Julian stepped toward me, and Birdwine physically moved me behind him, pushing me roughly down into a chair without turning, his eyes fixed on Julian. He seemed to swell into a wall between us, rising up to his full height.
“This would be a great time for you to go,” he said, calm and deadly serious. There was a fraught pause, and then he took a single step toward Julian, big as a bear, every line of his body meaning business. Julian’s eyes flashed wide, and his mouth popped open. Birdwine took one more step, his arms rising, and Julian turned and fled, abandoning his papers.
I put my head down, hands braced on my knees.
Birdwine did not give chase. He turned to me instead.
“Are you—” he said, but stopped mid-question, as if he was uncertain how to end it.
“I can’t be seen like this,” I gasped out, sick and shaking so hard I couldn’t try to stand. “Nick and Catherine already think I— Oh, shit, help me, Birdwine.”
He was already moving, swinging me up like this was a year ago, back when he was my lover and I was made of air and ribbons. He carried me fast down the hall toward my office.
I let him. I even closed my eyes and let myself sink into it, cursing my stupidity.
Kai had been gone only five months, and already I’d forgotten the most essential—maybe the only empirical—truth about her: My mother never stayed anything. Not even dead.
CHAPTER 3
I am a mouse in a red saddle, the girth pulled so tight around my chest that I cannot breathe. This is what I know: Ganesh has come. I am Ganesha’s little mouse, and as the huge god plops onto my back, my lungs compress, and I am flattened into something paper thin and airless.
The stricture around my chest eases, and I am not the mouse. I am me. I am eleven, and Ganesha is only a dear and funny fellow from my bedtime stories. I lie weeping in a bed soaked in the antiseptic reek of roach spray. Kai has doused the mattress so they don’t come and touch me with their whispery, plastic feet while I am sleeping.
We used to live in Asheville with Hervé, who had horses and an inheritance that let him say he was a folk musician. Kai kept him as her boyfriend for more than two years, a personal best. Then they started fighting more and more, and he called me a little shit when I spilled juice into his sitar.
The next time he took a fishing weekend, Kai told me to grab my stuff and load it in the old Mazda Hervé let her use. It was not my first hasty evacuation, but it was the first one I was actively against. I stared at her, big-eyed and balky, while she shoved her underpants into a duffel.
I wasn’t crazy about Hervé, but I liked his horses plenty, and I loved the hippie co-op school his money paid for. Before Asheville, we’d homeschooled. It was easier than reenrolling me as we changed names and cities, pausing only in the places where we lived with Eddie, then Tick, then Anthony. Kai loved teaching—I was working ahead of grade in English and science—but I was a class of one. I’d pick up day-pass friends at parks or fall in with a tribe of campground kids, good for a weekend.
At the co-op in Asheville, I had friends I got to keep. I felt at home there from day one, sitting in a multi-age classroom so mottled with colors that my copper hide was just another bead in a mosaic. My purple thrift-store pants were rendered regular when placed between a sari and a snaggy home-knit rainbow tunic. There was a girl named Meadow and a boy named River, not related. My essay on marsupials was taped up in the middle of the honor wall, and I’d collected nineteen Reading Challenge stickers. Only my friend Poppy was ahead of me, with twenty.
Kai saw me, frozen in the bedroom doorway, and said, “Thirty minutes and we hit the road. Anything that’s not in the car gets left behind.”
I knew from experience she meant it. I ran and started throwing all my favorite books in the trunk, claiming space, while Kai thoughtfully and thoroughly robbed Hervé. Kai drove the Mazda to Greenville, where a guy she knew gave us cash for it, even without the title. We took a Greyhound to Lexington, where we bought ourselves an old VW bus with a mattress in the back that gave us lice. We threw the mattress by the road and got a futon, slowly camping our way south to Georgia.
We met Dwayne right when the weather started turning cold.
Now we’re living with him in a sagging farmhouse deep in Paulding County. Kudzu heaps are laced around us, shielding us. From the highway, the house isn’t visible at all. Neither is the path that runs through the woods behind us, winding through the clearings where Dwayne’s pot plants are growing.