The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  “It’s out of service,” Birdwine said, disconnecting. “No new number listed.”

  I looked back at my mother’s note. I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning . . .

  The beginning. That could mean she was taking Hana to her parents. But I did not believe it. They were deep into their seventies, if they were even living, and PS, they were racist assholes. She’d given Julian away to keep him from them; she would not inflict those people on her third child. So what was the beginning? Damn Kai and her love affair with mystic, cryptic bullshit. Sometimes poetry was not the answer. I’d go so far as to say it never was.

  “Death is not the end. You will be the end,” Birdwine read over my shoulder. “Did she mean to bring the kid to you?”

  “If so, she botched it,” I said, so fraught I sounded furious. “I tend to notice orphans landing in my lap. Exhibit: Julian.”

  “But she says she’s going to see you?” Birdwine said, pointing.

  We will meet again, and there will be new stories.

  “That doesn’t mean in this life,” I said, and read the final line out loud. “You know how Karma works. Kai believed in reincarnation.”

  “She knew she was dying, though,” Birdwine said. “She must have had a plan for the kid.”

  “I hope so, but . . .” I said. “This is one crazy note. They’d lived in Austin a few months when Kai was diagnosed. Can you find someone you’d trust so much, that fast? Someone to raise your child? What if—”

  There was no good way to finish that question. What if had so many awful answers. I knew what happened to young girls when they were unmoored and left to the mercy of the world. The lucky ones grew tough in foster care. Others landed on their knees inside thickets of azaleas. Either way, their little-girlhood got used up. And those were the ones who lived. Others disappeared right over the edge of the planet, falling past the world turtle into an endless darkness. “Birdwine—”

  “Don’t,” he said, three fingers pressing so hard into his temple that the skin went pale around them. “No need.”

  He said it like he knew I was about to beg him. And I was. I was about to beg, and tell him that he couldn’t drop me off and put finding Kai’s corpse in his to-do stack. He couldn’t send me emails titled “Here is the information.” He couldn’t dive into the nearest bottle, either. It wasn’t about me now, or whatever misguided love he’d thrown at me once, or my questionable ability to keep my pants on. That was all crap. Hana made it crap.

  A wild tide of feeling had risen in me, both new and horribly familiar. My family wasn’t only me. I hadn’t felt this way for almost twenty-five years, not since I sent Kai to prison. I hadn’t even felt this with Julian, a grown-ass man who’d had a second family all his own. It was a sudden doubling of myself that echoed in the very air around me. I knew what it was to be a child, and lost. I was from that tribe.

  I had to make sure that my little sister didn’t permanently join it.

  “This is something I can fix,” Birdwine said with odd intensity. I thought he was talking about us, saying even though our onetime love affair was wreckage, he’d help me make sure my sister was safe. But when I looked at him, I saw his gaze was set into the middle distance, and whatever he couldn’t fix—it didn’t seem to have much to do with me at all.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He blinked and then refocused on the close-up picture of Hana.

  “I mean, I’ll find her.” Those were to me the three sweetest words in all the English language. He looked at me and gave them to me again. “I’ll find her.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Kai’s Ramayana comes in a large orange envelope with a brad at the end. It’s only a few pages long, so she could have stuffed it in a business envelope if she didn’t mind bending the pages. She’s illustrated the margins, though, drawing an endless blooming vine of curls and spirals. This kind of envelope comes from the prison commissary, and it costs extra stamps to mail. Either she traded for it, or it’s courtesy of Rhonda.

  Joya and I sit side by side on my narrow bed to read the Ramayana, backs to the wall. Joya’s small-boned and big-eyed, and with her hair in little braids she looks younger and sweeter than she is. She looks younger and sweeter than me, for sure, though she’s a grade ahead. We sit close, so we can read at the same time. It starts like this:

  Just as the serpent’s wife is torn, from hearth and home and all true love,

  And by the eagle’s claw is borne, away to places still unproved,

  So Sita was torn from Rama. Her heart was low,

  But the chains around her could not break her will.

  She denied the demon that had found her, and was faithful still—

  And though this happened long ago, it’s happening now.

  Joya makes a fart noise with her mouth. “Why are moms so fulla goo?”

  “Dunno, but damn,” I agree.

  We like to say things to each other about how mothers are, because we each still have one. This is what sets us apart and makes the other girls in our cabin hate us, except Candace, who is too weird and broken to get that she’s supposed to. Joya and I are a tribe. We even have a name; Candace calls us Gotmamas.

  “Why?” I asked her, hearing it as one word.

  “Because you two both got mamas, duh,” she said, then flinched, like saying duh might earn her a slap. It probably did, back where she used to live. But I smile at her. I like it. It names all the places I belong: with Kai, and in this tribe of two with Joya.

  The rest of the poem is the same, overblown and rhyme-y, with Sita as a thinly disguised Kai. Dwayne is her unlikely, redneck Rama. Sita-Kai is a veritable cup of love, so full she has a love meniscus. She is steadfast and faithful; Rhonda does not appear in any guise.

  The last page after the poem is a colored pencil sketch.

  “Oh, hey, now. This is good,” Joya says.

  It is, actually. Much better than the poem.

  “Kai draws for a job, sometimes,” I tell Joya. “She sets up an easel in a city park or near some tourist trap, anyplace with good foot traffic. She draws people thinner than they are, or with a smaller nose, and she dresses them like princesses or astronauts. She gets twenty bucks a pop.”

  In the picture, Sita kneels in the top right of the page, smiling and serene. Her lap is full of lotus blossoms, cradled sweetly to her belly. Kai is good at faces in particular, and in case the poem wasn’t clear enough, she’s given her own face to Sita. Rama has the sky-blue skin that shows his divine nature, but his features match Dwayne’s. Kai has even given this god-prince of ancient India a mop of Dwayne-ish, honey-colored curls.

  “Can I come back in yet?” Candace pleads, from the other side of the door.

  Joya kicked her out when the mail came, and she skulked off to bathe. Technically this room is half hers, but less technically, she’s scared of Joya. Candace is currently the only white girl in our cabin, and she is very, very white. She comes from way out in the meth-lands of west Georgia, and her skin is milky and her hair is butter-colored, as flossy as cotton candy. Where she’s from, black and white don’t mix, so it’s weird that she’s glued herself to me. Inside me, black and white have mixed all the way, with a big scoop of Asian and who the hell knows what all else thrown in.

  “Fuck off, Candace,” Joya hollers back, and at the same time I say, “Get away from the door.”

  The demon Ravana is drawn crosswise, with a low worm’s body that blocks Sita in the corner. Each of his ten heads is perched on a long neck that stretches straight down to his body, forming bars. In this production, the part of the demon Ravana is being played by the Georgia prison system.

  Rama has most of the page. He is moving purposefully toward Ravana, scimitar drawn, ready to attack the demon. Here the margin vines are covered mostly in blooms, but I am looking closely. I see a clot of pointy leaves hidden near Rama in all the flowers, and I am Kai’s child; I recognize the shape.

  “Pot leaves,” I say t
o Joya, pointing.

  I think it’s funny, but her eyes narrow. She takes the poem and starts flipping back through it.

  “Do you think she’s sending him a message? About the drug charges, or . . .”

  “Naw. It’s just a joke.”

  Joya says, “I hope so, because if she’s telling him to mess with the drug people, they will kill him. They will kill his whole ass, all the way.”

  I shake my head at her. Dwayne’s friends sell mustard sandwiches and acid in the parking lots of concert halls. They shoplift and rob empty houses, sure—they’re assholes with peace sign tattoos. But they would kill people only by accident, driving drunk or stoned.

  “Crack people aren’t the same as pot people,” I tell her. Joya’s mom was on the pipe before she went to rehab.

  Joya snorts. “No such thing as Drug-Lord Lite.”

  “There’s no secret message about drugs,” I say, reading back through the lines. I don’t want to send the poem, but not because I’m scared of hippies. It’s all the goo—was Kai really this big into Dwayne? He was nice and all, but the truth was, we were camping in a bus. She’d fallen for him at least partway because the nights were getting long and colder.

  Joya mistakes my silence for waffling. “You still can’t mail this. If they catch Kai using you to get to Dwayne? Shit, they won’t blame you. It’ll all be on your mom. She’ll get TPR’ed.”

  This is shorthand for termination of parental rights. Joya’s voice trembles just saying the letters.

  “Now can I come in?” Candace calls through the door, louder and more plaintive.

  “Yeah, ho, if you wanna get beat down,” Joya says. “Git your ass back in the toilet.”

  She says it really black, poking at me with her elbow. I have to smother a laugh. She talks like this with some of the other black kids, but sometimes she likes to turn it on for Candace; it makes Candace just about wet her pants.

  There is silence from the other side of the door.

  “She won’t move away,” I whisper. I mime Candace, making my lips into a thin line, pressing my ear to an invisible door.

  “You want me to move her? I’ll pop her head right off her body like a shrimp head,” Joya says.

  It’s not an idle threat. The other two girls in our cabin tried to bully Joya when she first arrived. Shar and Karice came at Joya in the common room, smiling mean, ready to teach her the pecking order. They expected her to shrink and cry and take a quiet slap or two. She was outnumbered, and she’s so small and cute. Mistake. Joya leaped right at Shar and grabbed her hoops. She jerked them through her ears, tearing the lobes clean through. When Shar fell down screaming, Joya hurled her tiny body on Karice and bit her on the face, then punched the bite until Karice went fetal. Joya stood up, not a scratch on her, just as Mrs. Mack came running in. Joya told Mrs. Mack that Shar and Karice had been fighting with each other, all the while staring down the bleeding girls, daring them to contradict her. No one did.

  “Candace isn’t worth getting in trouble over,” I tell her, then call, “Just a minute.”

  I get up and pull my footlocker out from the under the bed. It’s the only thing I own that locks—not that the lock keeps Candace out. I open it and start unpacking pictures, my peacock feather earrings, a braided piece of mane I clipped from Hervé’s big bay gelding. I want the Ramayana lying flat on the bottom, so it won’t get wrinkled.

  “Y’all! I’m standing out here in a towel!” Candace whines.

  I pack everything back carefully, and then I let her in. For the next few nights, I feel that poem’s presence every time I try to sleep. It’s like I’ve let something alive and dangerous move in under my bed. I toss and dream. My food tastes flat and all the textures are slightly off. I should burn it, but I don’t. Kai asked me to mail it, but I don’t do that, either. The tremble in badass Joya’s voice when she said TPR’ed stops me.

  The day before my next court-appointed phone time with my mother, I can’t sleep at all. There’s a streetlight right outside the window, and its brightness feels like a searchlight. I could tell Kai that her poem never came. I could tell her a dog got it. I could somehow blame Candace. On the phone, I could sell it, but what happens when she comes to get me? Like most excellent liars, Kai has a nose for truth. Lying to her face is the hardest kind of lying.

  I hear Candace’s bed creak, as if thinking her name was enough to summon her. My bed is too full of churning worry to have room for Candace. I scootch to the edge, making my body into a wall against her as she creeps silently across.

  Lying won’t actually fix the problem. If I tell Kai it’s lost or ruined, she can rewrite it and resend it.

  Candace hovers, and I pull my blanket up over my head.

  “Can I get in?” Candace whispers, as if my blanket isn’t answer enough.

  “Go die, Candace,” I say, mean as I can, but she’s impervious. Her spongy body can absorb superhuman amounts of mean.

  “I have lickem sticks,” she wheedles.

  Lickem sticks is Redneck for Fun Dip, my favorite candy. I unturtle from my blanket to see if she really has some. She holds up the little packets. Lime is missing, but she has cherry and grape.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Jeremy.” Jeremy is a pimply high schooler who lives in one of the boy cabins. He has a constant pants tent and dead eyes.

  “Ugh, it probably has perv juice on it,” I say. He’d never give her candy, not unless she did something for him. Or to him. That makes me want to pinch Candace as hard as I can, but I settle for telling her, “You’re so gross.”

  Candace shoves her flossy hair behind her ears, truculent, and changes the subject. “I think your mom’s poem is real good. It’s real romantic.”

  That has me sitting up, fast, and I do pinch her. “Stay out of my stuff!” She takes the pinch and waits for the next one. She’ll take that one, too, and keep on waiting, resigned to it before it even happens. “How’d you get my combination?”

  She ignores the question. “I know how you can send that poem to Dwayne and not get your mom in trouble.”

  “And stop eavesdropping,” I say. I blow air out my nose, mad. There are no bounds to Candace’s wormy snooping. But now she has two things I want. I sit up and scoot over to make room for her. “Gimme cherry.”

  We prop up on our thin pillows, licking the bland white paddles and dipping them into the packets of colored sugar. I try to keep an inch between us. Candace isn’t loyal. She talks shit about me with the white girls from the high school cabins. But at night, she’s like the love vine in Kai’s margins. She twines and weaves and clings until I’m flat strangled. I have to keep peeling her off, or she’ll grow right up my nose.

  She regards me over her candy paddle, her mouth corners turned up to a sly and waiting angle. Her mouth is full of sugar and ideas.

  “How?” I say at last.

  “I’ll whisper it,” Candace says. She knows how to milk a quid pro quo.

  My mouth sets, but I hold myself still as she closes that last inch between us, pressing in close. I can smell faux grape on her breath.

  “Write him a long, long boring letter, like about what you saw on TV, and talk on a lot about how you’re working on a poem for a school project. Then you put the poem in, but you recopy it.”

  “Mmm,” I say, noncommittal, leaning away.

  She leans with me, propping her head on my shoulder so that her pointy chin digs at me. “If it’s in your writing, and if you burn up the original, they can’t trace it to your mom at all.”

  Dammit, it’s a good idea. Candace is such a mouth breather, I forget how crafty she can be. I owe her now, so I don’t kick her back to her bed when the candy is gone. I turn my back and she presses herself against it. She is out cold in two minutes, limp and still as a corpse.

  She never sleeps like this in her bed. She cries and kicks her feet, saying, No no no, and I don’t like it. Listening to her moan and beg makes me feel queasy in my stomach. I wonder if
I cry out in my sleep, as pitiful as Candace. I have my own bad nights, when I dream that 911 call.

  What is your emergency, the dream-operator asks, and I see cop cars already zooming past the Dandy Mart, hundreds of them, zigging fast like a long line of black roaches. I don’t have one! I don’t have one! I yell, already too late. I see red light, like firelight, rising from behind the kudzu. I hear my mother screaming, and that always wakes me up. I could never, even in my dreams, un-tell the story that I told that operator.

  Now Candace is so hard asleep that her head is sweating like a baby’s. I can feel it dampening my T-shirt. I stay awake much longer, crammed against the wall in a bed that is gritty with spilled sugar.

  By morning, I have decided. I go to Mrs. Mack, and I squeeze out some tears. I am Kai’s child, and I know to start with true parts: “He always called me Bossy Pony, and he helped me with my math.” The true parts are a foundation that let the lie stand tall and strong: “I know he’s not really my dad, but he’s the only daddy I’ve ever known.” And then on top of this structure, I set the thing I’m angling for: “If only I could write him. I want to know that he’s okay.”

  Mrs. Mack gets his address for me, even gives me stamps. It’s easy.

  I follow Candace’s plan exactly, mailing Dwayne a long, dull letter that includes the poem, masquerading as a school project. I can’t send the drawing. I lack the talent to reproduce it, and the original is way too traceable to Kai. I won’t risk a TPR. Dwayne will know the poem is from her, anyway. She tells stories from the Ramayana all the time, and the poem reads like hers.

  Destroying both the originals would be safest, but my mother wrote the poem, and she drew her own familiar, absent face on Sita. I hide them in the very bottom of my footlocker and change the combination on the lock. Again. Not that it keeps Candace out. It’s a mystery, how she keeps breaking in.