Emmy Laybourne - Savage Drift

I told her and leaned over to read her letter: “Luna is famous here. Everyone loves her so much. Becawse I walk her I am basically a selle…”

“We’re writing letters and doing drawings for Batiste!” Max said, his cowlick bobbing like a rooster’s comb.

Batiste is at a refugee camp in Calgary. We found him at the listings. Every day, they update these thick notebooks filled with old-fashioned computer printouts with a record of the refugees at each camp. People line up for hours to pore over them, hoping to find a loved one. It felt so good to see his name printed on the register. He’s there with his mother and father. I’m glad for him. We all are.

Ulysses’s picture showed a family playing on green grass under a blue sky.

Max’s drawing was of a boy with spiky yellow hair, sitting on some kind of a car, being pushed by a taller figure. The boy was crying—big tears drawn as blue dashes shooting out of his eyes.

Caroline was drawing big circle people sitting at a campfire and Henry was just sitting on his mother’s lap, twirling her hair around his index finger.

“See, this is us around the fire at Greenway,” Caroline said. “Remember when Uncle Jake made us s’mores and cowboy soup?”

Henry nodded, serious. “That was fun.”

Max held up his drawing and I saw he had added red over the child’s black boots.

“This is me when Niko was pushing me in that stroller just before we got to the bus station,” he told me.

Jeez, I had missed a lot, holed up in the Greenway.

“That was a good stroller,” Max said wistfully.

Ulysses showed me his picture.

“This is us now,” he said with his beautiful no-front-tooth grin.

“Batiste is going to be psyched,” I told them.

Alex took a piece of paper and started to write a letter.

“You’re writing, too?” Caroline said, happy.

“Of course. Batiste is my family, too.”

“Just like all of us?” she asked.

“Yup,” Alex said, nodding.

Caroline looked to Chloe. “I told you, Chloe. We’re all family now. For real. Not ‘just a saying.’”

She shrugged. “Whatevs.”

Sahalia came up with her tray and I watched the smile hit Alex’s face. It was bright, unprotected.

Aaah. Made me nervous for him. Sahalia’s not always been the most dependable person.

But the wattage on her smile equaled his. That was good. Very good.

“Dean,” Max said, pushing a piece of paper toward me. “Can you concentrate a story for me?”

“How do you mean, concentrate?”

“Well,” Max began. “This one time I asked my mom to write down a letter to my uncle Mack who was in the pen, doing five to ten for salting batteries. I wanted to tell him about how I was sitting out in the car at Emerald’s, waiting on my dad because he had some business arrangements to straighten out and I wasn’t allowed to go in there anymore on account of all the G-strings.

“Anyway I was just sitting there, doing my multiplication tables homework when a cop car glides in, real quiet.

“And I see a cop get out, walking over to a car that’s way over at the end of the parking lot and he’s moving real slow and suddenly he opens the door and an actual lady, a mom I actually knew, fell right out on the asphalt. It was my used-to-be best friend Channing’s mom and she didn’t have any pants on!”

Sahalia laughed out loud and then buried her face against Alex’s shoulder.

Max continued.

“It turned out Channing’s mom was doing lap dances on the side. And that’s illegal! So she got arrested into the cop car and the man she was sitting on was, too.”

“Oh boy,” said Mrs. McKinley.

“What’s a lap dance?” Henry asked.

“Max, sweetie, I’m not sure this story is for little ears,” Mrs. McKinley said.

I wanted to tell her that Max’s stories never are, but he held up his hand, holding her off, and barreled on.

“So anyways, I wanted to tell all that, about what I saw to my uncle Mack, because he used to hang around Channing’s mom a lot and sometimes buy her things like baby diapers and stuff when she ran out. So I told that whole story to my mom and she was supposed to be writing it down and she only wrote one sentence on the paper. And I said to her, ‘Mom, why didn’t you write down my story?’ and she says, ‘I did, hun. I just concentrated it.’”

“What did she write, your mom?” asked Henry.

“She just wrote, ‘Natalia Fiore got arrested for prostitution.’”

He shrugged.

“Huh,” I said. “And what story did you want me to concentrate?”

“The story of what happened to us!” Max said. “So Batiste will remember us.”

He tapped the paper, like I should get to work.

I looked at him, his blue eyes sparkling and ready to roll.

“You know what, Max? That would take me a really long time to write.”

“You’re a good writer. It won’t take too long.”

“How do you know I’m a good writer?”

“You better be. You write in your journal every day!” Max exclaimed.

“Hey, do you write about me in your journal?” Chloe demanded.

“I do,” I told her.

“Do you write good stuff or bad stuff?” she asked, her mouth set in an expectant curl.

“About you? Only good.”

“Will we be in the story, too?” Caroline wanted to know.

“I’m sure you’ll all be in the story,” Mrs. McKinley said. She kissed Caroline on the top of the head. “Now it’s time to put the markers and papers away and go get our trays.”

Back in Tent J, I handed Astrid the meatloaf-on-a-roll sandwich I’d managed to smuggle out under my sweatshirt.

Watching her face light up was worth the glaze stain I now had on the inside of my shirt.

“Mmm,” she said, digging in. “Thanks.”

I handed her the apple I’d pocketed as well.

“Apple a day…,” I said.

Slightly lame, but I wasn’t entirely sure where I stood with her.

“I’m sorry about me and Jake,” I apologized. “I know it drives you crazy when we fight like that.”

She waved it away with her sandwich.

“Do you think I’m being ridiculous?” she asked after she took a sip of water.

She looked up at me.

When she looked at me like this, when she really focused on me, it made me shy for a moment. She was so smart and so perceptive, I felt like she could see right through me.

How could someone as beautiful as she was like me at all? Would she ever feel the same reckless love that I felt for her? The do-anything kind of love?

“Do you think I’m being ridiculous?” she repeated.

I looked away.

“You know that woman, the one from the line?”

I nodded.

“I’ve looked for her every day. At the listings, in the Clubhouse, I’ve never seen her again.”

“You think they took her away,” I said.

Astrid nodded, her blue eyes wide with fear.

I remembered the woman.

We had been on line for breakfast.

It was a really beautiful morning, the Clubhouse was filled with the scent of maple syrup and Astrid was being funny.

“How’s my hair?” she asked me.

I had given her possibly the worst haircut in the history of personal grooming back at the Greenway when we all got lice. Sahalia had since done her best to shape it up. But still… Astrid now basically had a blond faux-hawk, a style from around 2002 that our old barber had always tried to sell me and Alex on. Some of Astrid’s hair curled but in other places it just frizzed out.

“You look like a deranged baby chick,” I told her.

“Nice,” she said. She ran her hand through the blond mess of it. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to flatter pregnant women shamelessly.”