The first time my dad told me this, I didn’t get what he was trying to say, but by the time I was in first or second grade, I was already starting to understand.
The moral of the story is, don’t attract attention. Don’t have deformed fingers. Don’t let anyone find out how amazing you are at tuning strings by ear. Don’t show anyone the true, honest heart of yourself or else, when something goes wrong, you might wind up rotting in a tree.
Everyone has a point of origin. A place they come from.
Some people’s places are just simpler than others’.
I don’t remember any of this, but my sister, Emma, swears it’s true and I believe her. This is the story she used to tell me at night, when I would climb out of bed and sneak down the hall to her room.
The baby in the crib: crying, in that anxious, fussy way. His face is shiny between the bars. The man comes in the window—bony, wearing a black coat—and grabs the baby up. He slips back out over the sill, slides the window down, pops the screen back in. Is gone. There’s something else in the crib.
In the story, Emma’s four years old. She gets out of bed and pads across the floor in her footie pajamas. When she reaches her hand between the bars, the thing in the crib moves closer. It tries to bite her and she takes her hand out again but doesn’t back away. They spend all night looking at each other in the dark. In the morning, the thing is still crouched on the lamb-and-duckling mattress pad, staring at her. It isn’t her brother.
It’s me.
Chapter Two
Never Talk to Strangers
Roswell found me in the courtyard. The two-minute bell had already rung and there was no one on the lawn to watch me. I was leaning against the building with my eyes closed, breathing in long gasps.
“Hey,” he said, right next to me before I knew he was there.
I swallowed and opened my eyes. The sky was overcast, still raining that thin, dismal drizzle that was all wrong for October.
“Hey.” I sounded hoarse and confused, like I’d been asleep.
“You don’t look great. How are you feeling?”
I wanted to shrug and shake it off, but the dizziness rolled in and out in waves. “Pretty bad.”
Roswell leaned against the wall and suddenly, I was sure that he was going to ask what happened or at least ask why I was hyperventilating alone in the courtyard. I wondered if he’d seen my locker.
I took a deep breath and cut him off before he could say anything. “Nothing like topping off a dead-baby story with some fresh blood.”
