Rogue (2 page)

CHAPTER 3

I CROSS NIGEL MACKENZIE PARK AND SQUEEZE THROUGH A
gap in the fence to my backyard. The high fence and setting sun cast shadows across the grass. I sniff the honeysuckle bushes Mami transplanted from the Mackenzies' years ago. A tire swing hangs from a branch of our giant oak tree. Underneath it, the grass is scuffed to bare dirt. Here's where I pretend to be my favorite X-Men character, Rogue. In my mind, the oak tree becomes a cypress tree and the tire swing is a rope hanging over a bayou. I climb onto the tire, swing a few times, then jump off and land in a defensive crouch. I hold out my arms, one at a time, throwing imaginary fireballs. Then I practice a few karate kicks and end up on my butt.

A Hyper Chad move,
I think. I hope he doesn't get into trouble for the accident Mrs. Mac caused.

Dad must have left the back door unlocked when he got home from work, and when it closes, it skims my heel. Guitar chords in minor keys rise from the small room off the kitchen, which used to be a pantry until he turned it into a recording studio. The door is open, but judging from the slow, mournful melody, I don't think he wants to talk.

A box of spaghetti sits on the counter next to a jar of tomato sauce. The same dinner three nights in a row.

Dad's random chords segue into the Jackson Browne song “How Long.” The band used to play that song all the time. It was one of the dozen or so that Mami sang in English, and she sang it so beautifully that half the people in the audience wiped their eyes with tissues. When Dad plays the melody, I know he misses Mami. It also means I'll be cooking dinner tonight because he's too depressed to do it himself.

I pour myself a glass of milk and put a pot of water on the stove to boil. I have ten minutes until I have to add the spaghetti, so I go upstairs to my room, flop onto my bed, and stare at the poster on the ceiling. “Hey, Rogue,” I say out loud. “I think I found a friend. His name is Chad.”

Rogue stares back at me. Actually, Anna Paquin playing Rogue stares at me, and I wish they'd gotten me to play her instead. She's just an actress and I'm the real thing.

Rogue's wavy hair matches my hair. Mine falls to the middle of my back. It's cut in layers, a perfect combination of Mami's dark brown hair and Dad's light brown hair that goes to honey blond in the summer. I comb it over my right eye just like Rogue does, and one of these days I'm going to get that blond streak in front too. Like Rogue I don't wear makeup, because it takes too much time to put on and gets in the way when you're trying to be a superhero. In the poster on my ceiling, Rogue is dressed in black leather and looks away, down at her feet and a little to the left. She looks at the same spot I do when I talk to people.

Rogue's real name is Anna Marie. She's Cajun, from the bayous of Mississippi. Her parents were hippies like Dad—who met Mami at a music festival and dropped out of college after Mami got pregnant with my oldest brother, Eli. And when Anna Marie was fourteen, her mother left her family, just like my mother left me. Once I became obsessed with Rogue, I read everything I could about Cajuns and decorated my walls with pictures of bayous and cypress trees, cooking posters with recipes for gumbo and jambalaya, and maps. Because of her, I decided to take French last year. Mami, who fled the war in El Salvador with her mother and brothers when she was a teenager, wanted me to sign up for Spanish.

“Why should I take Spanish with beginners when I've spoken it all my life?” I asked.

“Because you don't know how to read and write it. And I don't have time to teach you.” Her father had taught high school before he died in the war, so reading and writing are important to her.

And already
je parle français mieux que les étudiants en l'ecole secondaire,
mainly from websites and the free videos I've downloaded. Now that I'm not in school, I have to teach myself French, and I'm learning a lot faster than I did in a class where the students acted up and took forever to figure things out. Ms. Latimer, the homeschool teacher the district sent me, comes two hours a day to cover English, math, science, and social studies, and the rest of the time, I get turned loose to study with Mr. Internet.

I'm typing
muriatic acid
into Google when I hear voices below.

I make out Dad's. And Mrs. Mac's. I check the clock at the bottom of my computer screen.

Six thirty-five. I forgot the water on the stove. And my promise to be extra helpful ever since I got kicked out of school.

I scramble downstairs, expecting to smell scorched pot the closer I get to the kitchen. Conversation stops me before I turn the corner from the living room. No burning odor. Someone—Dad or Mrs. Mac—must have taken care of the water for me. I press myself against the wall to listen.

“Are you still homeschooling her?” Mrs. Mac doesn't sound nearly as shaky as she did after the accident.

“Don't have a choice, Dee.”

“You should get her counseling too. It's helped me after Nigel . . .”

I'm not so sure about that. Mrs. Mac did wreck two cars today. But Dad doesn't say what I'm thinking. In fact, he doesn't say anything.

“It's not right to let her struggle.”

I turn Mrs. Mac's words over in my mind. Is that what I'm doing?
Struggling?

I hold my breath, waiting for Dad to say what I think he's going to say. What he says to Ms. Latimer. That I'm immature. That I can't control my anger—or my tears. That I miss my mother.

“What do you think I should do?” Dad finally asks.

“You can get her a diagnosis. Nigel and I wondered if she might have something else. Something related to autism.”

“So they can put her in special-needs classes rather than the honors classes where she belongs? If Yasmín found out they weren't letting her reach her potential . . .”

“She's not here, J.T. You have to do what's right for Kiara.”

“Which is getting her back to school.” After a few seconds of silence, he says, “God, I wish Yasmín was here . . .”

“It's tough being alone. I know. But you can get help.”

“Kiara doesn't need a shrink.”

The clattering of pots ends the discussion, but it doesn't stop my mind from stirring their words and a lot of other scary stuff too. When Ms. Latimer told Dad they might put me in a special-needs class in high school next year, I asked Mr. Internet about “special-needs kids” and at the top of a list called Alphabet Soup found Asperger's syndrome.

I wonder if that's what Rogue has, why she can't touch people or be touched and why she has to absorb their emotions, which she does when she touches someone. Her emotions didn't develop the way they were supposed to because of a mutation.

I can't tell Dad or Mrs. Mac what Eli said to Max when they came home from their college spring break last month—the week before I got kicked out of school—but I can't forget it either. Sometimes the words knock around the inside of my skull so fast I'm afraid they're going to burst out without me saying them.

• • •

I shouldn't have stood in the hall while they talked about Mami that morning—just like I shouldn't be eavesdropping now. Back when my brothers lived at home, I used to listen outside their shared bedroom all the time, trying to discover the secrets of making friends and what it was like to have them.

“I heard her sing in Montreal last week,” Max said. Because he goes to the University of Vermont, he's close enough to visit her. And he's always been the one most into music—like her. “She sounds better than ever. And she's happy to be performing again.”

“Glad someone's happy,” Eli said. “And it pays a lot more than tutoring or cleaning houses while Corazón del Este fell apart bit by bit.”

Eli was right about the bit-by-bit part. Three years ago he won a scholarship for a premed program at Boston College. After he left home, the band started getting fewer gigs. Dad got a job at Tech Town and Mami as a house cleaner, which made it even harder for them to travel to their remaining gigs. Then my two uncles returned to Montreal, where their mother, my
abuela,
lived. And when Max started college last fall, the band broke up for good.

“Eli, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. To be a backup vocalist for one of Canada's greatest singers. She's going to take Mami to the next level for sure.” Max paused. “And, get this.”

“What, bro?”

“I'm going to audition for her band soon as school's out.”

“Good for you, Max. Good for Mami. Totally stinks for Kiara, though.” I held my breath at Eli's mention of my name. “I mean, we're in college, so it doesn't matter as much. But imagine living with someone as helpless as Dad. Then imagine that person being Kiara.”

A cry caught in my throat. At least Dad had stuck around to take care of me. Mami hadn't.

“Poor Kiara,” Max said. “There's no way he can handle her.”

Then Eli lowered his voice, as if he had the special power to see me through walls. “There's something I found out in my molecular biology course this semester. The chemotherapy they gave Dad way back when he had cancer. It causes genetic mutations. That's probably why Kiara is—”

“Different,” Max finished.

A mutant. Like Rogue. Contaminated with toxic chemicals.

“Well, I hope Dad gets it together to get her some help,” Eli said. “Because Mami was good with her. She got Kiara to talk to people like a normal person instead of staring at the floor or throwing a tantrum for no reason.”

I didn't understand. How could Mami be so good with me if she left me?

CHAPTER 4

I PUSH MY HEAD AGAINST THE WALL THAT HIDES ME FROM
my father and Mrs. Mac. No more listening to other people talk about me when they think I can't hear them. I have to make them understand.

After a deep breath, I step into the kitchen. “I know what's wrong with me.”

Dad looks up from the pan of spaghetti sauce. He hasn't taken off his blue vest from his job at the Tech Town in Manchester. His name tag reads JEREMY T. as if he's a kid in elementary school, not the guitarist J. T. Thornton of Corazón del Este. Mrs. Mac holds the oven mitts. Cloudy water gushes over the top of the spaghetti pot and sizzles when it hits the stove.

I try to meet their eyes but end up watching the boiling water retreat to the inside of the pot as soon as Mrs. Mac turns off the gas. “It
is
a type of autism. Asperger's syndrome,” I say.

“That's what I tried to tell you, J.T.” Mrs. Mac slips her hands inside the oven mitts. She carries the pot to the sink and pours water and spaghetti into a colander. “She's smart as a whip but struggles in social situations.”

That word again. I'm
struggling.

Dad runs his fingers through his hair. Around his temples are sprinkles of gray and even more in his trimmed beard. “She spends too much time on the Internet, finding diseases to worry about. I'm almost sorry I got her that computer.”

Hello. I'm here. Not eavesdropping from the living room.
Heat bubbles inside me. I sink my teeth into my lower lip, to keep from saying something that would get me in trouble. I don't care about Dad, but I think Mrs. Mac is trying to help me.

As if my thoughts have supernatural powers, Mrs. Mac hands the colander to Dad and turns to me. “I was packing up this evening and found a book for you, Kiara.” She reaches for a stack of books on the kitchen table, but since she forgot to take off her oven mitts, she knocks them to the floor instead. She shakes her head, the same way she did in her driveway after the accident. “I'm sorry, dear. I'm getting so spacey.”

“Maybe you hurt yourself this afternoon. I can look it up online,” I offer, thinking of the search terms “concussion symptoms.”

“No, it's everything. Not just today.”

In my mind, I change the terms to “chronic disorientation”—some of the words I read last week when I was trying to figure out why Dad made the same thing every night for dinner, if he remembered to cook at all.

She ducks under the table. Her skirt spreads in a near-perfect circle across the wood plank floor. “Got it.” She stands with the books gathered in her arms and gives me the one on top.

“
Animals in Translation,
” I read, and then the author's name. “Temple Grandin.” It's a grown-up book. A hardcover. The book's jacket is torn, maybe from falling off the table. Torn covers make me nervous, but I don't want to seem ungrateful. I try to make the edges stick together by rubbing them over and over with my fingernail. “Thank you, Mrs. Mac.”

“She reminds me of you. And she has a special talent for understanding animals.”

The X-Men have special powers, which is sort of like special talents except special powers are superhuman, like Rogue absorbing people's emotions, Karma making people go where she wants them to go using mental energy, or Wolverine healing tears and wounds. This Temple Grandin doesn't look like any of the X-Men. In fact, she looks like a grown-up cowboy with her Western shirt and square face. Her name could belong to a man too. I have to read the inside flap to find out she's a woman.

“Thank you,” I say again.

Over dinner, Dad and Mrs. Mac decide to have her car towed to the junkyard and pay for the Elliotts' repair herself rather than calling her insurance company. Across the table, I finish the first chapter of the book. I have no special talent at understanding animals—in fact, the Mackenzies' cats and I pretty much avoided each other—but it's cool to read a book by someone who Mrs. Mac says is just like me. And she is.

Even though I started talking at a much earlier age than Temple Grandin did, she also got into fights at school and cried when people were mean to her. When she was going into ninth grade, her parents sent her to a special boarding school for emotionally disturbed children where she learned to talk to animals, like horses that had been mistreated. When I read that part, my stomach tightens up, and I can't eat anymore. I don't want to have to go to a special school. And I want friends who are people. Not horses. Anyway, Dad can't afford a horse.

I keep going because I know that if Temple Grandin wrote a book, she must have turned out all right. Dad doesn't tell me not to read at the dinner table. Mami would have, but she's not here. She hasn't even phoned us, even though Tuesday evening at six thirty is when she usually calls. After the plates are cleared—I'm too busy reading to see who does it—Dad says he's driving Mrs. Mac back to her new place with some of her boxes. “Go ahead and finish your homework,” he says. “Ms. Latimer comes early on Wednesdays.”

I fold a napkin in half to mark my place in the book. “Can you leave your phone?” I ask. “In case Mami calls.”

He shakes his head. “She already called. When you were out.”

“She called early?”
Unfair.

“She has a rehearsal tonight. They're extending the tour.”

“Which means she's not coming home next month?” My heart kicks against my rib cage. I squeeze the book, ready to throw it across the room. But what would Mrs. Mac say if I had a meltdown and destroyed the present she gave me?

“No, she isn't. She's touring all next month and then working at the studio through the summer.” Dad rubs his eyes, then flattens his hair with his palms of his hands. “I don't like it any more than you do. But with your brothers in college and you going one day, we need the money.” Glancing around the kitchen, I see that Mrs. Mac has left. Dad and I are by ourselves, and if he didn't have to take Mrs. Mac home, he'd go back into his pantry and play his songs the way he did when I got home this evening. The way he does every time Mami calls. Doesn't she realize how much we need
her
?

And I missed her call. Because I met Chad in the park, and we saw Mrs. Mac ram the back of his parents' van. He might be my friend now, but I have to do the right things so he won't go away like Melanie Prince-Parker and all the other New Kids.

I don't have Mami to tell me what the right things are.

But I do have Mr. Internet. And when I go upstairs to ask him how kids with Asperger's syndrome can find friends, he has 255,000 answers for me.