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thought about at night? Did they keep their rooms ready for them in case they came home, or did<br />
they give all their clothes and toys away to the Goodwill? Abra had heard that was what Lennie<br />
O’Meara’s parents did after Lennie fell out of a tree and hit his head on a rock and died. Lennie<br />
O’Meara, who got as far as the fifth grade and then just . . . stopped. But of course Lennie’s parents<br />
knew he was dead, there was a grave where they could go and put flowers, and maybe that made it<br />
different. Maybe not, but Abra thought it would. Because otherwise you’d pretty much have to<br />
wonder, wouldn’t you? Like when you were eating breakfast, you’d wonder if your missing<br />
(Cynthia Merton Angel )<br />
was also eating breakfast somewhere, or flying a kite, or picking oranges with a bunch of migrants,<br />
or whatever. In the back of your mind you’d have to be pretty sure he or she was dead, that’s what<br />
happened to most of them (you only had to watch Action News at Six to know), but you couldn’t be<br />
sure.<br />
There was nothing she could do about that uncertainty for the parents of Cynthia Abelard or<br />
Merton Askew or Angel Barbera, she had no idea what had happened to them, but that wasn’t true of<br />
Bradley Trevor.<br />
She had almost forgotten him, then that stupid newspaper . . . those stupid pictures . . . and the stuff<br />
that had come back to her, stuff she didn’t even know she knew, as if the pictures had been startled<br />
out of her subconscious . . .<br />
And those things she could do. Things she had never told her parents about because it would worry<br />
them, the way she guessed it would worry them if they knew she had made out with Bobby Flannagan<br />
—just a little, no sucking face or anything gross like that—one day after school. That was something<br />
they wouldn’t want to know. Abra guessed (and about this she wasn’t entirely wrong, although there<br />
was no telepathy involved) that in her parents’ minds, she was sort of frozen at eight and would<br />
probably stay that way at least until she got boobs, which she sure hadn’t yet—not that you’d notice,<br />
anyway.<br />
So far they hadn’t even had THE TALK with her. Julie Vandover said it was almost always your<br />
mom who gave you the lowdown, but the only lowdown Abra had gotten lately was on how important<br />
it was for her to get the trash out on Thursday mornings before the bus came. “We don’t ask you to do<br />
many chores,” Lucy had said, “and this fall it’s especially important for all of us to pitch in.”<br />
Momo had at least approached THE TALK. In the spring, she had taken Abra aside one day and<br />
said, “Do you know what boys want from girls, once boys and girls get to be about your age?”<br />
“Sex, I guess,” Abra had said . . . although all that humble, scurrying Pence Effersham ever seemed<br />
to want was one of her cookies, or to borrow a quarter for the vending machines, or to tell her how<br />
many times he’d seen The Avengers.<br />
Momo had nodded. “You can’t blame human nature, it is what it is, but don’t give it to them.<br />
Period. End of discussion. You can rethink things when you’re nineteen, if you want.”<br />
That had been a little embarrassing, but at least it was straight and clear. There was nothing clear<br />
about the thing in her head. That was her birthmark, invisible but real. Her parents no longer talked<br />
about the crazy shit that had happened when she was little. Maybe they thought the thing that had<br />
caused that stuff was almost gone. Sure, she’d known Momo was sick, but that wasn’t the same as the<br />
crazy piano music, or turning on the water in the bathroom, or the birthday party (which she barely<br />
remembered) when she had hung spoons all over the kitchen ceiling. She had just learned to control it.<br />
Not completely, but mostly.<br />
And it had changed. Now she rarely saw things before they happened. Or take moving stuff around.<br />
When she was six or seven, she could have concentrated on her pile of schoolbooks and lifted them all<br />
the way to the ceiling. Nothing to it. Easy as knitting kitten-britches, as Momo liked to say. Now,<br />
even if it was only a single book, she could concentrate until it felt like her brains were going to come