Free Overnight by Adele Griffin Page B

the house, too, in places where people who lived here would have wiped clean. Also, the rooms all had a mushroom smell. An odor of things that have sat too long in closed air.
    She did not contradict, though. She did not want to make Drew angry. She stood on her toes to open the cupboard. She saw baking powder and chili powder, salt and pepper, vinegar, and a dented box of crackers. She pulled down the salt and vinegar and crackers. Maybe she could use the crackers to make a version of salt-and-vinegar potato chips? That might taste good. In another cupboard was a saucer that looked useful for dipping. She returned to sit at the table and she unscrewed the top to the vinegar.
    “You want some crackers and dip?”
    “Ymm,” Drew said as he sipped his beer. He set the can on the table and studied her. “Gray Rosenfeld, right? Rosenfeld. That’s Jewish. I got a couple of Jewish friends. But you don’t look like any Rosenfeld I met.”
    “I was adopted,” Gray answered promptly. She had been told and had told others that she was adopted ever since she could remember. “Jewish people come in all shapes and colors,” she added. Someone had said this to her once. She pooled the vinegar into the saucer’s center and floated a cracker like a small white raft on swamp water.
    “Yeah, and you don’t look like any Gray I know, either.” Drew put a hand over one eye, then the other, studying Gray as if she were an eye chart. “Nah. I never met anyone named Gray. But if I did, she wouldn’t look like you. Nope, no sirree.”
    “What do I look like, then?” she asked, although she was not sure if she was ready to know. Besides, she did not like Drew’s tone.
    “I dunno. Maybe like a half Chinese? Or Mongol? It’s your eyelids, see. How they bend funny.”
    “They do not!” She could not resist touching her fingers to the outer corners of her eyelids, which felt the same as always.
    “You’re small, too. Like maybe you’re stunted, huh? Where were you adopted from?” Drew leaned in on his elbows. “Some malnourished country?”
    Gray used her pinkie to flip over the cracker. It was soaked with vinegar and its shape bloated. She could tell that it was not going to taste very good. “I don’t know. Not from very far away. Not from another continent or anything. I’m American.”
    “You sure?” Drew took another sip. Gray wondered if he was trying to provoke her on purpose. “You were adopted in America,” he continued, pointing his finger at her. “That’s all you know for certain. Right? But you could have come from anyplace else. Originally.”
    “My birth mother lives in America, in the Southwest. I’m allowed to contact her when I turn eighteen,” Gray explained. “And, for your information, practically everyone in the United States comes from someplace else, originally.”
    “Everyone comes from someplace, sure. But you could come from anyplace.” Drew sat back and winked. “Chew on that.”
    “I know who I am,” said Gray. She was not upset, not really—Drew was being a bully, like how Topher sometimes acted to Caitlin and Ty—but she felt her eyes sting a little, as if to remind her that she could be sad if she wanted. “What about you? What’s your last name?”
    “Doe.” Drew smiled as if this were a joke. “Brothers, sisters?”
    “I’ve got a younger brother. He’s seven.”
    “He’s adopted?”
    “No.”
    “Yep. That happens all the time.”
    “What? What happens?”
    “You know, folks try to have a kid and they can’t and so they adopt and then they’re relaxed and that’s when they end up having the kid they want. Their real kid.”
    “I’m their real kid.”
    “Okeydoke.”
    “I am!”
    “Whatever you say. Whatever you say, whoever you are, Gray Rosenfeld.” Drew smiled. His teeth looked mean. They were too square, each one identical to the next one over, like teeth soldiers at attention against her.
    Gray decided she did not want to talk to Drew Doe anymore.