Clark laughed then, a hoarse and breaking sound. He swept the gun up until it was pointing directly in my face. It gleamed like a bright toy in his elegant hand.
The small, dark hole at the end of it looked into my left eye, promising oblivion. I looked back, and time slowed. Stopped. I saw my end inside that pinprick darkness, saw it as if it had already happened. As if it had happened a long time ago, and was still happening now.
CHAPTER 11
This is the dangerous time.
Outside, the sun is shining, and yellow light streams in the window. Outside, Kai is on her way to me. This morning we have our first visit in the flesh since her release, and I feel like I am filled with butter-colored sunshine, too. Inside my body, I am bright with it, barely able to stay inside my skin. Even so, I keep my face blank and lie still. I am beside a bomb.
My mattress is shaped like a long, narrow valley. Candace lies in the center trench, staring up at the ceiling. The depression in the middle is the weight of history, shaped over time by every kid who ever slept here. Candace’s slight weight has not changed it in any way that I can feel on those rare moments when I have my bed to myself. She doesn’t seem like a bomb right now. She seems like a girl who is about to fall back asleep in the choicest spot.
I lie along the raised edge on my side, my back to the wall. Even now, I can feel the two depressions in the ridge that Joya and I made, back when we used to sit here every day. It is a solid proof that we were here, as personal as a graffiti sign or a fingerprint. The last time Joya fit herself into her space here, she was readying to leave me, and we burned each other to the ground.
“What’s she look like? Your mama?” Candace asks.
Candace has gone spelunking in my private lockbox often enough to see my mother in pictures from every angle. I answer anyway, to placate her.
“She’s tall and pale,” I say, offhand. I don’t say how beautiful she is. I don’t say, I used to put my bare feet on top of her bare feet, and she would spin while I yelled, “Dance me, dance me.” “She has long hair. Or used to have.”
It’s Saturday morning, and Mrs. Mack has sent the other girls to watch the TV in the center building’s rec hall, so Kai and I can have the common room. Candace wanted to wait with me, and I didn’t fight her. I will not fight Candace on anything. Not now.
My mother and I have made plans during our court-mandated phone calls. I know she is already job hunting, apartment hunting, working to meet every requirement to regain me. Soon, I will be going home with her. Every step I take between now and my departure, I am walking on a knife edge with this crazy girl who knows enough to ruin me.
“I think it’s weird your mama is a white lady,” Candace says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I can’t imagine what all your daddy was, huh?” Candace tells the ceiling.
I feel a lightning flash of temper, but I let it pass and fade.
“I don’t know.”
That puts us on more common ground. Candace only ever had a stepdad, and he was bad news. He’s one reason that her mama has lost parental rights forever and Candace is available to be adopted. She’s white, but she’s also an adolescent who’s been broken in ways that make people uncomfortable. Outlook not good on adoption.
“Here’s a weird thing about cats,” Candace says, abruptly. She shifts in the bed, rolling on her side to face me and scootching back. Now she teeters on the opposite edge of the mattress. The trench is between us, tipping us in toward each other. We both have to brace. “A mama cat is whatever kind of cat she is. Maybe she’s a calico. But she can have a litter with three kittens and one will be black, and one yellow, and one stripy, because they all have a different daddy.”
“Yeah. So?” I say, not following.
“Maybe you’re like that,” Candace says. “Maybe you’re all three kittens.”
I can feel my face flush. I’m pretty sure that in her crazy way, she’s called Kai a whore and me some kind of mutant. But all I say is, “That could be kinda cool, if I got three child supports. I’d be so rich. I could go to Disney World and stay all summer.”
Candace was hoping for a rise, and my attempt at humor agitates her. She blinks rapidly, then slithers in closer. Her breath is sweet, milky and butterscotchy, as if she’s been eating pudding.
“I had a secret dream,” she whispers. “In the nighttime. I was dreaming that your mama took us both. We both went home to live with her, and you let me pick out the color to paint your room. Isn’t that weird?”
Trick question. I deflect. “Depends. What color did you pick?”
Her brows knit. “I think green?”
“Then that’s not weird,” I say.
“Well, but, I had to sleep inside a drawer under your bed.”
That makes me smile. Sometimes Candace can be funny. “Okay, that is weird.”