“It’s complicated,” Dr. Fremont said, “but it’s true.”
She said that when bad things happened to people, it could make their brains change for the worse. “Especially if the bad things happen when you’re young,” she said. “Or helpless, or trapped, or if the bad things go on for a long time. Your brain gets more sensitive. Jumpier. Your heart beats faster. You get upset or angry or sad more easily.”
She handed me a list of ten ways bad things could happen to a kid. Like, mom in prison. Mom on meth. Not knowing who or what or where your father was. People putting their hand down your pants. All the stuff that had happened to Suki and me. Whew. I mean, we’d never starved. Not that I remembered. Though who knew, back in the day. There’s so much I don’t remember well. Probably there were days Mama forgot to feed us.
Dr. Fremont nodded when I said so. She said, “Over two-thirds of all children have had at least one of these bad things happen to them.”
I had to think about that for a moment. Then I said, “You mean one-third of all kids haven’t had any? None?”
Dr. Fremont looked startled, but she nodded.
“Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine that. I tried to imagine any one of the kids I knew—me, Suki, Teena, Nevaeh, Luisa—any of the kids at my school growing up in some kind of perfect place, without a divorce or being hungry or being hit or any single big thing going wrong. I tried to imagine what it would be like. A perfect life.
Nope. Couldn’t do it. Not the kids I knew.
“I’ve got, like, all ten,” I said. “So I’m pretty much screwed?”
Dr. Fremont leaned forward. She smiled. “No,” she said. “This is the important part, Della. No one is ever screwed. Not you. Not Suki. Not anyone.
“Bad things happening to you caused bad changes to your brain,” Dr. Fremont said. “But brains can change back. They heal. Your brain can get better. You can do things to help.”
“Really?”
“That’s what we’re working on here,” she said. “Changing your brain. Calming it down.”
I’d be calmer if I knew Clifton was staying in prison until I was grown. I thought Suki would be too. I said so.
Dr. Fremont said, “Some things are not entirely within your control.”
Sure. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t control them a little.
Be in charge of my own life. That sounded good.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Wednesday at the Y was a basketball day. Nevaeh and I had decided to take turns, basketball one day, swimming the next. Sometimes Luisa played basketball with us too, even though she liked swimming better.
Trevor’d been leaving me alone since I punched him, but halfway through our session, when we’d moved on from drills to playing half-court scrimmages, he came up to me, reached out one finger, poked me, and said, “Touch.”
I stopped dead on the court. “Trevor,” I said loudly, “you do not have permission to touch me. Ever.”
He laughed.
Coach was on the other half-court, demonstrating boxing out for the three hundredth time.
“Coach,” I yelled, “Trevor touched me without my permission.”
Coach blew his whistle to restart the other scrimmage and walked to my half-court. “Physical contact is part of playing basketball,” he said. “Every touch is not necessarily a foul.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” I said. “He poked me with his finger.”
Coach looked at Trevor.
“Joke,” Trevor said.
“It wasn’t funny,” I said. “I’d told him before not to touch me.”
Coach blew his whistle. “Trevor, three laps,” he said. Then he stood watching while Trevor ran laps and the rest of us started playing again. And yeah, I knew what Coach meant. When this kid named Demetrious boxed out correctly, under the basket, he stuck his whole backside right against my legs and shoved me out of the box, and that was just basketball, that was how you played.
Trevor poking me, much less pinching me, that wasn’t a game.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Next day, when Francine picked me up at the Y, she said there was a surprise waiting for me at home. She was grinning big, and I knew what I hoped it was, and I was right.
Suki. Home.
She was sitting on the front step. When the car pulled in, she got to her feet, and she was smiling like the old Suki, bright as the sun. I threw open the door and leaped into her arms.
38
I had a million questions for Suki. She had almost a million answers.
Yes, she would be seeing her therapist still. Three times a week, to start.
Yes, she was taking her medicine.
Yes, it was helping. She liked it.
Yes, she would be going back to school, starting Monday. The school had a plan for getting her caught up.
Yes, she was going to keep working at Food City. She’d call the office in the morning.
Yes, she’d try to get the Friday night shifts again. And I could go with her and help Maybelline.
I asked, “Do you absolutely swear you’ll never try anything like that again?”
I waited for her to say yes, but she didn’t. Her smile faltered. She said, “I absolutely swear I will always do my best.”
“Snow,” I said. “That’s not good enough, Suki.”
Her eyes looked panicky again. She said, “It’s all I’ve got.”
“No! I need you to promise!”
“Yo,” Francine said to me. “Knock it off. She can’t do better than her best.”
I swallowed hard. I said, “I really need you to promise, Suki.”
Suki thought a moment. “I promise I’ll ask for help if things get bad. Okay? I can promise that.”
It wasn’t enough.
* * *
■ ■ ■
I waited until we were both in bed that night, snug in the top bunk, to ask my last question. “Suki,” I said, my voice breaking a little, “did you let Clifton hurt you so he wouldn’t hurt me?”
She grabbed my face tight between her hands. “No,” she said, in a voice so fierce it was almost a growl. “No. I didn’t. It was never—I never had any kind of a choice, not that I knew of. He didn’t mess with you, that’s all.” She smoothed my hair. She kissed me. “I’m so glad he didn’t. Don’t you dare feel guilty.”
“How old were you?” I asked. “The first time—”
She knew what I meant. “Eight? Nine? Right after we moved in with him.”
I said, “When we still had Mama.”
Suki nodded.
I wanted to wail right then. I wanted to howl and scream. Mama had been there. She should have kept Suki safe. She should have protected both of us.
That right there is another of the really hard things.
Suki shrugged. “I’m pretty angry about it. But I don’t know whether to be most angry at Mama or the meth or what.”
I said, “Clifton.”
She said, “Oh, absolutely. I mean besides him.”
I said, “We’d be safer if he stayed a long time in prison.”
Suki didn’t say anything.
I said, “The whole world would be safer if he did.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“You know it,” I said.
She said, “Quit pushing me, Della. I’m doing the best I can.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
The next afternoon I went to the Y like always. When Francine and I got home, Suki was sprawled across the top bunk, writing in a notebook she’d brought home from the hospital. It was big and thick, with hard cardboard covers she’d decorated all over with markers. She had her own pack of markers, fancy new ones, and a dark black pen.
“This is my private journal,” she said, when I came in. She wa
s writing with the purple marker, scribbling words fast all down one page. Had about half the notebook full of words. “I don’t want you reading it, okay? It’s just mine. I already told Francine.”
Suki used to write in spiral-bound notebooks Clifton bought at the grocery store. Every time she filled a page she ripped it out, wadded it up, and threw it away. I never read anything she wrote.
“Whatever,” I said. You’d think I’d be all overjoyed to have her home. I mean, I was, I just didn’t feel overjoyed.
“We could get you a notebook,” Suki said.
I shook my head. Writing—that wasn’t my thing.
“Can I use your laptop?” I said. “I want to look up more about wolves.”
Suki shut her journal and pushed it under her pillow. “We’ll look them up together,” she said, and we did.
* * *
■ ■ ■
It was a Friday, but Francine wasn’t going out. She said there were no good bands in town, and she was only up for karaoke about once a year. Instead her three old-lady friends were coming to the house. “I’ve invited them for dinner,” she said. “Spaghetti and garlic bread. Suki, make a salad for us, will you? Anybody you girls want to have over?”
Suki and I looked at each other. I wondered if it was too late to call Nevaeh.
Suki said, “Teena,” and I grinned.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Suki called her, and I could hear her laughing on the phone. “I’d love to,” she said, “but I don’t know how I’d get there. Mom’s got the car.”
That was easy. Suki borrowed Francine’s car, and the two of us went to pick up Teena.
It was already dark. We drove down the long road by the railroad tracks, across the overpass, along the road toward my old school.
Past the group home.
Suki exhaled hard when she saw it. I said, “We’re never going there.”
“You wouldn’t have anyway,” she said. “You’re too young.”
“You aren’t there, Suki. You aren’t going there. We’re with Francine.”
Past blocks of houses, a Baptist church, the weird vacant building with the NO TRESPASSING signs. Left-hand turn up the hill to the street where we used to live. Teena’s house. Right next to Clifton’s.
Clifton’s house looked empty. Broken. No lights in the windows. We always kept lights on during the week—at least the kitchen light. Always. Now the dirty windows were dark and blank. The grass was raggedy and full of dead leaves. Clifton’s truck wasn’t parked in the drive. I wondered where it was.
Suki leaned her head against mine. We took a long slow breath together. Then someone flung open the car door, laughing. Teena jumped into the back seat. Suki peeled out of the driveway, tires squealing, and then we were all three laughing, and together like we used to be, and on our way home.
39
“The best place in the United States to see wild wolves,” I said to Dr. Fremont, “is in Yellowstone National Park. That’s in Wyoming, not Montana. There are actually more wolves in Montana, but they’re harder to find. The ones at Yellowstone are protected, so they’re not as afraid of people, and if you go to the right places early in the day you can see them.”
I showed her some of the stuff Suki had helped me print out from the internet. A map of Yellowstone National Park. How it cost $700 per person to fly from East Tennessee to Yellowstone, but if you wanted to drive it would be 1,967 miles each way. “That’d take, like, three days,” I said. “So it would cost a lot too. The hotel rooms at Yellowstone are super expensive but you can camp for cheap, but then you’d need a tent and stuff.” I sighed. “It’s all super expensive.” Way more than a trip to the beach.
“The first step is to know what you want,” Dr. Fremont said. “The second step is to figure out ways to get there.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
I knew what I wanted, but not how to get there. That night, when Suki and I were doing the dishes after dinner, I told her I thought Yellowstone would be a safe place for us.
“Jeez, they’ve got, like, exploding hot springs in Yellowstone,” she said. “Grizzly bears. Doesn’t sound safe to me.”
“Wolves,” I said. “Like us.” I paused. “Can’t you try to testify?”
Suki shook her head. “You want two things at once,” she said. “You want me to feel better enough that I can promise I’ll never hurt myself again, and you want me to do something that’s going to make me feel worse.”
“It’ll make you feel better, not worse,” I said.
“If it goes well, maybe. Not if it doesn’t.”
I thought it would. I thought I felt better, standing up for myself at school. I’d rather get in trouble for punching Trevor than shrink away from him like Nevaeh’d done.
I’d rather fight. I said to Suki, “You’re a fighter too.”
Francine pulled me to one side. “I told you—knock it off. It’s her choice.”
I said, “She’ll feel better if he stays in prison longer.”
“Maybe. But it’d be the hardest thing she’d ever have to do, Della. Harder than taking care of you when she was eight years old. Your sister just got out of the hospital. I don’t know how much she can take.”
“She’s a wolf,” I said.
Francine said, “You’re carrying this wolf thing a little far. She’s a wolf to you. She may not feel like one herself. Leave her be.”
40
Next day, Suki came home with a tattoo.
It was on the same wrist she cut, right beside her scar. It was a semicolon, a piece of punctuation that looks like this: ;
“You use semicolons when you don’t want to use a period,” Suki said. Her eyes were sparkling. “This is to remind myself. My sentence—my story—it’s going to keep going on.”
Okay, that was cool.
“You wanted me to do more,” she said. “To make promises. Here it is. The best promise I can make right now. Anytime I look at my wrist, I won’t just see what I almost did. I’ll see what I’m going to do—keep going.”
I looked at my own smooth wrist, the veins running either side of the tendons in the center. The artery Suki cut ran deeper. It connected directly to Suki’s heart. I said, “I want one too.”
She frowned. “Um, no. You’re ten. Also you didn’t— This is a special sort of symbol, Della. You can’t wear it. People will think something about you that isn’t true.”
“But it is true,” I said. “My story is still going on.”
“Yep,” Suki said. “Not the same.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
Francine didn’t care at all that Suki’d gotten a tattoo, without permission, even though she’s underage. “Think I asked permission for any of my tats?” she said. “It’s your skin, sugar, do what you want.”
I said, “Why are you so relaxed about everything?” She was taking up a whole bunch of her time hauling us to our appointments and things, not to mention gas money, not to mention that going to the Y cost money, and she kept acting like it was all no big deal. “Why are you so helpful?”
Francine said, “I wished someone had helped me when I was Suki’s age. Or yours.” She blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Wish I’d had someone on my side.”
Oh.
Snow, it was such a hard world.
“You said you only keep foster kids for the money,” I reminded her.
She shrugged. “I couldn’t do it if they didn’t pay me. Couldn’t afford to. But I didn’t say ‘only,’ did I?”
I thought she did. Maybe I was wrong.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Later that week, our social worker came back. She talked about Suki’s return to school and about our therapy appointments, and then she brought up the Permanency Plan.
Suki surprised me. “I was th
inking something in the medical field,” she said.
“You mean a doctor?” I said.
“No,” she said. “They had all sorts of people doing different jobs at the hospital. At both hospitals. Drawing blood and running tests. Taking X-rays. Stuff like that.”
The social worker nodded excitedly. “Medical technicians,” she said. “That’d be a great goal. The high school has some health sciences class that would get you started.”
“I know,” Suki said. “My guidance counselor said I could take one next semester.”
The social worker wrote a few things down. “You’d need to graduate high school and then take one or two more years of classes. So you might stay—”
Suki held up her hand. “I don’t know. I’m not saying that yet.” She sighed. “It’s not easy, missing three weeks of school and coming back with this scar on my wrist.”
I said, “And a semicolon.”
She smiled at me. “Which is part of why I got the semicolon, right? But”—Suki looked at the social worker—“I’m not saying anything yet. Just maybe.”
That maybe was more than we ever had before.
“How about you, Della?”
“I want to go to Yellowstone National Park.”
The social worker blinked. “When?”
“Soon as I can.” I pointed to her notebook. “Write it down. Yellowstone. National. Park.”
“But that’s in Wyoming—”
Which was farther away than Kansas. “Yes.”
* * *
■ ■ ■
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