I’m crazy. maybe I am, but all I can
tell you
is it’s like
I’m trapped and
the walls are closing
in. yeah, I know that sounds
cliché, right?
Yes. The thing was, Cali did know. Like the gypsy moth, her destiny was short-lived, but she knew her purpose now. She’d decided when and how it would end.
but the words
don’t always come
out
Across the wires and waves, another voice shattered the quiet. An adult voice laced with impatience. Cali could practically feel the woman standing over this girl, arms crossed, giving directives with her eyes.
“I have to go,” the girl whispered, mouth close to the receiver. The line cut out, and Cali shrugged and closed her eyes.
Cali lifted her head from the desk. Her cheek had been resting against the waxy crayon lines on her paper. She’d fallen asleep, drifted off in the midst of her work.
She checked her phone, confirmed what her stiff neck and sticky eyes already knew: three hours had passed. If Cali dreamed, she didn’t remember it, and now she was behind schedule and her body was anxious to continue with the plan.
She listened at the crack in her door again, humid air from the hallway tickling her ear. It was quiet; her parents snored softly from the room down the hall, the baby kicked rhythmically in his big-boy bed as his Sesame Street CD reset itself. Cali knew all the words, but it was late, and she didn’t feel like singing along.
She crossed the room, found the rubber spoon from her dinner, and fished out her collection of pills, transferring them two or three at a time from their tight little mattress cave into her palm. She slid open her desk drawer and tipped the pills inside the plastic cup that used to hold thumbtacks and paper clips, counting them twice to be sure. Nineteen. She’d accidentally swallowed them the first few times when she was still learning the trick. But nineteen was good. More than enough. And Cali knew to take them with water. Alcohol, she’d learned from one of the guys in group, often induced vomiting, often expelled the pills. Attention seeking, the wise doctor would say. Not a real attempt.
The drawer whispered as Cali slid it shut. The spider in the window had started another web in the left corner, maybe a better one this time. It occurred to Cali that the moth under her bed, had it not ended up there, would’ve made a tasty meal for the orb weaver. The moths flitting around her ceiling light were too far away. Maybe too smart to go near the spider. Or maybe they’d get caught in the dish that covered the bulb and sizzle to death.
Cali picked up her Outer Space crayon.
right and original—like when you’re
suffocating, burning up inside, when your
blood is
A memory floated into Cali’s mind from earlier in the night. She’d almost forgotten about the phone call. The girl. And now her phone was buzzing again, screen lit up with same area code as Eastport, but a different number. Cali answered, but there was no recording asking her to accept the charges.
“Hello. My name is Regina Simmons.”
Cali knew the woman was a social worker, probably the one who’d made the girl hang up before. It was the lilt in her voice, the strange combination of authoritarianism, compassion, and exhaustion. Cali drew another tree as she waited for Regina Simmons to continue, a sweeping trunk with feathery boughs. Some of the branches overlapped her words; she pulled out a different crayon and traced new ones over the treetops in Midnight Blue.
on fire, when your chest hurts and you
remember who you are. or if you even
exist at all. I’m
“Sorry to disturb you at this late hour. I’m a social worker for the state of Maine,” Regina Simmons went on. “I work in the Eastport Juvenile Detention Facility. I understand you may be in contact with a woman named Laura Zelnick?”
“Yes,” Cali said. Deceit was easy if you knew you wouldn’t be around when the truth came out. Cali glanced at her bookshelf, scanned the author last names until she found one she liked. “My name is Wolff. Um, Gypsy Wolff.”
sorry I
about
what happened last summer.
maybe
“I have an unusual situation here, Gypsy,” Regina Simmons said. Papers rustled in the background, and Cali imagined the woman sitting at a big industrial-looking desk, the cheap laminate kind with metal legs like the tables and chairs at school. There was probably a cup of cold, old coffee on the desk and a picture of two little kids in a dented gold frame and maybe an award for something, if they gave awards for social work things. Cali didn’t know.
“What’s going on?” Cali asked.
“How old are you?” the woman wanted to know.
I was born in the wrong time, to the wrong
family.
And I
“Twenty-six,” Cali said. It felt like a good age. She’d used it before. “Just turned.”
Pen scratched paper. More shuffling. “Gypsy, do you think you can locate Laura Zelnick? Ask her to contact me at this number as soon as possible?”
“Possibly. Can I . . . May I speak with . . . the daughter again?”
“Theresa. That’s her name, the daughter.”
“I have a few questions for Theresa,” Cali said. “The answers might help me locate her mother.”
“Of course.” Regina Simmons gave Cali the number to her direct line again, made Cali promise she’d call with an update as soon as she heard from the mother. Then she was gone.
someone else, maybe.
I
The girl, Theresa, breathed into the phone. She looked different in Cali’s mind now that she had a name. Softer, somehow. Prettier. “Is your name really Gypsy?” she asked.
“No. I don’t know your mom,” Cali said. Shame crept up her neck, heat spread to her cheeks.
things. in my head, you know,
I made them up, someone from the
right time, the right place.
And for a little while, you know,
“Yeah. I know.” The girl’s voice broke again. “She left when I was . . . I don’t know. A few years ago. I don’t really remember.”
Cali nodded, even though the girl couldn’t see. The phone slipped a little, and Cali shifted it to her other ear. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Now that she had Theresa back on the line, she really didn’t know what to say, didn’t know why she was messing around with this girl and her messed-up situation.
they were real. But then they told me, or I don’t know,
not
them exactly, but
something said
“I have to go,” the girl said. “That social worker is giving me the signal.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just that we’re not supposed to be on the office phone like this,” the girl said. “Not like this. Sorry.”
“Okay,” Cali said.
Cali, it said. Cali, it won’t last.
But I forgot. I
forgot the parts
that happened, and the parts
that weren’t real, and
I tried
to make the rest make sense, but
Outside the window, the orb weaver worked on the next strand of her intricate web. Cali turned her paper to a clean white spot in the corner and kept scribbling as Theresa sighed into the phone, waiting like there was anything left to say.