Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Jae
I’m about to step out of the grove when I hear someone call my name. I look back into the trees. The sun beams onto the forest floor through the open windows of the canopy. A bird is perched inside the hollow of an oak tree, and its head jerks sharply as it sings. But there’s no one.
A loud whistle pierces the air. “Jae!”
I step back in, walk past elegant palms and lazy oaks. I jump over a newly planted dwarf bottlebrush and scare off a hummingbird.
The voices get louder until I’m finally face-to-face with a banyan tree. The thick branches shoot out and up, hiding everyone inside like an open palm with curved fingers. It’s like a colony of trees weeping together, roots melting into branches with beginning and end indeterminable.
Mom and I had planned to visit the largest banyan tree in the world one day, all the way in India. It’s about two hundred fifty years old, covers four acres of land, and has three thousand aerial shoots. It looks like a small forest, but it’s a single tree.
I don’t know what happens to our plans now.
William calls down, “Don’t just stand there!”
I walk around the stalks of the tree, which look like a tangle of silly string. A thick rope ladder hangs from one of its branches, and I pull myself up until I see them all, sitting, hanging, lounging around like a primate family.
“What are you guys,” I say, out of breath, “doing here?”
CJ’s climbing up higher, standing on one of the tree arms and reaching for another.
His rectangular glasses are slipping precariously down his sharp nose.
He wipes his hands on his jeans and grabs the branch, then heaves his legs over it and lets his hands go.
He’s upside down, letting his arms swing, and his shirt has fallen over his face, revealing a soft and pale stomach.
William leans back on one of the limbs like it’s a reclining beach chair. “We hang around sometimes after the meeting,” he says. “Climb on up.”
I pause. I’m quite content this far off the ground. The last time I climbed a tree—I mean climbed up really high—Mom had to call the firefighters to carry me down.
I’m about to decline, and then I remember: See? I told you she wouldn’t come. That’s what my friends back home said when I stopped going to parties with them, because I was too busy noticing my growing bump to notice how gorgeous Paul Sutton looked, or how Tamera never says hi to us anymore.
I clench my teeth and stuff my bag into a hollow dip in the tree.
I reach for the branch Swan’s standing on and let out a loud grunt as I pull myself up until I’m standing next to her, face-to-face.
She blinks and her bright red eye shadow flashes.
We’re so close I can smell whatever tart candy she’s sucking on, and her perfume smells like money.
I lean against one of the thick shoots perpendicular to the ground. The ground. I’m probably twelve feet above the ground, and it feels like a hundred.
Just then, my bag tips slowly and falls with a thump into the tree’s hollow below. The contents spill out. Textbook. Phone. Pen. Lip gloss. Notebook. Letter. Photo.
It’s June Baby, lying on her back with her arms outstretched. I lurch, ready to climb down and rescue her, but I realize no one’s paying attention to my bag, and if I climb down to hide the picture, I’ll draw attention to it. So I stay put, trying not to stare down at the smiling dark face.
“Why didn’t you guys call for Derek, too?” I ask.
“CJ’s frightened,” William says.
CJ pulls his shirt away from his face and tucks it into his jeans. “Oh, Derek coming up for a friendly chitchat sounds plausible.” He rolls his eyes. “He’d probably gut me and stuff my internal cavity with leaves and turn me into a punching bag.”
I can’t help laughing. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“No?” CJ asks. “You know what he eats for breakfast? Fresh hearts.”
“I think …” I start slowly, because I don’t know how much I should say about Derek when he’s not here. “I think he’s afraid to let people see his soft side.”
Swan looks up at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Soft side? What do you know about his soft side? How soft are we talking?” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a roll of candy, which she holds out to me.
I shake my head and clamp my mouth shut and she returns the candy to her pocket. I think it’s better to keep the beach dancing and Bollywood movie nights to myself.
“I’m surprised he even wrote a poem today,” William says.
“I almost didn’t write one,” Swan says. “I have a long list of people who’ve screwed me over. It was hard to choose one. But writing about my Korea mom made the most sense.”
“Who’s harder to forgive?” CJ asks. “A person you don’t even remember, or a person who offed themselves?”
Shocked, I stutter, “Wh-who …”
“His brother,” William says quietly.
Swan stares at CJ for a while, then shuffles over to his branch.
She wraps her knees over the tree and lets herself fall over, hanging upside down beside him.
She pokes his pale stomach. “I don’t know, Ceej,” she says.
“It’s hard to forgive someone who says in the cruelest way possible, You’re not enough for me to stick around.
I think whatever they’re dealing with just gets so big it consumes them. They can’t think of anything else.”
“Yeah,” he says.
“We can talk about Gary if you want,” she says.
He shakes his head. “You wanna share, Swan? About your birth mom?”
At the words birth mom, my heart does a thing, a sinking, wrenching thing. Everything I hear now is filtered through the sound of blood pounding in my ears.
Swan shrugs. “I mean. There’s not much to share, right?
I have no idea who she was. She obviously didn’t think I was worth sticking around for.
She could have been a librarian. Or a spy.
Or maybe I got in the way of her trot singing career.
I mean, who knows. But if she could have kept me and she didn’t, that’s just unforgivable. ”
Unforgivable. That’s not true. It can’t be. I made the right choice. It wasn’t the right time for June and me, and I did the right thing by placing her with another family. Didn’t I?
“Who’s that in your picture?” Swan asks, as if she can read my thoughts. She’s looking at me, upside down, waiting for an answer.
My lips move around invisible words and nothing comes out.
She points below at the items scattered on the tree. “The baby. Who is she? She’s cute.”
My surprise suddenly turns into something else. Something bigger, redder. “Why do you care?” I snap.
Swan’s eyes widen. “Wait, are you serious? It’s a simple question.”
My face burns hot and I’m thankful they can’t see it beneath my dark skin. I lower myself slowly from the branch, reaching with my toes for the one below. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me. William’s telling Swan to let it go.
“I’m not trying to be an asshole,” she says, “I just asked a simple question. She never shares anything real about herself.”
CJ’s saying something I can’t hear because the blood is rushing too hard in my ears. I’m remembering all the reasons I don’t share anything about myself. I’m tired of being judged.
Unforgivable.
I finally jump down to pick up the fallen items and tuck the photo into my notebook.
I stuff everything else into my bag. Rung by rung, I lower myself toward the ground, the words repeating in my head.
Unforgivable. She never shares anything real about herself.
Unforgivable. I jump to the forest floor.
I wince at the sharp pain that runs from my feet up my legs.
I wait for the pain to dissipate. And then I run, the words thundering beneath my feet.
Don’t tell them anything.
Don’t tell them.
Don’t tell.
Don’t!