“You sound smart.”
“Camille is smart,” her brother told her.
“Thank you,” I said to them both. “That’s nice of you.”
“Are you the boss of everybody there?” she asked me.
“I’m pretty high up in my department, but I’m not the boss of the whole company,” I explained.
“But she could be, if she wanted to,” he added. “You too, Ly. You can be the boss.”
I looked in the mirror again and saw her nodding a little, her lower lip pushed out as she considered it. “Could you, too?” she asked him.
“Probably not, because I dropped out of high school. The easiest path to being a big shot like Camille is getting your education squared away.”
“I’m not a big shot,” I interjected. “Also, there are a lot of different paths and success is something that you can determine for your...” I closed my mouth because Silas had shot me a look. I was aware that he really, really wanted her to graduate from high school and college, too.
“How come you dropped out of school, Silas?” she asked him. “Were you bored?”
“Are you bored in school?” he asked her back, and she shrugged.
“Sometimes.Mostly.”
He looked at me again and I knew we’d now have a different problem to discuss, once she was out of hearing. I had also beena kid who’d gotten bored at school but I had handled it by asking for more and more work, until eventually I was doing things at a grade level a few above mine (and my teachers had been amazing as they helped me negotiate that). But maybe Lyra was handling it by causing problems, because her brother had already started to get emails about her behavior.
“But why did you quit?” she demanded. “Why?”
“I quit,” he echoed. “Yeah, I did. There were a few reasons. You know how I make you go every day, even when you say that you don’t want to?”
“I’m not there now,” she said smugly.
“Not now,” he agreed. “But I missed a lot more than one day. My mom didn’t force me and I was more interested in running around the city. Maybe that sounds fun, except I got into a lot of trouble and after a while, I was so far behind that it didn’t work when I tried to go back. I didn’t understand what was happening in the classes so I caused more trouble there, too.”
“Why didn’t your mom make you go?” she asked. “You say that you make me because you love me. So she didn’t…” But Lyra didn’t want to say her conclusion out loud.
“My mom loved me a lot,” Silas said. “You remember what Camille told you about how kids learn to love because other people teach them? My mom taught me, but she had a lot of problems that she had to deal with, stuff besides what I was doing. Like she had to make sure that we were getting enough to eat.”
“You eat a lot,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I do. And she didn’t always have nice boyfriends. Camille talked to you about that, too, about boys being nice and respecting you.”
I shook my head. Did I ever shut up?
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” Lyra announced, and then she had more questions. “Was she so busy with them that she forgot to take care of you? I think that happened with my mom.”
“You remember it?” he asked, turning around to look into the back.
She paused, thinking. “I remember parts. I remember crying and my tummy hurt because I was hungry.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Silas’s hand clench into a fist.
“That was what I asked the counselor last week,” Lyra told him. “I asked her why my mom didn’t want to take care of me, since you keep saying that she loves me.”
I glanced over again and now I saw him wince. “What did the counselor say about that?” he asked, and she told him.
Therapy was something new for her. After the incident with the bat and Mrs. Alford’s grandson, Silas and I had discussed the idea that Lyra needed to talk to someone besides him, someone who had experience in helping kids with trauma. Due to some bad experiences of his own when he’d been forced into therapy by a court, he hadn’t been crazy about the idea. But he would have tried anything for her.
As we got to Ohio, I needed a bathroom break. I’d brought a big travel mug full of coffee to help me stay alert and I got a refillfor that, too. Lyra and I came out of the station while he was topping off the tank, but we didn’t need much gas because we hadn’t driven that far. Once again, the phone had lied about how long this trip was going to take.
