Free As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowan Page A

you live?” she asks. I feel my face go hot and red, and then I pull one leg up between us and hug it to my chest. Truth is, I just assumed I’d crash here a bit, until I got a job and an apartment, but now I realize that it’s just too small and Aunt Sharon probably wouldn’t want a teenager in her way.
    “I don’t know.” I shrug my shoulders. “I’m working that out.”
    “I’d ask you to stay but, you know—”
    “Yeah,” I say, not wanting her to finish the sentence.
    “Well, we’ll figure out something. You can stay here tonight,” she says, slapping my knee. I feel like I should say something, but my mind is blank, so I get up and grab my schoolbag, reach down to the bottom, and pull out the crumpled papers that Mr. Hensley gave me.
    “My guidance teacher gave me these,” I say, extending the wrinkled sheets.
    She scans the papers with a careful eye.“Hmmm”—she points midway down the paper—“I know a woman who works at Delcare Group Home. I’ll give her a call tomorrow.”

    Aunt Sharon inflates an air mattress and puts it in the hallway, in between the living room and the kitchen. When I crawl into the bed, she leans down to check if my mattress is firm enough. “You used to love Elsie,” she says, pulling the duvet up close to my chin and then tucking it in around my feet.
    “I never loved her,” I say. “I was just a kid. You think you love everything when you’re a kid.”
    But she’s right, I do remember thinking I loved Elsie. A long time ago. But it was a different kind of love. I had gerbils once, about ten of them. They just kept getting pregnant. And sometimes I’d find the mother in the cage, eating one of her own babies. It was disgusting. And the thing is, when she took the first few bites, you could tell the baby thought the mother was just nuzzling it. Even when I tried to move the baby away, it would just crawl back to its mother. And you could tell that, even when it was happening, the baby still held this crazy faith in its mother’s gnawing teeth.
    In the morning I hear my mother’s voice. She’s saying my name— Snow —soft, like whispered kisses in my ear. Snow. I roll my body onto its side, skin sticking to plastic as I float on the air mattress down a blue ocean carpet. I slide my hand down to my thighs, fingertips tracing the three rough-lined scabs. I carefully pick at the dried blood, flicking the scabby testimonies of craziness into the sheets. “Snow.” I hear my name again. Only now I realize the voice is not my mother’s, it’s Aunt Sharon. She is talking to Brenda, her social worker friend. She is desperately trying to find a place to leave me, as if my very presence in her apartment makes her uneasy.
    “Great,” Aunt Sharon says enthusiastically. “Snow will be ready to go tomorrow.”

    In some cultures you are given a name only after you have lived long enough to earn it. In other cultures, you grow into your name the way a snail grows to the size of its shell.
    “She called you Snow because it’s beautiful and mysterious,” Elsie said, compelled to explain because it’s what everyone asked. But I could tell Elsie didn’t approve and, in some small way, that made me happy. Such an interesting name, people would say in a way that was more like a question, and I’d proudly explain a poetic mother who dressed like a gypsy and had a passionate longing for the exotic.
    I lie on my inflatable mattress and imagine my mother choosing this name. I imagine her at a library, with wood panelling and ceiling-high shelves, perhaps scanning a thick book on mythology or Celtic literature or modern science. I picture a woman with a round face and long fingernails and expensive socks. I imagine her arguments with Elsie, who couldn’t possibly understand the breadth of a name.
    My mother gave me a puzzle, a destiny I’m to figure out. And I’m determined to find my meaning. My high school science projects are on things like the James Bay Project,