If You Find Me(49)

I wrench my hand from his and make my way back to the building, marching through the footprints we’d made on our way out, my heart as cold as my toes, but my anger colder.

This was a mistake, coming here. I’ll never be the same as these girls, no matter how many pairs of bedazzled jeans I own.

Back in the library, I hide in a different carrel, unseen by Ryan as he sags through the library, his face stormy, his eyes devoid of their usual light.

You did that. You hurt one of the only people who bothered to be kind to you.

My chest aches. I don’t know the right words for it, but it aches so hard, I can’t breathe. My innards feel tangled as a net of bluegills. I reckon I’m just so sick of the tangles.

Even though Mrs. Haskell used the word, too, I still don’t want to believe Mama stole me. Mama took me away to protect me—she wasn’t the bad guy; my father was! But then, why do none of the stories add up? Why isn’t he the man Mama made him out to be?

Without realizing I’m doing it, I reach across my left shoulder and rub the burns on my back. Like Mama’s worry beads, I think, and stop.

Can you even hear me out here, Saint Joseph? Is it too loud for you to hear me?

I think of our lives in the Hundred Acre Wood, the days painted yellow (phoebies), rusty crimson (Christopher robins; to Jenessa, all robins are “Christopher robins”), blue (with blue jays, or possibly tears), and the woods themself, a living thing, unfurling in shades of beauty, pain, misery, awe, joy, all swirled together, never running out of new and different combinations.

Mama did what she had to do. She saved us.

Then why the burns? Why the switch?

I ignore the bell when it rings, and I do know the term for what I’m doing—cutting. Cutting class. I blend into the other students in the library, pretending I have independent study hall like everyone else.

Over in the reference section, I find a book on national parks. I leaf through the pages until I find Obed Wild and Scenic River National Park. I study the pictures. The familiar tide of homesickness washes over me.

This is never going to work. Maybe for Jenessa, but not for me. I’m like Ness’s broken-legged chipmunk, which had to be shaken and poked out of the birdcage once it healed, preferring the familiar, even if the familiar was a jail. Home is home.

A tree for every word of Pooh ever spoken. The Lady of Shalott curtseying before a minuet. Lancelot bowing, his hair a ripple of sun-bleached wheat. My “puffed-up library“ as Mama called it, a scooped-out nook carved by ancient tree roots in the high bank, close enough to be by Ness, yet far enough away to be alone. Boards wedged between rocks becoming shelves that housed whatever books I was reading at the time.

In Obed, I was queen of the world. In the zone, violin wailing, all the animals stopped to listen to a bow coax music from wood.

Here, there’s always noise. Pointless sounds. Electric lights humming, keyboards clicking, phones chirping, music playing, people chattering. My head is Thanksgiving Day-full, and I hate it.

But it doesn’t matter, because I need to be where Nessa is, and Nessa needs to be with me. She sacrificed her words because of the white-star night. I’ll sacrifice my sanity, if it means keeping her here.

[page]Back at my father’s house, with all the pomp and circumstance of an Obed red-shouldered hawk funeral, I shove my violin to the back of the highest shelf of my closet, pull some white rectangular boxes in front of it, fuss a little more, then stand back, satisfied.

I’m not that girl anymore. The fiddler in the woods is dead. I’m like a wild bear balancing on a ball in the circus: I’m no longer one or the other. I’m The New One. The One I Don’t Know Yet. And, as Delaney likes to say, it kinda sucks.

After dinner, a quiet one with Delaney at school for a late cheer practice, I sit cross-legged on my bed, my geometry book open on my lap. It doesn’t take long to work out the answers to the problems in the notebook next to me, even though my mind keeps returning to Ryan and the look on his face.

I can’t let Mama ruin one more thing.

I have to apologize. I know it. And yet I hesitate even as I imagine it, walking up to him and saying the words. No one warned me that being close to people meant hurting sometimes, both them and you. And then I think of Mama. If I’d learned anything, it should’ve been that.

A small knock and a short bark, and I can’t help but smile.

“Come in.”

Shorty climbs onto the bed in stages, eventually stretching out next to me, using my thigh as a pillow. I pat the bed.

“Come sit for a minute, Ness.”

Jenessa climbs up and snuggles against me. Her skin smells like cake. Like Melissa’s famous butterscotch cake, and, on further inspection, I see flour on her shirt. Dried batter above her lip. I push the books and papers to the end of the bed with my feet.

“You look good, Ness. You look healthy and happy.”

What she does next surprises me.

“I am,” she says softly. Me and Shorty sway toward the sound of her voice, like flowers to the sunlight. “I love it here. Don’t you?”

Her eyes are pleading, hoping. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how perceptive she is, especially where I’m concerned. Her silence makes a person forget her quick memory, the braille way she reads people, her mind sharper than the waddle badger and the shuffle fox combined.

I remember what the speech therapist told Mama.