“The hell it isn’t. Why do you think I’m still here?”
I sat up to look at her. It had honestly never occurred to me that she had a choice. “I thought you…” I trailed off.
“You thought I couldn’t leave. You thought I was stuck here. Well, I’m not. I like it here. It’s small—”
“Too small,” I interrupted.
“Other places have more people,” Pooh said, “but the problem with people is lots of them suck. You limit the population, you limit the assholes too.” Then it seemed like she changed the subject. “You know what growing up Korean in America in the thirties and forties was like? Even with the name Winifred?”
Especially with the name Winifred, I thought.
“Here I got teased and picked on and called names, and Bobby Euford’s mother wouldn’t let us go to prom together, but that was pretty much it. I had cousins in Los Angeles, San Francisco—big, beautiful cities—who got beaten, who got deported, who owned houses and businesses that got destroyed. Anyone tried to deport us? They’d have had to answer to all of Bourne. We were here so we were one of them. We were part of the community. Bourne was small enough that’s what mattered to people here. Matters to people here.”
I saw her point—that life can be terrible anywhere, that there are lots of ways besides ours to get screwed and lots of ways to be evil besides Belsum’s, that sheltered has its perks too—but instead I was thinking about how much wider her life had been than mine. How much fuller and farther flung. “Maybe a small town has fewer assholes,” I said, “but it has fewer cool people too.”
“We have plenty of cool people. Neighbors you know will be there when you need them. Neighbors who get you and what you’ve been through. A sense of place. Shared history. None of that’s easy to find. Or easy to give up.”
“I guess not.”
“You’ll leave, I’m certain, and out there, you’ll have your absolute pick of fellas, but afterward, maybe you might surprise yourself. Maybe you’ll come back.”
I wanted to ask her how she knew for sure I’d be able to leave, never mind return. I wanted to ask her where I would go and what it would be like. I wanted to ask her why anyone would fall in love with me when I didn’t know anything about anything. Instead I said, “Fellas?”
“Oh yes.” Pooh rubbed her hands together like a bad guy in a cartoon. “Fellas falling all over themselves to make Mab Mitchell’s babies. Now that I’d like to see.”
Which got me thinking about how she probably never would. That’s the part Petra and I don’t talk about when we talk about the SATs. If we get into college, we’ll go. We’ll get to leave Bourne, but we’ll have to leave everyone we know. And the difference between get and have is everything.
“Why don’t you ever serve cake?” I asked Pooh at the time, around the lump in my throat.
“Child, your mother bakes three a week. You don’t need me for cake. When you come to me, you get protein.” Bulgogi is an unusual after-school snack, but Pooh is an unusual friend.
Now Pooh lives in an apartment so she doesn’t have to negotiate steps, and there’s no one in the house next door to us. Most of our block sits empty, in fact. River turns to head back the way he came in, but I reach out and tug his sweatshirt sleeve, careful not to actually touch him, and pull him the other way.
It’s wet in the woods, but from below rather than above—the ground is sodden and muddy, but the leaf cover is thick enough that I lower my hood. River does the same, seems surprised it’s not raining in here, as if we’ve passed into some parallel dimension, and then looks at me, full on, like for the first time.
He puts out a hand—also to my sleeve, also not touching me—and says, “Wait.”
I do. I stop. I don’t say a word. Just look at him. And wait.
River is panting lightly, like we’ve been running. His color is high, red cheeks, bright eyes. He seems to be buzzhumming underneath where you can quite hear like the overhead lights at school.
What he says is “Your sister.”
“Yeah,” I say.
He shakes his head. Then he adds. “Is this whole town…？”
He trails off.
“Yeah,” I answer anyway.
“Whyyy?” He draws the word out. Not an idle why. A what-the-fuck why. A how-on-earth why. The why-God-why kind of why. Like he actually doesn’t know.
“Do you actually not know?”