hair was a nightmare of streaked dirt and bushy knots, and her clothes would be more accurately described as ‘rags’. It took all of two seconds for me to realize that she had a few screws loose.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, but she started to yell at me anyway. Her voice was loud and grating, and I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying. Pedestrians were starting to slow down around us.
“What is she saying?” I asked Mi-Yao.
“Something about your mother’s privates,” she translated.
“Oh, come on.”
The woman was getting angrier, and—impossibly—louder. A few of the pedestrians were giggling. Others were telling us in English to walk away. When we tried, the woman jumped into our way and spat at us.
That was when Mi-Yao stepped forward and tapped the woman on her chest. To my abject horror, the woman shrieked and collapsed onto the floor, thrashing and convulsing. The people around us screamed and dispersed.
“What did you do?” I cried over the commotion.
“Nothing she won’t recover from,” Mi-Yao said, grabbing my hand. “Come on.”
She pulled me away from the horrendous scene, pushing our way through the crowd, and into a side street. We ran down a few of these narrow lanes, until the noise of the main street was far behind us. We stopped at an empty parking lot, pausing to pant in the orange glow of a streetlight swarming with insects.
“What…what…” I wheezed and swallowed. “What did you do to her?”
Mi-Yao shook her head.
“Tell me,” I said. “You tell me now.”
She stared at me for a moment. Then: “I electrocuted her.”
I stared back. “What?”
“My species can do that. We can generate a mild current. I gave her a little shock that’s all.”
“Oh,” I said, and paused. “Are you out of your damn mind?” I yelled.
“I was protecting you.”
“I don’t need your protection!” I roared. “I am not your pet project. I don’t need anything from you! I didn’t need that healing stunt you pulled four years ago! I don’t need you trying to improve my mood! I don’t need you shoving all this new culture and experience down my throat. And I especially didn’t need you taking my dad’s cancer away!”
“Peter—“
“We were doing fine, okay? We were doing fine! We were going to beat that cancer together! You had no right to do that! No right! No right!”
“Peter—“ she tried again.
“He left us, Mi-Yao!” I cried, collapsing to my knees. My eyes were beginning to burn; the forewarning of welling tears that I had grown so used to. “When you healed him, he got together with his nurse, and he just left me and Mom.” My voice was broken now. I was sobbing, and I hated myself for it.
Mi-Yao didn’t say anything for a while. Except for my pathetic shuddering, the parking lot was deathly silent.
After about five moments, she said, “Is that why you’ve been dressing so morbidly?”
“Why do you even care?” I murmured.
Silence.
“Because you are my friend, Peter,” she said.
I looked up at her. “Just take me home.”
VII.
Later that night, I was sleeping when a noise woke me. I sat up, right as someone turned my bedroom light on.
“Mom?” I yawned.
She was standing at my door, dressed in a jacket, jeans and boots. Her eyes were puffy, and her smile was forced. I noticed there was a suitcase in her hand. “Pack your things, sweetie,” she croaked. “We’re taking a little vacation.”
I was confused, but I didn’t argue. As she helped me pack some clothes, I caught a whiff of her breath; she had been drinking.
We were on the road in fifteen minutes. When we turned onto the 37, I knew we were headed to the family farmhouse. Mom was driving a little too fast, and I worried we would be eventually stopped by the police. But luck must have been on our side because when I fell asleep and woke up the next morning, we were pulling into the front yard of our farmhouse.
“We’re here,” she cried, with more enthusiasm than I thought the situation warranted.
We took our suitcases inside. I wanted to unpack right away, but Mom thought we should have breakfast first. She wanted to make me pancakes.
“There should be some mix around here,” she said, flying from cupboard to cupboard. “I remember having mix.”
“You remember having mix four years ago?” I asked.
“Oh, sweetie,” she laughed, waving my concern off. “Those things never expire.”
She finally found the box of pancake mix. The powder was tinged green. It had expired.
“Oh well,” she said, laughing a little too loudly. “We can just make it from scratch then. Maybe we have some eggs.”
“I hope not,” I said.
“Oh yeah, you’re right, because then they would be bad too.” She ran across the kitchen to another cupboard. “I think I saw some flour in here. Ha! Look, we do! And it looks fine.”
“We’re going to make pancakes without eggs?”
“We can just pour a lot of syrup on them,” she said.
I made a face.
“Come on Peter,” she said, her smile wavering a tiny bit. “Where’s your spirit of adventure?” She got a bowl and a pan out of a bottom cabinet. Both articles were coated in cobwebs. “We just have to wash them,” she practically sang.
“Mom…”
“Oh, these pipes are so rusty,” she laughed, after trying to turn on the taps.
“Mom…”
“I just need to—oh!” she cried, because the tap had broken suddenly, and brown water was spraying all over the place.
There was about ten seconds of panic between us before I succeeded in fitting the tap handle back onto the pipe and turned it off.
There was silence as Mom and I stood in the kitchen together, dripping with dirty water.
“Mom,” I sighed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She looked at me, her smile wide. “Do I want to talk about what?”
“Dad leaving.”
She looked away, and her smile slowly disappeared. Without looking at me, she selected a bottle of whiskey from the liquor cabinet and climbed back upstairs. I heard her door close and lock.
I sighed and opened the tap again, allowing it to run for a bit. The brown water turned clear in about five minutes. I washed the pans, and packed them away. I found Mom’s car keys on the living room banister, so I drove to the closest supermarket, a couple of miles away. I got milk, eggs, cereal, bread, spaghetti, some canned food, and of course, pancake mix. I put everything on Mom’s credit card.
After some cereal for breakfast, I spent the whole morning reading old novels someone—probably Grandpa from Mom’s side—had stashed in the closet drawers.
Mom came out of her room to make spaghetti for lunch. I didn’t know it yet, but I would be having a lot of spaghetti lunches that month.
I napped away the afternoon. When I woke up again, it was already dark out. I could feel another weight on my bed, so I turned on my bedside lamp.
I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see Mi-Yao sitting at the end of my bed.
“How do you keep finding me?” I asked.
“You remember you fell down a tree that day I fixed your leg?” she said, without smiling. “I placed a tracker in your muscle while you were passed out.”
“Don’t joke about stuff like that,” I said.
She didn’t answer me. She looked around the room. It was quite bare, since I hadn’t come here prepared.
“I prefer your other bedroom,” she said.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, swinging my legs off the bed. “I don’t want us to wake up my mom.”
We went to the barn, climbing up to the upper floor. There was an old gaping hole in the ceiling, and we lay under it, staring up at the stars.
“I’m sorry,” I started off. “I’ve been a real jerk this s
ummer. You’ve been really nice to me, and all I’ve done is throw it in your face.”
“Why did you come here?” Mi-Yao asked.
I looked at her. “Did you not just hear my apology?”
“I’m sitting right here.”
“Well, do you accept or reject it?”
“Peter…I’m sitting right here. If I rejected your apology, I would’ve slapped you and stormed off dramatically, don’t you think?” She looked amused. “Is that a thing your people do? You have to specify whether or not you accept an apology? A tad superfluous, don’t you think?”
“Ugh,” I said. “Never mind. We’re here because my mom snapped.”
“Snapped?”
“After Dad left, Mom kept going to work anyway. I could tell she was only pretending to be fine—obviously.”
“So, this is a getaway,” she said.
“From life, and of a sort; yes.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“Where does that leave our summer?” she finally asked.
“It leaves it on hold, I guess,” I said. “I need to be around for my mom.”
“I understand that,” she said, narrowing her eyes and smiling. “When should I return?”
“In a week maybe.”
“That really throws off our itinerary, Peter,” she said.
I shrugged.
She turned to look back up at the stars. “I am sorry Peter, about your father. I can see why you would blame me.”
I shook my head. “No. That wasn’t fair. I didn’t want to blame him, because he was my hero for so long. But he’s the one who left. He’s the jerk face to blame.”
“Do you hate him?” she asked me.
“Right now, I’m scared how much I hate him.”
“And the woman he left with?”
I nodded. “Her too. Her more, even. You know how many times I met her, talked with her, laughed with her? My mom and I totally trusted her, and she destroyed
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