He gave me a frown, which also seemed weird, because Bodhi wasn’t much of a frowner. It seemed like maybe I was witnessing the one time since I’d known him that everything didn’t seem funny to him.
“Why did you run away from that lady’s house?” he asked me. “And who took over our crate while you were back in Utah?”
I know it sounds weird to say, but the one obvious explanation for how he could know all that just really didn’t occur to me at first, and I don’t even know why not. It just didn’t click into my brain. All I could think—or I guess really it was more like a feeling—was that he somehow had powers he shouldn’t have, and had never had before. Maybe it was because it seemed like he’d changed so much.
“How do you know all that?” I asked him, and I think my eyes were wide. They felt really wide.
“That lady came around looking for you. Well, not looking for you here at the jail. She knew you weren’t here. But she was looking for you and she came to ask me if I knew anything about where you’d gone. And this was a while ago now. Like, almost two weeks, I think. So all this time I’ve been worried about you.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Then I didn’t say more because I couldn’t think of what else to say.
“I can’t think of her name, though. But you know who I mean.”
“Brooke.”
“Right. Brooke. Why did you run away from her? I think she really cares about you.”
I snorted, and it came out through my nose, and it felt weird. I wanted to be really sure he knew I didn’t believe what he’d just said, but somewhere deep down I really wanted to believe it, but I was trying to blow that wanting out of me, too, because I was tired of believing good things and then getting let down.
“She doesn’t care about me,” I said. “She just doesn’t want to have to feel guilty.”
“She wants to help get you into a foster home or something.”
“Right, exactly. She wants to turn me back over to my social worker so they can put me in that awful home, or if I’m super lucky maybe another home, and then if it’s someplace terrible again she won’t have to worry or feel bad about it, because she will have washed her hands of me by then.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She seemed really worried. Maybe you should let her help.”
We both just sat there for a minute, and I was trying to get used to the fact that these were all some pretty un-Bodhi-like things to say. In the old days he would have said Brooke was the establishment, and my social worker was the establishment, and we could get by just fine on our own without all their crap. He would’ve said, “Never go to people like that when they say they want to help you, because they have no idea what real help even looks like, and they’ll only find a way to make it worse.”
“You want me to go into a foster home?” I asked him.
I wanted to ask a lot more, like did they have him on some kind of drug, or was he getting some on his own in there, or was there some other reason why it seemed like he’d changed? But I didn’t want to seem like I was criticizing him, so I just asked the one thing about the foster homes.
I was still thinking he’d be out pretty soon and then we’d go back to making our own way, just like we always had. It wasn’t what you might call great, what we had, but we managed, and in some ways it was better than what I’d had since. At least with him nobody ever locked me into a closet or anything, and nobody ever got my hopes way up and then dropped me all the way down to rock bottom again. Every day was pretty much what I expected it would be, and there’s something to be said for that.
“Might be worth a try,” he said.
“But what about us? You’ll be out soon, and—”
He didn’t even let me finish the sentence. He jumped right in and said, “I’m going to Kentucky when I get out.”
“Oh. Okay. Can I go to Kentucky, too?”
I could tell by the look on his face that the answer was no, but I didn’t know why yet. But that was when the buzzing-and-tingling thing started, all through the bones and muscles in my arms and legs and then into my belly. I felt like I was falling down a well, and I mean I actually felt the falling in my body even though I was sitting on a chair.
I always figured at least I had Bodhi.
“Here’s the thing about that,” he said, and then he made me wait a really long time to hear what the thing about that was. Or it seemed like a long time, anyway. Then he raised his hands and spread them wide and did this sort of gesture with them, like he had just stepped onto a Broadway stage and was about to start singing a show tune. “I have a boyfriend!” he said, and his voice was energetic and came up to a high note at the end, and just in that second he seemed Bodhi-like again. “Isn’t that just the best thing? For me, I mean. I realize it’s not so great for you, but I hope you’ll still be happy for me. I mean, we both knew this would happen sooner or later, right? One of us was bound to meet someone.”
It had never in a million years occurred to me to think like that. Not that I thought neither one of us would ever meet anybody as
