It’s reacting now.
I pat my cheeks a few times, trying to restore order and regain the upper hand over my physiology. As I sit on the bed, I take a deep breath, hold it, and then exhale. I repeat this process several more times before checking my pulse, sighing with relief when it slows down. My cheeks aren’t as warm to the touch now either.
Good. Very good.
I’m setting strict boundaries for myself, effective immediately: no more poetry from Juniper Bean. In fact, no more desk area, period. It’s time to move on.
There are two small pictures on the nightstand; when I realize they’re photographs, I cross the room and lean down to get a better look. I can handle photographs, no problem.
The first one is a shot of Juniper and a guy who can only be her brother; they have the same light hair in this photo, with similar face shapes and the same wide smiles. Despite the lack of pink hair, it still looks to be fairly recent.
“Is this your brother?” I call over my shoulder.
“On the bedside table?” she calls back. “With the blond hair? Yeah, that’s Roland.”
I nod, moving on to the other picture. My lips turn down as I study this one, something I can’t quite define tugging at my mind.
It’s a young girl, maybe seven or eight years old, although she could be older. She looks underfed, to be honest, and that can make it hard to tell someone’s age. It’s clearly Juniper, that much I can tell—the same blonde hair, the same blue eyes, and enough similarities that I can recognize her. But she doesn’t look healthy in this photo, despite her bright smile. Her hair is a little stringy, her cheeks a little gaunt.
That tugging in my mind intensifies—flashes of something familiar.
A breakfast sandwich. A large Band-Aid. Two little hands and a messy head of hair, peeking over the top of…
A dumpster.
I snatch the photo up, bringing it so close to my face that my breath fogs up the glass. I stare at the girl, racking my memory. Plucking images out, dusting them off, holding them up and comparing them side by side.
“No,” I breathe. “No.”
It’s not possible. This isn’t possible. There’s no way that little girl dumpster diving was Juniper. There’s no way I would have then ended up tutoring her, no way we would have ended up living together. That level of coincidence simply isn’t possible.
Except…
Except.
Itisn’tcoincidence, is it?
I sit down on the bed, my mind reeling with thoughts and implications, staring blankly at the photo until one clear thought emerges:
None of this would be coincidence. If that little girl was Juniper,none of this would be coincidence.
I tutored Juniper as part of my pedagogy course.
I took that pedagogy course as part of my major in social work, which I first became interested in when I helped that little girl out of the dumpster.
So, in essence, I became Juniper’s tutorbecauseI first fed her when she was just a hungry little girl. And she needed a tutor for the same reason she needed food that day in the alley: those needs weren’t being met in her home. She was recommended by the school as a student whose family couldn’t afford extra reading or tutoring.
I let the picture slip out of my hands and clatter to the floor as my brain keeps making leaps, bounding on ahead as the dominoes keep falling, knocking each other down faster than I can keep up.
My unimpressive salary—for the profession I chose because of my experiences with Juniper growing up—is the reason I’m living in this rental.
She’sliving in this rental because it has the loft bedroom, separate from the main levels. She said it gave her a quiet place to work and write. And she works as a writer because she said my tutoring helped her fall in love with storytelling and literature.
And I ended up tutoring herbecauseI was studying social workbecauseI found her that day in the alley—
I stand up abruptly, shaking my head like a dog emerging from water. Cause and effect, cause and effect, running through my mind on an endless loop as I pace, my footsteps nearly silent on the wooden floor.
It’s impossible. Impossible.