Counting by 7s(24)

I know I will remember nothing of this night because I will try as hard as I can to never think of it again.

I will win that battle.





Chapter 21





Quang-ha was mad.

That was normal. But this fresh anger struck a deeper chord than most of his sudden bursts of frustration.

Because he already had no privacy.

He slept wedged next to his sister and his mother. What difference did it make that he was on his own mattress?

Who was anyone kidding?

They lived in one room and that was a garage and now they were letting someone view their situation and, even worse, be part of it?

It was all just too much.

The little girl was strange. Couldn’t everyone see that?

Look at her clothes and her hair and her glasses and her luggage with the wheels. Listen to her whispery voice and her laugh, which was like someone choking.

Come on—she spoke Vietnamese! What was that all about?

Maybe she was some kind of spy or at the very least a complete nerd. You’d only learn the language if it was jammed down your throat—like everything else in his life.

He was not going to feel sorry for her because her parents died in a car crash.

Okay, maybe he felt sorry for her when he first heard, and she was shaking, but he wasn’t going to right now.

No way.

No how.

He was going to feel sorry for himself.

Because he didn’t ask to be born. He didn’t ask to have his father drive off in a truck and never return.

He didn’t ask to have every single thing in his life smell like fingernail polish. His clothes and even his shoes had that chemical stink.

And another thing to be mad about was that he slept in his underwear.

How was he supposed to do that now?

The underwear had robots on them. Like a little kid would wear. And he was in high school!

His mother never seemed to know the difference between something cool and something for idiots, because all she cared about was that it was something on sale.

Well, now he’d have to sleep in his pants because he wasn’t letting the girl see the robots.

And he hated that, because the pants twisted up around his legs and made it next to impossible to even bend his knees and sleep on his side, which was the most comfortable way.

As if it wasn’t already bad enough on the floor of a garage on the wrong side of the tracks in Bakersfield.



The next morning Willow told Mai that she wasn’t going to school. She didn’t say “ever again,” but Mai thought that’s how it sounded.

She was pretty definitive.

Quang-ha took a stab at refusing to get a high school education as well, but it didn’t work.

And so Quang-ha and Mai gathered up their things and walked down the already hot alley. Mai promised Willow that she’d hurry home the second she got out.

Pattie had been given a telephone number for the Kern County Department of Children’s Services. She was supposed to call first thing because Willow was going to be assigned a social worker and officially have her case file opened.

Pattie assumed that relatives would fly into town or that family friends would, once alerted, take over.

Everyone has a network of people in their lives.

Pattie only hoped that the group assembled to care for the odd little girl with the dark, wet eyes would do a good job.





Chapter 22





I want to turn off the sun and live in darkness.

I wake up on top of a mattress resting on the floor of the garage across the alley from Mai’s mom’s nail salon.

And I have no idea, for what feels like a very long time, where I am.

I hope that I’m dreaming.

I am not.

Yesterday happened.

The heavy weight of it presses down on me in a force much greater than gravity.

It is crushing.

I am twelve years old and already twice without parents.

If you analyze the odds of being given away at birth and then losing another full set of legal guardians 147 months and 7 days later, I’m right on the edge of the graph.

In the one percent of the one percent.

I can still walk and talk and breathe, but there isn’t much point.

It’s just something my body is doing.



I’m not going back to school.

You don’t have to watch many wildlife documentaries to know that the herd doesn’t accept the lone straggler.

And with the exception of Margaret Z. Buckle, the herd never accepted me anyway, so I’m not losing much.

When did middle schools eliminate weekly spelling bees? It’s the only activity that I would have signed up for.

There is just one person who I will miss now that I’m no longer a Sequoia Giant.

Miss Judi.

The school nurse.

She saw more of me than any other student and we shared a love of germ eradication.

I wish her well.



I’m sitting in the back of the salon next to the storage closet.

I found a furniture pad and rolled it up in such a way as to make a place for myself.

I wanted to stay across the alley in the garage, which would be good because it is dark back there, but Pattie insisted I be where she can see me.

I wasn’t going to argue.