Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.
“Don’t you want a hug?” he asked Stella.
Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch’s jacket.
“You’re so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.
She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.
“I’ve never given up,” Mitch said.
Stella’s long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.
“I couldn’t come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me. Part of probation.”
She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.
“I sent your mother messages.”
“She gave them to me.”
“There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.
“I know. Kaye told me.”
Mitch held his daughter at arm’s length. “You’re gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye’s—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.
“They want us to sit… here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.
Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.
Mitch smiled. “Let’s just stand for a while,” he said.
“All right,” Stella said.
“Try to get used to each other again.”
“All right.”
“Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.
“They probably think so.”
“What do you think?”
Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They’re afraid of us.”
Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”
Stella’s eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don’t want us to be who we are.”
“How do you mean?”
“They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we’re punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”
“I’ve read about that,” Mitch said.
“They think we’ll try to persuade them. Maybe they’re afraid we’ll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it’s awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.
“I hear the classes are boring, too.”
“They’re afraid we’ll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature… but something else was at work.
Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very different from the little girl he had known.
“I’ve learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster… capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.
“Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.
“I’m doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn’t so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.
“Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.
“But of course there’s stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I’ll tell you about that if you want.”
“Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”
Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’” she said. “We’re like sisters in the demes. But they don’t let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”
“That’s probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.
Stella shook her head. “But they don’t understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We’re so smart when we’re in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that’s why…”
Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:
“We need to be together/We’re healthier together
“Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others
“The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”
The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.
She looked at him directly, the skin over the outside of her eye orbits drawing in with a pucker he could neither duplicate nor interpret. Freckles formed around the outside and lower orbits like little tan-and-gold stars; she was sparking in ways he had never seen before.
He shivered in both admiration and concern. “I don’t know what that means, when… you do that,” he said. “I mean, it’s beautiful, but…”
“Do what?” Stella asked, and her eyes were normal again.
Mitch swallowed. “When you’re in a deme, how many of you talk that way… at once?”
“We make circles,” Stella said. “We talk to each other in the circle and across the circle.”
“How many in the circle?”
“Five or ten,” Stella said. “Separately, of course. Boys have rules. Girls have rules. We can make new rules, but some rules already seem to be there. We follow the rules most of the time, unless we feel there’s an emergency—someone is feeling steepy.”
“Steepy.”
“Not part of cloud. When we cloud, we’re even more like brothers and sisters. Some of us become mama and papa, too, and we can lead cloud, but mama and papa never make us do what we don’t want to do. We decide together.”
She looked up at the ceiling, her chin dimpling. “You know about this. Kaye told you.”
“Some, and I’ve read about some of it. I remember when you were trying out some of these… techniques on us. I remember trying to keep up with you. I wasn’t very good. Your mother was better.”
“Her face…” Stella began. “I see her face when I become mama in cloud. Her face becomes my face.” Her brows formed elegant and compelling double arches, grotesque and beautiful at once. “It’s tough to explain.”