“Secondly,” Miles continues, ignoring my argument, “a little while ago, you confirmed my long-held belief that birds don’t talk. Yet you just said that Poe”—he pauses—“I can’t believe I just called it that . . . this bird told you something.”
“I shouldn’t have said ‘told.’ I should have said ‘showed.’”
“Because that makes a difference?”
I just sit there for a moment, steaming from Miles’s sarcasm and regretting having followed Frankie’s advice and telling Miles the truth. But the moment passes when he says, “And thirdly, who is Whit?”
I have to tell him. Oracles are never wrong—only our interpretations of their prophecies, I remember Whit saying.
“Whittier Graves is my mentor. And I know that he is after me with these thugs, or whatever they are, because Whit sent me a note tied to Poe’s leg, and I”—how to explain it?—“tapped into Poe’s memory to see what he saw. But this is not Narnia. No talking animals. Poe isn’t sitting back there listening to everything we say and mulling it over in his little raven brain. However, if he flies back to Whit, which he might do if Whit calls him, Whit could use the same technique I did to see where we are.”
Miles is quiet for a whole three minutes, pressing his lips tightly together and tapping nervously on the steering wheel. “Okay, I get a few things out of what you just told me,” he says finally. “The least troubling of which is that the bird stays with us.”
“Until we’re farther away from Whit,” I reassure him.
“Not that that’s not troubling,” Miles corrects himself. “It’s just the least troubling. Because the next item on my list of concerns is that you claim this Whit guy, who was once your mentor but is now chasing you, can control where the bird goes.”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Miles says. “So the raven’s like one of those homing pigeons? I assume it’s Whit’s trained messenger and not some wild bird he snatched out of the woods.”
“Actually, Whit—”
Miles holds up his hand to stop me. “But the most troubling thing you said was that you tapped into the memory of the bird to see something. Now, I was not raised in a hippie commune in backwoods Alaska. But most people I know would have a hard time believing that you weren’t . . . I don’t know . . . crazy.”
He presses his index finger to his temple and opens his eyes wide. Now I’ve done it, I think. He’s scared. “Or on drugs,” he continues. “Wait, no . . . I have another theory. You were brainwashed by your hippie cult into thinking you have magical powers. In your head you’re like a cross between . . . I don’t know . . . Superpower-Flower-Child and Harry Potter.” That’s it. I’m not sure what he’s talking about exactly, but it’s clear he has shifted into sarcasm overdrive.
I won’t let this boy get to me. Why do I care what he thinks? “So I’m crazy, a druggie, or a cult member?” I ask as we crest a hill to see a sparkling city spread like a starry blanket beneath us in the broad valley below. “Well, you’re free to just drop me off here in Yakima.”
This shakes Miles out of his rant. He’s silent as we drive into the city center. I have obviously made my point. I’ve reminded him that he needs me as much as I need him, like Crazy Frankie said. But I still have no idea why.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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26
MILES
I HAVE TO GET TO A PHONE. TO CALL MY DAD. Have him take her off my hands. I can’t stand this much longer. I’m in way over my head. It’s one thing playing driver for a schizo teen who thinks she’s being chased by dangerous people. It’s a whole other thing when said dangerous people are actually chasing said teen and, by proxy, me.
But I can’t get away from her. She had me pull up to a woman pushing a baby carriage so she could ask where a supermarket was. (She called it a “food shop,” but whatever.) And once we had walked into Walmart Supercenter, she insisted that I accompany her every step of the way while she crammed a cart with food: canned stew, beans, and vegetables; liters of water; a sack of potatoes, a sack of apples; and, yes, a small pouch of birdseed.
She went all out on the flashlights, buying three jumbo ones along with a mountain of batteries. “I saw batteries in Seattle,” she whispered to me as if they were a state secret. I wonder what they would have thought of her pack of size-D Duracells back in hippie camp.