Supervision. Alison Stine

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СКАЧАТЬ are you doing?” I asked.

      “Packing,” she said.

      “Where are you going?”

      “I’m packing for you.”

      “Where am I going?”

      She looked at me. “You know.”

      The nightmares that night were different. No dancing. No mom. No tunnel even, despite the fact that I had just been pulled from one, despite the fact that the police had taken me to a corner of the station, and asked me: What was I doing? How could I have been so dumb? Didn’t I know I could have been killed? Didn’t I know people died that way? Just a few months ago, in this very tunnel.

      I knew, I knew, I told them. I said I was sorry.

      The first few times I told the story, I told about the man with the headlamp and the dirty clothes. But no one knew who the man was. So I stopped telling that part. When my sister showed up, the police let me go. No fine. This time. And no court appearance because the Firecracker was taking me out of state.

      She promised.

      The nightmares that night felt real. I dreamed I was in my bed in my room in the apartment—but something was wrong with my hand. It hurt. It tingled, the blood pricking my palm as if my hand had fallen asleep.

      But then in the dream, when I turned over to look at it on the sheet, my hand wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. My hand was gone. It hurt, but it was a phantom pain. In my dream, my body was missing.

      I woke up with aches, my limbs stiff from sleeping wrong—and I woke up late. The Firecracker threw my suitcases down the stairs. I pulled on an oversized sweatshirt and jeans without looking in the mirror, half-asleep.

      It was May, still cold in the morning. We didn’t talk in the cab. We didn’t hug at the station. I kept my hands stuffed in my pockets and my hood pulled down.

      But then the Firecracker said, “It will be better this time.”

      I sniffed. “What do you mean?”

      “Grandma. She’ll be good for you. It’ll be good for you to be in the country right now, away from …” she gestured around at the station: the early morning commuters rushing by, the platform littered with trash, the garbage cans covered with graffiti like scabs. “All this.”

      “I thought you loved all this.”

      “Sometimes I do,” my sister said. “But it’s time for you to go.”

      And then she gripped my shoulders and pulled me toward her in a hug. She smelled of fancy perfume and leather and the smell that never quite went away from her; it seemed attached to her hair, the smell of rosin for the toe shoes, though it had been ages since she had worn them.

      “I’ll visit you soon,” the Firecracker said. I was about to say something in response, but then she pulled out of the hug and squeezed my shoulder. “Esmé, eat something. You feel like you’re wasting away to nothing.”

      Once on the train, I closed my eyes and didn’t look back.

      My sister had bought me a ticket on the Keystone to Pennsylvania—a daylong trip from Penn Station. I slept mostly. We passed into New Jersey, following the water, steely and gray. I didn’t talk to anyone, or move when the conductor came through, calling for lunch reservations. I wasn’t hungry. When the train stopped after Elizabethtown, at the most desolate, busted place I could imagine, I stood. This was the stop. I knew it. After all, I had been here before.

      When our parents died, the Firecracker was fifteen—my age now—too young to take care of me herself. I tried to imagine my sister like me, in school, wearing toe shoes around her neck, her long hair in a ponytail. I couldn’t picture it, not really. I was five then, and we moved in with our grandmother, our mother’s mother, for three years until my sister was legal, could drop out of school and get a job, get a place for us back in the city where we belonged, she said.

      I knew the blandness, the brokenness of this place, I had been here and escaped from it once already. Wellstone.

      The conductor called the name of the town, but I was the only one who got out. The train huffed away, and I was left. Outside on the platform, under an overhang, I sat on a bench to wait.

      Wellstone was a punishment, like my grandmother was a punishment. My sister had used both of them as idle threats for years. If I didn’t do better in school, if I didn’t come home on time, if I didn’t stop talking back, she would send me here, to Wellstone, where there were no malls or coffee shops or stores that stayed open past five o’clock or kids my own age or anything to do.

      There were also rumors about this town, stories which I could still remember bits of: something about a man in the woods; bones in the weeds; places where kids were afraid to play. This was not a good place, I knew that much.

      My grandmother didn’t have internet. She didn’t have a computer. She didn’t have cable. She lived in an old, rambling mansion that was falling down. It wasn’t safe, I remembered. Once, my foot had fallen through a stair. Rain had fallen through the ceiling. The Firecracker had cried a lot.

      But in New York, after they had pulled me from the tunnel, my sister had made plans, secretly and instantly. There were three weeks left of school, and she had arranged for me to be transferred. The school in Wellstone had emailed a schedule. They were expecting me.

      Grandma was the only family we had left, the last resort for me.

      I didn’t even know if I would know her face. She was quiet and terrifying, I remembered that much. She kept cats with no tails who roamed freely in and out of the house. There was a barn I wasn’t allowed to go into. There was a big black bag she carried that I wasn’t allowed to touch.

      My grandmother had worked the night shift, as a nurse or something. She had cooked strange things, nearly inedible things, bubbling stews and simmering broths, which she left hissing on the stove all day. The house smelled of herbs and dried flowers and dust and spice and boiling chickens. She kept the bones. The cats played with them.

      On the train platform, I shivered. I checked for reception on my phone. I waited. And I waited. I had started to fall asleep when I heard a car. I sat up and reached for my suitcases.

      My grandmother came around the corner of the station. I hadn’t seen her for seven years. She was smaller than I remembered, and she wore glasses, the kind with a beaded chain. She walked heavily and slowly, as though it hurt her. She stepped up to the platform and looked across.

      I didn’t run to her. I didn’t shout. I wasn’t going to hug her. I decided to stay very still. I decided to look like it didn’t matter; I didn’t care.

      She turned, and without a word to me, began to walk back to her car.

      “Grandma?” I said, but my voice felt thick. I wasn’t sure she had heard me. By the time I had gathered up my bags, the car was starting. “Grandma, no!” I left the suitcases and ran into the parking lot.

      Her car, a station wagon, was just disappearing up the road.

      I dialed my phone. “Grandma left me,” I said when my sister picked up.

      “Why СКАЧАТЬ