Maybe you should leave that book for him, said Snow.
Put it with his stuffed monkey and stuff.
I can’t, said LaRose. She would search.
Well, said Josette, okay, but she wouldn’t find it. So she’d give up, right?
No, said LaRose. She would never give up. She might go out to the barn and scream like a banshee.
Ooo, said Snow. What’s a banshee?
It’s a boney old woman with long teeth that crawls around graves and screams when someone dies.
Holeee, said Josette.
Creep me out! said Snow. Where’d you get that?
Maggie told me. She’s got a collection of pictures from books and things that she keeps underneath her bed. All scary.
She keeps scary junk underneath her bed?
Josette and Snow looked at each other.
Whoa, for badass.
Where’s she get that crazy shit?
Don’t say that to LaRose.
She rips pages out of library books at school, said LaRose.
Little man, said Josette. Don’t let her bother you.
I’m used to her, said LaRose. I’m used to everything now.
The girls just held his hands and didn’t talk after that.
Before they took LaRose to the Ravich house last fall, Landreaux and Emmaline had spoken his name. It was the name given to each LaRose. Mirage. Ombanitemagad. The original name of Mink’s daughter. That name would protect him from the unknown, from what had been let loose with the accident. Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort, which is why LaRose was sent.
EMMALINE PEACE. A+ English student. Thought she’d like to teach literature. Got her teacher’s certificate, taught high school, and only got high on weekends. She decided she was better with little kids than teenagers because the teenagers were too much like her, and she was right. Any authority she had literally went up in smoke the night she was enjoying skunky fine weed at a party and a couple of her students entered the room.
After the momentously drunk days with Landreaux, she received an offer. Funding for a degree in administration because the tribe was taking control of the school system from the top down. Emmaline went back to graduate school, grew up. Returning with her expedited degree, she got excited about a newly funded pilot program—an on-reservation boarding school for crisis kids.
People didn’t want to think about boarding schools—the era of forced assimilation was supposed to be over. But then again, kids from chaotic families didn’t get to school, or get sleep, or real food, or homework help. And they’d never get out of the chaos—whatever brand of chaos, from addictions to depression to failing health—unless they got to school. To succeed in school, kids had to attend regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly, and study regularly. Maybe the boarding schools of the earliest days had stripped away culture from the vulnerable, had left adults with little understanding of how to give love or parent, but what now? Kids needed some intervention, but not the wrenching away of foster families and outside adoptions. A crisis intervention, giving parents time to get on track. The radical part was that, unlike historical boarding schools, this one would be located on the reservation. Pre-K through grade 4. After that, kids could board but go to regular school. This new/old sort of boarding school, equipped to pick up the parenting roles for families that went through cycles of failure and recovery, became Emmaline’s mission.