Annie deciding to stay in Sorrow Falls created a whole new set of problems, though.
In hindsight, the whole issue could be placed at the feet of Carol Collins, because sometime after the last chemo session and the current emergency, Carol decided to eradicate all negative thoughts from her life. In a very basic way, this made sense, because there was some evidence to suggest cancer patients with positive outlooks tended to do better. The idea of being healthy could impact the health, essentially.
But there was a difference between trying to be positive and refusing to anticipate a circumstance in which that positivity would be inadequate. Specifically, Carol made no concrete plans for her daughter in the event she wasn’t there to perform her duties as The Adult.
Anyone who met the two of them in the past two years would have drawn the entirely appropriate conclusion that Annie was playing the role of The Adult, but the problem was that this wasn’t in any real way a legal designation. If her mother was unavailable to perform her duties as guardian, the task fell to her father, but when she spoke to him about Carol’s condition he made it clear he would be unable to return to Sorrow Falls in anything like a reasonable period of time. (He said he was in Manitoba, which wasn’t just north of them but considerably west. Annie wouldn’t have time to appreciate this until later, but clearly Hollis’s paper trees made quite a circuitous route to the mill.)
All of this meant she had no available adult to pretend to tell her what to do and make sure she didn’t set herself on fire or subsist on chocolate bars and vodka, or wander into traffic, or whatever it was she was supposed to end up doing if unsupervised. It was completely crazy, because anyone who knew her at all knew she could take care of herself perfectly fine.
Her initial efforts, then, were to deflect the concern of the people holding themselves responsible for her.
At first, the hospital was pretty easy to fool. Doctor Ben asked if there was an adult guardian, and Annie said yes of course, her father lived with them, and this was technically not a lie because he had a room there. Carol backed her up, too.
Someone blabbed. Annie thought it was probably Lee, the paramedic, although just about anybody from Sorrow Falls could have been the source, as it wasn’t exactly a secret. So then they told her she had to have an adult in the house when the ambulance people came by with Carol, to verify that a legal adult was there, even if that adult wasn’t her father.
The adult ended up being Ed, which turned the day into possibly the most awkward thing in the history of awkward things. Because when Annie asked Ed to come into the house she didn’t tell him he was donating his services as guardian, right up until someone handed him a document to sign.
He did sign, which was great, because that meant one set of adults was going to leave her alone. But as with many of the things that made sense in her head, this did not solve Annie’s problem.
“I’M SORRY, did I just adopt you?”
“Don’t be so dramatic. Of course not. I just needed to get rid of those guys. You can take off now, I think they have a big enough head start.”
“No, I can’t.”
It was Saturday, and they had no plans to continue the interviews again until Tuesday, at which time they would be visiting City Hall, talking to some of the long-term resident/owners of the area businesses and, at the end of the day, Desmond Hollis. Annie was expecting it to be far less interesting than, for example, talking to the picketers at the end of Main might be, because those guys were entertaining as hell. Although Desmond was always worth the time.
Anyway, they had no place to go for the weekend, so he had no reason to stick around.
“I have plenty of food and everything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said. “We keep a well-stocked freezer. We pack for long winters around here.”
“I’m worried that I just agreed to make sure a minor is being taken care of. If something happens to you, I’m in a ton of trouble.”
“Okay. A little self-centered, but okay.”
“In addition to it being bad that something happened to you. Annie, you just maneuvered me into being your legal guardian until one of your parents gets back, did you even read what they made me sign?”
“Well yeah, but, I mean, c’mon, do you know how long I’ve been taking care of myself? Ask anyone.”
“Your degree of self-governance was something arranged by your mother, and I guess your father, if he’s… wherever he is. Now I’m the one who gets to make sure you don’t die in a fire or fall through a hole in the floor. And no, you cannot stay on the base, and you definitely can’t stay in the B&B with me.”
He had clearly visited the part of the house where there were holes in the floor.
“I wasn’t going to ask to. I’m fine.”
“You can’t stay here, Annie.”
“You can’t make me leave.”
“Actually, I just signed some documents that say I can do exactly that.”
Annie sighed. “Well that’s not gonna work. Do you want to stay here? I’ll show you where all the holes in the floor are.”
“That’s not going to work either. You keep telling me everyone in town knows you, and so far that’s ended up being true. There must be someone you can stay with.”
And that was how she ended up at Violet’s house.
THE HANDOFF WAS a lot stranger than it should have been, mainly because, somehow, Annie never spent the night at Violet’s house before. Vi spent many a night at Annie’s, hanging out with her and Carol and watching movies, and doing things girls did, like talking about quantum theory and orbital mechanics.
And boys, sometimes. Especially before the ship landed, when there wasn’t much else going on in Sorrow Falls aside from The Coming Puberty.
This was not to say Violet had anything particularly compelling to offer when engaged in a discussion of boys and girls and how they might interact socially, sexually or academically. It was perfectly understandable for someone home-schooled to have effectively no opinion on boys she’d never met, met only once, or only seen from a distance. At the same time, her lack of interest in developing a more robust understanding of the available local options seemed to go beyond her innate social awkwardness. At times, in other words, Annie wondered if her friend might be gay.
As explanations went, it was a pretty good one. She’d never asked, in part because she wasn’t sure if Violet even knew yet. It also seemed sort of rude. It was one of those things you waited for the other person to bring up.
The ship was sort of a welcome icebreaker, in that sense. Once it landed she and Violet had a ream of other things to discuss. It was an almost bottomless pool of things, actually, because Vi was some sort of genius. This was another thing Annie didn’t really come out and just ask, but unlike the gay thing, the genius aspect of her friend was more or less assumed.
In home-schooling their daughter, Violet’s parents decided early on to concentrate on science and math to the virtual exclusion of all other disciplines. How they got away with this, Annie didn’t know—she was pretty sure the state required some sort of testing for the home-schooled, and could only assume Vi tested out okay since she’d not heard otherwise. Anyway, it didn’t seem as if Violet had any issues with reading and writing, and if her grasp of history was a little general (aside from movies) it was still good enough to convince whoever regulated these things to let her slide.
Her understanding of science—physics, more so than biology—was, in Annie’s opinion, the coolest thing about her friend. It was also incredibly helpful; Annie learned way more from Vi than from school or from her friends at the campers. It was Violet’s information that helped Annie sort out the good theories from the bad.