around your neck?” Mae asked. She pointed at the penny. I took a step back.
But Trixie came forward and pushed my braids out of the way.
“Awww, would you look at that?” she said. “Sal’s made herself a necklace like Mother Morevna’s! How sad. How pathetic!”
Before I could do anything, Trixie reached out and grabbed the penny, to pull it off my neck and throw it into the dust, probably. But the second she touched it, Trixie’s whole body went stiff. Simultaneously, a wave of nausea rolled through me. Not the rain… not right now…
But the rain was not what came next.
“Trixie?” Mae said.
Trixie’s eyes were wide in shock. Then they went white.
The darkness was rising over my own vision. And suddenly…
Something was wrong. I was not myself. I felt disembodied, a ghost floating in a house that wasn’t my own. A small, brown-haired girl was sitting under a kitchen table, watching a man shouting through a doorway. This was Trixie, I realized. Trixie right after the walls went up… and the man who was shouting was her father, now dead like my own.
“Get your fat ass up, Molly!” he yelled. “It’s always something with you. Always making something up. Headaches, fevers, back pains… you’d better get your ass up, or I swear to God…”
Trixie’s mother said something from her bedroom, and her father went in. There was a struggle, and he dragged Trixie’s crying mother out into the kitchen and shoved her into a chair. Trixie scooted farther back, out of reach, against a box of water rations, half-empty. All of them had a black smudge at the corner, which I’d never seen before.
Trixie’s father bent down and sniffed her mother as she wept in her chair.
“I don’t believe this. You’re drunk. You’re blind drunk, and I’m out there working all day—all day, Molly! To try and get out of this place! To try and feed our goddamn kid!”
Trixie sobbed, then quieted herself as well as she could. But her father had heard her. He bent down and in a gentle voice said, “Are you okay down there, honey? Are you okay down there in all that dust?”
Trixie raised her arms and let herself be picked up like a baby, though I knew somehow that she was seven. Her father brushed the dust off her face and hair, then turned back to her mother, sobbing and slumped in the chair.
“She’s got dust all over her, Molly! She’s gonna get Dust Sickness. She’s gonna get Sick!” he shouted. “And…! And…!”
He turned to Trixie. “Have you eaten?”
Trixie shook her head.
He turned back to Trixie’s mother.
“Dammit, Molly! What good are you? I can’t even trust you to keep the dust out of my house or off my kid! I’m covered in it all day, breathin’ it in, feelin’ it scratch the skin right off my arms. All day, Molly! While you’re here, saying you’ve got headaches when what you’ve got is a belly full of booze! Can’t even keep this shit out of my goddamn house!”
“That’s enough!” Mae’s shout broke like thunder over the memory. I felt Mae wrench the penny out of Trixie’s hand, and immediately, I woke from the memory as though cold water had been thrown on me.
“What the hell did you do?” Trixie hissed. There were tears in her eyes. “What the hell did you do to me?!”
“I don’t know! I—I didn’t mean to!” I took a step forward, but Trixie pushed me away.
“Want me to hit her?” Mae asked, her eyes on me, sounding somehow meek and threatening at the same time.
“Nah…” said Trixie, wiping tears away with her fist. “Mother Morevna will have our hides. Come on, Mae.” And with Mae following like a confused puppy, she disappeared into the night, a trail of cigarette smell following her.
I had seen into Trixie’s past, somehow, and it had not been a pretty one. Both her parents, dead now of Dust Sickness. But how had I done it? And what exactly had I done?
I looked over toward the hospital, but the light had gone out, and Mr. Jameson was gone. Quickly, I headed back to the church, thinking of nothing but the memory, what had happened leading up to it, what that meant—if it meant anything.
I tiptoed over the hardwood floors as quietly as I could. But as I approached the stairs, I saw a sliver of light cutting across the hallway: There was a light on in Mr. Jameson’s office. I had to pass through it to get