Starbird Murphy and the World Outside (26 page)

She gazed back at all of us, and that's when her leaky dam broke. “It's not enough that I'm trying to keep the café running and visit Ephraim and . . . and be a phony guardian to teenagers and make sure we don't go bankrupt? I'm twenty-seven! Run your own damn Story Night. Do something for yourselves!” She spun around, her long, dark hair swinging behind her as she took the stairs two at a time. Devin was right behind her.

Sensitive Kale started crying, so Europa took her into the kitchen. Sapphira crawled between Penniah's legs. The rest of us were quiet as a graveyard, shifting uncomfortably. I heard Adlai lean over to Penniah and whisper, “Maybe we should go.”

That's when I cleared my throat and said, “Thank you for coming together tonight, Family.” I thought of my best memory, my happiest time on the Farm, and told all of them this story.

 
 

Every fall for as long as I can remember, the Family held an apple pressing, which started on Friday and lasted until Sunday night, during which we made the cider we drank all year. Fern Moon said it started as a Family business, that they used to sell the cider at a roadside stand with pumpkins and corn. But to no one's surprise, it failed, so it turned into a Family tradition instead.

On the Farm, we had the old cider press and apple grinder that Iron's ancestors built long before he was born. He said it was probably even older than the main house.

We worked all week in the orchard leading up to the pressing. Iron started by pulling the press out of the barn and cleaning it with boiling water to make sure no bacteria would harm the cider. Older kids got out of afternoon school to pick apples with ladders and bushel baskets and wheelbarrows until sunset.

Apple picking is a careful process. You have to steady your ladder in the tree so you can pick and load your basket without falling. And you don't just yank off an apple. That can make other apples fall, or damage the fruit. You cradle the apple in your palm and put a finger on the stem, then you rotate the apple until the eye goes up toward the sky and it breaks free.

By Friday, when other Family members started showing up, we had hundreds of pounds of apples picked and cleaned.

Together we worked all day, feeding the apples into the mill and then arranging the mashed apples in the wooden press. Iron and I would always sneak away to his porch and drink our first cup together in the quiet of the trees from ceramic mugs we made ourselves. We made apple cider, applesauce, apple cider vinegar, and hard apple cider. In the kitchen, women baked apple bread and made apple granola. The smell of apples snuck into the cracks in everything. Even the gravel smelled like apples by the time we were done. And at night, we had a big meal and then gathered into the Sanctuary for one huge Story Night, with all the visiting Family members sleeping in the barn afterward. Fern Moon let me bring my blankets to the Sanctuary so I could sleep there, too. I loved hearing the quiet sounds of all of us sleeping in the same room, sharing our dreams, all of us dreaming of apples.

 
 

I was so lost in my own story, I hadn't noticed that Europa had walked back in with Kale in her arms, the little girl's head resting sleepily against her mother's neck. And V came back, too, and was standing at the bottom of the stairs with Devin. After I stopped talking, she cleared her throat.

“I'm sorry for flipping out.” V wrapped herself in Devin's arms like they were a blanket.

“No need,” voices said. “You work so hard,” and, “we love you,” were muttered around.

“Hey, Starbird,” said Adlai, “when is the apple pressing this year? It's coming up, right?”

“It's this coming weekend,” I answered. “They're probably already picking apples.” Which made me think of being in the orchard, which made me think of the night I got my birth certificate, which made me think of Indus, which made me want to join V in crying.

Fern wanted me to go to the Farm for the apple pressing. Maybe Ephraim would be well by then. Maybe I could still make it home.

 24 

“G
et a chance to look at the book I gave you yet?” Teacher Ted asked before class started. I had arrived this time before the bell.

“Um, no.” I was aware of a few students listening as others shuffled into the room. Honestly, I hadn't even finished my homework after Story Night, much less done any extra reading.

“Well, I'll be interested to hear what you think, when you get a chance.”

Ben was already in his chair when I walked into second period. He sat up straighter when he saw me and then slouched again.

This time, when he handed back my homework (six right out of ten), there was no drawing. The margin was as clean as a brand-new T-shirt. Devastatingly blank.

I looked over at Ben, but he didn't make eye contact with me, bent over his own homework, drawing a picture there.

I found myself with a horrible itch on my back, right in the middle where it's impossible to reach. I turned my head and stared at the fake plant by the door while my eyes got wet.
I'm the one who pushed him away. It's better like this. He's an Outsider. He would only get in the way of me being with Indus. And he already knows too much about us. This is how it has to be
.

I turned back toward the teacher, hearing her voice but not understanding a word she said.

 
 

“Are you going to the café meeting tonight?” I tried to make conversation with Cham at the lunch table.

“It's mandatory.”

“What do you think will happen with Ephraim's shifts?” The stress of the night before was clinging to me like socks from the dryer.

“Not my main concern right now,” said Cham, taking a swig of the soda he had surprised me by buying from the vending machine.

I was such a jerk. Ephraim was Cham's dad. Of course he had bigger worries. “Sorry.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Ben?
It was Rory.

“Can I cram?” She stood there with a tray, looking at the bench beside me.

Cham scooted away to make room for her and started talking to his friends. I moved my leftover corn soup.

“I keep thinking about your history club thing on cults.” She plopped down.

Cham cocked his head to one side. He didn't turn to look at us, but I knew he had heard.

“What did Teacher Ted want to talk to you about? Did he get creeped out like you're going to join a cult and he's a mandatory reporter so he has to tell on you to the school counselor?” She started taking off her silver rings and stacking them along her lunch tray.

“He just wanted to see if I was . . . learning . . . stuff.”

Rory raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay. So, are you learning stuff?”

“Totally.” I took a sip of soup.

“I convinced my history teacher to let me do my oral presentation on tarot, so I'm going to research it at club. I can read your cards if you want. I do horoscopes, too.” Now that Rory's hands were ringless, she picked up the slice of greasy, orange pizza from her paper plate and started eating it. “Wait.” She dropped her pizza and wiped orange grease from her hands onto a napkin. “Let me read your palm right now! I just got an app.”

“No,” I said, pulling my hand from the table into my lap.

“Please!” She said. “It's totally real. Seriously. It's amazing.”

I glanced at Cham. It's not like Rory could find out anything about the Family by looking at my hand. It seemed harmless enough.

Rory pulled her phone out of her pocket and swiped her right thumb in a zigzag motion over the screen. Then, without looking up, she held her left hand out to me. I settled the back of my right hand into her palm, glancing around to see if anyone was watching.

She turned my hand over to look at the back. “What happened?”

My red scrapes were healing, leaving lines of soft, pink new skin. I had the sudden impulse to tell her about Indus, but I fought it. “Just a scrape.”

Holding her phone in one hand and my palm in the other, Rory looked back and forth between the two in silence. It wasn't anything like the first time I got my palm read. The Family had a short-lived fortune-telling business run by Saturn Salt.

“Your life line is long. I think you're going to live to be, like, eighty.” She put her phone on the table and trailed her pointer finger along my palm. “Okay, crazy, twisty love line. Do you see how it's interrupted right here?”

“Oh, that's a scar from when I was putting new barbed wire on the chicken coop,” I said without thinking.

“There should be laws against making kids do farmwork,” Rory said.

“Are you crazy? Do you even know where your food comes from? If you want to eat eggs, you should have to know how to raise chickens.” I yanked my hand back from her. Outsiders were so selfish and lazy, with their noses in their cell phones, afraid of doing any real work.

Cham glanced over at us, then turned back to his friends.

“Wait, I'm sorry,” Rory whined. “You're right. I'm super spoiled. Please let me finish your reading.”

I twisted my hands together in irritation. “Chickens are very intelligent creatures,” I said.

“I think it's really cool that you know about chickens.” Rory held out her left hand and smiled.

I reluctantly put my palm out again.

“This part of your thumb is your logic, and this part is your willpower.” She held the end of my thumb between her fingers and gave it a squeeze. “You have amazing willpower.” She leaned over closer to my hand, her warm breath exhaling onto my wrist. “Your fate line is crazy. I think you're going to do something really, really important, like invent something.”

“I wish I could invent something to help my Family pay the bills.” I don't know why I said that. I didn't even bother looking over at Cham.

“Yeah, us too.” Rory dropped my hand and picked up her pizza. “My mom quit her job when she got skin cancer, and she does weird things to make money now. Her latest insane idea is making crafts like corn-husk dolls. She's at home shellacking gourds right now.”

“People here buy things like that?”

“Oh yeah. They go to pumpkin patches, corn mazes, harvest festivals and buy it all. My mom has an event booked every weekend of October,” said Rory.

“In Seattle?”

“No. Mostly on farms a couple of hours away. It's all city people who want to see how a tractor works.”

“And people pay for that?”

“Mom says they do.”

“Do they sell food too?”

“I guess.”

An idea started to form in my mind. It was hazy at first, more of a pale watercolor than an oil painting. It was an idea about how we might pay the café bills. And if it worked, it could do more than just help the Family. It could get Indus Stone to come to Seattle.