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"Ren never laughed at that either, for what it's worth. Some of the others did. She just helped me wrap my ruined foot in rags after the fourth toe I lost to a bad throw. She didn't say anything comforting, comforting wasn't a thing Ren did, but she also didn't say anything mean. She sat with me, shoulder to shoulder, and that was enough to let me know I wasn't alone. That's Ren's whole vocabulary of kindness, near as I could tell. She'd sit with you and share her space. And I guess when you think of it, space was always a premium back then. Maybe that's why it felt like something special. "There used to be this bully. A big guy who was making all the kids lives hell, especially the weaker ones. One day during the morning meal, he gets up and starts coughing up all this blood, just all over the place. The most awful thing I'd ever seen. Died right there at the table. That's when I remembered seeing Ren as I passed by the kitchen on my way to the jakes in the middle of the night. She'd been grinding up glass in the big mortar and pestle that cook used for the oats." "I used to wonder what happened to her before Auntie's, to make her like that. Walls built so high and so smooth that there wasn't a handhold anywhere on them, but I never asked. You didn't ask things like that, not at Auntie's, not if you wanted to keep breathing. I figured I'd learn eventually, the way you learn most things there, in pieces, secondhand and years too late to matter. But yeah. I never really did. "Maybe I could've, if we'd been there together longer. But fate likes to spit in the eye of people who get clever ideas about what's going to happen in their lives. "I remember it was raining that night. The thunder was crashing loud outside, and water was trickling in at the street level windows to make puddles on the floor. This man walks down into the basement without knocking, like he owns the place. I don't know who he was, and at first I thought Auntie must be out, because nobody would just walk into this place without permission. That's the kind of thing that gets a guy dead. But then I looked past him and saw Auntie just standing there, staring at the floor, which was strange too, because Auntie was afraid of nothing that walked on two legs. But she wouldn't look at this man, and she wouldn't meet my eyes. "The guy walked right up to Ren like he already knew exactly where she'd be, and he said something low, something I didn't catch, and then he had her by the arm. "She didn't cry. I would've, but she didn't. Not one tear, not one crack in her voice. What she did was fight. She kicked him in the shin so hard I heard the sound of it over the rain on the windows, and she twisted and clawed and got a hand free long enough to jam a thumb in his eye, and the whole time she was cursing him, words I didn't even know yet at that age, words that would've made Auntie wash my mouth out with lye if I'd tried them. She cursed his mother and his blood and the day he was born, and she did it steady, like she'd had the words ready for years and was finally getting the chance to use them. "He didn't hit her back, he just held on, patient as stone, like he'd done this before, like she didn't matter and nothing she did was going to change what happened next, and after a while it was clear even to her that it wasn't, and that was somehow worse than if he had hit her. And then she just sort of went still and limp, a total dead weight. I guess she decided if she couldn't fight him with her fists, she at least wasn't going to make it easy for him to take her out of there. Knowing Ren, the only part of her that was still was her body. Her mind would've already been working on a new plan. ... | |