Free The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh Page B

didn’t breathe.
    Mama, Mama, please wake up!
    Later, I threw up in the bathroom sink—a sink that had often been littered with my mother’s hair. Less than a year ago, I’d found her staring into the mirror above that sink, holding such a mound of strands that they looked like a dead mouse in her hand.
    I’m getting old, Olivia , she told me. Sometimes I feel as ancient as a tree with a thousand rings .
    I stopped myself from saying, I still need you, Mama , because maybe it was coincidence that I’d finished my high school requirements a week before that, and I didn’t want to set off an up-and-down. But I did hug her, and she didn’t say anything more about it.
    “It’s too bad we didn’t hook up before today,” Ruby said, bringing me back. “I would’ve liked hanging with another girl.”
    “Yeah, it’s too bad.” Things happened for a reason, Mama always said. “You’re not headed in the direction of Cranberry Glades, by any chance, are you?”
    “Where’s that?”
    “South of Levi, where the train’s headed.”
    “Gotcha. But nope.” Her voice contracted like a shrug. “Jop and I are leaving West Virginia today, as a matter of fact. It’s time. We’ve never seen the East Coast.”
    “Oh,” I said, deflated.
    “But, hey, Hobbs said he’s walking on to see a friend after the next stop. He might tag with you if I tell him about your eyes.”
    “He has a thing for handicapped girls?”
    She laughed. “I think he has a thing for challenging Darwin.”
    I wrinkled my nose.
    “You know, helping with the survival of the weakest—like trapped dogs and lost travelers.”
    She told me the story, then, about how they’d met Hobbs. They’d just crossed into West Virginia and were looking for a jungle—a sort of home base for train folk—when they found him trying to free a dog’s leg from a trap. The dog had belonged to a guy named Ran, a hopper who’d decided not to help his dog, because that morning the mutt had stolen his last package of cheesy crackers. Ran called it karma, and abandoned his faithful friend in order to catch the next train. Jop figured out how to open the trap, and the dog latched on to him after that. Jop and Ruby latched on to Hobbs, who had helped the right side in a desertion scenario and had a good heart, despite what you might think about his looks.
    “What’s wrong with his looks?” I asked, and she leaned close, told me that most of Hobbs’s face and body was covered with tattoos—swirls of green and blue running along his cheeks and near his lips in thin lines, like a network of rivers. They traveled down his neck, giving wide berth to his eyes and nose and forehead. That might explain the hood, I thought, but what I said was “I don’t care about looks,” and meant it.
    “Cool,” Ruby said, “because I’m telling you, he’s the person to know out here. He’s taught us more in two weeks than the three months we had on our own before that. Dude might have a past—I mean, who doesn’t—but whatevs. He gets it. He’s, like, everything my parents wanted to be and never were. Free.”
    I wondered if such a thing was possible—to give up your past, start something so new there was no trace of what you were before. Erase it all. Be free. My mouth watered.
    “Too bad his walls are so high up, and I’m such a lazy climber,” she said with a silver-rain sigh.
    I smiled. “You like him.”
    “Mad crush. Not reciprocated. This,” she said, “is the story of my life. I’ve always had a thing for inaccessible men. Maybe if I had your lashes.” I fluttered them at Ruby, and she laughed. “Yeah, do that when you ask him for help. You know, this could work out. You can’t stare at him, which he’ll totally love, and hanging with you will give him an excuse to ditch Red Grass, which he’ll consider a huge bonus.”
    “Who?”
    “Older dude over there. Pushy and, I don’t know.… With Hobbs, you have to be real. It’s like he can smell pretense