Banished

The one no one had used in years.

Behind her she heard the door open, and the click of her boyfriend’s Italian shoes on the polished wood floors.

She didn’t move. Couldn’t move. She held the file in her hands, a file thick with papers, and stared at the name she’d thought she buried forever.

“Ah.” His deep, cultured voice came from behind her. He didn’t sound angry so much as amused. “Looking through my private files, are you, my darling?”

The germ of doubt inside her grew, and she began to shake. But still she held on to the file, as she slowly turned to face him. He offered his hand. Without thinking, she took it and allowed herself to be guided to the leather sofa, where they sat together, knees touching. His hands were warm, and even though the voice in her mind screamed in horror and fear, the part of herself that she had trained so carefully to be like everyone else, like normal women, did not pull away.

“We have a lot to talk about,” he said. “In a way, your timing is excellent. See, I recently made some discoveries about you. Yes, you. Don’t look so surprised, darling! You know I have always found you fascinating. Who could blame me for wanting to find out everything I possibly could about the woman I love? And now I can share it all with you, oh yes, because I found out something that you don’t even know about yourself, something wonderful, I think. Something exciting, that will mean great things for both of us and for our work.”

And then he called her by her real name, and the careful shell she’d built up through the years shattered into a million jagged shards, and she realized that she didn’t really know this man at all.

CHAPTER 4

I DIDN’T SLEEP WELL that night, and it took longer than usual to get ready in the morning because someone had spilled a beer on the kitchen floor. I didn’t want Chub sitting in it, so I scrubbed the floor clean. Before I left, I fixed him toast and dressed him in a cute pair of overalls, then got him set up with his stacking blocks. I fed Rascal and put him out in the yard for the day.

Maybe it was because I was so tired, but I didn’t see the car across the street until the bus pulled up. It was cold for April, and I was squinting against the morning sun and blowing clouds of breath on the chilly air when I heard the bus coming and looked up. Ten yards down the road on the opposite side was a dark gray sedan with tinted windows. Our house was the only one on this stretch of road between Gypsum and Trashtown, and anyone who came to see us just drove into the yard. No one ever parked on the road like that.

I boarded the bus, then slid in next to Coby Poindexter, leaning across him so I could look out at the sedan. The driver’s-side window was cracked a few inches, but I couldn’t see inside. As the bus pulled back into the street, I twisted around and tried to see the license plate, but all I could make out was a Lexus emblem.

Could it be the cops? Undercover, watching our house because of Gram’s dealing? But cops wouldn’t drive a Lexus, would they?

“Hey,” Coby said, “how’s things in white-trash land?”

I ignored him. Today, for some reason, I felt something inside me slipping. It wasn’t that I was feeling any braver. Almost the opposite-like I was falling apart at the edges. The way Dun had treated me the night before, the mess in the kitchen this morning, the strange car across from our house: it was all too much. It didn’t leave me enough energy to keep up the mask of indifference I worked so hard at.

“Shut up, Coby,” I muttered.

It wasn’t much of a comeback, but he seemed surprised. I could sense him staring at me the rest of the way to school, but I didn’t pay any attention. When we pulled up in front of the school I bolted out the door before anyone else could talk to me, and went looking for Milla.

She wasn’t hard to find. She was standing near the second-floor water fountain with two other Morrie girls who could have been sisters, their blond hair in greasy clumps around hollow-cheeked faces with sharp, jutting chins. I thought one was named Jean-she’d been in a few of my classes over the years.

“Excuse me,” I said, louder than I intended. I was nervous. I wanted to talk to Milla about what happened, but the other girls closed ranks in front of her as though they’d practiced the move. She would have escaped down the hall except she tripped over her backpack and dropped the book she was holding. It fell to the floor, pages fluttering open.

I reached down to pick up the book just as she did and bumped my forehead against her shoulder. She yanked herself away from me with such force that I left the book on the floor.

Ever since my first week of school, when I sought them out at recess and lunch, I had found myself drawn to the Morries. Maybe it was just that we were equally pathetic, all of us badly dressed and ragged and friendless, but it felt like something more. I felt-and maybe this was no more than an orphaned child’s longing for family-like we were related somehow. Like I was one of them.

I’d asked Gram about it long ago and she’d burst out in one of her breath-rattling laughs, spittle forming at the corners of her mouth.

“You ain’t no Morrie,” she said. “You’re way better’n any Morrie girl. Don’t you forget it, now.”

I must have looked unconvinced, because she reached out her nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger and pinched the tender skin on the inside of my arm. She could pinch surprisingly hard, making hot tears jump to my eyes, but I didn’t make a sound.

“Those Morrie boys, now, they’re a whole nother matter,” she added. “But that’s for later, and don’t you pay them no mind. I’ll let you know when, that’s what.”

There were no boys around now. I looked into Milla’s watery eyes and edged closer, almost enjoying the way she shrank from me.

“What happened yesterday?” I demanded.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You were unconscious. I saw… I felt it.” I didn’t say that her hands, her forehead beneath my fingers, felt worse than unconscious, they felt… wrong. Empty. Dangerous, broken, hurt.

“Didn’t you come to my house once?” I asked in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Last year. With that guy. You know. The one with the tattoos.”

It wasn’t much of a clue, since many of Gram’s customers had tattoos, but the man I was thinking of had blue crosses circling his neck, disappearing into his stringy gray ponytail.

I could see in Milla’s eyes I’d hit a nerve. “Wasn’t me,” she mumbled, lips barely moving as she spoke.

“Yes it was. Yes it was.”

“No. I’m, I was-”

“Why are you so scared of me?” I demanded, leaning close to her face. The bell rang loud over our heads, and I could see the kids, Cleans and Morries alike, scattering off to class, but I didn’t move.

Milla shook her head, eyes open so wide I could see the pale pink veins in the white parts. “I ain’t scared of you.”

She tried to slip away to the side, but I put out my arm and blocked her, my hand flat against the wall. Anger traced white-hot trails along my nerves. I itched to hit Milla. I could feel my palm tingle where I imagined smacking it against her bloodless cheek.

But when she dodged in the other direction, I let her go. She backed away with little shuffling steps, her book forgotten on the floor. “I ain’t scared,” she said again, and I knew she was about to turn and sprint down the hall, to sit in the back of some class with the other Morries.

“I ain’t scared,” she said one final time, giving me a look that was part triumph and part impossibly sad. “But maybe you oughta be.”

I couldn’t pay attention the rest of the day. I had done something to Milla that had fixed her. I wasn’t sure what or how, and my mind danced around the memory of yesterday, trying to make sense of it.

There had been a second, when my fingers pressed against her damp, stringy hair, when it felt as though something had shifted inside me. As though some hidden piece had broken free and now rode the currents of my