place these days. So it’s better if I just shut everyone out.
“No thanks,” I tell George, “I don’t really want to call anyone.”
I also cannot imagine walking out of this office. I want to stay here for a hundred years, or until I eat so many doughnuts I no longer fit through the door.
But of course, I do walk out into the dusty June day about an hour later with a bag full of free clothes, because George refused to let me pay. I’m wearing the basketball hoodie and hoping maybe I can somehow evolve into this “Lucy” person and leave Ruth behind. Whoever she was, she wasn’t tiny, and we’ve at least got that in common.
—
At the little white church, I stop and sit down on the steps to watch the river meander by. It’s still pretty high after the spring melt. A statue of the Virgin Mary is off to my left, her hands folded over her blue gown. “How did you get them all to believe it was a virgin birth?” I ask her, but of course she doesn’t answer. I notice that her eyes are cast off to the side, as if to deflect questions like this from girls like me.
My parents were married in this church, but we never went to Mass until we moved in with Gran. My parents called themselves “lapsed Catholics,” and when I was younger I thought it meant they ran laps around Catholics.
That doesn’t even make any sense.
I have an early memory of my mother and father whispering together when they thought I was asleep. Our house was so tiny I slept on their floor, in a makeshift bed my father built out of camping pads and thick woolen blankets. I liked to hear them talking in their secret adult language, which lulled me to sleep every night. But as I get older, the words that seemed random and foreign then have grown more recognizable. I can now string them together like a family heirloom that hangs around my neck, almost strangling me. Words like rules, suffocating, serious, guilt, and sin.
“Thank you for saving me from that,” Mama whispered, and I realize now she meant Gran. My father saved her, but there’s nobody left to save me and Lily. I think about the baby growing inside me. If I can’t save myself, how can I ever save someone else?
I know Gran has probably already made all the arrangements for this baby to be adopted. Will it hate me?
I’m so lost in my own thoughts that I hardly notice Dumpling, who has come up and is now sitting on the steps next to me. I like Dumpling, but we don’t hang out or walk together or sit on the merry-go-round at Birch Park, like she and Dora do. We usually don’t sit on the steps of churches together, either. I glance over at her, because I’m sure she knows this, too, but she just shrugs and looks out at the river.
It’s surprisingly nice. I can feel myself relaxing and soon I’m not just stealing glances at her, but really looking. She has a long black braid tied at the bottom with a red ribbon. I’m surprised at how familiar that ribbon is to me. I guess when you walk behind someone for as many years as I have, there are things you don’t even realize you’re noticing.
I’m also struck by the way Dumpling doesn’t resemble her name at all. Maybe I’d never really looked at her properly. She is slim and beautiful, with the most amazing olive skin and almond-shaped eyes. Her black hair shines like oil in the late afternoon sun.
Suddenly I want to tell her everything. But all I manage to say is “I’ll be getting sent away soon.”
“Really? Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I say. “I’m a disgrace to my family.”
“I wouldn’t say that at all,” she says. “Isn’t there an auntie or someone who would want to raise your baby?”
She says “your baby” as if it’s not a horrible ugly secret but just a fact. Maybe even something sweet.
“Do people do that?”
“Where we come from, babies are a gift to the whole village. Everyone loves them.”
“I can see why Lily is dying to be Athabascan,” I say.
Dumpling just laughs. “It would be easier for Lily if she was, I guess.”
“Really? Even though people talk about you?”
But maybe Dumpling doesn’t know this. I look away, embarrassed at saying too much.
“Does all this talk come from the same people who would