The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel (24 page)

“Great. Julian, let’s go. Your car is still parked by my office.”

Julian was looking back and forth between us, bewildered. “But, wait, what happens now? We can’t go home. We’re so close!”

“We’re closer,” Birdwine said. “But I’ve got a crap ton of phone calls and database searches to do now. Every hospital, every police department, every wrecking service along every route that she could have taken. A terminally ill woman traveling with a little girl will have left a footprint, but realistically, it will take days or even weeks of grunt work to find it.”

“So you aren’t going back to Asheville,” Julian said, thoughtful.

“I’ll be more effective here. My PI license gives me access to search engines that would blow your mind, kid, and I know how to work a phone. If that fails, then, yeah. I’ll run her possible routes in person, with pictures. I’ll canvass, asking everyone with eyes. I hope it won’t come to that.”

I hoped not, too. I’d have to make a much more comprehensive list. Would Kai have taken Hana to the Dandy Mart, shown her the row of pay phones I had used to break our lives? Did places still have pay phones? Maybe they’d been ripped out, and all my mother could show Hana was the hole where they’d once been. That was the journey itself in a nutshell—looking at the holes where we’d once been.

“If it’s phone calls and computer stuff, I could stay and help,” Julian offered. “It will go faster with two.” He looked back and forth between us, eager.

“What about your car?” I asked, buying time to think.

Our shared mother had died indigent, traveling under a name only the gods knew. The narrowed search radius had upped our odds of finding out what had derailed them, but Hana’s fate itself was still in play. She was still that famous cat in its closed box, dead and alive at the same time. I wasn’t sure that Julian should be the one to open it.

“I’ll get it later,” Julian said. “Although I need to borrow a charger. My phone is—it’s almost out of juice.”

“I could use the help, but I can’t begin to guess what we’re going to find,” Birdwine said in cautious tones. He understood that Hana was a coin spinning in the air.

“I’m not stupid. But even if Hana’s had a hard time, finding her can’t be anything but good news,” Julian told him, bristling. “She’s alone right now, and we’re her family.”

I fought the urge to trade a speaking glance with Birdwine. I was off his team. I said gently to Julian, “We know we’re her family. But—”

He turned to me, eyes overly bright. “When we find her, she’s going to know it, too. Last night, after you fell asleep, do you know what I did? I got on your laptop, and I started filling out a transfer application to Georgia State. I trolled Craigslist, too, looking for roommate ads here in Atlanta. I want her to know that even before I met her, I was changing my life for her. That I wanted be a real big brother to her, before I ever saw her face, or anything.”

I recognized the righteous temper. This boy truly shared my blood. Then I did look to Birdwine. It was inadvertent. I found him looking back, thinking the same thing. I turned away, fast. It would be too easy to fall back into our old rhythms, especially as we worked to find my sister. I could feel our connection, tenuous but living, under all my anger. It would take more than simple rage to kill it. I couldn’t join up with him for anything, even a simple try at giving Julian an out. The kid wasn’t going to take it, anyway.

I’d been trying to feed Julian reality in little sips, but the idea that we could get this close and not retrieve a Hana who was alive and well, one who wanted to be in our family—it was a bitter gulp, and it would not go down. This kid, who had recently lost his parents, was not ready for any more losses. Even imaginary ones. Hell, when he was asking for a charger, he wouldn’t even say his phone was dead.

Birdwine tried again. “All I’m saying is, you need to be prepared. This story might not have a happy ending.”

“I’m not looking for the end of a story,” Julian said, firm. “I’m looking for a little girl.”

Whatever Kai-created train wreck was raging toward us, he was bound and determined to stand in the middle of the track with his arms spread wide. No, more than that. I was waiting to get hit by what was worst, and Julian was planning for a best. I was bracing myself for impact, and he was actively preparing for a future.

Maybe I was getting schooled, again.

For the first time, I indulged in Julian’s game of
what if
. Best case, Kai had taken Hana to her bio dad, and he was a happy, invested, stable sort. I thought that was about as likely as finding her cheerfully colonizing Mars. Real best case, she was living with some kindhearted friend or lover Kai had picked up on the road or in the foster care system with a decent placement. Worst case? She’d fallen hand in hand into the black with Kai and Joya; there was no plan needed for that contingency. Next worst case? She was living on the streets, or someone in the range of indifferent to awful had made her into baggage or prey.

In every case but “magic, loving bio dad,” if she was alive, then I was going after custody. So why wasn’t I making best-case plans, like Julian? There were things I should tack onto my to-do list: Look for a house in a good school district. One with walls, that said
I have room for you.
Call a meeting with my partners, let them know all the ways my life was about to change.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m going in to work. I have a difficult negotiation starting up on Monday, and I have to go in prepped. If”—I stopped myself and looked deliberately to Julian—“
when
we find Hana, I’ll need some time off, so I need to bank goodwill with my partners now. Julian, can you send me updates, every hour on the hour?”

Julian grinned at me. “Absolutely!”

I spent the day drafting a settlement proposal for
Winkley v. Winkley,
and I was in quite a mood. It was weighted so heavily in Oakleigh’s favor that it was not a true proposal. It was the opening salvo in a war, and it promised that the war itself would be long and dark and bloody. When Dean Macon saw it, he might well crap his pants or recuse himself.

Julian kept me in the loop, texting me all day. Perfect. I wanted my fingers on the pulse of the search, but I didn’t want to hear from Birdwine. Not even a four-word text. Not even a sorry-faced emoticon. Not until whatever sweetness I had discovered at his bedside was ashes, cold and light, easily blown away by any wind.

I went home and fed Henry. I scratched his belly until he’d had enough and batted at me. Then I got in the shower, set the water hot as I could stand it, and scrubbed the day off myself. I stepped out mother naked, and as I dressed, it felt more like I was readying for a battle than a good night out. Maybe I was.

I left my hair to dry naturally, hanging in long shaggy loops and spirals down my back. I chose jeans cut to frame the good ass my mother gave me, paired with a fitted T-shirt that said
LUCKY
on the front. I traded my diamond studs for long bangles made of a multitude of delicate, free-swinging chains, each with a tiny garnet near its end. I went easy on the makeup: fresh skin, brown mascara, and a pale, glossy mouth. The only part of daytime Paula left was my shoes, their red soles now an invitation, not a warning.

I shook out my drying hair. The little garnets swung on their chains to ting and chime like bell song in my ears. I was going out, and if any god who walked above the earth or under it had mercy, I was getting myself laid.

CHAPTER 10

I
have a scoop of eggs, a biscuit, two floppy strips of bacon, a canned peach half with a maraschino cherry resting on it like a nipple, and no place to go. I don’t hesitate or look around, though. I walk to the eight-top table nearest the kitchen and take my usual seat on the end. Two of the four Hispanic kids are already there, eating, but there is an empty chair between me and them. Joya’s former chair is across from me. There’s a third open chair catty-corner to me, so that I am surrounded by absence. The empty spaces are a circle drawn around me, making me the center of a bull’s-eye.

Shar, Karice, and Kim saunter through the door before I take my first bite. They pause, scanning the room, and then Shar finds me. She sets the pace, eye-locking me and strolling slow toward the breakfast line. Karice and Kim flank her, one behind each shoulder.

I’ve settled arguments and ended grudges in the wooded parts of parks or behind the temporary buildings at school. I’ve done fine, thank you, both by myself and backed by Joya. I’m tall and strong and mean. But this? This is a pack. I have to go in smart or it will end very, very badly. They have hyena faces, chins down, eyes bright with heat over smiles so wide I see their red tongues.

I look back, very serious and calm. If a pack smells fear, they come in faster and harder. I don’t even blink, not even when Shar pauses, breaking stride to run her tongue over her bottom lip. She’s got a wide mouth with a host of big, white teeth all snaggled in it.

I lean toward her, show her all my teeth in answer. I am not going to be a punching bag for bitches until my mother comes. It isn’t in my nature.

I see Candace scuttling with her tray right past me, head ducked down, heading for her regular table. So much for last night’s
There, now
s. Once she sits, she gives me the side-eye, folding a tissue-thin strip of bacon into her mouth, accordion style.

After the pack sits down, I’ll let them eat most of their food. Then I’ll leave, making sure to pass right by their table. If they don’t follow, I’ll cast some shade to spark them up and after me. I will lead them down into the basement of this building. There’s a hallway after the stairs, leading past unfinished storage to the laundry. It’s long and narrow, so they can’t surround me. I’ll retreat down it, try to knock one of them all the way out of the fight before we get to the laundry room. I can make a final stand there, between the shelves and the big machines. Even if I lose, I have to hurt them enough to kill their thirst for repetition.

I know my plan, but I am not prepared for theirs; Shar swerves, bypassing the line to come straight at me. Kim and Karice wheel with her, holding the formation. I feel my spine elongating. I sit tall in my seat. Shar pulls back Joya’s old chair and sinks down into it, her two lieutenants standing behind her, one at each shoulder.

“Good morning,” I say, to Shar and only Shar, as if this fight is one on one. In some real sense, it is.

“How long you think till Joya’s mama go back on that pipe?” Kim says to Karice over Shar’s head. She speaks theatrically, like they don’t see me there, trading the evil eye with Shar across the table.

“Joya be too busy trickin’ herself to worry about that,” Karice says.

They don’t know Joya and I fell out. Still, I find my temper rising to it. I don’t like her name in their mouths any more than I liked hearing it from Candace.

I ignore them, looking for Shar’s weak spot. Except for those snaggle teeth, she is pretty. She’ll try to protect her face. Behind her, I can see the other two Hispanic kids have come out with their trays. They see us and pause, uncertain, milling by the silverware cart.

“Oh, yeah,” Kim agrees, “Joya’s mama gonna turn her out.”

Shar wears her hair short, in little rings, but not so short that I can’t get a good hold on it. Her ears peek out from under, and I can see the places in her lobes where Joya jerked her earrings through. They’ve healed split, each edge sealing itself, so that her lobes are doubled.

When I don’t react to Kim and Karice’s bait, Shar reaches fast across the table and snatches the top of my biscuit. She licks it with her tongue, a big, juicy lick, taking half the jam out. Then she sets it back in place. She gives me an eyebrow quirk, like she’s asking what I’m going to do about it, luxuriously licking my jam off her fingers.

“I never see you this up close, Shar,” I tell her. “I didn’t realize how much your earlobes look like butts. It’s like you have two old-lady sag-butts hanging off your ears.”

Shar stands so abruptly that her chair scrapes back along the floor. Now she’s looming over me, and Kim and Karice lean, too. For a single, breathless second I think it’s going down right here, right now. I find my body rising, too, readying to improvise.

In that second of fraught silence, Candace, of all people, sinks into the chair beside me.

“Hey, y’all,” she says, and we all boggle at her.

She blushes and ducks her head, drawing her knees up and perching her heels on the chair’s edge, wrapping her skinny arms around herself. She holds her biscuit in both hands, like a little mousie with a nut.

It’s baffling. When I look back across the table, I am baffled further. Karice is backing up. She’s a little behind Shar, so Shar can’t see her going. Karice takes two steps away, then three, and then she turns and walks toward the line, as if she needs her peach half with its maraschino nipple, stat. Kim stares after her, then back at Candace. My odds just got crazy better.

Shar is glaring with such hate at Candace now that Candace’s spine becomes a curve, as if she’s going to fold herself in two. I think she’d keep on folding if she could, into quarters and then eighths, smaller and smaller, until she disappears.

But instead, she peeks up over her knees and says to Shar, “Did you just lick her breakfast?” She sounds genuinely curious.

The two Hispanic kids feel the winds shift as Karice goes past them to the line. The fight they smelled has been deferred, so they file to their end of the table with their trays.

“I think she licked her own breakfast,” I say. I push the tray across toward Shar.

Shar is about to speak, but Candace interjects. “In the supply closet?”

Kim’s been looking uncertainly from Shar to the hole that used to hold Karice, but now she turns to Candace. “Bitch, no one here cares you exist. Don’t make us care.”

Shar leans back, oddly silent. She glances behind her, to her right, where Karice should be, and does a double take. She looks around until she spots Karice in the line.

Candace spins her biscuit in her hands, takes a tiny nipping bite.

Now no one is looking at me. I’ve puffed into a fighting shape, only to find myself invisible. It’s disconcerting. I sink back down into my chair.

Candace says to Shar, “That was nice that Paula got you breakfast. Go on, now. Take it to the supply closet.” She turns to me and adds, “You know how Shar likes to eat stuff in there.”

Shar’s mouth closes all the way, and I can see all the spine draining out of her. I’m so interested in understanding the mechanics here. Back in Paulding County, I learned that I pick fight over flight. From Joya, I learned to find the weak spot, then hit it first and hardest, skipping the preliminaries. Now I’m watching Candace turn a fight with implication. It’s pretty damn effective; Kim is so unmoored she’s taken a literal step back.

“This is not your fight,” Shar tells her.

Candace spins the biscuit and nips at it again. This is her standard, enraging way of eating anything shaped like a circle. She takes little bites off the sides, turning it in her hands, making it smaller but retaining the round shape. “I know, right? It’s yours and Joya’s, but I guess Joya’s gone. Oh well.” She scootches her chair close to mine, so close we’re almost cuddling.

I’m interested enough to abandon my own plans and back her play. I snuggle even closer and tell Shar, “Maybe you should head off to the supply closet, get you a bite of whatever it is you like to eat in there.”

Shar’s cheeks puff out in a fast exhale, as if a blow has landed.

“What is this?” Kim asks Shar, confused, but Shar shakes her head.

“How do you know abou—” Shar says to Candace, and then stops talking.

It’s a shame, because I’m deeply curious about the end of her aborted question. Candace has some dirt on Shar. It’s not surprising, considering the way Candace weasels around, eavesdropping. I know this from highly personal experience. What is surprising is her long game—she’s held this secret to herself, but now she is deploying it on my behalf.

Candace spins her biscuit, nibble nibble nibble, and Shar shoves her abandoned chair out of her way and walks off. Kim hurries away in her wake, already asking questions.

“What happened in that closet?” I whisper to Candace.

“A lot. You know how Karice goes with that tall boy, Arly? Well, Shar got with him in there when they was broke up,” Candace whispers. Her biscuit is barely the size of a silver dollar now. “Karice is back with him and still don’t know.”

“And what do you have on Karice?” I ask. It has to be big, to make Karice abandon Shar mid-intimidation.

“Nuthin’,” she lies. Her eyes go wide and round, telegraphing innocence.

“Yes, you do,” I say. It’s something worse than boy thieving.

Candace changes the subject. “Did you see Shar’s face when I set down?” She snickers and peeps at me again, spinning her tiny biscuit coin. She pops it in her mouth and sucks on it, as if it were a particularly savory lozenge.

“Yeah,” I say, smiling. I’m feeling warmly toward her. It’s as if we came through an actual fight together, and we won. Not warm enough to see her all rosy. I know Candace doesn’t have friends. She has quid pro quos. I say, in my nicest tones, “Is there anyone you don’t have dirt on, Candace?”

“Kim, but only ’cause she’s boring,” Candace says. “People aren’t careful, and we all live real close up on one another.” She swallows and looks right at me. “People tell each other things, like you would not believe. They get distracted, like, they’ll get in a big fight. They won’t even think about who might have come on in the building. They’ll say all their darkest things out loud.”

I feel my stomach drop, dizzy sick. She’s looking almost through me with those eyes so light blue they are barely darker than the whites. Cold trickles up my spine.

Did she hear me telling Joya about that 911 call? I think of Candace creeping to kneel by my bed. She can move in such silence. Her big ears seem to pick up sounds from space. Is she bluffing me, the way I bluffed Shar by picking up on her reaction to the word
closet
? I can’t tell. She’s better at this kind of fight; I’m new to it.

“Want a piece of my bacon?” I ask, sweet as I can.

Candace smiles at me and takes it. She folds the whole thing into her mouth. She drops her gaze, her lashes in demure, pale fans across her cheeks. Every atom in me whirls and clenches. She knows. She knows. She owns me in this moment.

She picks the second piece of bacon off my tray and bites the end off without asking. A bold move, testing the pecking order.

I consider my options, but they are limited. Maybe I should concede? My time here is finite, after all. Kai’s release date is set, and if everything goes right, I could be home with her in a couple of months.

Watching Candace chew my bacon like a cud, I realize I will not make it.

“You know what I like about you, Candace?” I ask, reopening negotiations. “You didn’t rat out Karice to me just now. That’s pretty cool. Not many girls know how to keep their mouth shut, like me and Joya. It’s why me and Joya were so tight.”

She peeks at me, still in profile, but I can see her eyes gleaming. I have changed the stakes. I am offering my willing friendship for her silence, and my currency is valuable. She can make me be her bodyguard and hold my heartbeat in the bed beside her, but she can’t make me like her.

As she thinks, I jerk my bacon out of her hand. She spins toward me, indignant, only to find my face is very close to her face, and my eyes are hard. Friendship is on the table, sure. But I will not be her dog. If she doesn’t bend a little in her style of fighting, I will go back to mine and bend her all the way in half.

Her mouth twists. I can practically hear the crafty machinery of her mind spinning and whirring, reworking calculations. Her currency can be spent only once, but I can beat the living shit out of her endlessly. I tell her so with my eyes and the insolent, openmouthed chewing of my own damn meat.

She drops her gaze, demure again. When she speaks, her voice is tentative, almost a whisper. “You want to sit beside me on the bus?”

“Sure I do,” I say.

We might as well have spit into our hands and clasped them. There will be border skirmishes and small negotiations, but we have the broad strokes of a deal. One I can live with, for the short time I have left.

Or so I thought then. It was months before I understood how thoroughly I had been played. Candace would have made a hellishly good lawyer. For example, when Candace met dead-eyed Jeremy in the rec hall stairwell, she wasn’t trading sex acts for Fun Dip or SweeTarts; she wanted both, the candy and the touch. She liked him, but she made him pay with sugar to kiss her, which she wanted, to touch her budding breasts, which she wanted, so they could put their hands down each other’s pants. All things that she wanted.

I learned the rudiments of dark negotiation from Candace. She got the candy
and
a boyfriend. Or her idea of one. Candace didn’t come from a world where a boy might like her, sweetly and simply. Love was something furtive to be paid for or extracted; her life had given her a dim view of that animal. But she wanted it. She was starving for it, though she wouldn’t have recognized it if it had run at her and slapped her—which, of course, it would. I’d see to that.

But was I any better, even now? Deep into my thirties and still one cracked heart away from walking to a pool hall in my fuck-me pumps, looking to pull a strange. And over Birdwine—a long-botched love that should already be scar tissue. Even so, last night, this morning, now, I was feeling it. It was an itch lodged deep inside my chest, too far below my skin to scratch or soothe. I had to shut it up. Shut it down.