We Are All the Same in the Dark - Julia Heaberlin Page 0,66
eye. Make out with boys with one eye, although I’ve always pretended to have two. Boys never notice I don’t have two exactly perfect eyes when I am happy to show them two exactly perfect breasts.
Looking over my shoulder is literally the most natural thing in the world to me. I’m hyper-vigilant. I hug the shadows. And I’m shit out of nowhere, as my aunt used to say. I’m pretty sure Odette’s killer doesn’t even know I exist. Sometimes I’m not sure I exist.
The old lady gives me an awkward pat goodbye. She tells me to keep up my art vocabulary. She says, “I will not forget you, Angie,” and I feel a prickle of guilt.
I’ve had a lot of names over the years.
Things like Angie that I make up on the spot, for one-time-only use.
Things people nicknamed me, like Angel.
Peephole. Hole in One. Fifty-Fifty.
The Girl with One Eye being the laziest and most common.
Official ones, like my birth name, Montana Shirley Cox. Every child on my mother’s side going back three generations has been given a first name for a state, city, or country plus a middle name for a dead relative.
My mother’s name was Georgia, but she’s also dead, so if I ever have a child, I wonder if he or she will be named almost 100 percent geographically.
At the group home, I used to travel around the globe in my head, picking cities, while I focused on a spider carcass that hung from the ceiling over my bunk. For my first baby girl, I liked the name Cheyenne Georgia, although Seville Georgia was a contender. For a boy, Camden or Harlem George.
I don’t hold it against Maggie that twenty-four hours after Odette disappeared, I was sitting in a social worker’s office, getting slotted for a place that specialized in bullies and fish sticks and spider carcasses.
I made three good decisions that day—all based on what I thought Odette would want me to do.
I checked the box for perfect eyesight.
I started talking.
I told the social worker I was afraid of my father.
The social worker didn’t stick me in witness protection, but my new name, Angelica, is official, certified by a judge. Angelica Odette Dunn. Angelica for Angel. Odette for Odette. Dunn because I was done with my past life, was born again with my magic green eye, and because it seemed just anonymous enough that my father would have to hunt through a lot of Dunns to get to me.
For the last five years, I have outwitted him.
For the last four years, I have lived with a foster mom named Bunny who has believed in my heart and mind so much that a full-ride University of Texas scholarship is waiting for me in the fall.
For the last twenty minutes, I’ve been sitting outside the Blue House, trying to make up my mind about whether to risk all of the above.
The old lady was right. The Blue House has gone to hell. The lawn is half dirt. Two of the branches of the big oak out front are dragging the ground. Around its trunk, a giant yellow ribbon no longer makes a bow. The front door is boarded up, graffitied with We’re Blue W/O You.
All of it tugs at a deep, sad place inside me. Odette is never coming back.
It’s just the first day, and I’m already not sure what to do.
I wish Mary were here. Mary and I made a lot of tough decisions together. Mary, who is so pretty, even with a livid red scar down her cheek.
She slept in the bunk below me at the group home for 363 days. Every night, we smoked pot and she sung us to sleep with “I’ll Fly Away,” even though goddamn was her every other word in the daytime.
I took out my eye for Mary once, the only time I ever have for a friend. A boy had brushed by her on the sidewalk at the park and whispered, “Scarface.” When I wanted to hunt him down, all she could remember were his green Nike shoes. Mary was the toughest person I ever met, and I’ve never heard anyone cry like that. He ripped her soul like it was nothing. People don’t understand that words can rape.
I wanted Mary to know that I knew exactly what she felt like, that I wasn’t just another person saying Sorry for your loss. Pitying a girl for something wrong with her face is just one rung up from bullying her for it.