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Everett glanced at Linnea but bypassed her to look at Ulla. “Are you coming to the Halloween party?”

Wiley belched and said, “Hell yes, Oo-la-la. Me and you are gonna be Tarzan and Jane!” He pounded his chest and bellowed.

The boys at the table hooted. Ulla rolled her eyes. Nowadays, Wiley traded insults for sexual harassment. He would bat his eyebrows, tug her hair, and blow on her neck. She only tolerated it because he was Everett’s best friend, and it seemed these days the only way to stick with Linnea was to stick with her love-of-all-things, Everett Barnes. So she didn’t slap away Wiley’s hand or kick him in the balls but certainly didn’t encourage him with a flighty giggle or a high-pitched, “Wi-ley, sto-op,” like the other girls did.

“Hey, Lin,” said Wiley. “You should go as Princess Leia. Ev has a Han Solo costume.”

Ulla felt Linnea’s spirit re-inflate with that suggestion, and she swore Linnea’s heart must’ve stopped when Everett said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

She and Ulla had planned on being zombies, but now they’d spend the rest of the afternoon after school roaming Kmart to sift through leftover costumes.

Ulla began counting down the days to Thanksgiving, imagining the ways she’d console Linnea when Everett was gone.

Linnea whispered in Ulla’s ear, “Are you still going as a zombie?”

Ulla shrugged. “I’ll go as a car mechanic. Put on my coveralls with some black paint.”

“So you’re not dressing up at all then,” Everett interjected.

Ulla shot him a disdainful look, annoyed at his eavesdropping. “At least I know how to change a tire.”

“Ooh, wouldn’t it be nice if we all had dyke-moms to teach us that,” Everett fired back. The boys surrounding them roared and pounded the table.

Ulla’s chest tightened as if shriveling from flames. She slid a heat-filled look to Linnea who stared at her hands. Just this once, Lin, please.

Nothing.

Ulla stood from the table with her lunch tray. It shook in her hands. She hurried to the garbage and threw the entire tray into the trash instead of just the food.

“Oo-la-la, you forgot something!” Wiley heckled.

The derisive laughter scorched her further. She broke into a run out of the cafeteria and out of the school.

The crisp air cooled Ulla’s face and chilled her arms through her plaid flannel. She numbly walked, her feet doing the work when her mind couldn’t get unstuck. Dyke-mom. How much more normal would she feel if she had a father! How much less would she have to bear her spikes of armor in protection from her peers? Did she really believe her mother’s nonsense about losing her memory? Ulla’s hatred toward Everett shifted with each step home.

When she arrived at her house, the door was locked, but she found the hidden key in the crevice of the backyard oak tree. She slammed into the house, needing to do something with her anger.

With the house in disarray, boxes torn apart, Ulla tucked the evidence inside her sweatshirt and raced along Maple Street, past the library and the Nazarene church. She veered off the main road, out of sight of any cars and nosey townspeople. She crunched through the dead leaves and kicked away spindly sticks, then skipped across Snake River under the overpass bridge, leaping to and from rock piles where the water was shallow to avoid soaking her Keds. When the pavement on the main road hit gravel, she broke into a sprint. The loose earth billowed in a dust cloud behind. She ran past the chain-link gates that were open with the wooden sign tacked to it in painted-black lettering: Mora Wrecking Yard.

Sugar, the dog, came yapping to greet her, though slower in her aging years. But Ulla ignored Sugar and followed the trail of hollow radio music bouncing off the concrete walls of the garage where she found her mother. The hood of a Chevy Apache truck had swallowed Ronja. It was fatally rusted and the tires were dead. Her mother had a foot planted on the rickety bumper and a knee balanced on the rim with a screwdriver in hand. She dug inside, cranking the fan with the tool.

Ulla marched up next to the hood. “What year is it?”

Her mother startled, then paused, gauging Ulla. “1950, pulled from the river,” she said with a huff from her exertion. “You’re not in school.” She blew a wisp of blonde hair from her eyes. It had escaped the bandana used to gather the hair from her neck.

Ulla whipped out the document she’d scavenged.

Her mother tilted her head, studying it, then her face dissolved as her eyes widened. “What are you doing with that?”

Ulla slammed her finger on it. “Right there. Mother. Right there. It says Peter Johansson is my father. I even had his last name before the police changed it. Why did you lie to me!”

Her mother drew herself into a rigid defense. “I never lied to you, Ulla.”

“Peter is my pappa! And you took him away from me!”

“No, he is not. I put his name on that birth certificate because I was alone and afraid, and he was . . . ” She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and turned away.

“Why do you hate him so much!” she cried.