flu coming on, maybe something I had eaten turned evil. Or like I’d begun to suspect, my motherloss was so real it was becoming a sickness inside me. I dry heaved. I looked around as if there could be a cold glass of water somewhere. I drank some warm Kool-Aid Cherry had mixed with soda and it burned all the way down. “If you could see me,” I said to my mother. “You would come back.”
“Rick already warned me my own family would be the least supportive,” she said. “He didn’t want any of you interrupting my process of becoming a star. In fact, if he comes back I’ll have to go. Doesn’t like us on the phone.”
I said, “Mom, I have to tell you something.” But then I thought: What was the something? Was it Lyle or was it that I lay down under him? Was it the Diviners or was it me becoming a phone girl? I couldn’t bring myself to say any of it aloud.
“Now you can have birthday parties at Cherry’s if you want. You don’t have to be ashamed of our apartment anymore,” she said. “You’re practically an adult. I raised you up and now you’re grown.”
I had never asked for a birthday party. I had never complained of our small apartment, the fact that of course I would never have a friend spend the night because there was not room in the bed we shared and there were not those fruit snacks with the sweet oozing goo in the centers that every kid seemed to have in their lunches, and I had never cared about my birthday because I cared more for Jesus’s birthday. I had never burdened her with my childish woes because her burdens took up the whole room. I felt angry she was using them against me now, the things I had never asked for. I heard a door slam, a man’s barking voice in the background. The line went dead. I rolled over and threw up in a tin bowl.
THE NEXT DAY Daisy eyed me, tapped a pen against her lip. “You don’t look good,” she said.
“My boobs hurt,” I said. “The skin feels like it’s going to burst open. And I’m so tired all the time.”
Daisy could see the motherloss on me like disease now. My darkened nipples, how my nearly flat chest had become full so fast, little red squiggly lines appearing all over the straining skin. I thought maybe my heart was swelling to burst, pushing its way out from all places.
“You have a boyfriend?” Daisy asked.
I didn’t answer. A boyfriend had nothing to do with this.
“She’s asking if you’ve had sex in real life,” Florin said. “Did you wrap it up or not?”
TEN MINUTES LATER I was outside the Pac with Florin, sitting in her car. I lowered down in my seat, afraid someone from the Body would see me with her. She lit a small joint and blew smoke out the window. It always seemed funny to see people smoking here. The air was so bad as it was—the valley was a bowl for other cities’ smog and pollution to fill, wiping away any trace of the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges that spread all around. The tagline for the valley was that we were the “Gateway to Yosemite” but I had no idea what that meant in any practical sense. If you cannot see mountains, are they even there? All I knew was that the haze sat heavy in the lungs.
“My mom said you’re some kind of puritan or something,” she said.
Florin said it like there was something to be ashamed of. Like she was so far above me. I wondered if she would have been converted too if she had seen Vern bring the rain, or if there was something about her that would have never been convinced. “We’re doing really important work,” I said. “We want to save all the sinners and live in paradise on earth with lots of rain to bring the crops.”
“You know what a diviner is?” Florin said. “A water witch? A douser?”
I shook my head no. “They take a Y-shaped rod and they find water underground. Farmers relied on them in old times.”
“Is that why Daisy named the hotline Diviners?”
“We come from generation after generation of water-finding women,” she said. “Women who could step on the soil and really feel its intention. You all are concerned about water coming from the sky, but there could be water under