Rodent

CONTENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

“I’m wet,” a voice whimpers in my ear.

My eyelids snap open as my head jerks from the pillow. Evan stands beside my bed, hair disheveled, naked from the waist down. Chicken legs shivering.

“What?” I blink, trying to clear my head.

“I’m wet.” Now the tears come.

“Evan!” I grab his wrist and drag him, wailing, toward his bedroom. “Not again!”

In the early-morning sun filtering through the blinds, Maisie is still asleep in her bed next to his, curled up with a matted lamb. I strip the blankets and sheets from the mattress, cursing under my breath. I fling everything in a pile at his feet.

“Disgusting,” I say, eyeing the foul wet circle. Rounding on him, I bring my finger right up to his pale face. “Tonight, you’re wearing a pull-up.”

“No! No diaper!” He sobs harder now.

“Yes, diaper!” I snap. “If you act like a baby, you have to wear a diaper.” Maisie stirs in her bed, makes a chirping sound and rolls over.

Evan gives up arguing now and shivers, tears running down his cheeks. He scratches at his peed-on legs. He looks so pathetic, I start to feel sorry for him. I check the clock for the first time. Mickey Mouse’s hands tell me it’s 6:15
AM
. I was cheated out of an extra fifteen minutes of sleep.

“C’mon,” I say, taking his hand and pulling him to the bathroom. I mop him up and find a clean pair of underwear. The plastic garbage bag I always put under his sheet has slipped to one side in the night, so I scrub his wet mattress for a minute before giving up. What’s one more stain at this point? He waits on the sofa in his Batman underwear while I wake up Maisie and get started.

Breakfast. Shower for me while they’re eating. Lunches. I lay their clothes on the sofa and let them watch some alphabet cartoon while they dress themselves. That gives me ten minutes to get myself ready. Right before we leave, I try to wrestle a brush through Maisie’s straggly mess of cinnamon curls.

She shrieks, trying to writhe away. I clamp my hands on her shoulders and push her back down. “Sit still! You want to look like a hobo on your first day at a new school?”

She gives me a dirty look but gets her shoes on when I tell her to. I help Evan into his.

“All ready?” I say, trying to sound more cheerful. Evan nods slowly, and Maisie just stares. “Okay then.”

I lock the door behind me, and we shuffle to the end of the hall. The elevator smells like piss again. I blame the loser on the floor below us, who roams the halls in his bathrobe half the time.

“Don’t touch anything,” I tell Evan and Maisie, making them stand on either side of me. This place is even more of a dump than the last, and that’s saying a lot. In the lobby we follow a worn path across the dirt-colored carpet to the main door and step into the bright September sun. Once outside, Maisie perks up and starts to tell me about her dream, which involves a farm.

“I got to ride the pony as much as I wanted,” she says, skipping over the cracks in the sidewalk.

I pick up the pace. Evan almost runs to keep up, two fingers gripping my belt loop. We follow the sidewalk to a strip mall half a block away, stopping in front of a rainbow-striped sign:
Little Treasures Day Care
. Someone has thrown a rock through the corner of the sign, so the
r
in
Care
doesn’t line up anymore.

Mrs. Carrigan, the owner, smiles at me as I push through the streaked door. I nod at her and crouch to help Evan take off his shoes and sweater, which I drop into his cubby. Then I corner Elaine, who runs the three-to-five-year-old room. She reminds me of a donkey, with her flat, tawny hair and the way she brays at the kids. Evan’s only been coming here a week, and I already know Elaine’s useless. Government subsidy covers most of the day-care fee, but it still feels like we pay too much for this place.

I get straight to the point. “Can you make sure Evan comes home in the right socks today?”

“Those
were
his socks.” She frowns and pulls her head back, which gives her about four chins.

“My Little Pony?” I say, eyebrows raised. “I don’t think so.” Without waiting for a reply, I turn and herd Maisie out the door with me.

We have about thirty seconds to make it to the bus stop on the corner, so we cover the rest of the block at a full-out run. Maisie’s backpack thumps up and down with every step, and I hear her puffing behind me. I turn and take her hand, slowing my pace a bit.

We make it with ten seconds to spare. The bus is packed. I finally find one seat near the back door and point for Maisie to sit down. Holding the bar above my head, I sway as the city slides by: cop cars, dogs, old people raking leaves, pawn shops, parking meters.

Maisie unpacks her backpack in her lap and shows me where she wrote her name on all of her school supplies. “I like this one,” she says, pulling the cap off a glue stick. “The glue is pink.”

After ten minutes, I ring the bell. The bus slides to a stop in front of Sir John A. Macdonald Elementary School, where we squeeze out with a few others. The bell has already rung, and the hallway’s a solid wall of children. Two boys wrestle each other, swinging backpacks and laughing. When they trample on my feet, I give them a good shove and say, “Watch it.”

We weave our way to the grade-two classrooms and scan the class list outside the door for
Maisie Bennett
. This is it. Her teacher, Mrs. Williams, strikes me as the cookie-baking-grandma sort. Silver hair pulled back in a hippie ponytail. Laugh lines around her eyes. She extends her hand to me as I leave Maisie at the door.

“Isabelle,” I say, shaking it. “I’ll be back to pick up Maisie after school.” I give Maisie a pat on the head and push my way through the swarming hallway.

Back out on the sidewalk, I look up and see my final destination across the street—Glenn Eastbeck High School—where I’m about to begin my first day of grade eleven.

TWO

One of the women in the office assigns me a locker. Mine’s a sickly blue and looks like it’s been attacked by a battering ram. I look around as I unload my empty binders and loose-leaf paper. An emo couple is making out three lockers down. A group of girls talks at a decibel level that could shatter glass. Everyone else pretends not to be texting when a teacher walks by. This all looks pretty normal. And I consider myself somewhat of an expert on what’s normal in high schools (and schools in general).

There have been five schools in the past three years, not to mention all the ones I passed through before I even hit junior high. I’ve seen it all. If I keep my head down, after two more years of this I’ll be free. Then it won’t matter if Mom has a good day or two when she finds a new job, drags us off to some other hellhole, then brings the whole thing crashing down. I won’t be a puppet in this stupid game anymore.

I don’t realize how hard I slam my locker until the girl next to me jumps. I give her a look like,
What
? and march off. Then I have to pull out a map of the school because I have no idea where I’m going. English. Room 102. Okay.

When I find it, I make a beeline for the back row, which is already taken by other students trying to be invisible or goof off. I end up sitting in front of a tall guy with a mop of dark hair and glasses that look like they belong in the sixties. He’s reading a thesaurus. To my left, a chubby girl with stringy hair picks at her split ends. I think I’ve found my corner.

While the teacher, Mr. Drummond, goes through the course outline, some tool in the back row starts throwing paper balls.

“Hey, Will!” he whispers. I hear the whoosh of a ball land right on the desk behind me—the tall guy’s desk. As far as I can tell without turning around, Will does nothing.

Then things get quiet. Mr. Drummond strolls down the aisle between us, his scuffed leather loafers not making a sound. His belly hangs over a pair of crisp khakis, and I can’t see his mouth under a bristly mustache. Thick graying hair sticks up on his head, like he just walked through a windstorm. For some reason, we all look straight ahead as he gets closer, even those of us who haven’t done anything.

I glance up at him for a split second as he pauses beside my desk. With that flicker of a look, square in his eyes, I see he’s a man who can silence a room with a stare. I look away, but he doesn’t move from beside my desk. He slowly scans the back row. Not a sound. Across the street, bus brakes hiss.

“That’s quite enough,” he says, his eyes moving from desk to desk. There’s some foot shuffling and squirming, but nobody speaks.

After an eternity, he turns and walks back to the front of the class. He picks up where he left off, telling us that we’re reading
Hamlet
this year. At least it isn’t
Romeo and Juliet
, which I’ve read at my last three schools and didn’t like the first time.

No one acts up again. When Mr. Drummond dismisses us, Will drops the paper ball in the garbage on the way out.

Social Studies. I check my map again before leaving English. Second floor. I elbow some girl out of the way for the last free desk at the back. The teacher, Mrs. Clarke, hands out a course outline. It’s quiet for a minute before she starts reading it aloud. Then the whispers start. A guy gets up to sharpen his pencil. Pretty soon people turn in their desks and talk to friends beside them. Out come the phones. Mrs. Clarke keeps going, the paper an inch from her face. I follow along with her because I have nothing else to do. I feel kind of sorry for her. She lets us go fifteen minutes early.

At lunchtime I find the cafeteria by following the flow of bodies. Standing near the door, I survey the long tables—a rippling ocean of heads, arms and mouths. It seems everyone except me has made Best Friends Forever and can’t stop talking, teasing and touching each other for even one second. I haven’t had a chance to find the library yet, so I have no book to hide behind.

Off to the left, a line snakes from the cafeteria counter. People leave with stacks of French fries, piles of chicken
nuggets and cans of soda tucked under their arms. I can see that one of those meals costs the same as two loaves of bread and a gallon of milk, so buying lunch isn’t an option.

I find a bench along the wall rather than a table—there’s no awkward stranger to avoid making eye contact with. I wolf down my bologna sandwich and banana at record speed and go looking for a garbage can. There’s one near the door, conveniently close to my escape route.