at the black mud and rinsing her mouth out with gulp after
gulp of water. She felt polluted. She scrubbed until her skin turned
red and her eyes were stinging from being open in the spray.
When she got out of the shower, she dragged her sheets and pajamas
over to the washing machine. There was no blood this time,
but Helen doubted she?d be able to get out that river mud. She put
a half a cup of bleach into the washing machine and made sure the
water was hot, hoping that she would be able to salvage something.
Then she went back upstairs to clean all the dirty footprints she?d
tracked through the house.
It was early Saturday morning, and usually her father would be
home during the day and working at night, but he had opted to
work a double to give Kate the day off. Helen had a feeling that the
two of them were avoiding each other. She had tried to talk to Kate
about it the night before after Claire left to go to the bonfire, but
she just didn?t have the energy to push Kate to open up. Everything
felt duller to Helen
. Muffled, like her feelings were in storage, buried
under mounds of packaging peanuts.
Helen went to her room and switched gravity off and on, alternately
floating up and thumping down until she figured out how to
swing her legs under her and land on the balls of her feet instead of
all over the damn place. She worked a bit with the air currents, but
she couldn?t do anything more than finesse her position as she
floated or she risked blowing her room to pieces. After a few hours,
the constantly ringing phone drove her out of doors. The Delos
229/395
family wanted to know why she wasn?t at their house yet for practice,
and they wouldn?t stop calling until she answered.
Helen had been thinking. She just couldn?t see the point of learning