A List of Cages(10)

“Besides,” I say, “if you had dementia, how could you know where everything in this house is at, like, a photographic memory level?”

“That’s a mom thing.” She smiles. “We always know where our kids’ missing shoes and schoolbooks are.”

“Your memory’s fine. I just happen to be better at Connect Four.”

Now she frowns, but she’s pretending to be more irritated than she is.

“Harvey and Marissa went at it again today,” she tells me during our third game. At times like these I can tell she misses being a social worker. Her happiest days are when her office coworkers fight and she can sort it out. “I really think Harvey just needs some counseling.”

Which makes me think of him.

“I saw Julian today.”

Mom’s face loses all animation, and her lips turn up in a creepy plastic smile, the way it does whenever she’s upset but trying to pretend she isn’t. “How did he look?”

“About the same.” Still small for his age, still too much black hair falling into huge round eyes. Only he seemed different in ways that would just worry her—too quiet, and flinching away like a skittish kitten when I got too close. “I tried to say hi, but he took off.” I don’t add that he literally took off, as in turned and ran.

She places another checker in the board, but she obviously isn’t paying attention anymore. “I still think about him every day,” she says.

I drop another checker, but I’m not paying attention anymore either. “I know.”





MISS WEST IS unhappy. I know this because she’s mean the way Jared is mean, like the grown-up version of kicking over your tower. She teaches Physical Science, the class I have first period. It’s a nerve-wracking way to start the day, but sometimes I think it’s for the best. At least I’m getting it over with.

I find my seat in the back, and as soon as the bell rings, Miss West confiscates one girl’s phone and screams at a boy for whispering. A moment later Dawn, the girl with cerebral palsy, is wheeled into the room. Miss West watches while the aide helps Dawn transfer from her wheelchair into a desk, a process that always has the girl wincing and sweating.

“Dawn,” Miss West says once the aide is gone, “wouldn’t it be easier to just stay in your chair?”

Dawn looks caught off guard, her eyes big and distorted behind her glasses. “I like sitting in a desk,” she finally answers. Her voice is a little strange, like all the letters don’t come out quite right, and every time she speaks it makes Miss West cringe.

“But none of us like having to delay class every day to wait for you,” Miss West says. “If you’re going to insist on doing this, then the least your aide can do is get you here early. All this coming in late and leaving early is very disruptive.”

Slowly, Dawn nods, then Miss West says it’s time to return our exams. The room was already tense, but now it’s even worse.

“David,” she says, handing a boy his paper, “seventy-six. Violet, eighty-five. Kristin, ninety-three. Julian…” She stops right in front of me. This close, she’s much scarier. Her eyebrows are two black ink arcs, and her skin looks like wax. “Forty.”

I never talk and I don’t have a phone, so when I get yelled at, it’s for failing.

“Can anyone tell me how someone could possibly make a forty on this test?” She looks around the room. “Alex, do you know?”

Alex and Kristin are the most popular kids in the class, and they’re the only two Miss West seems to like. They can be tardy or take out their phones and she doesn’t get mad.

Alex shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Me neither,” Miss West says. “I would have thought it was impossible unless you just randomly circled answers.”

I wince and close my eyes. If I concentrate hard enough, maybe I really could teleport.

“Pitiful.”

Or just disappear.


At lunchtime in my hidden room, my fingers itch to trace the words in my mom’s notebook. I like the way it feels, but I’m afraid to bring the notebook to school. What if someone took it and drew ugly pictures in it? What if they destroyed it altogether? The thought makes me feel sick, like I’m in a speeding car instead of standing still.

No, it’s better to leave the notebook safe in my trunk. I know most of the lists by heart anyway. There’s one that if it had a title would be called A List of Fears. All of the words end in phobia, except for number sixteen: kayak angst.

I looked it up on a school computer and read that it’s an anxiety disorder you can only find among the Inuit sailors of Greenland. The sailor feels fine as he’s heading out in his one-man boat, but he panics once land disappears. Disoriented and alone, unable to see a shore in either direction, he’s terrified.

It makes me think of Elian Mariner. He always sails alone, and he’s never afraid. Maybe he isn’t scared because he doesn’t experience this aloneness for long. One moment his sailboat is airborne in the stratosphere with a beautiful view of a tiny earth and all the stars. Then, flash, like fireworks and a sonic boom, you turn the page and he’s there. In another country or another world.

The travel looks instantaneous, but when I was little I wondered about it and asked my dad, Where did he go?