I backed off. But my motto was excellence. I stayed resolute and steadfast and I played a game with myself where I was his wolf acorn guard. I stood against the chain-link fence and made sure that no other faggot bastards tried to help him. And none did.

At home, when they asked me, I just said it was good. It’s an adjustment period, but it’s good, I said. Mama K said, Oh really, they just have you sit there in a chair all day, getting all atrophied, and getting diabetes and becoming unskilled and saying the Pledge of Allegiance like a little robot and they make you call them sir, and Mama L said, Piglet, if you don’t like it you don’t have to do it, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Mama K can be your teacher or you can come to the hardware and salvage store with me and I can be your teacher or Helen can be your teacher, and the Mean Aunt said, I don’t want to be his teacher, it’s good for him to be at school it will help socialize him, and Mama K said, Oh, like how it helped socialize you? All those teachers care about is obedience, and I was like, No way, I love my teacher and I love the principal and I am making a lot of friends my own age. Which made them all shut up probably because they didn’t have friends their own age and they were jealous. School is the best, I said. I love school.

What I loved was not having every single person know every single thing. What I loved was keeping a few things for myself. My home was the Holt the forest grove where the elves lived where Mama K was a treeshaper like Redlance except with a knife, and no one at school knew what happened there. No one at school, not the teacher or the principal or mowed head Bexley or even the acorn kid, no one knew I could send to the elves with my mind and no one knew I was a wolf pup sometimes or how quick my reflexes were and no one knew I was Friend of Snake.

And just the same, no one at home knew what happened at school. Mama K didn’t know and Mama L didn’t know and the Mean Aunt didn’t know. They thought they knew but they didn’t. And nothing happened at school. Nothing except that I began to see what the problem was. The problem was that I had practiced and prepared for the wrong things. I was totally problematic. The problem was my mamas and the problem was the Mean Aunt and the problem was the way we all lived together outside without permission, with sardines and yarrow and faggots and stone tablets, and so the problem was me.

6

HELEN