Prologue #2
He looked at me. His eyes were doing the thing they did, going glassy and flat and far away, which is a thing that a seven-year-old should not have a technique for.
"You're going to go," I said.
"You said—"
"I know what I said. Listen. You're going to go with them, because if you don't go with them they'll pick you up, and I don't want the last thing you remember about this house to be getting picked up. That's a bad memory. It sticks."
"I'll bite."
"Don't bite. Biting gets written down." I put my hands on his arms. Three shirts and I could still feel the bones. "Here's the thing I need you to hold onto. Are you holding on?"
"Yes."
"Say it back after."
"Okay."
"If one of us gets taken somewhere," I said, "the other one comes."
He blinked. "Comes."
"Comes. Not calls. Calling is nothing. Calling is a person on the other side of a wall saying they wish they were here.
Anybody can call. Anybody with a quarter can call.
" I shook him a little, once, the way you shake a thing to seat it.
"Coming is different. Coming means the wall's got a hole in it. So say it."
"If one of us gets taken somewhere the other one comes."
"Not calls."
"Not calls. Comes."
"Good."
"How long do you come for?"
And I remember I didn't have to think about it, which is the part I've never gotten over. Eleven years old. Not one second of hesitation. If I'd hesitated even a little, everything after would have been a different shape.
"Until," I said.
"Until what?"
"Just until."
The clipboard one said we needed to wrap it up.
I asked her for a pen. She said we had to go. I said I needed a pen, and I said it in a voice I didn't know I had yet, a flat one, and she looked at me for a second and then she took a pen out of the clipboard clip and handed it over like she was paying a toll.
Blue ballpoint. Cheap. It skipped.
I pushed Kai's sleeve up over his elbow and I wrote it on the inside of his forearm where the skin's thin and it stings a little, because I wanted it to sting.
IF ONE OF US GETS TAKEN THE OTHER ONE COMES
It took up the whole arm. The S on COMES ran off onto the crook of his elbow and I had to loop it back around.
"It's going to wash off," Kai said.
"Then write it again."
"With what?"
"Ask for a pen."
"You said don't ask for things."
"Ask for a pen," I said. "That's the one thing. You can always ask for a pen. Nobody in the world has ever gotten in trouble for asking for a pen."
He looked at his arm for a while. Then he pulled his sleeve down over it very carefully, the way you'd close a door on a sleeping animal.
"It's a rule now," he said.
"It's the rule."
"There's other rules."
"Not like this one."
At the door he turned around and did a thing that I have spent seventeen years not thinking about at four in the morning, which is that he waved.
Not to me. To the house. Little kid wave, all fingers, no wrist. He said bye house.
He was being polite to a building that had been fifty-two degrees for two months.
The Taurus had the bad idle, so I heard it for a long time after I couldn't see it.
Deena found me at the window at maybe six.
"You'll wear the carpet out."
"There's no carpet by the window."
"Don't be smart."
I wasn't being smart. There genuinely wasn't. There was a strip of subfloor where the carpet stopped short of the wall, and I was standing on it in my socks and it was the coldest thing in the house, and I stood on it on purpose, and if you want to understand everything about how I've handled my life since, that's it.
That's the whole diagram. Girl standing on the cold part on purpose so she doesn't forget.
"He'll be fine," she said. "They're a nice family. Two-story."
"What's the address."
"I'm not giving you the address."
"Then what's the town."
"Wren."
"What's the town," I said.
She took a long drag and looked at me with what I think, in her own private accounting, she believed was pity.
"You're going to make this hard on yourself for a long time," she said. "I've seen it. The ones who let go do better."
"Okay."
"You could just let go."
"Okay," I said again, and kept looking out the window, and she went away, and I stood on the cold part until my feet stopped reporting in.
He was four towns over. It took me nine days to find that out and eleven days to get there, and I got there on a bicycle with a bent rim that I did not, strictly speaking, own, and when I rode up the driveway he was in the front yard in a coat that actually fit him, which nearly took my legs out from under me.
He saw me and he didn't run over. He just pushed his sleeve up.
The pen was fresh. He'd redone it. The letters were terrible, seven-year-old letters, the E's had four bars, and one whole word was spelled CUMS and I never told him and I never will.
"I asked for a pen," he said.
"I see that."
"Nobody got mad."
"I told you."
"You came."
"That's the rule."
"How long do you come for?"
"Until," I said.
And he nodded like that was a real answer, like until was a unit of time you could look up, like it was Tuesday or an hour, and then he asked if I wanted to see the backyard because there was a dog situation, and I said yes, and I walked my stolen bicycle around the side of a stranger's house on the strength of a word I'd made up because I was eleven and I couldn't think of a better one.
Seventeen years later he'd be twenty-four and I'd be twenty-eight and I'd have a Class A licence, ninety thousand miles a year, a truck with a name, and the same word.
Nobody warns you that the promises you make at eleven are the only ones that ever hold.
The ones you make later have lawyers in them.
The ones you make at eleven are just a girl with a borrowed pen deciding what she is, in a fifty-two-degree living room, in the eleven minutes before the car with the bad idle takes your brother away.
I've kept a pen in every vehicle I've ever driven.
Blue ballpoint. Cheap. It skips.