No such luck. Lydia was absent.
Not a big surprise. She was probably still on
the mountain gaining her strength back. And it wasn’t like Kira
could go by her house—she didn’t even know exactly where she lived,
only that it was on the south side of town.
“Holy crap!” Carla said as she walked past
Kira. “Looks like someone’s been taking steroids.” She gave Kira’s
bicep a not-so-friendly squeeze before moving to her locker and
peeling off her sweater.
“What are you talking about?” Kira had
already stripped down to her bra and panties and put on her gym
shorts, but still held her baggy T-shirt in her hand.
Carla flipped her straight black hair over
her shoulder and motioned toward Kira’s arm. “You grew muscles
like, overnight.”
“What?” Kira closed her locker and walked to
the end of the row to where the mirrors hung. She raised her fist
in the air and flexed her arm muscles. “Whoa.” She was buff.
Actually, now that she stood in full view of
the mirror, there were a lot of changes she’d missed that morning.
Her hair had always been a little on the dry side, and the color a
dark, lifeless red. Now it was a beautiful auburn, with a hint of
honey blonde highlighting it in just the right places. Her
complexion was perfect. Even her teeth seemed whiter.
Kira put on her shirt to hide her new muscles
and joined the other girls on the football field to run sprints.
Too bad it wasn’t raining out. She would have liked another go at
that rope.
* * * * *
Kira lingered in front of the high school as
long as she could before taking the long walk home. When she saw
Paul’s beat up truck sitting in the driveway, she changed her
direction and went around back to the kitchen door. As she neared
the steps, she paused, taking in her last clean breath before
venturing into what would now be a smoke-filled house. She pushed
it open just enough so she could listen for voices and get a feel
for where her mother and Paul might be. When she heard the
television blaring in the living room, she tiptoed in through the
kitchen and through the hall toward her room.
“Mouse, is that you?” her mother called in
that sickeningly sweet way that always made Kira’s skin crawl. The
last thing she needed was to deal with her mother’s patronizing
tone and Paul’s rude remarks.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she yelled back. “Be there
in a sec.” Kira swung her backpack off her shoulder and threw it on
her bed, then tried to psych herself up for the confrontation.
Kira slipped her hands in her back pockets
and shuffled her way down the hall and into the living room. She’d
expected to find them sprawled out on the sofa watching afternoon
game shows, but instead she saw a room full of cardboard boxes and
her mother pulling pictures off the wall.
“What are you doing?” Kira took a few more
steps into the room about the same time Paul entered through the
front door.
“Hey,
Rat
. Looks like you’ll be rid of
me soon.” Paul chuckled, took a long drag from his cigarette, then
picked up a box and went back out through the door.
“Mom?” Kira said with a little more
urgency.
“Not to worry, dear. Just putting some of our
things in storage. Paul got a job in California and leaves
tomorrow. As soon as he’s settled, he’s sending for us. Isn’t that
great?” She ripped a piece of packing tape out of the dispenser and
tore it off on the tiny metal teeth.
“If he’s sending for us later, why are you
packing now?”
Her mom plopped down on the couch and wiped
tiny beads of sweat from her brow with her hand, transferring the
black print residue from the newspaper to her face. “We just
thought it would be easier packing now. There will be less work for
us to do when he finds a place, that’s all.”
Kira sensed there was much more to the story
than her mom admitted. “I don’t want to go, Mom. What about school?
It’s my senior year and I don’t want to move so close to
graduation. That would suck.”
“Now, Mouse. You’re always such a worrier. It
will all work out, you’ll see.”
When Paul reentered to get another box, the
smirk on his face brought anger riling up in Kira and she found
herself not wanting to back down like she usually did. She had
never been one for confrontation, but for some reason, she couldn’t
help herself. She propped her fists on her hips and shifted her
weight to one foot.
“I’m not going!”
Paul dropped the box he’d just lifted from
the stack and took two steps toward her. Kira was sure if there
hadn’t been a dozen or so boxes between them, she would have felt
the back of his hand across her cheek.
“How dare you speak to your mother like
that.” His hand flew up, pointing a boney finger in the direction
of her room. “Now scat—
Rat!
”
Kira backed out of the room and headed down
the hall, but not before hearing her mother’s response to her
outburst.
“Whew! I guess I’ll have to stop calling her
Mouse. She’s not so weak anymore. But then, after tomorrow it won’t
matter. She won’t even be underfoot.”
Kira felt like she’d been kicked in the gut.
What was she talking about? She quietly backtracked to eavesdrop on
their conversation.
“Ya think she suspects?” Paul’s voiced
whispered.
“Nah, she’s not smart enough to figure it
out. Besides, she’s almost eighteen. She’ll be fine. I was pregnant
with her by the time I was seventeen and look how good I turned
out.”
“Still, we should be outta here before she
gets home from school. I don’t want a scene.” Paul cleared his
throat.
The sudden silence coming from the living
room made Kira uneasy. Maybe they’d stopped talking because they
knew she was there. She took a step away from the doorway, then
another, taking extra care not to make a sound.
No wonder they hadn’t asked her opinion on
the move. They had no intention of taking her with them. She slowly
made her way back to her room and closed the door behind her. She
spent the rest of the night curled in a ball, trying not to feel
the pain—but it came anyway.
By the next morning, Kira was numb. She went
through the motions of getting ready for school before finding
herself in front of her mother’s closed bedroom door. She paused
there for a moment, her fist poised a few inches from knocking.
Confronting her mother would be useless, she knew that. And now
that she knew how her mother really felt about her—that she was
weak and always underfoot—she wasn’t sure she wanted to change her
mother’s mind anyway. Kira would be eighteen in a few weeks. How
hard could it be to live on her own? She practically did it
now.
Kira let her hand drop to her side,
straightened her spine and slipped out the back door without a
word. She didn’t remember attending most of her classes and there
was still no sign of Lydia. Between what had happened on the
mountain and her mother’s plans to move, it was all she could do
not to burst into tears anytime someone looked at her. That’s all
she needed, to cry in front of everyone.
The trip home after school took longer than
normal as Kira postponed the inevitable. Somewhere in her heart,
she held a tiny grain of hope that her mom would reconsider and
stay. That all changed when she opened the door to an almost empty
house.
Everything was gone except for the tattered
couch, a rickety coffee table and a cracked mirror that hung
slightly crooked on the wall next to the kitchen.
Panic set in as Kira thought about her own
things.
They wouldn’t
. Kira dropped her backpack and ran
down the hall to her room. She half expected it to be stripped of
her belongings, but as she swung open the door she saw that nothing
appeared to have been touched. From her grandmother’s handmade
quilt to father’s photograph sitting on the table near her bed, it
was all there. Even her laptop still sat on her desk where she’d
left it.
She plopped down on the bed, pressed one of
her many colorful pillows to her face and screamed until her throat
ached from the strain. Her gut wrenched as she turned on her side
and drew the pillow into her chest with knotted fists, letting the
tears flow freely—again.
Several hours passed and the room grew
darker. The house felt like a tomb—so quiet and cold. The only
sound came from the tree branches just outside her window, brushing
against the house as if dragging its sharp claws up the length of
her spine. She shivered to the core, but lay still, not daring to
move. She couldn’t, fearing that what was left of her world would
crumble around her.
Kira skipped school on Friday. By Saturday
she was more than upset with Lydia. She hadn’t heard a word from
her. She thought the least Lydia could do is send Octavion to tell
her she was okay, or maybe a, “
Hey, thanks for saving my
freakin’ life.
” But nothing.
When Sunday morning came, the anger turned to
depression and Kira didn’t want to get out of bed. She lay there,
barely alert, wishing she could get in touch with Lydia. Her lack
of contact made Kira feel abandoned all over again.
When she finally peeled her quilt back and
slid out of bed, it was almost ten. The last thing she expected to
find when she stepped into the living room was Lydia perched on the
arm of the couch with a smile on her face. She had on her usual
worn-out pair of blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and she’d
kicked off her boots, making herself at home.
“You really should lock your door,” Lydia
said. “A stranger could walk right in.”
Kira had spent the past two days thinking
about this moment—wondering how she would react when she was
finally able to talk to Lydia. The anger she felt didn’t surprise
her. “Strangers, I can handle. It’s my
friends
I have to
worry about.” Kira knew by Lydia’s expression that her words cut
deep, but she didn’t care.
“I guess I deserved that,” Lydia said.
Kira turned without a word and went back into
the bedroom. She sat on the bed, and pulled the covers over her
legs just as Lydia appeared in the doorway.
“Look, Kira. I know this all seems strange,
but I didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Lydia? Sorry you lied to me?
Sorry you got me involved in your secret little life, or sorry you
abandoned me and left me here to deal with all this crap by
myself?”
“All of the above.” Lydia sat across from
Kira on the bed. “I knew you were overwhelmed with everything that
happened. I just figured you could use the time to regain your
strength and let everything sink in.”
Kira shook her head. “You were wrong. What I
needed was a
friend
. What I needed were answers to all my
questions and someone to talk to about the crap that’s going on in
my
life.”
Lydia nodded slowly. “I can see that by how
upset you are. I really am sorry.”
“And is it true that you can hear my
thoughts? Because I even tried that. Where were you?”
Lydia looked down at her hands. “It’s
complicated.”
Kira huffed out the air in her lungs and
threw her hands up. “And you don’t think
my
life is
complicated?”
“I just don’t know what to say.”
Kira let the tension in her body relax a
little when she saw her friend struggling with Kira’s anger. She
had to admit she was glad to finally see Lydia, but letting her
know that was difficult. “So, where’s your
brother
?”
“He’s my half-brother, actually. We have
different mothers.” Lydia flashed her crooked smile. “You don’t
like him very much, do you?”
Kira grabbed the pillow of the bed and hugged
it to her chest. “I don’t like his temper.”
Lydia’s expression saddened as she became
more serious. “He’s not always like that. He was just worried about
me—and you. He brought you home, ya know?”
“How did he do that, anyway? One minute he’s
being nice, feeding me and bringing me juice, and the next—”
Lydia raised her brows as if Kira had
answered her own question.
“What?”
“The juice,” Lydia confessed.
Kira buried her fingers in the pillow and
clenched it in her fists. “He
drugged
me?”
“It was just a little something to help you
sleep and get your strength back,” Lydia said. “It didn’t hurt
you.”
“Well, it’s not like he gave me a
choice.”
“Actually, it was my idea.” Lydia cringed.
“Forgive me?”
“And why should I do that?”
Lydia looked at Kira with her big green eyes
while sticking out her lower lip. “Well, there’s that whole ‘you’re
my best friend’ thing. Besides, who else do you know who can knock
back a pint of chocolate ice cream faster than you? You’d be
miserable without me.”
Kira glared at her, then tossed the pillow on
the floor next to her dresser. “Well, I’m glad
somebody
thinks this is funny.”
Lydia sighed. “I don’t think it’s funny,
Kira. I just don’t know what to say.” She pulled her braid in front
and twirled it around her finger.
“Maybe you could start with the truth. There
hasn’t been a whole lot of that going around lately.” Kira folded
her arms and leaned against the headboard.
Lydia’s head shot up. “I didn’t lie to
you.”
“Ha! The first words out of your mouth were a
lie, or don’t you remember telling me you were an only child and
that your dad was rich. Who knows what else you’ve lied about?”
Lydia straightened her back, her brow
furrowed in frustration. “What was I supposed to say? Octavion
forbid me to tell you and, just for the record, my father
is
rich, just not on this planet. And don’t you think I
wanted
you to know everything about me? You don’t know how many times I
wanted to tell you the truth—everything, about where I’m from and
why I’m here—but I couldn’t.