Cover

Dedication

For Lucas

Epigraph

Traditional children’s rhyme, Hancock County, Maine

Mumbler, Mumbler, in your bed,

Mumbler, Mumbler, take your head,

Eat your nose, gobble your toes,

And bury you where the milkweed grows.

One

HOODIES COME OUT of the rain, four of them, coasting down the Birchwood Terraces slope on stunt bikes. Green hood leads, followed by blue, yellow, and white, their knees up around their ears, steering with one hand, letting the other dangle.

My jacket’s zipped to my chin, but if I could, I’d pull my whole head inside, tortoise-style, and wait out this ritual. Got to wear the old stone face, though. Prove I’m hard.

They hang a left, straying across both lanes toward the school-bus-stop shelter where I stand. Some of the other kids shift, tensing here beneath the corrugated plastic roof, where the sound of raindrops is amplified to a snare drum backbeat.

Green Hood circles the shelter, gone, back, gone, back, the other hoodies trailing behind. Scoping the new-kid situation. I focus on the sign across the street, peeling and faded, welcoming people to the Birchwood Terraces development—Affordable Family Housing—ready to eat my ration of shit so they can forget about me.

“Who’s that?” Green Hood says.

“Dunno.” Blue Hood reappears.

“Hey. Who are you?” Green Hood flashes by. “Hello-o-o? You speak-ay Engleesh?” Something bounces off my chest, and my gaze follows it to the mud. A balled-up gum wrapper. Back to the sign. Affordablefamilyhousing. Affordablefamilyhousing. I’m going to make it here. I am.

“What’s up with her hair?” Blue.

“Looks like Christmas barfed on her head.” Green.

Laughter, from the hoodies and the other kids. Take it. Take it. My jaw clenches so tightly that the tendons jump in my neck.

A girl speaks in a low monotone: “Aidan?”

Green Hood puts his foot down to brake when he sees who’s talking.

She stands to my right, tallish, rangy, wearing a charcoal-colored fleece, her blond hair in a brief ponytail. A middle-of-the-classroom type, average, nothing to see here. Only her gaze—shrewd, eyes a barely-there shade of gray—makes her something more. She twitches her head once. “No.”

She could be telling a cat not to play with her shoelaces. I expect f-bombs, but Green Hood just sniffs, wipes his nose on his hand, and shoves off down the street, letting the rest of them play catch-up.

She turns to me. “Goddamn hoodies make everybody look bad.” Her expression’s deadpan, a real stone face, not like the mask I wear. “We aren’t all assholes, I swear.”

I don’t thank her—I can tell she wouldn’t like that—and I don’t ruin everything by saying that she should’ve let the ritual play out, that now they’ll only wait until they can get me alone. I search for chitchat. “They left fast. You must be scary.”