I rest my hand on the guitar next to me and watch the landscape slip along the highway and try not to think about how this woman, who’s talking nonstop from behind the wheel, came to be my mom’s emergency contact and why I haven’t see her since I was a kid.

6 Castaway

The room I wake up in is blue, very pale blue with white wooden shutters and carpet so thick and soft it feels like walking on fur. I scooch up under the covers and make a nest of pillows on the queen-size bed. I am a bird in an egg.

The clock on the table next to me says it’s one o’clock… in the afternoon. We didn’t get here until almost five in the morning. The sun was just beginning to rise. Guilt rattles around in my head at the thought that I slept so hard in a nice fluffy bed while Mom is who knows where. I have to count the days in my head to figure out it’s Saturday now. I can hear a radio or television going somewhere in the distance. This house is big enough to have a “somewhere in the distance.” And I smell bacon and something else… blueberry muffins, maybe? My stomach gives a grumpy gurgle. It wants its breakfast. One day of real meals and it’s already high maintenance.

I look around my new bedroom. It has a couch that Ginger named the “reading chair,” under the windowsill. I have my own bathroom. And a white desk with a little lamp on it. A fan turns slowly above me. I feel turned inside out.

I get up and brush my teeth with a brand-new toothbrush and toothpaste that tastes like bubblegum and then walk out onto “the landing.” That’s what Ginger called it. It’s really just the top of the stairs that overlooks the living room, which has wood floors and a fireplace and glass doors like the ones at Joe’s that open out onto a stone patio with a fire pit, because apparently, Dan likes to invite his book club over, and that’s where they meet. Dan is an English teacher at the middle school I’ll be going to and also the tennis coach, which makes sense when I think of his long pale limbs. I can just see him in white knee socks swinging a racket.