Free Origin by Jessica Khoury

what just happened and why I feel so upset. I wish she hadn’t shown me that picture. It was very unlike her to exhibit such sentimentality, and it’s true, Uncle Paolo wouldn’t have approved.
    Even so, I wish she’d let me keep the picture.
    I sink against the door, kneel on the carpet, and hug Alai around his furry neck. “Too close. Way too close.” In response, he licks my cheek, his tongue as rough as gravel.
    I crawl forward and tuck the corner of the map back under the bed, then change my mind and pull it out. Dr. Klutz wasn’t exaggerating. It takes me ten minutes to fold the thing back up.
    Looking around for a hiding place, I wonder if it might be better off under the bed. My room is pretty sparse. There’s the bed and a small table beside it on which sit my clock, lamp, and a botany book I’ve been working my way through. On the one plaster wall hangs my mirror above a dresser holding clothes and some of my research notebooks. They’re mostlyall on biology, which is the subject Uncle Paolo has me studying the most. Alai’s chair in the corner of two glass walls. The shelf in the other corner with my orchids.
    My dressing room isn’t much better. The clothes are all hanging, and I briefly consider hiding it in one of my shoes, but then I think that if
I
were looking through this room for a hidden map, that would be the first place I would look.
    Nothing seems right. I even lift the back off the toilet, but it’s too wet to put anything in there, unless it were a frog, maybe. I remember doing something like that when I was around three.
    Finally I pry up the carpet in the corner of the room where Alai’s chair sits. Hauling the chair aside proves cumbersome; it’s huge and overstuffed, and unfortunately “extra strong” is not an added perk of being immortal. But the carpet comes up easily, and I’m able to slide the map under it. After I shove the chair back in place, I plop down in it and wait for my nerves to stop humming, while Alai stretches on the floor below me.
    That’s when I see the hole in the fence.

SEVEN
    A medium-sized ceiba tree has fallen from its stand several yards outside the fence. It fell toward the rainforest, and I see where its roots were yanked out of the ground. The chain link was buried at least a foot into the earth, but where the roots have been pulled up, the fence has come with them. Beneath the mangled chain link is an opening about three feet wide and two feet tall. It is nearly invisible behind the bromeliads that grow along the fence, but from my vantage point I can just see it.
    Hardly believing my own movements, I rise to my feet and get my flashlight from the top drawer of the dresser. I keep it there for the times when a storm puts out the electricity until Clarence can get the generators running again.
    “Come, Alai.”
    What’s gotten into you?
I ask myself as I tiptoe down the hallway of the glass house. My room is the only one with actual glass walls, and hence the reason for calling it
the glass house
,but there are windows everywhere. As I pass them, I can see the glow of the torches reflecting off the buildings toward the center of Little Cam, where a handful of late-nighters are still dancing. Only B Dormitory, its dark windows indicating that nearly everyone inside is asleep, stands between me and the remains of my birthday party, and it would only take a few steps to bring someone within view of the house.
    Holding my breath, not daring to stop and consider the consequences of this mad course of action, I open the front door and slip outside. The night is cool and the air so crisp it makes my senses as acute as Alai’s. As if encouraging my madness, shadows cling to us and cover our trail. I don’t need the flashlight yet. I know every inch of Little Cam as well as I know my own reflection.
    Stray notes of jazz escape the confines of the gardens and find their way to my ears. The music is lively, but beneath the airy melody is a steady,