relegated to the mechanic pile. I was going to have to go shopping soon.
A vague prickle of guilt set in as I fiddled with bolts. It wasn’t Petite that needed work. It was me. My head was spinning. I rarely got drunk. I never brought guys home, even if I had not, at least, actually slept with the one in question. I certainly didn’t find myself calling the guy back and agreeing to go out on a date. Well, I wouldn’t have thought I did, anyway. It’d never happened before, so apparently it was what I’d do in that situation. It still didn’t seem like me. I was by nature a much more isolated person than that.
I’d grown up on the road, my father unwilling to settle down for more than a few months. The one time he’d stayed anywhere over a year, a one-night stand he’d had showed up again and dumped a kid on him before flying back to Ireland without so much as an explanation. I’d had a pretty clear idea from a very early age what he was trying to leave behind.
Me.
My earliest memories were of mashing my nose against the car window, watching other vehicles whip by and calling “Zoom! Zoom!” at them. I loved the leather seats and the tangy scent of old cigarettes, the way the world skimmed by effortlessly and the thrum of power that shook the car as we took interstates and blue roads, always exploring. Dad taught me to read and how to fix cars, the two of us pulled off the road, me holding a flashlight while he bent his dark head over the engine. I got most of my primary school education that way, visiting historical sites and reading books about what had happened there. The one time I remember Dad having any real emotional response to one of those history lessons was at the Battle of Little Bighorn. He never before or after made much comment about it, maybe because although he was as pureblood Indian as you could get, I was only a half blood, but there was a serious undercurrent of stupid white men to that particular lesson. The truth is, I’d think anybody who stood there and looked out over the battlefield lands would think stupid white men, because even I could tell that no one in his right mind would get in a fight there. But that wasn’t really the point, and after that, Dad started teaching me Cherokee. I didn’t remember much of it anymore, but there’d been a while when I was seven or eight when it was almost all we spoke.
That was also when we started stopping in small towns for up to a semester at a time, so I could get some proper education. Dad never really understood that I was badly socialized, having only had him for company, or that a white girl—because despite the tan I currently had, my coloring was my mother’s: pale skin, green eyes and black hair—who spoke an Indian language wasn’t going to fit in. He never had much idea that grades were at different levels all over the country, or that several weeks to a semester was only long enough for me to always be the new kid, not to belong. The older I got, the more I resented it, until I was old enough to enter high school and put my foot down. I told Dad he had to choose a place for us to stay for my whole high school career.
It was like he’d never seen me before. Behind all the years of resentment I had this feeling that at least it was always me and Dad against the world, but the way he looked at me was more like it’d been him on the road alone all that time, and suddenly this young woman had appeared to make demands of him. We went back to North Carolina, where he’d grown up and I’d never been. I spent my high school years in the Eastern Cherokee Nation, fitting in just as poorly as I ever had. Those were the borders I tended to define myself by. When I stretched outside of them, like I’d done with Mark, I found myself turning to the one thing I really knew I could rely on.
Cars. They were my home, my first memories, my comfort foods and smells, and they could take me away from all the things that were wrong with the world. When the going got tough, the tough went shopping, but I went to work on my car.
Concrete and asphalt, even sun-warmed, wasn’t exactly the most comfortable bed I’d ever lain on, but it was enough to have me yawning until my eyes watered within half an hour of starting to tinker on Petite’s undercarriage. A distant jangle sounded right next to my ear, the wrench sliding from sleepy fingers, but I couldn’t convince my hand to grope around for it. Eh, it didn’t matter. Nobody was likely to come along and nick my stuff while I was lying right next to it. It wasn’t as if I was actually going to take a nap in the parking lot, even if I did feel a bit stretched thin and gooey, like the asphalt was folding itself around me, one big comfy bed.
The sky was the wrong shade of blue. It was a color I knew, hard and pure and unrelenting, but it wasn’t the color I was used to. I squinted against it, tracking the sun from the corner of my eye. It, too, was without remorse or gentleness, heat intense enough to redden my skin just from a few minutes’ exposure. Weight pressed down on me, both in the dryness of the air and in the inescapable sense that this was one of the more important moments of my life.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder, hotter and drier than the air. I turned to look up—unusual; I wasn’t used to looking up at much of anybody—and the scene changed around me.
Hot air became muggy, so full of water I choked on my first breath, tears suddenly blurring my vision. Heat vastly more intense than the air outside radiated at me, a fire built up in the center of a compact mudroom. I was one of four in the room, the other three sitting at cardinal points around the fire. I knelt, blinking against the heat, my hands on my thighs, and felt long hair sticking to my shoulders and back. I had never worn my hair long. My father had, but neither he nor I were patient enough to deal with a child’s tangles, and the unfamiliar feeling sent a shudder up my spine. I was not me, but I didn’t know who I was. Usually in dreams even when I was someone else, I thought I was me; now I felt like the butterfly wondering if he was a man, or maybe the other way around.
I tried to look down, but my head wouldn’t respond to my command, neck remaining stiff and my gaze direct and hot on the overwhelming fire. My heart knocked around inside me with a child’s excitement that I tried to quell: it wasn’t appropriate, no more than the grin that kept wanting to stretch across my face. I needed to be solemn and adult for this, the itchy idea that it would be taken away otherwise skittering over my skin. I knew that wouldn’t happen, but I still struggled to be serious about it all. That was what everyone expected, and I didn’t want to disappoint them.
Time compressed and ballooned, stretching me across it like taffy until I felt barely attached to my body, a heady swimming sensation that made nausea float in my belly. Voices sang in the background, drums thudding with resolute direction. Sometimes I joined in, singing words I didn’t know in a language I didn’t recognize. Mostly, though, I let the songs and the heat and the drums sink into my skin, and pull me farther and farther away from my body. That was the purpose: I was there to be guided. Later I would become more active in these rituals, but for now I was the student.
A part of me, far beneath the music and the taffy feeling, said, so this is how it should have been, but that didn’t make much sense to me as I snapped apart from my body and drifted into a place of absolute quiet blackness.
Oddly enough, I knew where I was. It wasn’t the Dead Zone, the starless place between life and death and other worlds, though how I could tell the difference between one utter darkness and another, I wasn’t sure. Sparks of life floated through this place, like invisible motes reflected from inside my eyes. I drifted for what felt like a long time, watching them, aware that somewhere behind the bones of my ears, I could still hear the drums beating.
I couldn’t remember being so relaxed. The darkness was warm, unlike in the Dead Zone, where it had weight and purpose and chill, even when it wasn’t being visited by deadly snake-gods. I could rest here forever, warm and content and safe.
One of the floaties popped into something brighter and more solid, making me chuckle. Last time I’d seen these things, a whole host of them had come tumbling out of the black to rassle for dominance over one another. This time only one creature came, that quick burst of light seeming distant and hopeful. It was a coyote, I could see that, more ethereal than
