“Tell me something,” Soo-jin said, talking quickly now. “Are any of you—different? Because there’s something wrong with me.”
Cate and I exchanged quick glances. “Wrong with you?” I repeated. “No. I doubt it.”
“When I was a teenager,” Soo-jin went on, “I used to sneak out to parties. My mother didn’t know about it. She thought I was studying or staying with friends. Most of the time I was, but sometimes I just wanted to be the ‘bad kid’ and see what it felt like. There was this one time I went to a party out in the middle of this field. A big bonfire and everybody drinking too much. One by one, my friends trickled off, and suddenly I looked around and I didn’t know anyone. This guy—he was too old to be there. He was looking for trouble. He kept chatting me up, getting me these hard lemonades and, like, cherry vodka.” She swallowed like she could still taste the sickly sweetness. “This guy’s asking me about my life, about school, whatever. Getting me to share all my favorite books. Before I know it, I looked back and the fire was so distant, and we were alone in the woods. I started walking, mumbling some excuse, and he got in my way.”
Everything she’d felt back then was inside her voice. All the fear of that disorienting moment, still alive.
“It was my mom who taught me to scream if I ever got in trouble. She said, bad people will think you’ll be too nice and quiet to do anything. They hope you’re quiet. So you have to scream. Be as loud as you can. I always said, okay, whatever, Mom. She was always on my case about this stuff when our life was so safe and quiet. Back then, I didn’t know about the Homestead. I didn’t think my mom knew what she was talking about. But there I was with this guy and I just knew in my gut that this was it. This was the time. So I did, and at first my voice was normal, sort of soft. I felt like I was acting. Then it got louder, and just kept going. It was like I was inside my own voice. Like I was my voice, big and powerful and wild. I lost track of time. When I came back, the guy was on the ground—dead, I thought, and I started running. I ran past the bonfire and everyone was lying still. I figured I’d killed everyone. I ran home and curled up in bed waiting for the police to show up. Next day at school, though, they’re all okay. Talking about what a great party it was. Everyone drank till they blacked out, including that jerk who’d tried to get me alone. I caught him giving me funny looks sometimes, but … he never said anything, and he kept away after that. They had no idea it was all me, but it was. I know that.”
It didn’t matter how many times it happened. When one of us brought our impossibility to the surface, it made my heart still inside my chest, a sense of wonder so buoyant I could rise into the air.
Soo-jin’s face was glowing with secrecy. “I haven’t done it again, really. But sometimes I just go way out into the woods and I scream—I just scream. To hear myself.”
“All of us are like this,” I said. “Not in the same way, maybe, but every one of us.”
She nodded, taking this in.
“Soo-jin, come with us,” I said impulsively. “You should know where you came from.”
She looked at each one of us and I wondered what she saw: these three fatherless Girls, motherless Girls, our bodies scarred and bruised, our hair flat, artificial colors that didn’t look quite right. There was a flash of longing in her eyes, clear as daylight. But she shook her head. “No. My mother needs me. My sister, my father. My friends.” She laughed a little, opening and closing her arms. “I can’t leave them. Not right now.”
“We understand,” Cate said.
“Maybe one day,” I said, “you’ll come find us.”
Soo-jin smiled, a little proud, a little wicked, and she looked more like her mother than ever. “Maybe one day, you’ll come find me.”
* * *
“What do you know about Freshwater, Texas?” I asked, sliding into the car, clutching Soo-jin’s newspaper scrap close.
“Besides the fact that the Grassis live there?” Tom asked.
Around me, the world expanded and contracted. The Grassis: Mother Four; Girl Four. The last of the Homesteaders on my mother’s list, the only ones we hadn’t contacted. The dead birds, scorched; the red-haired girl; the Grassis.
“They live in Freshwater? You’re sure?” I asked.
I opened the notebook, flipped through to what had seemed like a nonsense word in my mother’s sloppy handwriting. Birds. I showed it to Cate, who inhaled softly.