A List of Cages(7)

The screaming vocal and clashing guitar sound about like every other band he’s shoved into my ear, but I smile and chew my last bite of chicken. I can only half-hear the table now as they decide how many cars we’ll need to get all of us there.





AFTER SCHOOL, I take a sharp right and cut through the park. It’s not really much of one—no slides or jungle gyms or anything that might attract parents and their kids—but it’s thickly wooded, with a few small ponds and some faint pathways. I like this route better than going through the neighborhoods not because it’s faster, but because it’s as if I’m doing this deliberately instead of avoiding Jared and the bus like a coward.

Sometimes, if I try hard enough, I can picture the Jared I met way back in kindergarten. I remember when Mom picked me up that first day, I told her there was a very mean boy in my class. Jared pinched kids when the teacher wasn’t looking. He scribbled on everyone’s watercolors with black crayon. He knocked down their towers in the block center.

Mom listened, nodding, then she said there was no such thing as a mean child, only an unhappy one.

“But you don’t know,” I told her. “You didn’t see.”

“I don’t have to see. I know.” She wouldn’t tell me how she knew, but she swore that Jared deserved nothing but my sympathy.

The next day, when he kicked down my tower, I put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said. “I know you’re just unhappy.” Then he punched me in the eye.

After school I told Mom she was wrong. Jared was evil—he’d hit me. I waited for her to be angry, to tell me she would call his mother. Instead she said no one is evil, only unhappy, and unhappiness festers inside like a sore.

Later, as I watched Jared on the playground, playing alone or hiding under the wooden beams of the jungle gym like a real-life kindergarten troll, I’d worry, imagining festering sores under his skin where no one could see.

But I could see. I can still see, and I can feel all the sympathy Mom told me I should feel.

But that never made me any less afraid of him.


As soon as I get home, I open my trunk, and today I take out the green spiral notebook. I found it on my mother’s desk in our old house, and I grabbed it before everything we ever owned was catalogued, boxed, and stored away. Sometimes I can picture it: paintbrushes, toothbrushes, shirts, quilts, books, and musical instruments, all in boxes in the dark.

For all I know, in one of those boxes there are a hundred more spirals like this one. But this is what I have, a single notebook, sheets filled front to back until the words stop right in the middle.

I flip at random, landing on a familiar page. The first time I read it, I thought it was a list of her favorite movies. I didn’t recognize most of them, but I knew a couple were ones she really liked. But if they were her favorites, then where were all the Shirley Temple movies? She loved those. And why were war movies on the list? She hated war movies.

So if it’s not a list of favorites, and it’s not a list of least favorites, then what is it? If she wrote them down, they must be important. Maybe something happened on the day she saw each of them. Or maybe…I don’t know, but they have to mean something.

For the millionth time I wish she’d titled her lists, because the entire notebook is like this. A list of places. A list of colors. A list of songs. But no titles. No context. No way to understand what they mean.





I OPEN CHARLIE’S front door, and it’s like stepping inside a bad Western. The life-size Sylvester the Cat doll he won at the fair last spring has been hanged and disemboweled. White fluffy guts explode from its stomach as it swings from the chandelier by its jump-rope noose.

One of Charlie’s brothers flies by wearing nothing but a Superman cape. Three more kids, dressed in clothes that barely fit, are hot on his trail. One is carrying a jar of jelly, and the others are waving cap guns. I dive in between them.

Soon I’m surrounded by identical blond children. Two leap up, digging footholds into my ribs like I’m one of those climbing walls. The rest giggle and hug my legs, looking up at me with faces so dirty it’s like they’ve been cleaning chimneys. This house is basically a Charles Dickens orphanage, except the kids are happy and the villain here is completely outnumbered.

Speaking of Charlie, he’s just begun his menacing march down the stairs. The kids in my arms cling to me and bury their faces in my shoulders. The ones on the ground try to flee but don’t make it before Charlie grabs the jelly from Tomás and orders Olivier to put on some pants.

“Gotta go,” I tell the kids in my arms. They kiss my cheeks before hopping to the ground and following the other horde of children up the stairs. I don’t know how they’re growing up to be so sweet when they live under a constant reign of terror.

Charlie grabs his jacket from the dining room table, then glares at it in astonished fury. Something purple and sticky is dripping from the sleeve. I can’t help but laugh.

“Tomás!” he bellows, and even I’m scared. Several more little blond heads scatter in all directions with frightened squeals. He takes an ominous step, and I grab his arm.

“We’re gonna be late.” There’s actually no set timetable for playing laser tag and video games, but I’m trying to avoid bloodshed.

“I just bought this jacket.” Charlie takes his possessions very seriously. Money’s always tight—a side effect of having so many kids—so he works for a landscaping company, mowing and raking and hauling heavy things.