I do too.”
The sun rose steadily over the twenty-minute walk and melted the frost, making the boulevards and trees glitter. The neighborhood looked pretty, but Morgan always felt detached from it—no matter how high the sun rose, no matter how many times she walked the same route, and whether Eli was trailing behind her or not. It was one of several routes Morgan had taken to one of several schools, coming from one of several homes, and it was hard to think of what was different from one placement to the other. The only constant was that they’d all been in the same city.
“This is your first home, right?” she asked.
Eli looked forward, as though the glittering blades of grass had caught his attention. As though he wasn’t ignoring her.
Finally, he nodded.
“I don’t remember much about my first,” she said, “but I know what it felt like. Like I was empty, and even though the house was full, it felt empty too. Does that make sense? I was like, I don’t know, three.”
“I was home,” he said. “Home home…” He shrugged. “And then I wasn’t.”
“How’d it happen?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.
The school was up ahead. A long, flat brick building set against the backdrop of a large field that, too, was shimmering in the early-morning sun.
“I was too young to remember,” she said. “All I know is that my mom didn’t want me.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
“How could she?”
As they got closer to the school, they were joined by a throng of students funneling into the wide concrete walk that led to the front doors. Morgan made herself thinner, avoiding both physical and eye contact.
A gust of wind shouldered its way through the mass of middle schoolers, and when it collided with Morgan and Eli, Eli’s drawing pad went flying through the air. It danced in the wind until it landed on the street, where it was promptly run over by the 68 Grosvenor bus.
“No!” Eli cried.
Without looking, he turned to run after it. Morgan grabbed his backpack and pulled him out of the way of an oncoming car. His drawing pad was run over again in the process and the pages went flying.
“Are you trying to get killed or something?” Morgan said.
“Let me go!”
Morgan looked both ways, saw that traffic was clear, and followed him onto the street. They gathered the pages together and piled them into a messy, muddied stack of art. Eli slumped on the curb, and Morgan flipped through some of the pages. With the exception of that drawing of her, his illustrations were all of villages within beautiful landscapes, with animals walking on two legs through forests or along canyons or over mountains. Some were of lands in the middle of summer, some were colored with the warmth of autumn, others were made to face the harsh bite of winter. They looked like places straight from the fantasy novels Morgan loved.
She sat next to Eli on the curb, put his drawings aside, and placed her arm around his shoulders.
“These are amazing,” she said, “even though they aren’t all of me.”
Her humor fell flat.
“They’re all ruined,” Eli said.
“Where did you get the ideas from? Do you like reading fantasy?” she asked.
“They’re stories from my community,” he said.
“Sooooo…” She picked up the pile of art and placed it on her lap. “The art is ruined but the stories aren’t?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Could you draw them again?”
“I guess,” he said again. “But that’s…” He looked at his drawings resting on Morgan’s lap, then looked away, as though he couldn’t stand to see them in their condition. “My dad got me that pad before I was…”
“Oh. Sorry.”