Bubbles floated into the air as Zelda leapt out of the tub. She shook her whole body, covering me in heavy drops of water, then rolled over and wiggled her butt on the rug before springing back up and shaking again.
“Hey!” I said.
The sooner we get this sourdough starter started the better. You get some rest. I’m going to go find some flour to steal.
“How?”
I’m a master thief, remember?
“But you don’t have hands.”
A challenge! Delight was in her eyes as she pranced out of the bathroom.
After opening the bathtub drain, I went out to the living room, where I found Zelda gone and the front door open. She’d opened it somehow, as if to show me she didn’t need hands. The night air had already chilled the room. As I closed the door, I worried about her going out in the cold still wet from her bath, then realized foxes were built to withstand worse.
Feeling a sense of loss at her absence, I busied myself with the dishes but didn’t make much progress before I heard a bang behind me over the running water and turned to see Kayak Brad entering through the door I’d just closed. He wore a tight-fitting T-shirt, no jacket—despite the cold—and a flat-brimmed hat. He carried a staff. Kaliah came in behind him, still wearing that ridiculous Victorian dress.
Before I could even curse at Brad, he was taking long, swift strides toward me, devouring the distance between us. I didn’t care if he had a stick. I would never run from this man. I threw two wet plates at him. He dodged one, and the other bounced off his shoulder before he reached the kitchen. I managed to duck his first swing, but he brought the staff back around low, sweeping my feet from under me. My back landed flush against the linoleum, knocking the wind from my lungs. Brad stood over me, and, like he was sweeping the floor, landed three quick strikes to my face. They didn’t rattle my brain, but they stung badly. I lifted my hands to shield myself and felt blood leaking out of me. Voices blossomed from the pain, Zelda’s the loudest of all: What’s wrong? What happened? I’m coming! Hold on.
“Brah,” Brad said. “You can’t be starin’ at my girl like that. She ain’t yours anymore. I catch you doin’ it again, your gonna get some more kisses from Gidget here. Only next time they won’t be little pecks. She’ll give you the tongue, and trust me, you don’t want the tongue.”
I took my hands away from my face to see Kaliah crouched over me, her skirt touching my stomach. “St-st-stay awah-wuh-wuh-way from me you disguh-uhs-sss-ting pig.”
I’d never heard Kaliah stutter before. As she leaned closer, I felt her hand slip behind my back. Then she spit in my face. Brad laughed, and they both left without another word, without closing the door behind them.
When I sat up, I found a piece of paper on the floor where Kaliah’s hand had been. On it was a note in her handwriting:
“After orientation, go to the room by the ficus plant.”
Chapter 21
THE LEFT SIDE OF my face was completely healed when I woke up in the morning. Though Craig had closed the cuts with his saliva last night, the area was still sore when I went to bed. Now it felt as if nothing had ever happened.
Zelda, who’d gotten back late the night before after failing to fulfill her promises to both find flour and bite Brad’s face off, had slept at my feet and gotten up only after the bacon had been sizzling for a few minutes. She insisted on having pancakes with her bacon and eggs, but with only cornmeal in the house, the pancakes came out flat and rubbery. She enjoyed them anyway, as vessels for maple syrup.
In the middle of her third helping, the landline phone attached to the wall next to the refrigerator rang, and I picked up. A man on the other end skipped introductions and said, “Your orientation is scheduled for 10 AM. Check-in is at the school library. If you are not checked in fifteen minutes before your appointment, an escort will be sent to find you.”
I used the hour before I had to leave to clean the kitchen and take a shower. I found some men’s clothes in one of the dressers. They were a little baggy on me but clean.
Before I left, Zelda described a ficus plant to me one more time, then trotted off to resume her search for flour.
A light snow was falling outside. I didn’t have an umbrella, but the heavy coat I’d grabbed from the front closet was enough to keep me dry and warm.
I held three main assumptions about Kaliah’s note: 1) the room by the ficus had to be somewhere in the school because that was where orientation was, and I couldn’t imagine Kaliah making me search the entire town for a ficus; 2) Kaliah was probably not there, otherwise she would have written “meet me in the room” instead of “go to the room”; 3) some part of Kaliah remained Kaliah. There was still hope to save her.
I was happy Kaliah wasn’t fully gone, wasn’t fully a creation of Brad’s twisted, Victorian-obsessed imagination, but I was also horrified, because that meant Kaliah was conscious of her captivity, of her torture, of the slow death of her identity.
My hatred for Brad and Blanche and all the Friends burned brighter and brighter every day.
I walked three blocks past white houses with new snow gathering in the lawns to the school, where I asked a woman for directions to the library. She looked at me like I’d just exposed myself, then turned and walked away. Being called
