Breathing Fire, page 1
Breathing Fire
Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Copyright ©2014 Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Tsiang, Sarah, 1978-, author
Breathing fire / Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang.
(Orca soundings)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-1-4598-0566-8 (bound).--isbn 978-1-4598-0565-1 (pbk.).--
isbn 978-1-4598-0567-5 (pdf).--isbn 978-1-4598-0568-2 (epub)
I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings
ps8639.s583b74 2014jc813’.6c2013-906722-1
c2013-906723-x
First published in the United States, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951368
Summary: Running away from her foster home, Ally finds herself on the busking circuit, performing as a juggler and fire breather.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover photography by Getty Images
In Canada:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B
Victoria, BC Canada
V8R 6S4
In the United States:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 468
Custer, WA USA
98240-0468
www.orcabook.com
17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1
For Harriet and John, Kendra and Matt: my found family
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Chapter One
A kid beside me, Bruce, tortures flies as Mr. Getty drones on about algebra. The flies spend all day ramming into the window and then dropping stupidly onto the metal sill. Maybe they’re so desperate because they’ve been trapped inside this math class for most of their lives. Bruce plucks the wing off a fat one, and the fly spins, like a drunk winding up for a punch. I hit Bruce lightly on the arm.
“Stop it.”
Bruce looks at me and rips off the other wing.
The principal opens the door. “Mr. Getty?”
As soon as they leave the room, everyone relaxes and starts chatting. I reopen the book in my desk.
Mr. Getty steps back into the room, and everyone stops. His eyes are red, and his mouth is set in a grim line. It looks like he’s about to cry.
“Ally.”
Everybody turns to look at me. My mouth opens and closes. I stand and shut my book. Outside the classroom, Principal Hearn puts an arm around me and leads me down the hallway. “We have some bad news for you, Ally.”
Mom. What else could it be? I clamp my jaw shut because I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know. Suddenly, all I want to do is prolong this walk, this not-really-knowing, for the rest of my life. This moment of awfulness.
The school counselor is waiting for us—she’s already seated by the principal’s desk. I take a seat and cross my arms over my chest. I can’t believe how cold it is in here.
“There’s been an accident.”
I nod to let him know I hear. I focus on the big picture behind him, an aerial view of the school. Each tiny student is a speck waving at the plane. I stare and stare until the picture wavers and becomes a blur of dark spots.
“Ally, your mom passed away this morning.”
I knew it would happen. I knew it would. But today? This morning she seemed okay, dressed and up for work. Almost happy.
“How?”
“She was hit by a bus on the way to work. It all happened very quickly.”
I want to wipe that sorry look off his face. I want my mom here so I can shake her. I want her here so I can have her hug me and tell me she won’t try it again. I want her to wake up again like she did when I found her with the empty bottles of pills.
A bus. A fucking bus.
I try to figure out exactly what I was doing when my mom died. The coroner puts it at 9:23 AM. I think I was sitting down and opening my books in French class. I was supposed to have a dialogue using the verb vouloir.
I try it while I wait in the office of the social worker. Even French seems like a relief, something old and quaint from when my life was my own.
“Je veux disparaître.”
“Pardon?” The social worker looks up with a distracted, sad smile. She must practice it, I think, for all the tragic orphan cases like my own. I imagine her in her home, preparing for her day by making faces in the mirror. Sad face. Tragic face. You’ll-have-to-live-with-strangers face.
“Look, I’m almost sixteen. I don’t need foster care.”
“Ally…” The social worker pauses and adjusts her facial expression to one of patient explanation. “It’s the law. You’re not old enough to take care of yourself. Normally, we would find a family to care for you, but in your situation…” She flips through the thin file one more time. “Are you sure you can’t think of any relatives? Or maybe an adult friend that you and your mom were close to?”
I shrug. We both know it’s impossible. Mom ran away from home because she was pregnant with me. It wasn’t so much the pregnancy that my grandparents took exception to. It was more the fact that her baby would be a half-chink, a smear on their streak of white-only lineage. God forbid anything new be introduced to that gene puddle.
She changed her name, and I don’t even know their last names. I don’t want to either.
We arrive at the foster home after midnight. Everyone is in bed except for Darla, the foster “mom” who opens the door for us. She’s short and round, wrapped in a brown bathrobe that is fraying at the edges. She exchanges a few words with the social worker and then looks me up and down.
“So. Ally. Is it okay if I carry one of your bags upstairs? You have a room to yourself tonight.”
I grab the backpack that has my cash in it and hand her the duffel bag.
“Thanks.”
I follow her upstairs and down a dark hallway. It’s quiet, but I can hear the slight shuffling sounds of people shifting in their beds, the barely audible sighs of the sleeping. We go to the last bedroom. She opens the door to a neat and tidy room. It has two single beds in it and a scuffed desk.
Darla sets down the bag she’s carried. “Are you good for tonight? Toothbrush, pajamas?”
I nod.
“There’s a bathroom down the hall, first left. I’ll wake you up in the morning, around eight.”
When I finally crawl into bed and turn out the light, I’m surprised by the glow-in-the-dark stars that suddenly burn a greenish light. They are all over the ceiling, a stick-on galaxy. Right above the bed, the stars are arranged into a glowing message: Fuck U, in slightly off-kilter writing.
The message makes me sad. It looks so small and pathetic. I turn onto my side and try closing my eyes, but I can’t help seeing it, those green letters, the stupid kid-like message.
I kick off the covers and stand up. The stars are cool to the touch. I carefully unstick each one and rearrange them into a more or less random pattern of light. Then I lie back down. They are already starting to lose their glow. Watching them is like trying to focus on something from under deep water. I watch them until my eyes hurt, until they begin to well up with tears. Each one fades out, empty of light.
Chapter Two
When I open my eyes, I’m faced with a new room. It takes me a minute to work backward and figure out how I got here. Did we move again? I look up at the stupid plastic stars, and it comes back to me. I’m in a foster home. I’m in a foster home, and my mom is dead.
I should cry. I should really feel like crying. I dig my nails into my arm until the skin breaks open and little drops of blood well up. It stings, sharp and clear. At least some of me is still working.
My door opens with a bang, and a girl with bed head walks in.
“Shit. You’re new?” She opens my closet and grabs a skirt and then looks down at me. She eyes my arm.
“Don’t be a cutter. That’s so cliché.” She gestures toward the closet. “And I’ve got some of my stuff here, so keep your paws off.”
She walks out with a little saunter. I already hate foster kids.
Darla knocks lightly on the open door. “Good, you’re up. Come down for breakfast, would you? I’ve got lots of cereal. You don’t have to go to school t
The kitchen is dominated by a large Formica table and a bunch of ratty yellow chairs with food stains on the seats. In the middle of the table are boxes of Cheerios, Captain Crunch, Cocoa Puffs and some off-brand Raisin Bran. Darla points at an empty seat.
“Sit there, honey. Bowls on the counter and milk in the fridge. This is Rachel”—she points to the surly girl from earlier this morning—“and this here is Ben. Ben doesn’t say much, do you, kiddo?”
Ben shakes his head. He looks about ten, with a mop of blond hair and a small head. Small everything—eyes, snub nose, thin little lips. A dribble of milk slides from the corner of his mouth.
“Darla says your mom croaked. That sucks.” Rachel looks at me like she’s waiting for me to bawl or start yelling.
“Yep.”
There’s a long silence as I eat my cereal and Rachel stares me down. Finally, she sighs and rolls her eyes at Darla.
“Awesome. We have another Ben.”
“Oh shut it, Rachel. You’ll be late for school.” Darla reaches over and ruffles Ben’s hair. “I’ll take a quiet kid over a mouthy one any day of the week and twice on Sundays.”
After Rachel and Ben are out of the house, I run up to my room and empty out all the cash from my backpack onto the thin comforter on the bed. The bills fall out, crumpled and dirty-looking. A quarter rolls off the bed and lands on the floor with a small ping. The pile of crumpled bills counts out to less than two hundred bucks. These few fives and twenties are all I have in the world, and I can stuff them all into my jeans pocket. I think about our shitty little apartment with the frayed secondhand couch and the sink that leaked and the mattress that smelled like piss. This is all Mom had in the world too.
I spend the day in the social worker’s beat-up car. When we get to my apartment, the social worker sits on the couch and tells me to take my time. Mom’s room is exactly the way I remember. It feels like it’s been a thousand years since I was here instead of a night. Her nightgown is on the floor. There are some dirty socks sticking out of the hamper. Her bed is unmade, the sheets tossed into a loose pile at the bottom. I don’t know what to take. I open up the closet and stand there like an idiot, my arms around an empty box. The social worker flips the TV on in the other room, and for a minute I let myself pretend that it’s Mom in the kitchen, watching Dr. Oz while she cooks up a box of macaroni.
What is there to take? I walk around like a zombie and dump random things into a box. Her nightgown. Her Swatch. Her runners. A plastic hair clip. I do it quickly, almost running. I don’t want the social worker to come in and watch me decide whether to take a half-tube of mascara or the tacky solar dancing flower that Mom found in a thrift shop.
When we get back to the social worker’s office, she types up the final few notes of my life.
“Ally, do you want a funeral for your mom? The province will pay for a basic one.”
I have a sudden urge to punch the social worker in the face. You can tell that she’s happy to be on her side of the desk. I want to yell at her, and I want to yell at Mom too. How do you live to be thirty-two and not have anything? No friends, no money, just a fucked-up daughter in foster care.
“I don’t want anything. Just cremation.” My mouth feels funny, like it’s kind of numb.
“Ally, are you sure? I know this is a difficult time for you, and I don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.”
“Who’s going to go to her funeral? You?”
“I can if you want me to be there.”
“Don’t pretend you’re my friend. You don’t know anything about us. Just do your job.”
Chapter Three
“I don’t get why you don’t have to go to school and I do.” Rachel pouts dramatically as she stuffs her backpack with various books and makeup.
“It’s the orphan prize. They’re just giving me the marks I got so far. How much eye shadow do you need to take to one exam?”
“I want a sultry look. Also, I’m a traumatized, abandoned foster kid too. Shouldn’t I get, like, half my exams off since my mom is in rehab?”
“No. Now stop bothering me. I have a lot of sleeping in to do.”
Rachel leaves for school, and I wait until I hear the door slam for the last time this morning before I kick off my blankets. I’m so glad to be by myself during these last two weeks of the school year. I wander down to the kitchen and make myself a bologna sandwich. I put in three thick slices, even though the rule posted on the fridge says One piece of meat per sandwich. There are notes everywhere in the house. 10 minutes for showers. 1/4 cup detergent MAX. Darla wants to bring her husband and kids to Canada from some foreign country, so she’s saving by buying bologna and raising foster kids.
After breakfast I grab my backpack and go for a walk. Mom’s ashes are in the backpack, in a small cardboard box lined with plastic. I keep thinking that I’ll find a place to put them—somewhere nice, somewhere she would want to be. When the social worker handed me the box, I almost thought it was some kind of sick joke. A cardboard box? But she shrugged and told me that since I had chosen not to go to the funeral home, there was no one to choose a proper urn. I guess I can go back sometime and get a metal one. Something classy. But I haven’t.
I stop at the park and sit on the wooden bench. I take out the box. It’s light but sturdy. I could just scatter everything here. There’s a nice view of the river, and a little garden with flowers. I could mix the ashes into the garden.
The box is about the size of a fish bowl, and it’s sealed with a solid line of tape. Part of me wants to take off the tape right now, just to peek inside. Is it like wood ashes, or are there maybe bits of Mom in it too? Like hair, or something that doesn’t really burn well. A tooth, maybe.
“Hey, cutie. What have you got?”
There’s a guy standing two feet away from me. He has on sweats and a hoodie. Graying hair. He’s grinning like a pedo.
“My dead mother’s ashes. Do you mind?” He turns and walks away without another word.
Mom would have liked that. One time we were riding the bus on the way to school. Mom spotted her then-boyfriend groping some other woman on the street. When the bus rolled to a stop, Mom poked her head out of the window and shouted, “You can have the no-good cheat if you want him, but he has two bucks in the bank and a small dick. Good luck!” After the bus rolled on, she turned to me and said, “Actually, I lied. He has at least ten dollars in the bank.” You could tell everyone on the bus was trying to keep from laughing. Mom didn’t believe in keeping jerks in her life, which was good, but I think sometimes that’s why we moved so much. We were never moving to a new place, we were always moving away from where we were.
She was happy sometimes, and when she was up she was funny as hell. But it’s hard to remember her like that. I can’t even really picture what her face used to look like when she was happy. I can only really picture her when I remember the bad days. The days I would come home from school to find her in bed, all the curtains closed, her eyes red and raw. She could never really say why she got so sad. Maybe she felt like I do now. Maybe I can understand why she wanted to die.
Once I start crying, it’s hard to stop. I hug the box tight to me and press my face to the cardboard. When I can finally breathe again, the cardboard is all splotchy from where it got wet. I wish I had something stronger to hold Mom together. I put the box back in my pack and wipe my eyes. I’ll try to find a better place tomorrow.
Evenings at Darla’s drag on for hours. She only has one TV with cable, and Darla gets the remote. She watches nothing but game shows and reality TV. She and Ben sit on the couch all night and stare at the tube. We’re also not allowed out of the house after 8:00 PM. Rachel has argued so much with Darla over this that I don’t even try. I can spot a lost cause.
Darla has one bookcase with some dusty VHS cassettes and a few romance novels (a blond shirtless man and a half-swooning girl with too much cleavage on each cover). I pick three cassettes and start juggling them. It’s harder than juggling balls, especially since the cassettes keep slipping out of their sleeves, but it’s still not much of a challenge. I miss the gymnastics gym, the high ceilings, the smell of chalk dust. The way a routine can focus your life to two minutes of impossible tricks. Rachel walks in and slams the door.
