Birdwine sounded disapproving, but I took it as good news. If Julian was after money, it could make everything so easy. I owed the kid, and money was something I had. If he was an asshole, I could pay my debt off in the most literal manner and send him on his merry asshole way.
My computer dinged. I walked back to the table and saw that Julian had responded to my missive with a friend request. He was less wary than I was, or simply of a different generation, or Birdwine’s suspicions were justified, and this was step one in his scheme to get his hands deep in my pocket.
“Get this,” I said to Birdwine. “I sent Julian a note on Facebook not ten minutes ago. I’m already hearing back.”
“See, now, that’s eager. Another warning bell.”
“No, it’s these kids today,” I told him, huffy old man style. “I don’t think they ever log off anything.”
“Not even to pee,” he agreed. “But still.”
A small chat window opened up at the bottom of the screen. I sat down and leaned in to read it.
Hello?
With the question mark, the simple greeting looked so plaintive. I remembered Julian’s crescent-shaped eyes, his nervous energy. He’d been an easy blusher, his feelings showing in the wash of pink and red across his skin. I was good at reading people, and he’d smelled of hope and nerves and worry, undercut with an edge of desperation. I didn’t think Julian Bouchard would turn out to be something so easy as an asshole. I hit Accept.
I’d made two friends in the space of hours, after all. Now I was on the phone with one and fielding Facebook IMs from the other. This was turning out to be a banner fucking Wednesday.
“He opened a chat,” I said to Birdwine.
“You sound thrilled.”
“I forget what that word means,” I said. “Is thrilled a kind of stress vomiting?”
“Yeah, I think. Well, your guard is good and up. Go chat with your li’l hustler. We’ll meet the guy who’s hustling him in the morning,” Birdwine said.
I started to thank him, but he’d already gone. Not a big one for Hello, how are yous or Good-bye have a nice days, that Birdwine.
I stared at the blinking cursor under Julian’s Hello?
The phone, still in my hand, was ringing again. I checked the screen.
It was Remi, hitting me back. My thumb moved toward the green button, but it stayed there, hovering. I wasn’t sure why. My other option was the Facebook chat, and hadn’t I had enough new brother for one day? I liked Remi. I liked him a lot. He had those bright black eyes you sometimes find on Cajuns and was my height, exactly, which could put us eye to eye in bed. I paused, my whole body cocked to catch any faint vibration from below.
I got nothin’. The sex that had risen in me back at the office with Birdwine had re-died, or at least was sleeping heavily now. I let Remi go to voicemail and pulled my laptop closer.
Well, hello there, I typed back to my brother.
CHAPTER 5
My mother and I do our time. We live in loose groups of squatty buildings that look like industrial office parks. Thirty-some-odd teenagers are housed with me, while Kai lives with several hundred inmates. My cabin holds up to six middle-school girls and a house mother named Mrs. Mack. Kai’s cellblock holds forty women, watched over by armed guards. She’s in prison for obstruction and destroying evidence, while I’m in a group home for the more private crime of putting her there. It’s tacitly unfair that I’m in the softer, smaller version.
Especially since my mother isn’t like me.
If Kai could see me now, she’d say that I’m not like me, either. I am not her tambourine girl in a beaded dress from Goodwill, or the gypsy one who’d coo, Such a long life line, peering at a palm over her shoulder. I can barely remember the achiever-girl I started to become in Asheville. More and more, I’m the Paula who rose up in Paulding County the first time I was asked to choose between fight or flight. In this place, I’ve learned—or I’ve decided—that I’m not a runner.
My first week here, a high school boy accidentally fell down the stairs and broke his wrist. The whole truth was, he followed me into a stairwell with some bad intentions. Week two, a girl from another cabin came to visit me, then walked into my door and blacked both eyes. The whole truth was, she muscled close and gave me a testing shove, so I smashed her face into the door jamb. I took some hits, sure. Hard ones, but I always came back swinging. The bullies have moved on, like bullies do, looking for meeker mice.
I worry more for Kai than for me. My mother’s best defenses are the fade, the melt, the sneak away, the dash. Kai can see trouble from a long way off, and until the raid I engineered blindsided her, she always had us elsewhere long before it landed. Since the arrest, she’s been hemmed in by bars and walls and doors, with no room to run.