Free Girl in Shades by Allison Baggio

— as though they were inside an aquarium, with me observing them. All I learned was that teepees are difficult to assemble, and some events made no sense at all.

    My mother took the single mattress off my box spring for her outside bed, because it took up less space than a double. And to replace it, Father brought the queen-size bed from the guest room into my bedroom. As far as we knew, Aunt Leah (or anyone else) was not coming to stay any time soon. I liked my new big bed. I could stretch out from side to side if I wanted to and not just from top to bottom. And I never rolled off if I tossed and turned too much. I found it difficult to concentrate on sleep knowing my bald mother was dying by herself in the yard on my old single mattress with no box spring. (Father had propped it up against my bedroom wall.) Was a teepee tarp enough to keep the chill out? Couldn’t the mosquitoes get through the holes? The bugs were starting to get bad out there. These sorts of thoughts led to sleepless nights for me, which made me tired at school the next day. I didn’t mind though, because to walk around sleepy was almost like I wasn’t anywhere at all.
    Jackie and I didn’t talk much at school anymore. I think my family scared her off. I think she thought I had become a bit too weird to associate with — especially with the next year being grade seven. I didn’t talk much to anyone. I concentrated most of the day on deciding whether I would sit with my mother when I got home or pretend she didn’t exist.
    â€œDon’t you get lonely out here?” I asked her one night after deciding she needed me with her.
    â€œYou are never lonely when you have yourself,” she said with a pout to her lips, and I wanted to yell at her, “What about me, you freak! You have me. And your husband?” But she was my mother, my protector, the one who raised me. And she was sick, which made it even harder to say what I really felt.
    â€œI’ll keep visiting you, Mother,” I said. “You don’t have to sit out here all alone.”
    She put her hand on my shoulder to say thank you. She was weakening, which was probably as much to do with her diet as preparing for the end. She ate mostly saltine crackers, and sometimes I brought her bowls of boiled vegetables — carrots, spinach, and broccoli — when she asked for them. Her arms were turning small like twigs and the bones in her cheeks growing pointier. When it was time for her to sip water from a blue plastic cup, her hand rose to her mouth in a slow motion that seemed to follow her everywhere.
    Aside from the single mattress, my mother had one wooden chair that used to belong to our old dining room set, a TV stand she bought my father at a garage sale, and a scratchy wool mat she rested her feet on. The prairie sun and the moisture created from spring rain meant that she had to keep the hanging door of her teepee flap open instead of tied tight, but even this didn’t help with the suffocating heat. She wore only a white tank top with no bra and an elephant-print skirt that reached her knees.
    She had one more thing beside her bed: two red milk crates that I had stolen from outside the cafeteria at Holy Cross High School and brought home for her to make a bookshelf. And on the bookshelf she put her copy of the Bhagavad Gita , cones of incense, her water cup, and a copy of the Bible — which her mother had given her right before I was born. It looked new and straight, like it had hardly been opened.
    â€œI’ve figured it out, Maya,” she said. “They wrote the Bible only to keep people in line by scaring them with punishment. God is such a villain in there.” She pointed to the black book. “It’s like he’s ready to condemn anyone who makes the tiniest mistake.”
    â€œIs it true we get punished for doing the wrong thing?” I asked her.
    â€œIf we do, I can see why he did this to