coming with me? Yes or no?”
“I need some time. I mean,” he said, following after me, “we can’t leave now! Really—I swear. Wait a little while. Give me a day! One day!”
“Why?”
He seemed nonplussed. “Well, I mean, because—”
“Because—?”
“Because—because I have to see Kotku! And—all kinds of things! Honest, you can’t leave tonight,” he repeated, when I said nothing. “Trust me. You’ll be sorry, I mean it. Come to my house! Wait till the morning to go!”
“I can’t wait,” I said curtly, taking my half of the cash and heading back to my room.
“Potter—” he followed after me.
“Yes?”
“There is something important I have to tell you.”
“Boris,” I said, turning, “what the mother fuck. What is it?” I said, as we stood and stared at each other. “If you have something to say, go on and say it.”
“Am afraid it will make you mad.”
“What is it? What have you done?”
Boris was silent, gnawing the side of his thumb.
“Well, what?”
He looked away. “You need to stay,” he said vaguely. “You’re making a mistake.”
“Forget it,” I snapped, turning away again. “If you don’t want to come with me, don’t come, okay? But I can’t stand around here all night.”
Boris—I thought—might ask what was in the pillowcase, particularly since it was so fat and weirdly shaped after my over-enthusiastic wrapping job. But when I un-taped it from the back of the headboard and put it in my overnight bag (along with my iPod, notebook, charger, Wind, Sand and Stars, some pictures of my mom, my toothbrush, and a change of clothes) he only scowled and said nothing. When I retrieved, from the back of my closet, my school blazer (too small for me, though it had been too big when my mother bought it) he nodded and said: “Good idea, that.”
“What?”
“Makes you look less homeless.”
“It’s November,” I said. I’d only brought one warm sweater from New York; I put it in the bag and zipped it up. “It’s going to be cold.”
Boris leaned insolently against the wall. “What will you do, then? Live on the street, railway station, where?”
“I’ll call my friend I stayed with before.”
“If they wanted you, those people, they’d have adopted you already.”
“They couldn’t! How could they?”
Boris folded his arms. “They didn’t want you, that family. You told me so yourself—lots of times. Also, you never hear from them.”
“That’s not true,” I said, after a brief, confused pause. Only a few months before, Andy had sent me a long-ish (for him) email telling me about some stuff going on at school, a scandal with the tennis coach feeling up girls in our class, though that life was so far away that it was like reading about people I didn’t know.
“Too many children?” said Boris, a bit smugly as it seemed. “Not enough room? Remember that bit? You said the mother and father were glad to see you go.”
“Fuck off.” I was already getting a huge headache. What would I do if Social Services showed up and put me in the back of a car? Who—in Nevada—could I call? Mrs. Spear? The Playa? The fat model-store clerk who sold us model glue without the models?
Boris followed me downstairs, where we were stopped in the middle of the living room by a tortured-looking Popper—who ran directly into our path, then sat and stared at us like he knew exactly what was going on.
“Oh, fuck,” I said, putting down my bag. There was a silence.
“Boris,” I said, “can’t you—”
“No.”
“Can’t Kotku—”
“No.”
“Well, fuck it,” I said, picking him up and tucking him under my arm. “I’m not leaving him here for her to lock up and starve.”
“And where are you going?” said Boris, as I started for the front door.
“Eh?”
“Walking? To the airport?”
“Wait,” I said, putting Popchik down. All at once I felt sick and like I might vomit red wine all over the carpet. “Will they take a dog on the plane?”
“No,” said Boris ruthlessly, spitting out a chewed thumbnail.
He was being an asshole; I wanted to punch him. “Okay then,” I said. “Maybe somebody at the airport will want him. Or, fuck it, I’ll take the train.”
He was about to say something sarcastic, lips pursed in a way I knew well, but then—quite suddenly—his expression faltered; and I turned to see Xandra, wild-eyed, mascara-smeared, swaying on the landing at the top of the stairs.
We looked at her, frozen. After what seemed like a centuries-long pause, she opened her mouth, closed it again, caught the railing to balance herself, and then said, in a rusty voice: