Chapter Twenty-Five
AS AUTUMN WINDS to a close, I help Silas plant garlic bulbs in the cool soil.
Carlos comes home from school one day, giddy with news.
One of his classmates has a barn cat with new kittens, who is supposed to be a very good mouser.
After a few rounds of cajoling, everyone agrees he can have one of the kittens, so long as he can keep it from bothering Wendell’s allergies.
Each night, the sun sets earlier, so we move our meals inside.
James’s guitar echoes off the walls of the kitchen every evening.
One of those nights, I finally meet Silas’s boyfriend.
Roger has bushy hair and round-framed glasses that immediately make me like him.
He hugs me on sight, because we’re the two “in-laws,” which is hilarious, since our situations aren’t comparable: Silas and Roger aren’t temporary.
There’s an easy, time-won affection between them that I learn goes back five years, when Roger tried working as a medic for the border patrol and got assigned to their team.
“It was a total bust,” he says with a laugh. “I was a nervous mess. Don’t know how these guys did it.”
“But something good came of it, right?” I say, serving up carrots caramelized in honey. Carlos and I have been hard at work again.
“Meh. I guess.”
Silas rolls his eyes.
On the other end of the spectrum, James scuttles by with a girl I’ve never met before.
I’ve seen him tow three girls home since arriving: a leggy brunette named Jen; a giggly blonde who I never got the name of—and now this girl, who has a black bob.
She introduces herself as Alison, but declines sitting down to dinner.
James drags her away once he’s snagged cheese and bread from the kitchen.
The next person to bang through the door is April, hair sticking to her face thanks to the rain. When she spots the large crowd gathered around the table, she stops, scanning the room like a rabbit caught in crosshairs.
“Hey, you’re home late,” I say. Tonight was one of her days staying after class for tutoring, but she’s usually home before supper. I was trying to decide how worried I should be and if we needed to establish a curfew for her.
“I know.” She marches around the table, not looking at me, but making a beeline for Sid, who looks up when she taps him on the shoulder. “Can I talk to you?”
He stares at her, slightly bewildered. “Sure?”
“I mean in private. Can we talk upstairs?”
His eyes slide to me. I give him a nod, and he rises from his chair. As they go outside, every head at the table follows them.
“Are they close?” Roger voices the question on everyone’s mind.
“Umm… sort of?” I slide fried ham onto the table to go with the glazed carrots. “They’re both pretty independent. I wouldn’t say their paths cross a lot.”
“And is school going well for her?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Except, do I? April talks about school a lot, but it’s all circumscribed into her study regime.
I took that to be a good sign, but school is more than tests and assignments.
Most of what I remember about Port Alberni’s classroom is my time with Mom.
In Astolia, the lessons were so rudimentary, it was my classmates that stuck out to me.
Those are an important part of school, too.
“I mean, teenagers never really tell you anything,” Roger chuckles, giving me an out.
“Right?” I sure as hell never told my mother I was sleeping with Curtis. Sometimes I like to picture them in Heaven together, her giving him a disapproving glare when their souls are exposed to the cosmic consciousness and she realizes what we shared.
But I never thought about April hiding things from me. She didn’t when we were in the woods. Why would she? I was all she had. I was her mother, sister, best friend, you name it. What if someone else is taking that friend role in her life now?
It would be for the best. Or at the least, it would be more like what life looked like pre-Quake, and everybody tells me I’m supposed to want that for her—to live an echo of the past.
I try to be talkative. With Sid off with April and James bedding whatever her name was, we’ve been whittled down to the younger crew, plus me, Silas, and his boyfriend. We all know how well Silas does carrying the social obligations, so someone has to engage Roger.
Try as I might, I keep looking toward the door, wondering when April is going to come back. What secrets could she want to tell Sid instead of me?
When my paranoid behaviour becomes impossible to ignore, Roger gives me a weak smile. “It’s probably not anything serious.”
“Yeah.” I try to laugh. “It’s probably…”
A muffled shout reaches my ears. Sid. Both my pulse and my body leap, so I’m already at the door when it bursts open. April is in the lead, cheeks flaming. She pushes past me with a hard thrust of her shoulder.
Sid shakes a finger at her. “Hey! That is not how you treat your sister, young lady.”
April’s back goes rod straight, her hands balling into fists. One of which, I realize, is holding a piece of paper.
“Sid, calm down. It’s okay.” I hurry to her side. “Something going on?”
“You have to sign this.” She shoves the piece of paper at me so hard, it’s like a punch in the stomach.
“Have to sign wha—” I unfold the page, and the words die on my lips.
Dear Mr. Charles and Ms. Hollins,
I am writing to inform you that April Hollins was involved in an altercation today, where she struck another student. Behaviour of this kind is not tolerated at Gulf Islands Secondary School and as such, she is required to attend detention following classes from November 13th – November 17th.
We require your signature as her legal guardians to certify that you have been informed of the situation.
It goes on, describing what I need to do if I want to consult with a member of staff and how the actions they take might escalate if she repeats this behaviour, but I’ll have to go over the details another day.
“April, what the hell?” I round on her. “This is why you—did you ask Sid to sign this and not show me?”
“You don’t have to scream about it. He wouldn’t do it.”
“April!” On a certain level, I’m impressed.
She’s embarrassed and did her damnedest to make it so that only Sid had to know.
But my mind is reeling. April has a temper, but she’s never been physical in how she expresses herself.
Hell, I used to wish she had more fight in her.
That kind of thing is useful out in the woods.
But we aren’t in the wild anymore. Society’s standards for tameness are different from mine.
“What happened?”
Her fists tighten, and it dawns on me how public our setting is. I grab her by the wrist. “Let’s talk upstairs. Roger, I am so sorry—”
“Oh, you’re fine,” he says, but like everyone else, he’s obviously incredibly uncomfortable.
“I’ll be up later tonight,” Sid says.
“Sure. Thanks. Grab food before we go, April. You need to eat.”
“I know!” she snaps, taking out the measuring cup she keeps in her knapsack to control her portions before ladling carrots and ham onto a plate. “I know how to manage my own body!”
“I never said you didn’t.” The sooner we get out of this room, the better.
Once we’re in our bedroom, I give her time to administer an insulin dose and start her meal.
Her hands are shaky, the needle drawing a prick of blood, when usually she’s so slick nothing shows on her arm after she’s done.
I don’t interfere, except to tell her how much honey I used per pound of carrots so she can enter all of it into her dose computations.
Someone should tell her math teacher about this, and he’ll pass her in an instant.
Geometry can’t be more important than the things she needs to calculate every day.
I wait for her to finish eating, so we both have a chance to cool off. When she’s done, I take a steadying breath. “I’m only asking because I care about you. What happened?”
She sets down her fork, balancing an empty plate on her knees. “I hit someone.”
“But why? I thought you were studying.”
“I was.” She presses her hands into her eyes. “That’s all I ever do. I was in the school library, studying.”
It sounds terribly lonely. “And?”
“And when I got up to go, Gia Lawson was waiting outside for me. Some of the other girls put her up to it, I think. I don’t know how anything works.
” She sniffs hard. “But they were standing down the hall. Maria Patterson and Cirie Gagnon and… I didn’t see everyone.
At first, I thought it was just Gia, until they started laughing. ”
“What did she do to you?”
“You wouldn’t get it!” April lurches up from the bed, and her plate nearly topples off her knees.
Not for the first time, I want to tell Sid to buy some more furniture, but this isn’t my apartment.
For now, I take the plate and cutlery off her lap and set it on the floor where she won’t break it by accident. “You’ve never dealt with any of this.”
“Hey! I was fourteen when we left Astolia. I’ve been to high school.” Sort of. “There were class politics. Girl drama. All that stuff. You can tell me.”
April gives me a withering glare. “Did all the kids make fun of you for being a Wildling with a weirdo sister who married her sanctuary host, too?”
My mouth falls open. “Excuse me?”
“Gia was asking me…” She clears her throat and holds her hands up to make scare quotes around the next words. “If I was a big slut too and sleeping with Carlos, since that’s what my sister did the second she got here.”
My heart and face burns for this poor girl. My girl. “How did they know about—”
“Maria Patterson.” April buries her face in her knees. “Her older brother is that douchebag who came in the carriage to the guild tour. He must have learned about you guys and then… rumours, I guess.”
“The little shit.” I’m not sure if I mean Maria or Bradley. I have half a mind to punch either one in the face now, too.