Chapter 29
AMELIA
Seven years old
My mother was the first monster I ever loved, and in our house, love was a scavenger hunt.
My mother’s affections came in unpredictable currents, erratic and quick, the way a bat might veer through a living room if you left the window open overnight.
Some mornings, I’d find her collapsed at the kitchen table, forehead pressed to the stained counter, hands curled in fists like she was still fighting the dreams that clung to her.
Other times, she’d vanish for hours—days, sometimes—and I’d forage my own breakfast out of the splintered pantry, inventing games to make the silence less jagged.
I was seven years old and already an expert at the art of invisibility. If I held my breath to the count of fifty, I could become air and drift right up to her shoulder, watching her chin loll while she snored.
If I tiptoed just right, I could escape the house entirely.
When she woke, if she woke, she’d call my name with a start, like a mother who’d simply lost track of time, not a mother who had lost whole seasons of her life.
That morning, I walked myself to school, crunching acorn caps under my sneaker soles and pretending each one was a tiny skull. We lived at the bottom of a hill, the kind that grew longer when you looked at it with tired eyes.
At the top, our school hunched in a block of cinder and brick, surrounded by a yard of grass and the permanent stink of wet mulch.
I practiced counting the steps from our porch to the bus lot, my small way of controlling how the day might unfold. Thirty-seven sidewalk cracks, four sewer drains, two dead squirrels (run over, not murdered, though I liked to think of myself as a child detective and examine the evidence anyway).
It was late autumn, so my breath drew little ghosts in the air. I liked to believe the ghosts belonged to other kids who had walked this same route and survived it, their stories trailing out behind them like kite tails.
My knapsack was a hand-me-down that still smelled faintly of my father’s aftershave, even though he’d been gone for over a year. Sometimes I’d shove my face into the canvas just to remember the way his hugs used to squeeze the wind out of me.
I was almost at the crosswalk when an older boy—fifth grade, maybe—rammed into my shoulder with his backpack.
My knees buckled, scraping against pavement, and suddenly the world was nothing but hard gray.
He laughed and kept going. My eyes stung, but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing me cry.
I was still on the sidewalk, palms stinging with grit, when someone’s shadow blocked out the sun for a second and a voice, not unkind, said, “You okay?”
I looked up into the face of Caiden Baxter. I knew him the way you know the shape of the moon on a cloudy night: always there, sometimes hidden, always something a little dangerous around the edges.
He was in my class but never talked much, unless it was to correct a teacher or startle the other kids.
His hair looked like it had been hacked off with kitchen scissors, and there was a bruise, fresh and purple, blossoming just below his left eye.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I tried to stand up without making a face, but my knee had split open just enough to draw blood.
I stared at it, hypnotized by the bright welling red, and for a second I thought about how my mother hated the sight of blood, how she’d fainted when I lost my first tooth and came running with it in my fist.
Caiden crouched beside me, knees to his chest like a grasshopper. “That guy’s a jerk,” he said. “You want me to trip him tomorrow? I tripped a teacher once, by accident.”
The idea made me laugh, which hurt more than the scrape.
“I’ll live,” I said, and reached for my backpack, but Caiden beat me to it.
He held it by one strap, careful, like it was a baby bird or some other breakable thing.
His fingers were all scabbed over, and I remembered hearing he’d punched a window once when his dad locked him out of the house.
“You got a Band-Aid?” he asked, like it was the most important thing in the world.
I shook my head. He set my bag down and rummaged in his own.
It was a plain black backpack, way too big for him, like he could crawl inside and zip it up if he wanted to disappear.
He pulled out a crumpled sandwich bag with two Band-Aids inside.
One shaped like a dinosaur. “You want the T-Rex?” he said, holding it up between us.
“Yeah.”
He peeled the paper and stuck it over my knee, hands steady and gentle. “You know,” he said, not looking up, “if you squeeze the skin real hard, it stops the bleeding faster.”
I tried it. He was right.
We walked the rest of the way together, not talking much. I liked the way we didn’t have to.
The other kids swarmed around us in packs, hollering and shoving, but we moved like ghosts—untouched, unnoticed, except for the trail of bloody sneaker prints I left behind.
We filed inside the classroom, Caiden and I, and he peeled off to his assigned seat, cramming himself into the seat so he could wedge his knees against the book rack.
I sat closer to the window, where I could see the frost ghosting across the glass and the playground beyond, already scuffed to dirt by the first recess crew.
The teacher was writing something on the board, her handwriting swoopy and wide, like she was always trying to make things prettier than they really were.
I kept sneaking glances at Caiden. It wasn’t that I liked him, not like that. I just didn’t want him to vanish, to become another one of those people who only existed in the holes they left behind.
Lillian used to say Pathosbury was full of ghosts, but I thought it was more full of leftovers. The kids who didn’t have anywhere better to go, who walked to school with their heads down and learned to laugh at the wrong things.
At lunch, I picked at the edges of my peanut butter sandwich until the bread turned see-through from my fingers.
The sandwich tasted mostly like sadness and a little bit like refrigerator.
Caiden found me there, or maybe he’d been following, quiet and deliberate. He stood to the side, watching his shoes, shifting from foot to foot like he was waiting to be let in on a secret.
The bruise on his face had started to turn yellow at the edges, seeping under his skin like watercolor.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to trade?” He held out his own sandwich: bologna drowning in mayonnaise, cut into uneven triangles.
I shook my head. I hated mayonnaise, but that wasn’t the reason.
“I already licked mine,” I said, which was true, but really I just wanted to keep something that was mine for once.
He shrugged and sat down next to me, close enough that our knees almost touched. I tried not to think about it, but it made my stomach go jittery in a way I didn’t have words for yet.
Caiden picked at the seams of his jeans, winding a frayed thread around his finger till the tip went pinkish-white. “My dad says if you’re not tough, people walk on you forever.” He watched the playground, not me. “But I think maybe he’s wrong.”
I didn’t have anything smart to say to that. My dad used to say, There are three types of people in this world, Amelia: the ones who build, the ones who break, and the ones who run. He’d never said which one I was.
Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe that’s why he left.
Caiden’s sandwich sat untouched in his lap. He unzipped a side pocket of his backpack and pulled out a tiny plastic dinosaur.
He set it on the concrete beside us and rolled it back and forth with his finger. “They say these guys had brains the size of a walnut, but they survived for millions of years.” He nudged it toward me. “Guess it’s not always about being smart, huh?”
I took the dinosaur and rolled it between my palms.
It was warm from his pocket. I imagined keeping it, hiding it under my pillow, building a secret nest of things that belonged only to me: the dinosaur, a bone I’d found in the woods, a photo booth strip of my parents from before everything went bad.
Maybe if I slept with these treasures close, I’d wake up in a world where people didn’t leave.
“My mom fell asleep in the bathtub once, and the water turned cold around her, and when she woke up, she screamed so loud the neighbor called the police."
I wasn't sure why I told him this; it wasn't a contest, but it felt close. I remembered the way her voice had sounded that night, thick and tangled, and the way the police officer had squatted down to my height and asked if I wanted to stay at someone else's house for the night.
I’d said no, because the only thing scarier than my mother was the idea of leaving her behind. Or coming back and finding her gone.
Caiden nodded like he understood, though maybe he just wanted to.
He prodded his sandwich once, then picked it apart, piece by piece, pinching the bologna into tiny rolls before dropping them onto the concrete for the crows.
They came quickly, strutting closer with their oily, rainbow-black feathers and their cartoon villain eyes.
"They're smart," I said, pointing. "Crows. I saw it on TV."
"Yeah," he said, watching them. "They remember faces. If you're mean to them, they never forget."
The crows picked at the meat, hopping back every time a car drove past, then inching closer again.
One of them had a limp, dragging its left foot behind like dead weight. I wondered if it ever hurt or if it got used to being broken, the way you get used to the smell of your own house after a while.
We watched in silence as the crows warred over the scraps. When they finished, Caiden wiped his hands on his jeans, then turned to me and said, “Sometimes I wish I were a crow. I’d just fly away, never come back.”
“Where would you go?” I asked. My voice sounded thin, even to me.
“Anywhere, away from here.”
I didn’t want to tell him I’d thought about the same thing, only my way out was more like melting into the walls or slipping between the floorboards, somewhere small and warm and quiet.
My mom always said home was people, not a place, but I knew that was a lie.