Nature of Jade Read Online Free PDF Page B

wanting me to go to the dance. Mom sighs, looks down at the paper in her hands. It's the way I sometimes catch her looking out of the window. As if she's staring somewhere way beyond, to a place I can't see. "I'm sorry I snapped," she says. "I guess ... It just makes me feel you expect more of me, and I already expect more of me enough for the both of us."
    "Man, we're hard on ourselves," I say.
    "You're so right," she says. "Let's make it a way-after-New-Year's resolution not to be."
    "Deal," I say.
    She sets the invitations on the bed. Looks at them a long while. "Yeah, yellow on blue," she says finally.
    I tap my doorframe three times, same as always, and go into my room. I let myself be swallowed up in the comfort of my deep blue walls, the warm light of my paper lanterns, and my patron saint candles (long glass cylinders decorated with pictures of 33
    saints, lit when you feel in need of a little protection and good luck) on top of my dresser. It occurs to me, then: four people, four different rooms. We are in our own cages, unlike the elephants, who stay all together in their adopted family.
    I do a mind-blowing two hours on calculus and another brain-frying hour on research notes on Faulkner. I spend forty minutes on essays for my college applications. I spend ten minutes online talking to Michael Jacobs about how much work we have to do. I spend five minutes thinking of things I could do if I weren't such a freaking overachiever. I could read something without a theme. I could paint my fingernails. I could make an igloo out of sugar cubes.
    All the while I keep checking out the computer screen, hoping the guy in the red jacket will appear but knowing it is too late, past the hours the zoo is even open, for God's sake. I'm just so disappointed at how he hadn't come when I'd been so sure he'd be back. It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is--a sense of loss for something you never had.
    Dad is still in the basement, Oliver is asleep, Milo is cuddled with his blankie, and Mom's light is off when I go to bed.
    I shut off my own light, prop up on one arm. The moon is almost full, bright and round in my window, illuminating the blue-black clouds hanging around while deciding on a direction. The computer screen glows an eerie greenish gray. The image on my desk is of an empty viewing area, a still, dark night. Only the trees sway a bit; that is the only movement, until I see the bulk of a figure enter the bottom corner of the screen.
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    I sit up in bed, get up, and bend down over the computer. Yes. It's true. A figure is there. I can only see shoulders--the night zookeeper, maybe? A watchman of some kind? At night I usually switch to the elephant house, where they sleep, so it's possible this is routine. That's what my front-stage mind is saying. My backstage mind is thinking something else. Accelerating just a small bit with crazy-but-maybe possibility.
    I send the figure a mental request: Turn around! Let me see you! If he turns around, I will know if it is the boy. Maybe if he looks toward the camera our eyes will meet, him a sea boy, same as Oliver's sea girl. Our eyes will meet from different worlds and still we'll connect. Two points in need of a line.
    The figure goes to the rail, leans over, and rests on his elbows. This is not what a watchman would do. Not what anyone who worked there would do. It is a visitor's pose, so whoever it is had snuck in. The man does not have a baby in a backpack, and it is too dark to see a jacket color.
    But he just leans there for a long time, gazing into the darkness of the elephant pen.
    It is when he leans back, tilts his head up to the moonlit clouds, that I know it is him. It is that same profile, full of questions, full of thought. My heart babamps in my chest. I feel this surge of happy. My inside voice too often screams unreliable things at me, misinformation--that I am