by Leah Thomas
“I think . . . I think they’re lucky. I don’t want to be a girl.” I shocked myself by going further. “I don’t feel like I am a girl, and I never want to be a woman.”
I couldn’t meet Patricia’s eyes but I felt the soft weight of her gaze on me. Finally she said, “Well. Maybe you’re not a girl, then.”
I glanced up so quickly my neck cracked, expecting to see her smirking. But she looked matter-of-fact. I could only stammer, “B-but th-that’s crazy, right?” I laughed at myself, chest aching. “I’ve got to be crazy. I mean, I’m a girl. I’m on my stupid period, and I’m starting to get boobs and . . .”
“Those are just body parts, not who you are. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I taught my kids to treat people kindly, and that included themselves. Don’t call yourself names. You’re not crazy.”
“But everyone knows I’m a girl.”
“Everyone but you,” she amended, “and you’re the only one that gets to say.”
I couldn’t even respond to her words, but I clung to them like a buoy. I wanted to hug her, or at least hug her words close and hold them in my heart until I believed them.
But I didn’t hug her, and she didn’t hug me, and I wiped my eyes.
“Don’t tell Sarah,” I said, after my voice returned. “She won’t get it.”
“Are you sure that’s true?” Patricia asked. “She’s pretty understanding.”
I shook my head. “Not about this.”
“It’s not my secret to tell. But you know what?”
“What?”
Patricia’s smile was the warmest glow. “I think I finally have some book recommendations for you.”
BONE DANCE
At around midnight, Sarah appeared beside me in bed. I rolled over and her face was three inches away. If she still breathed, we would have been sharing the same air. Her hair was always tearing free of its braids, and looking at her stilled something in me.
I thought she looked beautiful, not because she was beautiful in any specific way, but because she was Sarah. But she looked sad, as if she was carrying some heavy new weight.
I put my hand to her cheek, close as I could, so the fuzzy warmth of her seemed to bounce off my skin. “Sorry I was so angry today.”
“Pah. Don’t apologize for feeling emotions,” Sarah said, her eyes crinkling.
“Where’ve you been?”
“The library.” I was relieved she didn’t try to lie and say the lobby, but I was worried about what had left her so unhappy. I felt I couldn’t ask, as if asking her what was wrong might encourage her to ask the same of me.
“Did you see any of these books there?” I pulled a sticky note from my nightstand.
She frowned at the titles I’d scribbled on it. “The Left Hand of Darkness? Sounds familiar-ish. Bone Dance? Never heard of it, but maybe it was written after I died. Triton? Sounds like a toothpaste brand. More aliens, right? Gosh, Trish likes some trashy stuff.”
Patricia’s words still warmed me. “These books aren’t for her. They’re for me.”
Sarah laughed. “But you hate reading, Dani.”
My cheeks flushed. “Maybe I haven’t read the right books.”
Sarah didn’t reply. Clearly something was on her mind. And I knew I would hear about whatever it was. No matter our secrets, we had more truths in common. Like clockwork Sarah sat upright, levitating above the bedspread. “Did Patricia seem okay to you today?”
I wanted to say that she had seemed wonderful, like the family I never thought I could have, but Sarah’s expression was lined with worry.
“As okay as ever. She was in a good mood, almost. Why?”
“Well, I know she asked us not to look into her family . . .”
“Curiosity got the better of you. Honestly, I figured you looked her up the day she told you not to.”
Sarah punched my shoulder. “Gimme some credit. But fine. Yeah, today I looked into her family. On Patricia’s obituary page her family was mentioned, so I looked them up and found an article about her son.”
The son Patricia had spoken of an hour ago? “Oh really? What about him?”
Was he in jail? Had he hurt someone, called another woman a bitch and gone a few steps further? Or—
“Oh god. Is he dead?”
Sarah sighed. “No, he’s not dead. He lives a few towns over, in Faylind. He seems like an okay person. He’s a teacher like Patricia was. His students seem to like him, or at least that’s what they told the papers. You know how Patricia mentioned grandkids?”
“Yeah?”
“Apparently her son and his wife had a baby girl about two years ago.”
“Wow, so she’s a grandma after all? Cool.”
But Sarah shook her head and lowered her eyes. “The baby’s got brain cancer. So the whole town’s doing a fundraiser, but if I’m reading between the lines correctly, the doctors think she’ll be dead by Christmas.”
“Oh,” I said hollowly, because there were no words for this. And I thought how Patricia had had such kind words for me when I didn’t think they existed. It didn’t seem right.
“Yeah. The town’s doing this thing where they bring Christmas to the kid early, you know? Like so she can get presents from Santa and whatnot. It’s so fucking sentimental.”
“You mean it’s so fucking sad.” Maybe my shoulders trembled at the thought, because Sarah placed her velvet hands on them.
“How are we . . . I mean, what do we tell Patricia?”
Sarah shook her head, her touch fading. “We can’t tell her any of this, obviously.”
“What?” I sat up. “We have to tell her. She might want to meet the baby, or check on her son, or go . . . go say goodbye. She might want to visit the hospital or something.”
“Believe me, she won’t want to visit.”
“How do you know if you haven’t asked her?”
Sarah seemed surprised that I would argue with her. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Aren’t we supposed to help her? Isn’t that why we took her in?”
“You think that would be helpful? You think anyone wants to see their loved ones living and dying, and not be part of it? Why the hell should we suffer more? Christ. I don’t want to know what happened to any of my family.”
“But you’re not Patricia,” I said slowly. “It’s not okay for us to know about this when she doesn’t. That’s absolutely not okay.”
“Again, you wouldn’t get it.” Sarah looked away from me. “There’s too much life in you for you to get it.”
“But you understand everything? About the living and the dead, about everyone?”
Sarah bristled. “I’ve been around long enough to know pretty well, kid.”
“Kid? You don’t even understand me.”
That comment looked like it stung, but she bit her tongue. The color in her skin faded.
I backtracked. “Look, I’m sorry. You know me better than anyone.”
“It’s fine, I get it. But it’s not like that says a lot.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, cheeks flushing, because I suspected I knew precisely what she meant, and didn’t actually want to hear her say it. I was friendly with people at school, but no one really knew me. No one knew my insides, my past, my ghosts. Not my Mom, and now not even Sarah.
But Patricia was trying to understand me.
“Sarah. Seriously. I think Patricia deserves to know this.”
“Remember when we found her out there on that trail? She asked us not to tell her anything about her family. Are you really okay with taking that decision away from her?”
“As if you researching her behind her back is any better?”
Sarah’s skin became fully translucent, her face a distant star though she remained beside me. “What I do with my time is not Patricia’s business. And maybe . . . I don’t know, Dani. Maybe it’s not yours, either.”
“Sarah . . .”
“Honestly? I don’
t know why I told you this. I guess sometimes I forget that we’re separate people. Because I don’t belong to you, you know? Half the time I live in your stupid Game Boy, but I’m not your accessory!”
I stared at her, silenced by the sudden grief in her expression. I wondered if it was mirrored in mine. After all, I did belong to Sarah. Whatever bravery I had in me, whatever fearless confidence—they had once been hers.
If it weren’t for meeting Sarah, would I even know how to argue?
“Please don’t tell her,” Sarah whispered. “Promise me you won’t.”
Thing is, the lesson couldn’t be unlearned now.
“I can’t promise that. I won’t.”
Sarah shook her head. “Fine. You win. I really don’t understand you.”
She shrank to a pinprick, then wafted into nothingness.
THE CRUCIBLE
The following morning, Sarah wasn’t in my room.
Had I really treated her like an accessory? And maybe she was right—I could be wrong about what was right for Patricia. But even so, this felt, in my gut, like information Patricia should know.
I needed a third opinion, and realized, with a hollow thump in my ribs, there was literally no one in the world who I was close with to give me one.
Sarah’s words echoed in my mind: You don’t talk to other people.
There was Mom, but regardless of me being vaguely furious with her, I’d never been able to turn to her for advice. She was as afraid of giving it as I was of getting it.
And let’s say I had friends, actual living, breathing friends. What had become mundane to me—living with ghosts—would sound batshit to them. Over the years with Sarah, ghost rules made more sense than social cues; telekinesis was infinitely easier for me to comprehend than asking someone out on a date. Maybe somewhere down the line, I’d become a story told around the fire.
Even if I had friends, I’d only have secrets from them, too.
———
At school, I was so jittery that I probably looked high. During silent reading in American lit—a class that’s already stressful enough because (a) I hate reading and (b) Seiji fucking Grayson sits at the table behind mine—I sort of lost it.
Anne Blumenthal tapped me in the arm with her gel pen. “Hey, Dani, did you do the Algebra II homework?” she whispered.
And I blurted aloud for the entire class to hear: “If someone in your family was dying, would you want to know about it?”
Anne flinched before snickers erupted near the back, prompting Mr. Hammond to say, “Silent reading, folks. Silent.”
I was pretty damn silent after that. Anne didn’t speak to me again, but stared intently at her book with her hand over her mouth to hide her expression. I guess that was a fair response; my question didn’t have a lot to do with what we were reading in The Crucible.
When the bell rang, she said, “See you!” and caught up with some other friends. They glanced back without any subtlety at all before hurrying away without me.
I waited a long moment before standing, and by the time I got all my stuff together, I was alone with Mr. Hammond and his outdated moustache.
“Everything okay at home, Daniela?”
I’d asked Mr. Hammond not to call me Daniela at least seven times. “Same old.”
He nodded, seeming relieved to disengage. “Okay. Well, get to your next class.”
Seiji Grayson loomed in the hall, blocking the doorway and scowling beneath his bangs as always.
“The answer is yes,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“If someone I loved was dying, I would want to know.”
He turned and left me there without another word, but the conviction in his voice left my ears and mind ringing.
STAR TREK
I stopped by the public library on my walk home from school to ask about the books Patricia had recommended. The librarian told me that The Left Hand of Darkness was definitely in the stacks, but she’d have to request the other two from the library system. For that, I’d need an interlibrary membership, so she showed me to a row of old desktop computers where I could sign up for one.
I felt a little guilty, listening to her explain how to make an account, showing me a brochure and everything, as if I were another one of the elderly patrons sitting at the back table swapping church stories. I’d already stolen more than a dozen books from the place, tossing them over the sensor at the door, and subsequently torn them to shreds. I wondered if this librarian was trawling the shelves at night, hunting for them like missing persons.
The desktop computers were pretty clunky and slow, but we had no internet at home. I set up my account and requested my books, then followed in Sarah’s footsteps and searched for information on Patricia’s family.
When I searched for Patricia’s name—Patricia Lyttle—I mostly got articles about her death. How she was missing for months, buried in a snowbank. How once she was found, it took a week to identify her because her body had deteriorated so much.
All of this was exactly as Patricia had said, but her words hadn’t quite conveyed the poignancy of seeing Patricia’s obituary photo, which featured her visiting a sci-fi convention with her son. Her Vulcan ears were striking, but more striking was her smile mirrored on his round face.
I found his name in the caption under that photo, and that led to the articles Sarah had relayed. Once again, the visuals stole my breath. Hundreds of messages of support littered the comments section of a public fundraiser that had already reached $12,000. Again and again, my stare was snagged by the same picture: a bald, grinning toddler with tubes in her nose.
Against my better judgment, I clicked on a video file and waited five minutes for it to load on the dial-up. The video featured an interview with Patricia’s son and daughter-in-law.
“We’re humbled by all the support.” Gary Lyttle didn’t look too much like Patricia, but his voice had the same cadence and his glasses made me think he’d been a bookworm for decades. “We’ve had difficult days before, but this is . . . this is . . .”
His wife, holding the baby close, placed her hand on his arm. “Gary lost his mother to violent crime. We named Patty after her.”
“We’re grateful to the community.” His eyes were exhausted and his smile was forced. But no amount of fundraising or gratitude would shake the tumors from his kid.
A little old lady at the computer beside me offered me a tissue. I took it and said thank you.
It cost five cents per page to use the library printer. I printed two dozen pages, and paid for the articles with my lunch money. I thought at the very least Patricia might want to read the transcript of her son’s interview or see a photo of Patty Jr.
I felt light-headed as I left the warm glow of the library and trod down Main Street in the cold. For some reason I felt compelled to walk past the Rochdale Women’s Shelter, aka The Green House.
When Mom and I arrived in Rochdale on a rainy night years ago, the Green House was our first home. They took us in on the recommendation of a kind, tired social worker, Kathy Myers, who reassured us both that Dad wouldn’t find us, not here, not if she could help it, and even if he could, that’s what their security was for. We stayed there for a month or so while Dad broke parole and went missing, and in that time, the staff of equally tired and helpful women ensured Mom got a part-time job, I got school supplies, and we both got fed and clothed and counseled.
One of the counselors, a woman named Raquela, told me something I won’t forget: “Don’t ever let someone else, especially someone you love, decide who you are.”
Sarah had shaped much of who I was, but she wasn’t all of me.
The Green House windows were curtained for privacy, but the porch light was on. The earliest snow of the year had started falling. I couldn’t help but think that Patricia’s granddaughter might get her white Christmas early, after all, and I didn’t care if Sarah would call that sentimental.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
“Did you get th
e books?” Patricia asked, when I climbed the stairs to the lobby, stomping fresh slush from my boots.
“One of them,” I said, and pulled the old laminated hardcover from my bag.
She smiled, sitting up straighter. “That’s the best one! You’ll have to let me know what you think.”
“Oh, she’ll definitely let you know what she thinks,” someone muttered.
Sarah was lying just above the check-in counter, staring at the ceiling with her arms folded behind her head, as if she were lounging in a spectral hammock.
I felt the tension in the room rise, as perceptible as my clouded breath on the air.
“Hey,” I said, awkwardly.
“Hey,” Sarah told the ceiling.
I couldn’t stand her impassive expression, and glanced around the space instead, trembling with cold. The calamity of the wallpaper aside, the lobby was much neater than it had been. I’d brought a few flashlights and blankets, and there were broken book bindings and pillows on most surfaces. I’d even dragged out my old boom box, and the low buzz of a classical radio station colored the air. The lobby felt a bit like a living room or den, the mad study of some eccentric old person.
Perhaps it was. Patricia sat in her favorite battered armchair beside the blacked-out windows, leaning over a side table to peer at the glossy pages of a National Geographic magazine. She couldn’t flip the pages on her own, but we three had all puzzled that one out together weeks ago.
I’d placed a fan on the floor, angled upward. Every day, I taped the back and front covers of a new magazine to the surface of the table. Whenever Patricia wanted the pages turned, she clicked her tongue at Sarah, who simply pointed her finger, switching on the fan blades with her electric expertise. It was a haphazard method, as a lot of pages got skipped or clung together. Still, the three of us were so proud that Patricia applauded and gave Sarah a massive hug.
It felt like years ago. The printed pages in my backpack were heavy like an anchor.
“Do you need something, Dani?” Patricia asked, and I realized I had kept a noticeable distance between us.
“Um.” I hesitated. “Sarah . . . ?”
