Free Plus One by Elizabeth Fama

my life vest to see the dead metal hulk, eerie in the artificial light, with its empty portholes, winch hoists that were arched like gnawed ribs, and straw bird nests poking out around the smokestack. I remembered feeling exposed on the water, chilly in the breeze. I tipped back and forth in the inflated raft, wishing the birds would stop growling at us. Now I realized that the cormorants had profited from the shipwreck. Nature had stepped in to make good use of the Day/Night insanity of human beings.
    When I sat at my desk the next night, my partner in crime had written in excited letters, “Weather Station Campground, South Manitou Island, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore! I can’t believe you’ve been there, too!” And he had added an adorable picture of one of the ubiquitous island chipmunks pulling an entire sandwich from a lunch sack, like the little thief it was. On South Manitou Island, campers were instructed by rangers to hang their food in trees, because the chipmunks were as aggressive as bears.
    At the end of class while I was packing up my books, I realized that, like the drawings of the deer and the brain, his rendering of the chipmunk was skillful and accurate, and it led me to wonder for the first time whether he might be an Artist Apprentice, a coveted and rare assignment. I startled when my teacher said over my shoulder, “It’s Frinight, Michelangelo. Come back at lunchtime to wash off this graffiti.”
    “Transient art,” I corrected him.
    “And if you’d only snitch on your little friend, I’d gladly force him or her to do half the cleaning. I don’t know why the two of you insist on contributing to the reputation Night students at this school have of being disrespectful punks.”
    I threw my backpack over my shoulder and looked him square in the eye. “I don’t know why the Day students have no souls.”

 
    Wednesday
4:00 p.m.
    I walked past the nurses’ station straight and tall, striding purposefully but not hurriedly. It took every effort not to hunch and scurry like the Smudge rat I was sure everyone saw when they looked at me. I passed the women’s restroom and found the stairs. There were red letters on the door warning “Alarm will sound,” and the security reader on the wall to the right had a bar of red light. I reached inside the neck of my visitor’s gown and pulled out the ID. I waved it near the reader as I had seen Day Boy do, holding my breath, and after a fraction of a second that felt much longer the light turned green. I left the ID dangling around my neck, but with the photo facing my chest, and walked down to the next level, the first floor. It was no longer maternity here, it was radiology.
    I ducked into the public restroom. In a stall, I took the stethoscope out of my back pocket and draped it around my neck, casually, like a doctor. I slipped off the blue booties and stuffed them into the feminine waste container. But I left the cap on my head, because the color of my hair was too memorable. I went to the sink and splashed water on my face, which had the hue of the papier-mâché paste Poppu and I made when I was little, and blue bruises under pink-lidded eyes. Seeing myself in the mirror, I wished the nurse on my stolen ID had been a redhead. I wished I had my phone. I wished I didn’t look so wounded and young. I wished for a lot of hopeless things, and then I took a deep breath and put everything out of my mind except Poppu, at home.
    I headed toward the west exit. There was no way I could slip through the east exit with Day Boy’s girlfriend manning the desk; she might recognize me. The baby stretched against her bindings, poking my rib with a little grunt. I ought to have been panicked she would wake up and start wailing right there in the middle of that cavernous lobby. But in my rubbed-raw brain her movements became oddly comforting: I was taking Poppu something real—making a final moment of joy possible for him, a little miracle. And if I