“All right,” she finally said, snapping her fingers at me. “Come on, Liv. Let’s get settled. I need some rest after all that driving.”
I dragged a suitcase from the trunk of the old car that had taken us so many hundreds of miles. North showed us a bedroom in the main house, then brought us to the kitchen where an older woman with frizzy, blond hair explained the work schedule.
“Liv can do that.” My mother pointed at the column for gardening. “And cleaning in the kitchen, right?”
I nodded.
Asha wrote my name in the column. North looked at my mother.
“And you?” he asked.
“I’d prefer not to be outdoors.”
“What are you good at?” North asked.
“She makes pretty jewelry,” I put in.
“Well, maybe you can help out in the workshop.” North nodded at Asha, who wrote my mother’s name on the chart.
“We won’t be here very long,” my mother said.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t work,” North replied.
North had been at Twelve Oaks for over a decade. He played the guitar, did macramé and woodwork, and was in charge of the commune’s website. The day after we arrived, he took Crystal to his workshop and taught her how to use different tools and materials. He sold wooden bowls, signs, and decorations at art fairs and the farmer’s market, so he was well-equipped to help Crystal with her jewelry making.
“He’s nice,” I ventured one morning when my mother and I were getting dressed. “Seems to know a lot.”
Crystal shrugged, looking at herself in the mirror as she tied a purple scarf around her hair and applied lipstick.
“He’s no different from the rest of them, Liv.”
But he was. He was one of the few men who didn’t seem interested in my mother sexually, and she didn’t set out to try and seduce him. Maybe it was the environment of Twelve Oaks or the fact that she didn’t have to sleep with him in order to stay… Whatever it was, I welcomed the change.
One afternoon when I was picking basil, North stopped by the garden and tossed me a flat, metal medallion, the size of a half-dollar, attached to a silver chain.
“What’s this?” I caught it with both hands.
He squinted his eyes against the sun. “Read it.”
The medallion had an inscription—Fortes fortuna iuvat.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Fortune favors the brave.” North tilted his head. “Like it?”
Wariness coiled tight in my chest. I took a step away from him. Despite the fact that he was different, I’d had a shield up for a few years now, ever since a couple of perverts, my mother’s so-called boyfriends, had messed with me.
“Uh, thanks,” I said to North.
He studied me for a second. “You’re like a turtle, you know?”
“A turtle?”
North thumped his chest. “Hard shell. Hiding. You been on the road long with your mama?”
“Since I was seven.” I had no idea why I was telling him the truth.
“School?”
“I’ve been to a ton of schools.”
“What’d you like most?”
“I don’t know. English, I guess.”
“Come on. Let’s see where you’re at.” He tilted his head to the house where most of the commune members lived.
I wasn’t really afraid, just because there were always people around and little risk that I’d ever be alone with North. My mother and I stayed in our own bedroom in the main house, where about a dozen other people lived. Bedrooms were private, but we shared the other living spaces and kitchen. Some members lived in small cabins dotted around the farm.
North nodded to the rough-hewn trestle table and took a stack of homeschooling workbooks from a shelf. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I did the work he gave me, then frowned at the look on his face.
“What?” I asked.
“You ought to know advanced algebra and geometry by now. Maybe even some precalculus.”
I stared at him. With his shaggy hair and scraggly beard, he looked like he’d never set foot inside a classroom, let alone knew anything about mathematics.
“You know about that stuff?” I asked.
“Sure. I studied physics in college.”
“You went to college?”
A wide grin flashed behind his beard. “You think I’ve been a hippie my whole life? Yeah, I went to college. MIT. Plasma physics was my thing.”
I couldn’t help laughing. “So how’d you get from plasma physics to organic gardening?”
He tugged at the tiny, beribboned braid in his beard. “Sometimes you end up on a different path than the one you started on, you know?”
I didn’t, not really. I’d never started on a path by myself. I’d always just been dragged onto one.
North sat across from me at the table and opened a math workbook.
“So what made you take a different path?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Just life, Liv. No one’s immune from anything.”
“Are you sorry you left MIT?”
“No. Sorry about other things, though.”