school, which is the one equalizer among us, besides also having to find a way to stay warm. Being poor may be enough to make us all look like a bunch of mismatched, unfashionable orphans, but it isn’t enough to make us all friends.
Ruth Lawrence and her friend Selma Flowers are walking ahead of me and Dumpling. Selma doesn’t even live in Birch Park, but she walks home with Ruth every day because her mom is a fancy-pants reporter at the paper and the overprotective type, which means Selma can’t be home alone, even at the age of sixteen. Selma’s adopted, which would be no big deal, except that she loves talking about it.
You can tell she is not from a village. In a village, it doesn’t matter who belongs to who. There are so many kids, they just bounce from house to house. If you happen to notice that your auntie’s new baby doesn’t look anything like her husband—but more like one of the guys from upriver who comes down in the spring to fish—you just smile and pinch his chubby cheeks anyway, because who cares? It’s not Selma’s life that makes her different from us, it’s the fact that she talks about it.
She and Ruth both wear hand-knitted scarves and bulky hats that keep falling over their eyes. There must have been a big sale on orange yarn. Every day it seems like they have one more newly knitted item that doesn’t fit. One of them is suddenly into arts and crafts.
Dumpling thinks Ruth is all right—maybe it’s just because she’s Lily’s sister and everyone loves Lily. But if the rumor about Ruth and Ray Stevens is true, she’s definitely not very smart.
He sat behind me in social studies all last year and kept saying things like “Does anyone else smell muktuk?” Oh, that’s original. Of course all of us smell like whale blubber. It’s such an old racist joke I can’t even give him points for trying. No matter how much I ignored him he didn’t let up. I’ve never told anyone, not even Dumpling, about the note he slid onto my desk when nobody was looking. It said, “I could do things to you with my oosik that would make your fat bubble-gum ass dance.” I had nightmares for a week about that, even though he spelled it wrong. The word for whale penis is usruk, smart-ass. How could Dumpling think Ruth is okay if she likes someone like that?
—
But Dumpling always takes the high road. I’m sure she and her sister, Bunny, are nice because they have such nice parents, but as a matter of survival, I don’t take people at face value. I wait. Some people may look harmless, but most are just waiting to flare up and burn you if you get too close. You can never be too careful.
Dumpling’s dad taught her that the glass is half full; mine taught me that the glass is totally full—of whiskey. Not very many people have a father like Dumpling’s, which is too bad for the rest of us. Sometimes I pretend, just for a few minutes every night before I go to sleep, that her dad is actually my dad, too, and that’s the only time I get any sleep.
Most people in Fairbanks just lump all native people together, like the lunch lady who asked if Dumpling and I were sisters. I wish. Never mind that our Athabascan and Inupiat ancestors fought each other—she’s Indian; I’m Eskimo. Nobody would ever confuse Lily and Bunny like that—except maybe Lily and Bunny, who are walking in front of us now in their hand-me-down snowsuits, arms linked together, their heads practically touching, talking nonstop as they trudge between mounds of dirty snow. One dishwater blond like a hawk, the other jet-black like a raven. As usual, they’re laughing their heads off about something, probably that dumb Liquid Drano commercial they’re always reciting. The rest of us remember coming to Birch Park, but Bunny and Lily were too young. They’ve been inseparable since the moment they first laid eyes on each other.
—
As I get up to the corner, Crazy Dancing Guy yells to me, “What didn’t you fail at today?” Then he lists off a stream of numbers like he’s a drill sergeant. “Eighteen, seven, three, forty-two, nine.”
I ignore him. He always yells the same thing and then random numbers. Nobody knows what he’s talking about. But as I turn the corner on Second Avenue, his words curl