Free Crossing by Andrew Xia Fukuda Page A

me.
    I thought I understood her a little better now, understood how in the empty waiting of her daily life, my return and an occasion for conversation could enliven her so. It bothered me that her happiness should be so tethered to me. But she sat so patiently now, her eyes—somehow I knew this—fixed not on my lowered head but on the empty plates and bowls before her, waiting and hoping, waiting, waiting. I lifted my head. Her eyes were soft and tentative, barely certain enough to stay level with mine. I thought to smile kindly at her.
    “I’ve been having problems with this one kid at school. A few weeks ago I got into a fight with him. Him and two of his buddies. As it turned out,” I said, gloating a bit, “I got the better of the situation. Actually, he ended up with a black eye.”
    “I remember that night,” she said. “Weren’t you somewhat hurt, if I recall correctly?”
    “Yeah, but I definitely got the better of him that day,” I said with emphasis.
    “And tonight?”
    “I don’t know. I think he might have followed me, stalked me in the woods. It sounded like someone was following me.”
    Her face tightened as she tried to suppress a mounting alarm. She looked at me with a new focus. “What’s his name?”
    “Logan. Trey Logan. Otherwise known as the Idiot.”
    “And where does he live?”
    I stared at her. “Excuse me?”
    She shrugged her shoulders dismissively.
    “You ask a lot of strange questions,” I said to her.
    She stood up and came back to the table with more food.
    “You must be tired. Have more food.” She placed some chicken on my plate. “It will help you relax.”
    “Why do you want to know where he lives?”
    She tsked tsked me and took dishes to the sink.
    I felt a numbed alarm rise up in me. But perhaps it was because I was so sleepy that I said nothing and only stared at her washing the dishes. And then: the dimness of the room, the soporific sound of splashing in the sink—sleep fell on me, firm and heavy. And then, hastened by the dimness of the room and the soporific sound of splashing in the sink, sleep fell on me, firm and heavy.
    I was in that sleepy netherland when I heard Miss Durgenhoff take her seat.
    “You should go to bed now,” she said. Her voice sounded very far away.
    I thought about my bed upstairs, the long journey up the stairs. I would collapse on my bed and awake in the morning sore and smelly. I would take a shower, dry myself off with my dank, smelly towel, and get ready for school. There would be books to open, chairs to sit in, classes to attend. I knew what was going to happen the next day just as if it had already happened; it seemed tedious to have to go through the pretenses of actually living through it to make it real. It was all the same routine, all carried in the confines of school, house, room, and this small town, all with the same dreary repetition. I yearned for something more.
    “One day I will leave this town,” I said in a voice so soft the words seemed to float up delicately like ashes.
    “And where will you go?” she asked after a moment.
    I wanted to tell her. That place I went to in my dreams, a place I’d never spoken of, not even to Naomi. Where rattan fishing boats floated in sedentary waters under crimson skies; where lush grass rippled in the breeze before undulating hills; where the pristine air was so clear and pure that merely breathing it in rid the body of disease. This land that I not only belonged to but which somehow belonged to me, a place whose contours embraced and contained me even more completely than my own skin.
    But I was too tired to speak. Sleep had enfolded me.
    “Where it’s beautiful,” I murmured. My eyes closed.
    “Shhhh…”
    Sleep was overtaking me now. “Where nobody hates me…”
    “Hush now. Nobody hates you.”
    “Almost everyone does…”
    “Sleep.” And she began to hum, a light lullaby somehow both foreign and familiar to me. But I hardly heard it at all. Her fingers