The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (10 page)

Big ones, I thought, for him to call me back this fast. “About the adoptive family, or about him, personally?”

“Him. The parents were typical American middle class.”

“You mean they had a lot of debt,” I said, and then I picked up on the verb tense.
Were
. It made my body restless, set me pacing from the table to the sofa. “His adopted folks are dead?”

“Oh, yeah. The mom was a type-one diabetic. She developed complications when Julian was a teen. Celiac, then intestinal cancer. The dad dropped dead of a heart attack near the end of her illness. Stress got him.” Birdwine said this like it was fact, but I knew what he was doing. He was telling me the story he had read between the lines of documents and spreadsheets. I knew if I were in the room with him, his hands would be rolling in that way he had, laying out the hypothetical. “So the kid just started his senior year at Berry College when his dad bites it. He drops out. Moves home. From that point on, he’s taking care of his mother. By October, she’s dead, too. You want to hear the obit?”

I was lagging a few sentences behind him, trying to process as I paced back and forth across the space between the dining table and my great room sofa. Birdwine was distilling it down to something too dense for me to chew. “I don’t know. Do I?”

“Nah. It’s long—a full column in the
Marietta Daily Journal
. Active in her church, community, blah blah. Dies ‘after a long illness.’ At the end, all it says is, ‘She is survived by her beloved son, Julian.’ ”

My heart sank. “That’s it? No other kids? No spare sister or some cousins?”

“Full stop. His parents were both only children, and they’re gone. Meanwhile, his old friends are off at college, his new friends are back at Berry. Kid’s got nobody. He hires Tim Worth to find Kai in November.”

I sighed. Julian and I were orphans, which gave us a full three awful things in common. If he took my offered meeting, I hoped he liked the Braves or David Cronenberg movies so we’d have something innocuous to talk about. Otherwise a simple lunch with him might be enough to put me back in therapy.

“I hear you oiling up your pity gland,” Birdwine said. “Stand down. He’s also dead broke, Paula. Worse than. Medical and hospice ate the Bouchards’ retirement. Kid has three quarters of a liberal arts degree and a job at Mellow Mushroom. Whatever cash he did have went to Worth. No way can he go back to Berry. Not without a payday. He shows up at your swanky midtown office, sees your rich-people carpet, your crazy-ass shoes. I gotta wonder, what’s he thinking?”

Birdwine sounded disapproving, but I took it as good news. If Julian was after money, it could make everything so easy. I owed the kid, and money was something I had. If he was an asshole, I could pay my debt off in the most literal manner and send him on his merry asshole way.

My computer dinged. I walked back to the table and saw that Julian had responded to my missive with a friend request. He was less wary than I was, or simply of a different generation, or Birdwine’s suspicions were justified, and this was step one in his scheme to get his hands deep in my pocket.

“Get this,” I said to Birdwine. “I sent Julian a note on Facebook not ten minutes ago. I’m already hearing back.”

“See, now, that’s eager. Another warning bell.”

“No, it’s these kids today,” I told him, huffy old man style. “I don’t think they ever log off anything.”

“Not even to pee,” he agreed. “But still.”

A small chat window opened up at the bottom of the screen. I sat down and leaned in to read it.

Hello?

With the question mark, the simple greeting looked so plaintive. I remembered Julian’s crescent-shaped eyes, his nervous energy. He’d been an easy blusher, his feelings showing in the wash of pink and red across his skin. I was good at reading people, and he’d smelled of hope and nerves and worry, undercut with an edge of desperation. I didn’t think Julian Bouchard would turn out to be something so easy as an asshole. I hit Accept.

I’d made two friends in the space of hours, after all. Now I was on the phone with one and fielding Facebook IMs from the other. This was turning out to be a banner fucking Wednesday.

“He opened a chat,” I said to Birdwine.

“You sound thrilled.”

“I forget what that word means,” I said. “Is
thrilled
a kind of stress vomiting?”

“Yeah, I think. Well, your guard is good and up. Go chat with your li’l hustler. We’ll meet the guy who’s hustling him in the morning,” Birdwine said.

I started to thank him, but he’d already gone. Not a big one for
Hello, how are you
s or
Good-bye have a nice day
s, that Birdwine.

I stared at the blinking cursor under Julian’s
Hello?

The phone, still in my hand, was ringing again. I checked the screen.

It was Remi, hitting me back. My thumb moved toward the green button, but it stayed there, hovering. I wasn’t sure why. My other option was the Facebook chat, and hadn’t I had enough new brother for one day? I liked Remi. I liked him a lot. He had those bright black eyes you sometimes find on Cajuns and was my height, exactly, which could put us eye to eye in bed. I paused, my whole body cocked to catch any faint vibration from below.

I got nothin’. The sex that had risen in me back at the office with Birdwine had re-died, or at least was sleeping heavily now. I let Remi go to voicemail and pulled my laptop closer.

Well, hello there,
I typed back to my brother.

CHAPTER 5

M
y mother and I do our time. We live in loose groups of squatty buildings that look like industrial office parks. Thirty-some-odd teenagers are housed with me, while Kai lives with several hundred inmates. My cabin holds up to six middle-school girls and a house mother named Mrs. Mack. Kai’s cellblock holds forty women, watched over by armed guards. She’s in prison for obstruction and destroying evidence, while I’m in a group home for the more private crime of putting her there. It’s tacitly unfair that I’m in the softer, smaller version.

Especially since my mother isn’t like me.

If Kai could see me now, she’d say that I’m not like me, either. I am not her tambourine girl in a beaded dress from Goodwill, or the gypsy one who’d coo,
Such a long life line,
peering at a palm over her shoulder. I can barely remember the achiever-girl I started to become in Asheville. More and more, I’m the Paula who rose up in Paulding County the first time I was asked to choose between fight or flight. In this place, I’ve learned—or I’ve decided—that I’m not a runner.

My first week here, a high school boy accidentally fell down the stairs and broke his wrist. The whole truth was, he followed me into a stairwell with some bad intentions. Week two, a girl from another cabin came to visit me, then walked into my door and blacked both eyes. The whole truth was, she muscled close and gave me a testing shove, so I smashed her face into the door jamb. I took some hits, sure. Hard ones, but I always came back swinging. The bullies have moved on, like bullies do, looking for meeker mice.

I worry more for Kai than for me. My mother’s best defenses are the fade, the melt, the sneak away, the dash. Kai can see trouble from a long way off, and until the raid I engineered blindsided her, she always had us elsewhere long before it landed. Since the arrest, she’s been hemmed in by bars and walls and doors, with no room to run.

I got to visit her at least, when she was in jail here in Atlanta. After her case settled, she was transferred to a women’s prison in south Georgia. Her lawyer and my guardian ad litem worked it out so she could call me—we lucked into a family-friendly judge—but I can no longer read her face, her body language, look into her eyes. It’s so much harder now to know how much she’s lying.

“Are you safe?” I asked, on our first call after she moved.

“Of course! Don’t you worry, baby. I already got myself a prison boyfriend. Rhonda.” She said it light, like she was being funny, but she wasn’t being funny. “Are you making any friends?”

“Not like that,” I said, but I told her about Joya, a sleepy-eyed eighth grader with a comforting whiff of pot smoke in her tang. She’s my friend even though she’s black. Most friendships here are set by race, which should put me on my own just like in Paulding. But Joya defaults to me because her mother is in court-mandated rehab. She and I belong to someone. The other two black girls in our cabin are on the adoption track. They belong only to the state and to each other.

Now, five phone calls later, Kai and I ask easier questions.

“Are you eating enough fruit?” she says.

“Yes,” I lie. “I’m eating lots of fruit.”

I have the receiver pressed so tight to my ear, it will be red and sore when we hang up. I am hungry for her voice, her laugh, her stories.

I sit cross-legged on the floor of the pantry, tucked between the stacks of paper goods and the shelves of potato flakes and canned soup. I am in the large building at the center of the campus that holds the dining hall and rec room. Mrs. Mack lets me take Kai’s calls from this staff phone in an alcove off the kitchen. The cord is long enough to let me drag it to the pantry and close the flimsy door.

“Fresh?” Kai asks. “That canned stuff is mostly sugar.”

“Yeah, fresh,” I say, though I am eye to eye with a row of outsize cans of fruit cocktail. Inside are cubes of yellow so soaked in heavy syrup that I can’t tell pear from pineapple. She has to know my food here is not much different from hers there. Dumplings with shreds of chicken, tater tot casserole, spaghetti. I’m growing just fine, anyway, fruit or no fruit. My puppy fat has begun to shift, as she promised it would. I see my body getting long like hers, curving to her angles; I’m morphing myself into the shape of what I’m missing.

“Is that Mrs. Mack being nice?” Kai asks.

“I guess. I mean, she kinda sucks,” I lie, but the truth under it, the one I hope Kai hears is,
No one can replace you.

I like Mrs. Mack. She’s a middle-aged black lady who calls me girlie. She calls us all girlie.
I love my girlies,
Mrs. Mack sings out every morning when she wakes us up, and I believe her. She loves us, all of us, in the same blanket, replaceable way that my mother loved her boyfriends.

“Are you sleeping good?” I ask.

“Oh, yes,” my mother says.

The pattern of these calls is set. Now she’ll ask me how I sleep, and how I did on my last math test, and I’ll ask her what book she’s reading. These little questions, the little lies we’re telling, they are promises we give each other.
I will be okay if you will
. When time gets short, she’ll tell me the next installment of an old bedtime tale. We’re in the middle of “Baby Ganesha at the Feast” now. I’ll close my eyes and let her smoky alto drift over me like warm fog. But this time, she breaks the pattern.

“Listen, I need for you to do me a favor. If you can.”

I hear tension in her voice, and I sit up straighter. I say, “Okay,” and it comes out halfway between agreement and a question.

I hear her swallow, and then she says, quick and quiet, “I’m doing something. I’m writing something. Like, a poem.”

It’s a strange collection of words to deliver with such low urgency. Kai is nineteen kinds of art-fart. She tells stories and draws beautifully, sings well, plays an okay mandolin. I’d be more surprised to hear she wasn’t writing poetry in prison, but she says it as if rhyme and meter have been declared contraband. It’s almost confessional, the way an inmate might say
I’m making wine inside the toilet tank,
or
I’m digging a tunnel to freedom with this stolen spoon.

“Okay,” I say again.

She goes on, still talking fast, her voice more urgent than the subject warrants. “I’m retelling the
Ramayana
. Just the part where the demon steals Sita. You remember that? Sita is living happily with Rama in the forest. Then Ravana steals her and locks her up, and it’s like prison. It’s a lot like prison. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say, and I feel my stomach curdling. She’s picked this bit of the
Ramayana
because she is living it. All the organs in my abdomen have gone sour; I should be in her poem, playing the part of the demon.

Kai says, “I’m going to mail the poem to you, as soon as I get it done.”

“I can’t wait to read it,” I lie.

“There’s someone else I want to read it. Do you know who I mean?” Kai asks. A thinking pause. I don’t. “I was hoping you could send it to your uncle.” Still nothing. I don’t have an uncle. “The one who used to call you Bossy Pony.”

Is she talking about Dwayne? He’s the one who called me that.

“I think so,” I say. I don’t say his name, because I don’t know who is listening. There could be a snitchy prisoner standing near her, or a capital
S
Someone on the line. There’s no expectation of privacy on a prison phone, not unless she’s talking to her lawyer. “You mean the one who had all the roaches in his house.”

“Yes, that’s the uncle,” Kai says firmly. “Could you maybe send the poem to him?”

She can’t mail it to Dwayne directly. Inmates aren’t allowed to contact inmates at other institutions, not unless they are immediate family. She especially is not allowed to talk to Dwayne, whose active case is linked with hers.

A silence grows on the phone between us. Dwayne was just a boyfriend, and she didn’t even have him that long. Why is she writing him poems? Also, I’m scared of getting caught.

On the other hand, my mother sounds so urgent. She isn’t safe, and I’m the one who made her so.

What is your emergency?
the operator asked when I called 911 from the Dandy Mart, and I didn’t even have one. I didn’t know what one even looked like. Now I do. An emergency is Kai locked up a hundred miles away from me. An emergency is living in these cabins full of feral children.

Last night, my new roommate crept over and knelt by my bed. She slipped her hand under the covers, groping for the place between my legs. “Can I sleep by you? I’ll be so nice.” Candace learned this from her stepdad. Joya told me it’s why she’s in foster care.

I sat up and shoved her shoulders, hard enough to tip her over. “Screw off, lesbo. I don’t need a prison boyfriend.”

Candace is a weedy white girl who cringes when I talk to her, sidles up and sits too close when I ignore her. She’s a mouth breather, snuffling from allergies, and the raw, chapped skin under her nostrils skeeves me out. She smells musty, too, as if someone filled her up with damp laundry and then forgot her.

Candace popped back up, blinking, the whites of her eyes pink and glistening with histamines. “I’ll give you two dollars.”

I pinched her arm, hard enough to make her suck her breath in. Hard enough to leave a mark. She crouched lower and took it like it was her due, ducking her head down. If she were a dog I’d have seen her naked belly about then. She was new, but I had a reputation. I let her go and rolled away to the wall, turning my back on her. She stayed where she was.

After a minute, the sniffling got to me. I scooted over, making room on the edge of my bed. “Don’t get handsy. I want that money first thing in the morning.”

She climbed in and pressed herself into my back. We slept huddled together like cold baby animals.

If I am caught forwarding Kai’s messages, her sentence could be extended. I could be here longer. The state would push to terminate Kai’s parental rights. If we’re caught, no family-friendly judge will be friendly enough to overlook it.

Even so, I say to Kai, “I don’t know his address. But I’ll mail it if I can get it.”

It is not a yes, but it isn’t a no, either. It is
I’ll try
.
I’ll try
lands me firmly on the righteous side of
Maybe
.

I open the pantry door to find Candace standing close on the other side of it. She jumps back, bug-eyed. She must not have heard me hang up. I’d thought about snitchy prisoners, or someone on the line with us, but eavesdroppers on my end had not occurred to me.

“What are you doing?” I say, mean-voiced, trying to remember how much I’ve said out loud.

“I came across to see if there was snacks.” Candace has gone about as fetal as she can while still technically standing. I push past her, and she falls in beside me, her dry, pink lips turning up at the corners. “I wasn’t listening to you talk with your mom about the mail or nothing.”

I spin and grab her wrist in my other hand, squeezing her hard enough to feel her bird bones grind under my fingers. She yelps, and I step in very, very close. My growth spurt has given me an inch and change on Candace, and I use it.

“You don’t want to start with me. We sleep in the same room, you understand?” I say it like I hope she will start.

She swallows and her shifty gaze slips sideways, but she nods. The second she breaks, I ease my grip and smile at her, all sweet. Sugar after slaps, because slaps don’t seem to last with Candace. Maybe she’s too used to them? I need to be careful with her now, at least until Kai’s
Ramayana
comes. At least until I decide what I should do with it.

My mother mailed that poem twenty-three years ago, and I still had it. The dark blue ink was faded, and the paper was dry and ratty at the edges, but it was still legible. I’d kept it all these years in an army surplus footlocker at the back of my walk-in closet, on the highest shelf, behind my boot boxes. It floated in other bits of wreckage from my disordered childhood: a tarnished anklet made of bells, the antique glass doorknob I stole from Hervé’s house, three strings of Mardi Gras beads.

Now it was inside my briefcase. I’d dug it out right before I left to pick up Birdwine. I planned to drop by Kinkos and scan the pages. I wanted a digital copy for myself because I’d decided I should offer the original to Julian. It was rightfully his—a love poem by his mother, maybe to his father, written while he was in the womb.

“How’d your chat with the kid go?” Birdwine asked. It was the first thing he’d said since a grunty “Can we stop for coffee?” when I picked him up. I’d pointed to the cup I’d gotten him at Starbucks on the way, and he’d put his face in it.

“I don’t know. Weird. Stilted. I invited him over this weekend,” I told Birdwine, talking over the GPS as it ordered us into a small parking lot. I parked in front of a strip of stores that couldn’t live up to the word
mall:
Chinese take-out, a tattoo joint, a quickie mart with milk and Lotto. “He’s coming to the loft, but maybe I should take him out for tapas or to a steak place? Neutral territory.”

“Play it by ear,” Birdwine said.

As we got out, I realized I should have let Birdwine drive, after all. Gentrification had tried and failed here, and this was his car’s kind of neighborhood. Across the street, Cape Cod bungalows in various stages of abandoned rehab sat in the shadows of huge Victorians that had been sliced into awkward apartments.

Birdwine pointed to a door near the end, between a nail parlor and a tiny used-book store. It was covered in signs. The top one said
OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT
. Under that was a sign for Krauss & Spaulding, a ground-zero firm a bare half step up from a do-it-yourself divorce kit. The Worthy Investigations sign was next, the top edge covered by a hand-lettered piece of poster board that said
MASSAGE! WAXING! TA
ROT! WALK-INS WELCOME!
That one had an enthusiastic red arrow drawn on, pointing up.

“Hooker?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Birdwine said.

Birdwine’s default setting was quiet, and he’d never been a morning guy, but this was overkill. It was as if he’d decided in cold blood to have this friendship, and now he was doggedly enduring it. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess he was hungover. I did know better, though. If Birdwine had started drinking yesterday, he’d be very busy still drinking right now.