A List of Cages(36)

MISS WEST IS sitting silently at her desk, staring at nothing. I can tell she’s upset, but I’m relieved, because it looks like I won’t get called on today.

A couple of boys start to whisper, daring each other to ask her a question about the assignment, but neither of them actually does it. A couple minutes later a different boy asks if he can go to the nurse, and she snaps at him so viciously that no one tries it again. Other than that everything is quiet, and Miss West just keeps staring.

When the bell finally rings and the room clears, I approach her desk, my heart pounding hard against my ribs. “Miss West?”

“What?” Up close she’s even scarier, with eyes that glow and skin shiny like wax. “What?” she repeats.

“Are…are you okay?”

Her dark ink-eyebrows rise up. Her chin quivers.

Then she starts to cry. I don’t know what to do, and I’m afraid anything I say might make her yell again.

“It’s my son’s birthday,” she says.

And immediately, I understand. “I’m sorry.”

“He was twelve. Only twelve.”

She looks younger and frailer now, but I’m still not sure what to say. My father never really talked about what happens when you die. I remember one vague comment that you go somewhere else. Sometimes I wonder if my mother and father haven’t stopped at all. Haven’t stopped reading or drawing or singing. They’re just doing it somewhere else.

I pull a tissue from the box on her desk and hand it to her.

She wipes her face, smearing the makeup below her eyes.

The second hand of a clock ticks loudly on the wall. The bell rings, but no more students rush to fill the room.

“You’d think it would get easier,” she says. “It’s been eighteen years. I remember being pregnant with him, and now he’d be thirty. Can you believe that? Thirty!”

My mother once said that the planet was like an enormous womb, and every single one of us was a fetus. Death was nothing to be afraid of. It was just birth to another world, and someone would be waiting for us there. Sometimes I try to see this, my mother and father as two newborns holding hands and ejected into this other world. There they are just beginning.

“They’re—he’s okay,” I say. “I think he’s okay.”

“Yes.” She nods, wiping her face again. “It was meant to be. We each have a mission on this earth, and we don’t die until we complete it. I may not understand it, but he completed his mission.”

I’ve heard people say things like that before, but I still want to ask her what she means. What sort of mission? How is she so sure that he finished? How does she know he didn’t die in the middle?

Miss West looks almost peaceful now, but if she has an idea where her son is, she doesn’t say. That’s the thing I wonder about most—not why they’re gone, but where. Sometimes when I can’t sleep and I’m trying to think good thoughts, I imagine that magical place between worlds, the place in the flash where Elian’s ship disappears before it reappears again. In that split second maybe time slows down, and he can see all the invisible places. And maybe, sometimes, he sees them.





I’M STILL GRINNING like my face is broken. I can’t turn it off. Emerald and I have become that annoying couple that kisses in public and can’t stop staring at each other and makes everyone else feel both nauseated and suicidal—according to Charlie, anyway. Yesterday at school he told me to take some meds and calm the fuck down, but I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m happy. And I see no reason to pretend I’m not.

Though I will try my best not to annoy him this afternoon. The second I step inside his house, I’m ordered to stand on a rock resistant to space acid (aka throw pillow) while I wait. Today, all his brothers and sisters are aliens struggling to survive on a dying planet. Upstairs is the safety zone, but getting there is treacherous since the ground floor’s acidic. Most of the kids have already lost a limb and are dragging themselves around on couch-cushion lifeboats.

After a few entertaining minutes, Charlie stomps downstairs, ignoring the kids’ warnings that his shoes will melt and he’ll die.

We hop into the van, and I modulate my smile. A couple minutes later Charlie demands, “Why are you turning this way?”

“I have to pick up Julian.”

“What?!” he screeches about as loud as one of his little sisters. “He’s seriously tagging along again?”

“He’s not tagging along. He’s invited.”

“You don’t see me bringing Carver.”

“Carver’s eleven.”

“I don’t get it. Julian’s weird—he doesn’t talk, and he just stares at everyone! It’s fucking creepy.”

“Julian’s not creepy. He’s, like, the nicest person ever.”

Charlie sighs deeply. “You and Emerald have been together every second for the past two weeks, and now you’re bringing Julian. It’s never just us anymore.”

For a second I’m too stunned to react. Then I laugh out loud, which is the wrong thing to do right now. I think he may actually punch me in the face. When I catch my breath, I say, “I’m sorry. You’re totally right. We need a night out just the two of us.” He looks suspicious. “I mean it, baby. You pick the restaurant and afterward…” I waggle my eyebrows suggestively, and Charlie does punch me, a painful blow to my bicep. “Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.”