Free Banished by Sophie Littlefield Page A

“Hayee, Hayee,” in his happy voice.
    Gram hadn’t bothered to ask the social worker if she’d like some tea or coffee. She had her cigarettes in front of her, and judging by the butts in the ashtray, she hadn’t stopped smoking since our visitor arrived.
    Last time one of the social workers came, she made a big deal out of Gram’s smoking. I thought it would be a bigger issue that we still didn’t have smoke detectors, and the porch stairs were still just a nail or two away from collapsing; that Chub was still barely speaking and wouldn’t use a toilet, and Gram was still refusing to let him go to preschool.
    It was time for damage control.
    “Hello,” I said loudly, pulling Chub’s arms away from my legs. “I’m Hailey Tarbell.”
    The woman seemed to tense at the sound of my voice. She had shiny dark brown hair that came to little below her shoulders—no one I’d seen before, but that wasn’t unusual. They came and went from this job all the time.
    She pushed her chair back and stood up and turned toward me and started to speak. Then she stopped and we both just stared at each other.
    The face looking back at me—it was my own.
    I don’t mean her face was a mirror image of mine. But she looked like me if I was older and had money for nice clothes and makeup and a good haircut.
    She had eyes like mine—more gold than brown, tilted up at the corners. Her eyebrows were high and arched like mine, though I’d bet she paid good money to get hers done in a salon.
    She had my mouth, thin top lip and full bottom lip. She had the high, sharp cheekbones and the wide forehead I have.
    My aunt—this had to be the aunt I never knew I had!
    After staring at me for a few seconds, she did something that surprised me even more—she turned back around and smacked her hand down on the table so hard Gram’s ashtray jumped, spilling ashes and butts. It had to hurt her hand, but she curled it up into a fist. For a moment I thought she was going to hit Gram, but instead she just squeezed her fist so hard her skin turned white. I realized I had stopped breathing the same instant that she put both her hands flat on the table and leaned down until her face was inches away from Gram’s and said in a low and threatening voice:
    “If you ever lie to me again, Alice, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
    Then she turned back to me and all of the anger drained from her expression, leaving her looking sad and tired.
    “My name’s Elizabeth Blackwell.”
    Gram tipped her head back and laughed, an awful hacking laugh that showed her long yellow teeth. We both stared at Gram. Finally she ended on a skidding series of gasping coughs and wiped at her eyes with her hands.
    “Now who’s lyin’,” Gram said.
    The visitor blinked once, hard. Then she took a deep breath like she was trying to get her courage up to jump off the cliffs over Boone Lake.
    “Okay,” she said in a voice so soft I knew it was meant just for me. “I’m not—who I said. My name’s Prairie, and I’m your aunt.”
    My throat went dry. Prairie .
    Clover .
    “What was my mom’s name?” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
    “What?”
    “My mother . Your sister . What was her name?”
    “Clover,” my aunt said. “Didn’t Alice ever tell you that?”
    Suddenly my head felt both tight and dizzy. The words on the wall, the way they felt under my fingertips, the invisible pull they had on me … It was my mother’s name there. I wondered if she had carved the letters herself. The dizziness escalated into something more, like my whole self had lost its moorings and gone drifting away. “I’m going to get some air.”
    I went out the back screen door. For some reason, when I heard her following me, I wasn’t surprised.
    She stayed a couple of steps behind me while I walked toward the woods, away from the road where Rascal and I had walked together just yesterday. A short path met up with the crisscrossed web of trails through the woods that