Bron didn't remember much from that time in his life. It was just another home where he hadn't been wanted. As an infant, he'd been dropped off at a hotel in Brigham City. A note pinned to his chest said, "If you want him, Bron is free!"
Often, Bron thought about that wistfully. He wondered where he came from, why his mother had abandoned him. He asked himself, When have I ever really been free?
Sometimes Bron used to pester Mr. Bell for news. Bron would ask if anyone had ever made an anonymous call, saying something like, "I just wondered if that baby that I abandoned sixteen years ago is okay?" But Bron had given up asking.
"You know what I think?" Mr. Bell went on. "I think that when you got to the Stillman's, you began doing dishes and helping out a lot...."
Bron remembered it well. He'd wanted so badly to make that home work, to live in a little gingerbread house with that big family. So he'd mopped floors and washed dishes that winter until his hands were raw. Even with all that, he'd never really felt connected to them.
"When Mrs. Stillman saw what you could do, she decided to take a break for a bit, let you do most of the work. After twelve years of spittin' out kid after kid, it probably felt good. She was always heavy, but the more she rested, the fatter she got, and getting up to work just took more and more energy—until now she can hardly climb out of bed."
"That sounds about right," Bron said, "though I never thought that much about it. Did you tell her what you think?"
Mr. Bell laughed. "I told her that I doubted that you had such powers."
"If I had a super power," Bron admitted, "I'd like the power to hear people's thoughts.
Not everyone's, just the thoughts of girls."
"Why's that?"
"Cause I'd really like to know what they're thinking."
Mr. Bell chuckled. He got into the HOV lane, and then headed south, but Bron had imagined that they'd go north, toward the group home in Salt Lake.
"Where are we going?" Bron asked.
"Where do you want to go?" Mr. Bell gave him a sidelong glance, and Bron knew that it wasn't a rhetorical question. "Look," Mr. Bell said, "I checked into this charter school that I heard about last year, one for kids who want to be singers and actors and artists...."
Bron's heart suddenly pounded. He'd never told Mr. Bell about his dreams. He hadn't wanted to sound stupid.
"It's called Tuacahn," Mr. Bell said, pronouncing it carefully so that Bron would learn it: Two-uh-con. "It's a Mayan word, and means 'Canyon of the Gods.'"
Bron had heard television commercials advertising musicals at Tuacahn, but it was hundreds of miles south of here, down in the hottest corner of the state. Bron fought back an irritating fear.
"Townsfolk down south," Mr. Bell added, "take a lot of students there on placement from around the whole country, so I checked to see if any of them are certified foster parents. I found a teacher at the school who has been certified for three years, though she's never taken a child. The Hernandez family. They're good folks: middle-aged, can't have kids of their own. For the past three months we've been phoning back and forth. I didn't tell you about them because I didn't want to hold out any false hopes, but the long and short of it is, I called her not half an hour ago, and she is willing to take you in."
Bron let out a breath that he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "I don't know these people. We haven't even met!"
"They know a little about you. They know you're an artist."
Bron's head was spinning. He loved art, but that didn't make him an artist. He worried that he wouldn't fit in at such a school. He imagined that Tuacahn would be filled with poor-little-rich-kids. Then there was the family name.
"Hernandez?" he asked. "She's a Mexican?" He worried that he might have to eat enchiladas all the time, or deal with weird cultural issues.
"Not that you could tell," Mr. Bell said. "Her husband might be third generation."
"What about the heat?" Bron said. "I heard that it gets up to 120 down there?"
"They have this thing called 'air conditioning' at the school," Mr. Bell said dryly.
The man was trying to put Bron at ease, but the truth was that the idea of going to a new area, to this special school, unnerved Bron, despite its attractions.
Bron desperately wanted to spend more time working on his art. But it all sounded too ... fortuitous. Bron had learned young that good luck never lasts. You can never let your hopes get too high. Something was bound to go wrong.
"What if I don't like it?" he wondered.
"There's two girls for every boy in that school," Mr. Bell said, as if offering a tempting dish, "and every one of them wants to be an actress or a supermodel. What's not to like?"
"How long do I have to think about it?" he asked. He figured that he'd be a couple of weeks in a group home down south before all of the paperwork was done. There would be phone calls with his potential foster parents, then maybe a personal "meet-and-greet."
Mr. Bell gave him a sideways smile as they rounded a bend. "Where do you think we're going now?"
"Today?" Bron asked.
"School starts on Monday. Mrs. Hernandez, Olivia, thought it would be best to get you settled in."
Bron didn't know how to respond. He'd seldom just been dumped into a new family. He usually had at least one meeting first, sometimes three or four.
So he merely stared out the window, aware that he might never come back to this place again.
Bron gazed off into fields of golden grass and golden flowers, and fought the urge to jump out of the car.
New city. New school. New family. He hadn't had even an hour to get ready for this.
I don't have to bail out here on the highway, he told himself. If I don't like the school, I'm old enough so that I could walk away from it—and the Hernandez's.
No one would ever miss me. No one would bother to come looking.
Chapter 2
Finding the Fledgling
"Some sing to drive away the darkness. Others sing to beckon it. I always imagined that I sang at night because I felt at one with it."
A message came over the intercom, "Olivia Hernandez, your son is here." Olivia glanced up from the computer at her desk, peeved at the administrative secretary. She hadn't wanted anyone to know that she might be hosting a foster child. Now every teacher in the high school would find some reason to visit the office in the next five minutes.
Today was supposed to be a prep day, but Olivia didn't have anything to prepare for. She had her curriculum planned for the fall, had studied the upcoming plays, and she knew all of the returning students and had read the bios of the incoming freshmen. Still, bios sometimes revealed more about prejudices and phobias of teachers and school administrators than they actually did about the students. You had to read between the lines.
That's what she was doing as she studied the case files for Bron Jones. She didn't like what she saw.
Bron had been abandoned at less than a week, and had been given into the care of a young couple. But Child Welfare Services had removed him at the age of two and a half. His foster mother, they'd found, refused to touch him, often put him on a dog leash, and had been keeping him sedated during much of the day in an effort to avoid contact.
Children who suffer touch deprivation at an early age, Olivia knew, tended to withdraw,