"My dad filled the garage with weird carpentry tools he found at yard sales. He fixes them up and builds things for fun. He puts up little posters in bad neighborhoods with his phone number and an offer to teach people how to do carpentry, and every weekend he's got a couple kids in there, banging and sawing away at things." The tears slowed and stopped. I sniffed, a little life coming back into my voice.

"I only live twenty minutes away from them. I've taken strangers out climbing and given romance advice to teenagers making picture frames as Valentine's Day presents. My dad calls them all his friends, even the ones who've only come once or who've stolen things from him." I shook my head and looked down at my hands.

"My little brother is obsessed with frogs. Totally over-the-moon in love with them. He's raising tadpoles in an aquarium that my mom and he scooped out of a pond, he sleeps in frog footie pajamas, and at random intervals he'll ribbit loudly. If you ask him a frog question, he will proceed to tell you about frogs for several hours. As of two weeks ago, he would only respond if you ribbited at him." I rolled onto my other side to face Dain.

He had a tight expression on, his ears pinned back and his honey-gold eyes narrowed.

One corner of my mouth drew back. "Your life seems bad," I said. "How much of that is prejudice and how much of that is you being an ass and people responding in kind I have yet to discover. But my life was good."

Dain looked away, and didn't reply.

I sighed, and flopped onto my back to return my gaze to the sky. "If you want to be my friend, you're going to have to accept that sometimes something is going to remind me of everything I've lost and of how badly I want to go home. I'll do my best not to take it out on you, but you're the reason I'm here. I can't promise that I won't someday hate you for that."

He didn't answer, and I didn't continue. We laid there in the warm summer sunlight for a long time, the breeze shifting the grass and sweeping the heat of the sun off of my skin. I watched the sky and pretended that it was the same one my family could look up at, wishing I had any way to let them know not to mourn.