The Barren Grounds

“Why are you angry all the time?” Eli asked.

Morgan glared at him for a second, and Eli recoiled, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. They kept marching towards school. Truthfully, she was kind of surprised that he’d said anything at all. She’d not yet heard him string that many words together at one time.
She tried to distract herself from her anger by observing the neighborhood. The endless run of two-story houses, each almost identical to the one next to it. The too-perfectly manicured boulevards that were more like putting greens you’d find at a golf store. The absence of graffiti sprayed on walls. There were white picket fences, basketball hoops attached to garages-even some Christmas decorations. They passed a couple of people walking dogs (all some form of doodle-Labra or Golden). The people nodded and smiled at Morgan and Eli, but Morgan just looked away.
“Could you at least slow down?” Eli asked.
He was struggling to keep up. His drawing pad kept slipping from under his arm, and every time it did, it slowed him down further. Morgan breathed out deliberately and waited for him to catch up. “I’m not angry all the time. I’m angry now.”

“You’re-”

“You can’t just say that,” Morgan continued, cutting him off. “You can’t ask ‘Why are you angry all the time?’ when I’m just angry now. That’s like saying a clown’s happy all the time when their smile is just, like, painted on.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“Well, I’m not angry all the time, so hopefully that makes sense,” she said.

“You’re angry at home and when we walk to school and at school,” he said.

“How would you know if I’m angry at school?”

“I’ve seen you at school and you look the same way you do now -you’re just quieter about it.”

Morgan crossed her arms and sped up. He could just walk faster with his stupid drawing pad. “Stop watching me at school. That’s weird. Especially because you’re in seventh grade and I’m in eighth grade. There are rules.”

“What rules?” he asked.

“Just rules, that’s all!”

Morgan watched Eli too, though. He sat in the corner of the gym during lunch-on the floor, even though tables were set up. Every lunch hour, separate from everybody, his drawing pad bal- anced perfectly on his lap, scribbling away at whatever he liked to draw. It wasn’t fair that she’d told him to stop watching her, when she watched him. But she felt obligated to keep an eye on him, just as she usually felt obligated to walk him to school (ex- cept for trying to ditch him this morning). He’d been around for only a week, but she felt like she knew him better than that. He reminded her of herself, when she was younger. At a new house, before new houses became part of her life. The irony was that while Morgan watched Eli draw, sitting by himself in a corner of the gym, she’d be sitting by herself at a corner of a table.

“I’m not angry at school. I’m shy at school, okay?” she said. “There’s a difference.”

Eli shrugged. “Why are you shy at school, then?”

“Because I don’t like talking to anybody and I don’t think anybody likes talking to me. We have an unspoken agreement to avoid each other. Me and…everybody else.”

“If you don’t talk to anybody, then how do you know if they don’t like talking to you?”

“I liked you better when you didn’t talk,” Morgan said. “Plus, you’re not exactly a chatterbox at school yourself, or anywhere for that matter.”

For a while they just kept walking.

“It’s not just that people wouldn’t like talking to me; I don’t think they’d like me period,” Morgan said, as though they’d been talking the whole time.

“I like you,” Eli said.

Morgan stopped abruptly, forcing Eli to stop too. He almost dropped his drawing pad.

“You hardly even know me.” Morgan reached forward and flicked his drawing pad with her index finger, gently. “Plus, you’re always drawing in that thing, so how do you even have time to like me?”

Eli held out the drawing pad and flipped to a page. It was a picture of the lunchroom, in pencil, full of kids eating their lunches, and there was Morgan, off to the side, sitting on her own, looking at the ground.

“Oh,” Morgan said. “Eli, wow.”

Eli closed the pad.

Morgan kept walking. Eli followed.

“How’ve you been to so many homes?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “Stuff happened.”

“What kind of stuff?” he asked.

“I run away,” she said, “or they don’t like me. Or I run away because they don’t like me. I get older and, you know, they want a cute Native kid. And I can tell, so, I don’t know…I guess I act like a jerk. They’re saviors, you know. Like, all of them. Katie and James too. They want to save kids like us.”

“I like them,” he said.

Morgan took a deep breath, then half smiled. “Yeah,” she said under her breath. “I do too.”

The sun rose steadily over the twenty-minute walk and melted the frost, making the boulevards and trees glitter. The neighborhood looked pretty, but Morgan always felt detached from it—no matter how high the sun rose, no matter how many times she walked the same route, and whether Eli was trailing behind her or not. It was one of several routes Morgan had taken to one of several schools, coming from one of several homes, and it was hard to think of what was different from one placement to the other. The only constant was that they’d all been in the same city.