Parable of the Talents

timid and afraid of almost everyone—resentful, but afraid. I had to be provoked suddenly and severely to make me react with anything other than argument. That's why I was so upset when I broke the girl's jaw. Not only did I not know that I could hurt someone that badly, but I wasn't the kind of person who hurt people at all.

But somehow, Madison didn't know that.

He wouldn't let me alone, but at least he didn't use phys­ical force on me. His moist little hands kept wandering and he kept pleading, and he watched me. His eyes followed me so much, I was afraid Kayce would notice and blame me. He tried to peek at me in the bathroom—1 caught him at it twice. He tried to watch me in my bedroom when I was dressing.

At 15, I couldn't wait to get out of the house and away from both of them for good.

from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

thursday, june 7, 2035

I'm back at Georgetown. I need to rest a little, check in with Allie, clean up, pick up some of the things I left with her, and gather what information I can. Then I'll head for Ore­gon. I need to get out of the area for a while, and going up where Marc is seems a good choice. He won't want to see me. He needs to be part of Christian America even though he knows that Christian America's hands are far from clean. If he doesn't want me around reminding him what kind of people he's mixed up with, let him help me. Once I've got my child back, he'll never have to see me again—unless he wants to.

************************************

It's hard to accept even the comforts of Georgetown now. It seems that I can only stand myself when I'm moving, work­ing, searching for Larkin. I've got to get out of here.

Allie says I should stay until next week. She says I look like hell. I suppose I did when I arrived. After all, I was pre­tending to be a vagrant I've cleaned up now and gone back to being an ordinary woman. But even when I was clean, she said I looked older. 'Too much older,' she said.

'You've got your Justin back,' I told her, and she looked away, looked at Justin, who was playing basketball with some other Georgetown kids. They had nailed an honest-to­goodness basket-without-a-bottom high up on someone's cabin wall. Early Georgetown cabins were made of notched logs, stone, and mud. They're heavy, sturdy things—so heavy that a few have fallen in and killed people during earthquakes. But a nailed-on basket and the blows of a newly stolen bas­ketball did them no harm at all. One of the men who had a job cleaning office buildings in Eureka had brought the ball home the day before, saying he had found it in the street.

'How is Justin?' I asked Allie. She had set up a work area behind the hotel. There she made or repaired furniture, re­paired or sharpened tools, and did reading and writing for peo­ple. She didn't teach reading or writing as I had. She claimed she didn't have the patience for that kind of teaching— although she was willing to show kids how to work with wood, and she fixed their broken toys for free. She contin­ued to do repair work for the various George businesses, but no more cleaning, no more fetching and carrying. Once Do­lores George had seen the quality of her work, Allie was al­lowed to do the things she loved for her living and for Justin's. The repair work she was doing now for other peo­ple was for extra cash to buy clothing or books for Justin.

'I wish you'd stay and teach him,' she said to me. 'I'm afraid he spends too much time with kids who are already breaking into houses and robbing people. If anything makes me leave Georgetown, it will be that.'

I nodded, wondering what sort of things my Larkin was learning. And the unwanted question occurred to me as it sometimes did: Was she still alive to learn anything at all? I turned my back on Allie and stared out into the vast, jum­bled forest of shacks, cabins, tents, and lean-tos that was Georgetown.

'Lauren?' Allie said in a voice too soft to trust

I looked around at her, but she was hand-sanding the leg of a chair, and not looking at me. I waited.

'You know... I had a son before Justin,' she said.

'I know.' Her father, who had prostituted her and her sis­ter Jill had also murdered her baby in a drunken rage. That was why she and Jill had left home. They had waited until their father drank himself to sleep. Then they set fire to their shack with him in it and ran away. Fire again. What a cleans­ing friend. What a terrible enemy.

'I never even knew who my first son's father was,' she said, 'but I loved him—my little boy. You can't know how I loved him. He came from me, and he knew me, and he was mine.' She sighed and looked up from the chair leg. 'For eight whole months, he was mine.'

I stared at Georgetown again, knowing where she was