by Nina Berry
My heart thumped hard. Mom and Richard would go ballistic as soon as they knew I was home. I’d never stayed out all night before without them knowing where I was. Had they called the cops?
I glided into the living room, past the ceiling-high shelves stuffed with books, sidestepped Richard’s rowing machine, and headed toward the hall to my bedroom. I kept about a hundred dollars stashed in my dresser. With that maybe Caleb could make it to his mysterious destination.
“Desdemona, is that you?” My mother’s voice swooped up out of sleep to a hysterically high pitch. A light clicked on. I turned to see Mom and Richard, uncurling from the couch in the living room, shell-shocked and furious.
“Are you all right? Where have you been?” Mom was on me in a flash, grabbing my shoulders, scanning my face, checking me for injuries. Richard walked up slowly behind her, rubbing his bearded cheeks with one hand as he shook his head at me. I hastily rolled the folder I was carrying into a tube and held it down at my side within the folds of my dress.
“I’m fine, Mom, really. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” Had Caleb seen the light go on?
“We called the police!” Mom looked more upset than I’d ever seen her.
“Your mother was very worried,” said Richard in that soft voice of his that cut through any argument. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I know. Did I mention that I’m sorry?” Neither of them was softening.
“You are going to sit down and tell us exactly where you were and what you were doing!” Mom pointed at our threadbare wingback chair. “This is so unlike you, I thought . . . I thought something had happened to you.” She fiddled with the Triple Goddess symbol she always wore around her neck. Tears sprang to her eyes. Richard put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the couch.
My heart gained about eight hundred pounds. I sank into the wingback chair. “I am so sorry, Mom, really. I forgot my phone, and I met this boy after school . . .”
“A boy?” Mom’s eyebrows almost popped off the top of her forehead. “You were out with a boy?”
“Yeah. I met him after school and he invited me to a party.” My brain was working overtime. How to make this plausible and yet not give anything important away?
“You’ve been at a party this whole time?” She exchanged a look of disbelief with Richard. “The only party on the planet without a single phone in it?”
“It was out in the desert,” I said. That was true. “And I didn’t realize how far out it was till we got there, and by then nobody could get reception.”
“Okay, okay.” Mom’s hands were shaking. Richard stroked her back, but she started to pace. “So I’m expected to believe that you were at a party in the desert with a boy you’ve never mentioned before, for fifteen hours?” She paused to give me her “I know better than that” look. “Honey, you’ve never even been out on a date.”
“Guess I have now,” I said, making sure to look her right in the eye. “He didn’t tell me how far it was—somewhere out past Barstow along the 15, like, halfway to Vegas. They had a bonfire next to this big rock formation, and I think I sat in a cactus.” I stood up and tugged the back of my dress around, searching for the holes.
Mom studied me, as if I were some new life-form she’d just found under a rock. “So you went to a party with a boy. Did you drink any alcohol?” She walked right up and sniffed at me, scrutinizing my face.
“No!” My voice had the ring of truth in it now. “I swear to you, Mom, I did not have a drink. I just had a soda and a hot dog, and so did Caleb.”
“Caleb?” Mom’s eyes bored up into mine. I’d towered over both her and Richard since puberty. “So his name is Caleb?”
Damn. I’d meant to use Jake Peters’s name, but Caleb had slipped out. No going back now. “He’s just this guy.”
“How crazy was this party?” She took my chin and tilted my head down to look her in the eye again.
“Marijuana? Ex? Meth?” asked Richard.
Mom was pacing again. “We’ve been to a few parties in our lives too, you know.”
“Mom, you know I’m not into that stuff. I don’t like the thought of being so out of control.”
“Okay.” Mom stopped pacing and gave me a determined look. “It’s nearly six a.m. You and I are going to have a talk. Then I want you to take a shower and get ready for school.”
School? After the insanity of the past hours, I couldn’t imagine dragging myself to classes. And how was I supposed to get the money to Caleb? “Mom, I’m really not feeling all that hot . . .”
“That’s what happens when you stay out all night partying,” she said crisply. “Maybe next time you won’t go so far, remember your phone, and come home at a decent hour. Now, excuse us, Richard.” She took me by the arm and led me toward my bedroom. “It’s time for a mother-daughter chat.”
“I’ll call the police, tell them to stop looking.” Richard walked to the phone.
I cast a final glance out the front window but saw no sign of Caleb in the gloom outside. Richard mouthed “Good luck” at me as we headed down the hallway.
“I know you know the facts of life,” Mom said, shutting my bedroom door. “But we need to talk about this boy you’re seeing and why it’s not okay for him to take you out to all-night parties.”
“He’s not really like that, Mom.” I knew how that sounded as I pulled my dress over my head and slipped off my sandals. I slid the folder onto my desk out of sight. “He got dragged into it too. And before we knew it, we were hours away.”
“But what does that say about his judgment? And yours?”
She talked on as I eased out of the brace and stepped into the shower. I’d heard a lot of this before; Mom often babbled her free-living beliefs to me. Only this time she sprinkled in more warnings. I made the appropriate responses from behind the shower curtain as she paced my tiny bathroom.
She finished up by saying that if I ever needed to talk to her about anything, she’d be there for me. And I was grounded for a month.
I didn’t protest. Any chance of sneaking money to Caleb was gone now. Would I ever see him again? I couldn’t imagine never looking into his dark eyes again.
I got out of the shower, and wrapped a towel around myself; then my mom gave me a tight hug. “You know I love you, Desdemona,” she said.
I hugged her back. “Me too, Mom. And I really am sorry.”
Her hazel eyes shifted back and forth between mine. “Anything else you want to tell me about this Caleb guy?”
Did she sense I was lying? “Like what?”
“Is he cute?”
Holy crap, she was smiling.
I shrugged. “Um, yeah. He is.” He’s ridiculously hot, Mom. In fact, if you knew how hot he was, you wouldn’t want me near him.
Her smile widened. “Okay, you get dressed and I’ll make you some eggs.” She started to leave.
“Mom, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course, honey.” She turned in the doorway.
“What exactly did they tell you about me in that orphanage in Russia?” I tried to make it sound casual, grabbing a comb and looking into the bathroom mirror. “Did they say anything about my biological parents?”
She took a moment, standing there, then cleared her throat. We didn’t talk about the adoption much. I avoided it so she wouldn’t feel like she wasn’t enough of a parent. Maybe she avoided it for the same reason. “No, unfortunately. I asked them, but they had very little information. I found you in an orphanage in Moscow, but you’d been transferred from out in the boondocks and the records on you were minimal.”
I turned to face her, running the comb through my hair. “Did you notice anything, like, weird about me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said automatically, then froze, her eyes flickering with thought.
“What?” I said. “You thought of something.”
“They were afraid of you,” she said. “The people at the orphanage. I never told you before because I
didn’t want to disturb you. But they didn’t tell me about you at first, and when I saw you and wanted you, they tried to persuade me not to take you. That just made me want you all the more.”
“Afraid of me?” I realized I was combing the same section of hair over and over and stopped. “Why?”
“Well.” She furrowed her brow. “You were only eighteen months old, but you’d already had more adventures than most folks have in a lifetime, or that’s how I saw it. The orphanage had a thin file on you, but I can still remember it—gray and creased and stained. It was written in Russian and some tribal tongue from the place they found you. I hired a lawyer to help me with the red tape, and she got a translator to help with the tribal language. Isn’t it funny? I haven’t thought about this in years.”
I stopped pretending to comb my hair and turned to stare at my reflection in the mirror, trying to see past the green eyes and the freckles to a large feline underneath. As far back as I could remember, I’d known I was adopted. I often wondered what my biological parents looked like, moved like, sounded like. I hadn’t let myself wonder too much, since I figured I’d never find out, and poking at the tiny empty space inside me was painful.
I didn’t look like a cat. Had my father’s nose been a bit too long, my mother’s eyes large and green? I held up my hands and scrutinized them. One of my parents had given me slender fingers and nails that always easily grew long and strong. Was that typical for a tiger-shifter?
“Where did they find me?”
“You’d been transferred to Moscow from some tiny town in Siberia,” said Mom. At the word “Siberia,” a strange chill ran through my bones. “The section of your file in that tribal tongue was a transcription of what the person who first found you said to the officials. He was a reindeer herder.”
“I was found by a reindeer herder?” This was getting stranger and stranger. “Was he my father?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “He’s just the one who found you, out in the woods. That’s what he said anyway. And they had a photo of him. He looked like he was Chinese or some sort of native Mongolian tribesman. Nothing like you.”
“I was found in the Siberian woods by a Mongolian reindeer herder,” I repeated. “That is the weirdest thing ever.”
“He spoke rather poetically,” said Mom. “He was out in the snow with his deer, and the sound of angels and your cries led him to you. You were the only thing alive in a great circle of dead trees. I think he said you were wrapped in furs, or maybe he wrapped you in furs.”
“A circle of dead trees . . .” I said. “Is that what scared the orphanage people?”
She shrugged. “They didn’t say much. I almost didn’t even get to see you. I was waiting alone in the reception area of the orphanage in Moscow for a while, and this skinny old man I’d never seen before came out and motioned for me to follow him. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but he pointed at a door. When I went inside I found you, smiling right at me. Vines had sneaked through the window and wound themselves around the slats of your crib, as if Nature herself was tending to you. You had your green thumb even then. And I never saw that old man again. I’m certain now he was an angel.”
Mom really believed in angels too. It always sounded like wish fulfillment to me. “So I wasn’t scary to you?”
“Scary, Desdemona? Not at all! You held your arms out to me right away, and that was it. I was yours forever.” She smiled, her eyes misting with remembrance. Tears formed in my own eyes. I was used to hearing her say how much she loved me; Mom was touchy-feely like that. But that was the moment when we’d become a family.
“At first they told me you weren’t available for adoption,” she continued. “But when my lawyer checked, she found out that wasn’t true. They called you Varvara, which means ‘stranger.’ You were my little fairy child from the start. Well, now you’re my tall fairy child.” She smiled.
My heart jolted in my chest. Stranger? Had they known what I was?
Mom didn’t notice my disquiet. “They said you made flowers bloom and clocks stop. Stray cats would sneak in and snuggle up to you. I just hoped it was all true.”
“You don’t still have this file, do you?” I tried not to let the deep urgency I felt creep into my voice. “I’d love to read it.”
“No, sorry.” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t let me take the original, and they took the transcription from the lawyer. I got a whole set of new files once the adoption went through, of course. All cleaned up and sanitized so that it didn’t look like they ran a country where babies were found abandoned out in the woods.”
“Stranger.” I stared at my racks of brace-mandated waistless dresses, elastic-waist pants, and long tunic T-shirts, pretending to select an outfit. But in my mind’s eye, I saw a man in fur from head to toe, walking toward one of his reindeer as it nuzzled a squirming, squalling bundle in a ring of dead trees. Who had left me there, and why?
“You were three months old when he found you, and someone had cared for you very well. They must have loved you, Desdemona.”
“And you think they’re probably dead?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged. “Maybe the herder lied and killed your parents, but couldn’t bring himself to hurt you. Maybe your family ran out of food and knew he’d be coming by. We’ll probably never know.”
“Yeah.” I tugged a new dress out of the closet. “Can’t see me rushing off to Siberia anytime soon.”
“Maybe after you graduate we can take a trip to Russia so that you can get a sense of where you came from. Would you like that?”
“Yeah,” I said, warmth spreading through me. “That’d be great.”
“It’s a deal.” She opened the bedroom door and headed down the hall, shouting. “Who wants eggs?”
I threw on my clothes and grabbed the cash from my dresser. Caleb might still be waiting for me. Mom was humming to herself in the kitchen. Avoiding the creaky board in the middle of the floor, I crept down the hall, out of sight of the kitchen, and ran to the front door. Chilly early morning air embraced me as I stepped outside. The cypresses murmured in the breeze, and a few birds sang toward the rising sun.
But no tall boy in a long black cloak stepped out of the shadows. The curb across the street sat empty. Caleb was gone.
CHAPTER 7
School had been mild torture for years, but that day it was a blur of torment. I literally ran into Iris after history, my head down, trying to move through the halls unnoticed.
“Whoa, there,” she said, stepping back hard. “You don’t know your own strength.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. The tide of students eddied around us, two small stones in the stream. Iris had her long dreadlocks piled up to show off eight different earrings, four in each ear, every one a different color. Around her neck hung several chains featuring a silver unicorn, a gold Cheshire cat, and a tarnished Eiffel Tower. Her “friends,” as she called them, were nearly popping out of the top of her sleek white blouse. She’d painted purple flowers on her Doc Marten boots.
She fell into step beside me. We had art class next. “You okay?” she asked. “No offense, but you look like shit.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like the flowers.”
“Aren’t they cool? Inspired by your azaleas.” She kicked up one of her feet to get a better view of the blossoms on her boots. “This hippie phase I’m going through has totally fueled my creativity.”
“Iris, you’ve been in a hippie phase for two years,” I said, weaving my way through the throng. “If you got any more creative you’d be growing flowers out of your ears.”
“Hey, great idea!” She laughed her infectious, deep-throated chortle, and I couldn’t help smiling. “That’s better,” she said. “Now quick tell me what’s wrong before I kick your butt in pottery class.”
“Competitive art, the way it should be,” I said. “I just didn’t sleep last night, that’s all.” Did that spiky head of hair up the hallway belong to Jake? I slowed down. No way I wan
ted to run into him today. I leaned down and spoke low. “Jake Peters asked me to the dance.”
Iris’s perfect eyebrows shot up. “Holy shit. What did you say?”
“I said I don’t dance.” I tried to adjust the brace without being seen. It was extra uncomfortable today, as if my body was rebelling. “And then he put his hands on my waist and, well, that was it, right?”
She frowned. “Why? Did you knee him in the balls or something?”
I threw her an exasperated look. “No. He touched the brace. He looked all crazy, and I got the hell out of there.”
“Oh, right. I forget you have that thing.”
She forgot? How was that possible? Was I really that good at pretending it wasn’t there?
Iris’s big brown eyes shifted back and forth in thought. “So you didn’t talk about it with Jake, give him a chance?”
“No!” I started down the hallway, my stomach twisting. “Why does everyone say that? Like Jake Peters or anyone else is going to date a girl encased in rigid nonbiodegradable materials.”
“Anyone else?” She craned her neck to get a look at my face as I sped up. “Who else you been talking to about this?”
“It’s not important.” This was too hard. The lies were piling up. First Mom, now Iris. If I couldn’t tell them the truth, it was better to be left alone. “I’ll see in you class, okay? I’m going to hit the bathroom.”
“Okay, but I need more details!” she yelled after me.
I headed for the bathroom. Maybe a few moments of quiet in a graffiti-covered stall would clear my head. I slipped past a few guys outside the boys’ bathroom, almost there, when one of them turned in my direction.
Damn. The spiky hair did belong to Jake Peters. He looked at me, then turned away. I ran the rest of the way to the bathroom,
A toiled flushed, and a girl in a yellow sweater emerged from a stall and headed to the sink. I kept my eyes down, moving toward the other faucet, hoping she’d leave me there alone. But the door from the hallway swooshed open behind me.
“You okay?”
