“Clever.”
Sandra half-turned, revealing a slight smile.
“Here’s my chance to be clever – I think you said that the people that were strong enough to help me should know that it’s a bad idea to?”
“Yes.”
“Johannes is one of the exceptions to that rule, I take it?”
“Yes he is.”
“Is this a nudge? Is this one of those nudges, like you gave Laird? To go see Johannes?”
Sandra smiled, picking up Hildr. The girl in the checkered scarf could see how the fur at one side of the ferret’s head had been braided and clasped in place with a tiny metal clip. Sandra said, “It could be. Nothing mystical about it. The question would be why.”
“Yeah,” the girl in the checkered scarf said. “I guess so. Would I upset you if I said I don’t want to go see him just yet?”
“No. Can I offer you anything else?”
“I’m done,” the girl replied. And the juice sits heavy in my gut. “Thank you. I haven’t eaten a breakfast that good in a while. One of my dads is on this health kick.”
And I might never get to eat a crappy vegan tofu salad or granola-milk slop breakfast if I can’t get my name back.
“Are you okay?” Sandra asked. “All things considered?”
The girl looked up.
“You were somewhere else for a moment.”
“I’m… yeah. Like I said before, I’m not so functional when I’ve just woken up. I’m ready to get down to business.”
“Use my shower. I’ll get things ready so I can teach you what you need to know when you’re out.”
■
She decided to pull on clothes rather than use the offered bathrobe, feeling fabric stick to skin where she hadn’t quite dried off enough. For much the same reason, she hadn’t used the offered shampoo and conditioner. Shampoo tended to leave her hair more unruly, so she tended to do one day on and one day off. Her hair going unwashed a day was more her than it was smelling like the wrong products.
She donned the hairband, pushing her hair away from her face, and stared at herself in the mirror.
Was it just the more intense lighting above the bathroom mirror that made her look paler, her eyes lighter, her hair darker? Starker?
She wound the scarf around her shoulders, loose.
When she emerged and stepped into the living room, she saw a sheet of parchment had been laid out. Not paper. Old fashioned stuff, a little uneven at the edges. Another scrap sat at the base of the coffee table, mostly rolled up. Thin ink marked it. Lines and scribbled words. Testing pens?
Sandra didn’t look up as she drew a circle in the middle. “Write all personal details you can inside. Everything about yourself you can think of. You can’t include your name, but you can and should include other things. Try to think of things that Padraic wouldn’t necessarily know about. Things he wouldn’t have taken or claimed for himself, as part of his identity, that make you unique.”
I have three parents, but I think Padraic thinks it’s just the two. I don’t sign my name with a heart over the ‘i’, but I do a little squiggle at the middle part of the M to make my signature mine when I’m signing something like a cheque. I like salty foods way too much. I don’t actually love regular pizza, but I’ll eat anchovy pizza and I’ll tolerate other stuff. Both of the boys I’ve really liked much at all turned out to be gay. It’s very rare for me to cry or sob when I’m upset, though I might get tears in my eyes but sometimes after a really long day, I’ll just break down and cry into my pillow for no reason, like I save it all up for that.
“More?” she asked.
“All you can,” Sandra said, eyeing the list.
It bothered her that Sandra was reading these small, personal things, but she wasn’t in a position to complain.
I’m pretty sure I’ll die young. Polar fleece fabric gives me the heebie jeebies so bad I can barely sit still after touching it.
She hesitated.
I love my parents more than anything, and they’ve done better jobs than most. I mean it. But sometimes I wonder if the reason my priorities and feelings are messed up are because my surrogate mom wasn’t around enough and my dads just aren’t that emotionally sensitive. I know it’s stupid, I know it’s wrong, and I tell myself every time that I’m just looking for a broad-strokes answer to it all, but I still think it sometimes.
She stared down at the words, pen still in hand, for a long minute.
“A little bit of blood,” Sandra said. “I have a needle-“
The girl was already biting the end of her thumb.
“Or you can do that.”
“Used to it,” The girl said. “Center circle?”
“You have the right idea. Good. Now draw more circles,” Sandra prompted her. “Around that one. Things you’re connected to that are important to you.”
Dad. Father. Mom. Home. The house. My room. My title as a goblin queen.
She paused at that last one.
“That’s fine,” Sandra said. “Being a student?”
“I’m not much of one.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
She wrote Blake, then Molly.
“Good. This is something you can do again when you feel the need, to figure out where you stand. When we do it, we use a board, pins and threads, so we can practice illustrating webs of connections and manipulate things more. That isn’t what you need, so we’ll take the simpler road. Draw lines from you to each of these things.”
The girl in the checkered scarf did, drawing a line between the circle with the confession, little secrets and blot of blood, to the circle with ‘goblin queen’ within.
The pen was nearly out of ink. The line came out spotty, half of it was just the pen nib digging a groove into paper.
“That’s supposed to happen?” she guessed.
“Yes. Keep going.”
Between herself and her parents. Worse. Two thirds of it was only scratches.
Herself and the house? Worse still.
Mom? Better again.
Dads? The worst yet.
Her room?
She suspected she knew the answer before she tried. The pen scratched paper, but no ink came out.
Padraic had made his claim to it.
Blake?
The sole bit of line was so short she could cover it with her fingertip.
Molly?
One of the stronger connections.
“If these were threads, and we were applying stress, you would be seeing how frayed they were. You could gauge the health of the connections. Keep this in mind. Check again later today. Figure out how this condition of yours is progressing.”