Worried that Palingenesis might be tracking her LFD, she shut it down. Probably they’d simply followed her home, but better safe than sorry. Eventually, exhaustion brought her literally to her knees as she stumbled over an enormous tree root that had shrugged aside the sidewalk pavers like tissue paper. She had to find somewhere to sleep and was long past being picky.
She made her bed in an alley behind an Ethiopian restaurant on a stack of flattened shipping boxes, her backpack serving as a makeshift pillow. The restaurant’s dumpster created a natural blind that blocked any view of her from the street. But it did have its drawbacks. The summer heat had turned the overflowing dumpster into a fetid Crock-Pot, and the simmering perfume of rotting food filled the alley. On the bright side, she figured the smell would discourage casual tourists. Someone would need to be highly motivated to come looking for her here.
A car horn jolted her awake. Without her LFD, she could only judge the time by the hazy sunlight slanting down the alleyway. It didn’t feel like she’d been asleep for that long, though. She lay on her side bathed in sweat, feeling nauseated and weak. Gamma Jol shuffled up in slippers and a housecoat. It was a bathrobe, but she had always called it her housecoat. As if that somehow made it alright to wear to the grocery store.
“When you going to stop getting in fights at school?” Gamma asked.
Con shrugged. She was twelve again and had just been suspended for the second time. Fighting again. This time with a white girl who’d run her fingers through Con’s hair and pretended it was gross and dirty. She’d come here to Gamma’s rather than face her mother.
Con shook her head, trying to chase away the hallucination, but Gamma just handed her a bag of frozen peas as if to say, You’re not getting rid of me that easily, child. Con pressed the peas to her swollen cheekbone. The peas, frozen in clumps, felt so real. It all felt so real. The sweet, bubbling aroma of pork stew on the stove. Fela Kuti on the stereo—there was always music playing in Gamma Jol’s home.
“You ever win any of them fights?” Gamma asked.
Con shrugged again. No, she never won. She was small and there were more of them. Always more. But winning wasn’t even the point. You talked shit about her father who had died for his country; you made fun of how she looked; you put your hands on her—then it was on. Gamma clucked as if she could read her granddaughter’s defiance.
“Will you braid my hair tonight?” Con asked. Let’s see Amber Thornton run those pork-chop-looking fingers through her hair then.
“Oh, you get suspended—again—and you reckon your gamma’s gonna fix that mess you got going on up there?”
“Can I stay here tonight?” Con said, asking her real question.
“Yes, but only for one night.” Gamma Jol smiled and squeezed Con’s face in her calloused hand, which Con loved and hated and loved to hate.
It would be two more years before Con moved back home. She’d recently announced that she’d no longer be singing in the choir at church. Con had become a star attraction in the last few years—this snippet of a girl with a voice larger than the sky—and her mother basked in the attention and praise it brought. Standing up to her mother had been the scariest thing she’d ever done and turned all the simmering tension that had been building between them to open hostility. Mary D’Arcy’s house had never been a pleasant place to grow up, but since their argument, it had become downright poisonous. Twelve-year-old Con knew exactly how her mother would react to her being suspended. How she’d refer to it darkly as Antoine D’Arcy’s “bad influence,” even though the man had been dead for six years. Con was just old enough now to suspect what her white mother really meant by that and was afraid of what she might do if she said it again.
“Child, you are gonna be the death of me,” Gamma Jol said with an exasperated eye roll. “Come on now and help me make up the couch.”
Con wanted to chase after Gamma and take her hand but found she couldn’t move. Gamma Jol disappeared from sight, the kitchen dissolving in smoke and haze, becoming an alleyway once again. Con knew it was another hallucination, but that didn’t make it feel any less real or make her miss her grandmother any less. This was what Laleh had warned her about. Her new body trying to reject her consciousness. So far it felt like the world’s worst breakup.
When she felt steadier, Con sat up and took another round of the pills Laleh had given her, washing them down with a protein shake. The shake did little but cause her stomach to rumble impatiently. She needed food. Real food. But food cost money she didn’t have. Well, there was always dumpster diving in an emergency. Nothing like yesterday’s Ethiopian to start the day off right. She meant it as a joke, but it landed with a thud—not nearly far-fetched enough for comfort.