THE NEXT THREE WEEKS became a routine of sitting and reading at Blackbird before my shifts at Salishwood. Kira brought secret free toast with jam to my window seat. “Until they raise the minimum wage, I’ll take it in toast,” she said, and pretended to wipe the table while we talked.

“How’s the woods?” she asked every time.

“Woody. How’s the math?”

“Mathy.”

She was spending her summer afternoons with a math tutor, trying to get through algebra, let alone geometry or precalculus, before graduation. “My parents are horrified by the fact I may not get into college because of it, and I keep telling them to calm down, because I’m majoring in art, so I’ll be fine.”

I noticed a big square bandage on her shoulder.

“Nicotine patch,” she moaned. “Gum’s giving me TMJ.”

“Maybe because you chew fifteen pieces at once?”

She sighed. “Maybe.”

“How long did you smoke?”

“Year? Fifteen months? Don’t ever do it. I’ll be nicotine’s bitch the rest of my life.” She rubbed the patch.

“Well. Is it helping?”

She shrugged. “Not as much as horking gum. I need to find a better spot; it’s covering my waves.” The swirling inked ocean spilled from beneath the patch.

Each of her tattoos, as I suspected, was her own design: the waves, birds, whales, the pine branches across her shoulders. I could not imagine anything in the world worth putting on my skin, part of me forever.

“Do your parents have tattoos?” I asked, nosy but not rude enough to ask what I really meant: What kind of parents let a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old kid start collecting so much ink that they’re practically sleeves?

“God, no,” she said. “They’d rather die.” She stood up and wiped the table for real. “Want tea to go? On the house,” she whispered. Like Francine. Said what she needed and nothing more. I walked, full of toast and jam and tea and intrigue, to Salishwood.

—

Salishwood, Jane had told me in the lodge when I arrived, slows down considerably during the school year. She and Man-Bun Natan and the other grad students would work with the school-day visits, but she asked me to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and Saturdays. “You and Sean,” she said. “Okay?”

Twist my arm.

She gave me my official name tag and smiled longingly as I pinned it to my shirt. “Still jealous,” she said.