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“But it’s about timing. Miig will let you know the whole story when it’s time. Slopper was pretty messed up for months after. He stopped playing, didn’t want to learn anything, and even stopped sleeping so good.” She was finally quiet.
“Indian?” Miig asked. She nodded, and Rose squeezed my hand a little. We were always excited at the possibility of more of us. Miig must have seen the looks on our faces, the sudden excitement, because he said, “Not every Indian is an Indian.”
“You know what I did before I got here?” I looked up at her. She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was tipping the bottle side to side, watching the amber liquid slosh and wave. “No.” “I ran.” She laughed with no joy, like a cough racked with sickness.
She was hard to figure out. Harder even than Miig or Minerva; their personas were clear. Their trauma was stark and motivating. Wab’s was less defined, messier somehow, and therefore more dangerous.
I’ll never forget the way that man looked when they tossed his grandson in the back of the van like a bag of rice. I watched his soul fold up on itself like a closing door. The light and warmth and humanity clapped shut in his eyes because he couldn’t protect the one thing that mattered. There was no coming back from that, even if he did manage to walk away later on, which he wouldn’t.
wonder if you can feel poison in your blood? If your veins feel tighter or your pulse gets thicker somehow?
She couldn’t believe her luck and assumed the worst for their backstory.
He nodded, wincing at bit at the name like a remembered wound pinching at a nerve.
There is a feeling that has no name because, really, it is such an absence that it exists only in a vacuum of feeling and so, really, can have no name. It sucks you inside out and places you in a space where touch and taste and sound and sight all turn to ash. I was there now, alone.
“I didn’t want to live after Isaac didn’t make it out of the school,” he said. “I’d escaped, sure, but why? I had no life without him. The only thing that kept me going was the promise I’d made to myself to go back, to get Isaac the first chance I got.
I remembered the way my mother had changed when Dad didn’t return. Her skin turned to paper, and on it was written all the worries that’d ever crossed her mind and heart.
“No, I’m more tired of missing Isaac, is all. Just an old man with an old love, I guess.”
His body went rigid. I read the stress in the veins that popped anxious Braille into his neck. His eyes looked at something I couldn’t see.
