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  “I can do the dishes!” Mina chimed in from the table, unintentionally proving Mrs. Ortiz’s point. She was eight years worth of freckles and gapped teeth, and I couldn’t tell which was brighter—her hair or her eagerness.

  “Mina. You can help by reading the next poem. You still need twenty minutes of guided reading this week.”

  “But Mami, Melissa Suthers said her mom just signs the stupid paper and doesn’t make her read. Why do I—”

  “And Melissa Suthers is a blithering moron. Do you want to be a blithering moron?” Mrs. Ortiz responded.

  “Que es blithering?”

  “Es estúpido,” Mrs. Ortiz explained.

  She giggled. “You’re right. Melissa Suthers is kind of stupid.” Mina was Mrs. Ortiz’s long standing foster-child. She showed up at the age of three, and it constantly amazed me that no one snatched her up. I mean, if I were a family looking for a kid, Mina would be like stumbling across the gold mine of goodness.

  The kid sighed and turned the browning page of the large green volume. Mrs. Ortiz always had the most obscure books, and this one was the strangest.

  Mina’s voice pulled out the words and danced them into our ears:

  “As for the Unswaying Atalanta,

  Had she been but a man

  The chase would not have

  Been her doom.

  Some say she was distracted by

  Mere baubles.”

  The pause came before the question. “Que es baubles?”

  I smiled. The scene was so familiar. I could travel back in time within my memory and put my own body in that tattered chair, eight years old, knobby knees, rat-nested hair, asking Mrs. Ortiz questions in half-hearted Spanish, as I learned to read big kid books. “Trinkets,” I answered. “Things that look expensive, but aren’t.”

  Mina nodded and finished up the poem:

  “The sheen, shining apple.

  The gold in her eyes.

  Some say she was impressed

  With trickery.

  The sheen, shining deception.

  The gold in his eyes.

  It is believed she was doomed

  When transformed into the other.

  But I say she was set free.

  For the shape she took allowed her to roar

  All the things she was never allowed to say.

  I say

  Envy the sharp power of

  The sheen, shining teeth.

  The gold in her mane.”

  Mrs. Ortiz handed me the pan to dry, and asked me, “Do you remember the story of Atalanta?”

  I nodded. “She didn’t want to marry, so she challenged each suitor to a race. If they won they could marry her; if they lost, she got to behead them.”

  “And?”

  “And she beheaded many a man until Hippomenes prayed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, who gave him three golden apples. Atalanta gave him a head start like she did every poor sucker, and every time she’d catch up, he’d distract her with an apple so he’d get another head start. She eventually lost the race.”

  “Do you remember the rest?” Mrs. Ortiz asked, and I shook my head no after searching the caverns of my memory. She tisk-tisked and continued. “You see, no gift is ever free, and Hippomenes was supposed to pay a price for winning. A simple sacrifice, but he forgot to make it because he was too excited over his victory. Aphrodite took revenge and consumed them both with desire in front of a temple belonging to a powerful god named Zeus. When they, what is it you kids call it these days? Bumped uglies?”

  “Mrs. Ortiz!”

  She handed me a plate and slid me a sheepish smile with it. “Well, they ticked off Zeus, who turned them into lions. It does well to remember not to get distracted by shiny things when it comes to men. Atalanta came up with a sure-fire way to protect her heart, but when it boiled down to it, men are tricky when it comes to desire.”

  Mina bounced up and down in the chair as a lightbulb of understanding went off. “I get the poem! I get it! They were turned into lions because the Hippo man didn’t sacrifice something as a thanks. Transformed into the other. That’s the Lion.”

  “What’s the clue that tells you that?” I asked.

  “Roar. She can rawwwwr.” Mina made mini-claws with her tiny fingers and scrunched up her nose as the sound thundered out.

  I put another dish in the cupboard and laughed. The kid was too cute, and she didn’t even know it.

  “Mami… I asked Mrs. Gallighar. She said there’s no such thing as Greeks.”

  “Well, Mrs. Gallighar has no imagination,” a familiar, grating voice said from the doorway.

  “Iago!” Mina screeched and leapt up from the chair to fling herself into his arms. She squealed when he gave her a bearhug, and with the child in his arms, he leaned over and kissed his mother on her wrinkled cheek.

  Mrs. Ortiz slid her hands back into the water to grab some silverware that had sunk to the bottom of the sink. “How was practice?”

  “Oh. You know. Coach yelling this. People doing that.” He set Mina down and headed towards the fridge for his dinner. Every Thursday, it was bundled up neatly, waiting for Iago to claim it. He set the plate on the counter next to the wet dishes I hadn’t yet dried and began shoveling food into his face. “Hey, Texi,” he said, spilling rice out of his mouth. Each piece that fell looked like a red maggot bouncing unceremoniously off his chin until it fell back onto his plate for a second attempt into his mouth.

  “You could always heat that up, you know?” I said. “Or… you know… sit at the table?”

  “Naw. S’okay.” His voice crawled into my ears with the poison ivy of annoyance as he bulldozed in another bite.

  “You’re the epitome of class, Iago.” I tightened my jaw and focused on drying a cup. The towel made a squeegee noise on the glass, but I kept drying it anyways. It gave me something to do rather than swipe his plate to the floor accidentally with my elbow.

  It hadn’t always been this way with Iago. There were pictures of us playing in sandboxes and climbing trees at dangerous speeds. Embarrassingly enough, there was even one of us in the bathtub with rubber duckies floating all around us. Since he was two years older than me, he was basically the only big brother I had, but these past couple years I had trouble remembering those days. Sure, we had our little spats growing up, but he used to stick up for me on the bus rather than be the one to cause the hurt.

  I was in fifth grade when the inevitability of eventually happened. He was too cool to be seen playing games with me. He made it clear that I was just a stupid kid, and he no longer had time to search for the Monks of the Hidden Humanity or fish for the bat-dolphins in the Suniuchu Lake because the games we made up from his mother’s stories were a waste of time. Then he said, “You. Are. Nothing.” He made each word a fist and sucker punched me in the gut with them. It hurt more than it should have because part of me always felt like nothing… like I didn’t deserve the things I had and that I deserved to lose all the things I’d lost. He only nailed the coffin shut on these feelings, trapping them in my heart forever when he added, “Stop pretending my mother is yours. You lost yours. You can’t have mine.”

  It was a speech that replayed in my head over and over again until I had every word memorized. You can’t tell an eleven-year-old to get over her dead mother and expect to be forgiven within a lifetime. That kind of concept doesn’t exist for eleven-year-olds, and I was pretty convinced it didn’t even exist for anyone of any age who lost someone to something as stupid as death. I mean, I was almost seventeen, and I still couldn’t shove the words he said into the realm of forgiveness.

  After his speech, he took off with Sarah Schneider on the four-wheeler. Sarah Schneider, with her bursting boobs and curly brown hair. Sarah Schneider, with her stupid laugh and her willingness to do anything else but search for the Monks of the Hidden Humanity or fish for the bat-dolphins in the Suniuchu Lake. He told me to go home, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat in his living room and played video games by myself wh
ile Mrs. Ortiz ran errands. I cried through a few rounds of Super Luigi Brothers before I realized he didn’t deserve my tears. When he and Sarah stupid-Schneider returned from their ride, I’d already swallowed myself up in silence. We orbited around each other like opposing magnets after that day, but when I started high school, he acted like he wanted to be friends again. There was no apology. He simply switched from radio silence to mindless, one-sided chatter, which was especially annoying as we worked on the fence this summer. There was kindness in his voice and sympathy in his eyes, and there was absolutely no escaping the hours and hours of barbed wire spooling down the hill between our ranches.

  I couldn’t explain it, but Iago’s being there to help with the fence pissed me off as much as him getting out of helping because of football.

  “I think that cup is dry,” Iago said. He set down his fork and reached over to take it from my hands, but I tightened my fingers around the glass and shoved it into the cabinet before he could.

  Mrs. Ortiz sighed and withdrew her hands from the suds as she pulled the plug up. “I believe I’m done here. Iago, do you mind helping Texi dry the rest of these dishes, and Texi, do you mind not trying to kill my son with those dagger eyes of yours?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. I couldn’t tell if I should feel angry or embarrassed that I couldn’t even pretend to be nice. What Ringo said rotated in my mind, and I needed to stop letting Iago get under my skin in front of her.

  “I can help Texi with the dishes!” Mina said.

  Mrs. Ortiz rubbed the messy mop of orange hair and tugged at Mina’s bulbous ear. “You still have at least thirteen more minutes of reading, and now you have my undivided attention.”

  They disappeared into the living room before I heard their soft feet plod up the soft stairs. I watched the sink drain and pulled on the spray-nozzle to push the rest of the suds down the garbage disposal.

  “Thanks for asking, Texi. Practice was great. We’re definitely going to cream the Bulldogs tomorrow.”

  I glared while he shoved a bite of chicken into his mouth.

  “And then there’s the dance afterwards, but I know you’re too cool for homecoming dances.”

  I grabbed another cup to dry and moved the towel over it.

  “If you come, I’ll talk Gunner Proctor into dancing with you.”

  “Wow. Every girl’s dream.”

  “You could do worse.” He laughed.

  I looked up towards the specks in the ceiling and silently asked the universe to send me some more patience. Iago wasn’t making my promise to Ringo easy, and I felt the surge of anger taking root inside of me. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

  But as I turned to face him with a snarky retort, I felt a dull throbbing at the back of my head. The pain was like a tide coming in, slow at first before it grew into the space around my brain. I dropped the towel, placed the palm of my hand onto my forehead, and closed my eyes.

  “You okay?”

  I squeezed my eyes, but the pain came anyways. “I’m fine,” I barely managed to say.

  “A headache?”

  I reached behind me and squeezed my fingers into the counter to balance myself. There was a sledgehammer thudding on my temples, and I grunted out an answer that made no sense to either of us.

  “Is it a headache?” he repeated. There was an ounce of concern, an ounce of panic, and an ounce of pity in his voice that startled me almost as much as the pain. He stepped towards me and placed his fingers on my temples, alternating circles with his forefingers. I was about to knock his hands away, but the pain started to pull back so I could breathe again. It wasn’t as if he was trying to be intimate with the gesture—that’d just be gross. The movement was more surgical than that, like he was a doctor who knew just what to do to make the pain lessen.

  “See. You’re okay.”

  But I wasn’t okay.

  Things felt far from okay.

  I started to step away from him, but the counter bit into my hip reminding me I had nowhere to go. His fingernails had moved on to scraping lines along my scalp just above my ears, as if he was pushing the headache out of my skull, and it was working. I ground my teeth and yanked his hands out of my hair so I could shove him away with my hip.

  “You can finish the dishes. Tell Ringo I walked home.”

  “But—”

  “Just don’t,” I said, and walked to the kitchen door. When I shut it behind me and stepped into the backyard, I felt the weight of something big coming. I looked up into the night sky, and watched black, blotchy clouds race across the stars. They made it darker than normal, but I didn’t need the starlight to lead me home. I knew the entire one-and-a-half-mile walk back to the cabin on our ranch like the back of my hand.

  Still, as I walked home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, horribly wrong.

  I just didn’t know what yet.

  Chapter Three

  “You’re a bit late this morning,” Rebecca said as she put down the chart she was working on. The green scrubs she wore had teddy bears on them. She was sweet, but what self-respecting adult wore teddy bears?

  I rapped my knuckles on the raised countertop wrapping around the desk that faced the door and sighed. I checked the clock above her desk, and realized I only had about twenty minutes before I had to be at school. It’d have to be a short visit. “Not my fault. Blame my moron father. He couldn’t find his keys,” I said.

  “Moron or not, I wouldn’t exactly mind if your father stopped by more often. I’m still waiting on him to wake up and ask me out on that date,” Rebecca said.

  “Gross.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  I laughed. “I don’t mean you’re gross. I just can’t picture Ringo on a date… with anyone.”

  She frowned. “Both you Nicholsons are drier than ice. A love life is a good thing to have. Speaking of, you’d be surprised to know that Sheriff Garza and you have not been the only visitors this week. On Tuesday, a handsome Hispanic boy showed up. Does the name Sully ring a bell?”

  “Sully was here?”

  Rebecca winked, and I sucked in a breath. I’d been more worried than normal about my grandfather for the past few months, but when I spilled my guts to Sully, I didn’t think it’d spur him into a visit of his own. Friday and Wednesday mornings were my days with Papa, and the old man was getting worse and worse and remembering less and less. Sometimes he wasn’t even aware of his surroundings, and he sat in silence the entire visit. It made the conversations with him tricky to navigate.

  Alzheimer’s Disease is an evil, evil beast.

  “If I were you, I’d snatch that boy up! He’s a hottie,” Rebecca said.

  I crossed my eyes.

  “You know, if you keep doing that, they may get stuck that way.”

  “You should know that statement is a scientific impossibility created as a last-ditch effort by parents to scare their children into submission. And, by the way… Sully? Gross.” I walked past the nurses’ station towards room 124 before she could say much more.

  Rebecca was hitting on nerves that I was barely starting to realize existed. It scared me because I was becoming extremely aware that Sully did exist in volatile new ways. I told everyone that he was simply my best friend, but lately, that didn’t feel true. I couldn’t help notice how girls looked at him in the hallway. Muscles were sprouting everywhere off of him, as if he had a secret stash of steroids that he mixed in with his Frosted Flakes every morning, and his voice was growing into this soft, deep growl that tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I hated it, because it meant that things were changing.

  “Suit yourself, hon, but boys like that don’t stick around forever. Sooner or later, some hot little blonde is gonna scoop him up, and you’ll be sorry.”

  I looked back to see Rebecca fluffing up a lackluster blonde curl and laughed. I wasn’t sure when she decided my love life was her business, but she was determined to live vicariously through me. Not many young people entered the nursing h
ome, and I think she appreciated the opportunity to talk to someone under the age of ancient. Luckily, I’d already reached the door and could escape the rest of the uncomfortable conversation.

  “Papa?” I peeked into the door to make sure he was decent. Seeing him in an open bathrobe once was traumatizing enough, but lucky for me, today he was fully clothed in his khakis and an old man shirt. Papa loved wearing wool button-ups that were close to being plaid but were never actually plaid. He sat near the window, and he didn’t say anything in return which meant it was one of his silent days.

  “Papa?” I tried again.

  I was asked all the time why I called my father Ringo and my grandfather Papa. I’ll admit it was a strange habit, but as a toddler, I kept hearing Ringo call my grandfather Papa, and Papa calling my father Ringo. Those were the names that stuck in my head. They found it too endearing to correct, and eventually it was too late to even try.

  I put my backpack down and sat in the chair next to him. A gift bag was on the windowsill with “Texi” written in Papa’s big, shaky letters. When he was lucid, he always talked Rebecca into helping him find a gift for me when I visited. Torn our pages from musty books with highlighted passages, Internet printouts of obscure poetry, mismatched chess pieces with letters on them, magazine clippings about a new species found in the rainforest or some other scientific discovery. It was always a something small, and I had a box hidden under the floorboards of my bed where I collected them like soft memories at the back of my mind. The little box put tangibility to the intangible. It reminded me that every once in a while, my grandfather was still himself—a thoughtful, kind, old man—even if by the time my visit came around, he’d already forgotten all about the gift he worked so hard to find for me.

  Rebecca always set the gift on the windowsill by the fern. “I’d give it to you as you walk in,” she explained once, “but this way, it comes from him completely. It’s a dignity thing, you know?” Things like that made Rebecca the best person for this type of job. I couldn’t imagine spending every day watching people move in and out of lucidity, but she always found a way to remember the person trapped inside the fading mind.