Free Pack Up the Moon by Rachael Herron Page A

scream their way into oblivion. Okay, the first thing is to figure out your name.”
    “Jimmy. Have we met?” He winked, a straight-faced lazy drop of an eyelid that made Pree accidentally bite the inside of her lip.
    “It can’t be your own. Related, sure, but not just your name. Usually people pick an anagram. RARE is what I took from Peresandra, my real name.” Rare was what her mothers had always said she was. She’d believed it when she was a kid.
    “You need a fake name because technically this is illegal. Should I fire you again?”
    Pree shrugged and hoped she looked as casual as she meant to. “Misdemeanor vandalism, that’s all.”
    Jimmy turned the sticker over and then held it up to the light. “Okay, then. What about Mijy?”
    “Sounds like a kind of drink. A Mijy drop.”
    “Yijim?”
    “If you painted lines from the Torah, sure. Use your whole name.” She scribbled “Jimmy Donegal” at the top of a blank page in her journal. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so.
    “I’ve got it,” she said. “JOIN GYM.”
    He made a sound at her, a
grrr
under his breath with a smile at the back of his eyes, and a shiver raced down Pree’s spine. “I like LEGMAN better.”
    “How about LOGJAM?” she suggested.
    Jimmy shook his head. “Closer.”
    “DEMON?” She sketched it out for him. “That would be pretty street. Or A GOD.”
    “I like ADOG better. Because I am one.” He tilted his head. “You know I am.”
    She felt that dizzy feeling again. “Fine. Draw it.”
    “Like yours?”
    “Of course not. Draw it like it’s
yours
.” She tossed him a small stack of stickers. “Just doodle a while. I’ll draw some, too.”
    A Russian family took over the table next to theirs, dumping bag after shopping bag onto the concrete. The father yelled something and the mother just laughed as the three children raced back and forth, from the table to the shallow steps. Pigeons scrabbled at their feet, hoping for a dropped crumb or two.
    After long, quiet minutes, Pree ventured, “So I was thinking. If Abel and Wichita both have a signature slap, that could be good, you know? We’re doing a lot with the bigger pieces, the murals, but what if they left something that others can find, hidden?”
    Jimmy didn’t lift his eyes from the sticker in front of him. “So you’re bringing up work.”
    “Isn’t that what you wanted? To get a little real graffiti in there?”
    “Why do people hide the stickers?”
    Pree blinked. “They don’t, not always.”
    “But when they do?”
    “I guess . . .” She thought about how it felt when she stuck a slap behind something, the inside of a newspaper box or on a café wall below a table’s lip. “It’s like telling a secret.”
    “So you like to tell secrets.”
    “Or to hide them.”
    He looked up then. “Tell me one, you.” Again, that use of
you
that she wanted to mean . . . more.
    And there was only one secret she could think of right now.
I’m pregnant.
But if she told him, he’d immediately jump to whether or not she was going to have the baby, and if she did, how much maternity leave she’d need . . . She hadn’t been working there long enough yet to do this to the company.
    “Wow.” Jimmy pushed his chair back an inch. “You got a good one, huh?”
    “I met my birth mother.” Pree offered the second-best secret she had.
    “
That’s
what I’m talking about. And?”
    “And?” She shrugged. “It was fine.”
    “You never met her before?”
    Pree shook her head.
    “So that’s a really big deal.”
    It was—oh, it was. “Nah. I’d been meaning to do it for a while.” She paused. “She’s an artist, too.”
    “So that’s where you get it.”
    Pree lowered her head to finish her sticker. The fumes from the pen made her slightly nauseated. That was new.
    “You must be freaking out.”
    Pree exhaled as she nodded. “I guess.”
    He capped his pen. “I didn’t know you were adopted.”
    “It’s not like you can see