Chapter 2

Vivian Reed drove fast. Outside the window, the houses and trees blurred into gray smears.

Her building was tall—so tall we had to ride up in a big metal box that dinged when it stopped. The apartment itself was small and cluttered, messier even than the home I'd shared with my mother, and the air inside smelled bad.

She pointed to a small, pitch-dark room stacked with cardboard boxes. "You sleep here from now on." Then she pointed at a corner. "That's the bathroom. Drink water if you're hungry. Don't come out. Don't make noise."

She shut her own bedroom door behind her.

This home was colder than the inside of her car had been.

I spread the little blanket my mother had left me on the floor, hugged my backpack, and sat down on top of it. I didn't dare move. I didn't dare make a sound.

At night, Vivian would set a bag of stale crackers on the floor outside my door, knock once, and walk away. They were salty and not very good, but eating them kept my stomach from growling. I was hungry enough that at night I'd crush them into crumbs and lick them up bit by bit off my palm, just to make the bag last longer.

One day, while I sat in the storage room drawing my sun, I heard someone knock at the front door. It was Margaret Ellis from next door—Granny Ellis, as everyone in the building called her. She was holding a steaming bowl of pierogies. When she saw me, she froze for a second, sighed, and called Vivian out of her room.

"Vivvy, how could you let this child eat that?" Granny Ellis pointed at the bag of crackers by my feet, her voice sharp. "Look how thin he is. A stiff wind could blow him away."

Vivian leaned against the doorframe and gave a cold laugh. "He's an idiot. He should be grateful for whatever he gets. What, Granny Ellis, does it break your heart? Take him home and feed him yourself, then."

"How can you talk about the boy that way!" Granny Ellis's face went red with anger. She pressed the bowl of pierogies into my hands, pulled me out into the hallway, and whispered to Vivian. "Don't talk about him like that. He's just slow. But look how well-behaved he is—all these days here, and he hasn't cried or made a fuss once. I heard his mother cut ties with her entire family for your father's sake and raised him alone. Hard life. And then to get lung cancer so young, without ever once giving up on this boy—"

"So what!" Vivian's voice suddenly rose, sharp as a cat with its tail stepped on. It made me jump too. "What about my father? He gambled his way into learning card tricks to pay for this idiot's treatment, and got beaten to death for it! When he left me and my mother for this idiot's mother, did he ever once think about us? My mother hated him for it her whole life—hated me too, because of him—until she finally ran off with some drifter. Why does his precious little family of three get to love each other so much, while I'm the one stuck cleaning up this mess?"

She threw one last hard look at me and Granny Ellis, then slammed the door.

Granny Ellis let out another sigh beside me.

I held the warm bowl of pierogies. They smelled wonderful. But I couldn't eat.

I didn't understand most of what Vivian had said—something about card tricks, something about a drifter. I only understood two things. One was "idiot." Granny Ellis said I was slow; Vivian called me an idiot. The other was that my father was gone. He'd gone to the other world before my mother even had.

I looked down at the plump white pierogies in the bowl.

A tear fell and landed right in it.