“Dunno, but damn,” I agree.
We like to say things to each other about how mothers are, because we each still have one. This is what sets us apart and makes the other girls in our cabin hate us, except Candace, who is too weird and broken to get that she’s supposed to. Joya and I are a tribe. We even have a name; Candace calls us Gotmamas.
“Why?” I asked her, hearing it as one word.
“Because you two both got mamas, duh,” she said, then flinched, like saying duh might earn her a slap. It probably did, back where she used to live. But I smile at her. I like it. It names all the places I belong: with Kai, and in this tribe of two with Joya.
The rest of the poem is the same, overblown and rhyme-y, with Sita as a thinly disguised Kai. Dwayne is her unlikely, redneck Rama. Sita-Kai is a veritable cup of love, so full she has a love meniscus. She is steadfast and faithful; Rhonda does not appear in any guise.
The last page after the poem is a colored pencil sketch.
“Oh, hey, now. This is good,” Joya says.
It is, actually. Much better than the poem.
“Kai draws for a job, sometimes,” I tell Joya. “She sets up an easel in a city park or near some tourist trap, anyplace with good foot traffic. She draws people thinner than they are, or with a smaller nose, and she dresses them like princesses or astronauts. She gets twenty bucks a pop.”
In the picture, Sita kneels in the top right of the page, smiling and serene. Her lap is full of lotus blossoms, cradled sweetly to her belly. Kai is good at faces in particular, and in case the poem wasn’t clear enough, she’s given her own face to Sita. Rama has the sky-blue skin that shows his divine nature, but his features match Dwayne’s. Kai has even given this god-prince of ancient India a mop of Dwayne-ish, honey-colored curls.
“Can I come back in yet?” Candace pleads, from the other side of the door.
Joya kicked her out when the mail came, and she skulked off to bathe. Technically this room is half hers, but less technically, she’s scared of Joya. Candace is currently the only white girl in our cabin, and she is very, very white. She comes from way out in the meth-lands of west Georgia, and her skin is milky and her hair is butter-colored, as flossy as cotton candy. Where she’s from, black and white don’t mix, so it’s weird that she’s glued herself to me. Inside me, black and white have mixed all the way, with a big scoop of Asian and who the hell knows what all else thrown in.
“Fuck off, Candace,” Joya hollers back, and at the same time I say, “Get away from the door.”
The demon Ravana is drawn crosswise, with a low worm’s body that blocks Sita in the corner. Each of his ten heads is perched on a long neck that stretches straight down to his body, forming bars. In this production, the part of the demon Ravana is being played by the Georgia prison system.
Rama has most of the page. He is moving purposefully toward Ravana, scimitar drawn, ready to attack the demon. Here the margin vines are covered mostly in blooms, but I am looking closely. I see a clot of pointy leaves hidden near Rama in all the flowers, and I am Kai’s child; I recognize the shape.
“Pot leaves,” I say to Joya, pointing.
I think it’s funny, but her eyes narrow. She takes the poem and starts flipping back through it.
“Do you think she’s sending him a message? About the drug charges, or . . .”
“Naw. It’s just a joke.”
Joya says, “I hope so, because if she’s telling him to mess with the drug people, they will kill him. They will kill his whole ass, all the way.”
I shake my head at her. Dwayne’s friends sell mustard sandwiches and acid in the parking lots of concert halls. They shoplift and rob empty houses, sure—they’re assholes with peace sign tattoos. But they would kill people only by accident, driving drunk or stoned.
“Crack people aren’t the same as pot people,” I tell her. Joya’s mom was on the pipe before she went to rehab.
Joya snorts. “No such thing as Drug-Lord Lite.”
“There’s no secret message about drugs,” I say, reading back through the lines. I don’t want to send the poem, but not because I’m scared of hippies. It’s all the goo—was Kai really this big into Dwayne? He was nice and all, but the truth was, we were camping in a bus. She’d fallen for him at least partway because the nights were getting long and colder.
Joya mistakes my silence for waffling. “You still can’t mail this. If they catch Kai using you to get to Dwayne? Shit, they won’t blame you. It’ll all be on your mom. She’ll get TPR’ed.”
This is shorthand for termination of parental rights. Joya’s voice trembles just saying the letters.
“Now can I come in?” Candace calls through the door, louder and more plaintive.