The Sound of a Heart Breaking; 11,14
You’re 11 and Indra comes home one day with a bunch of boxes and tells you all to start packing everything in the house. She won’t answer questions and she won’t look any of you in the eye, just tells you that you’re moving and anything you don’t have packed by tomorrow will be left behind. You leave Anya to pack up your shared bedroom, climbing out the window to bike over to Clarke’s house.
By the time you get there, you’ve fallen repeatedly because you’re crying so hard, and when Abby opens the door and sees you all bloody, sees that your blood is black, she has to do a double take. Jake comes to see who’s at the door and he picks you up and sits you on the kitchen counter to get you cleaned up while you tell them what happened, and Abby goes to get Clarke. You stay the night in a borrowed pjs, and you know you’ll be in deep shit with Indra when you go home, but even at 11 you know that some things are more than worth being in trouble for. You and Clarke fall asleep with your arms wrapped around each other, tear stains down both your faces. Jake comes through to check on the two of you and lingers in the doorway for several minutes with an odd look on his face. Neither of you go to school the next morning, and when Abby asks whether you need to call Indra, you shake your head because you know she knows where you are.
Sure enough, her blue van pulls up that afternoon, loaded down with the other 3 kids and half of what you own. She thanks Jake and Abby for keeping you last night and hands you a clean set of clothes to go change into. Clarke is waiting in the hall when you come out of the bathroom, and she’s crying, and you hold each other tightly and you whisper in her ear “ai hod yu in, Klark kom Skaikru. Ai keryon ste yun. Osir gonplei no ste odon nowe.” without knowing why, exactly, that feels right. She angrily swipes the tears from her face and kisses you quickly and lightly on the lips before running down the stairs. You come down in time to see Abby disappearing out the back door after her, and Jake sweeps you up into a hug. When he lets go, he holds out his hand and you take his forearm the way he taught you and Clarke years ago. “In peace may you leave this shore; in love may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again.”
Indra doesn’t speak to you until after you’ve reached your new home. When she does, it’s in trigedasleng. No one is allowed to speak anything else at home for 6 months.
You’re 14, and North Carolina isn’t quite the death sentence it felt like 3 years ago. Something in you always feels unsettled, and you’re nothing close to happy, but you’re also no longer in Florida, nowhere close to the reservation where your mom’s spirit lingers, away from the elders who had looked at you with fear and hope for years. The farms aren’t so bad, and the schools are small but not awful. There’s a reservation in the western part of the state that Nomon drags you out to a couple times a year, but they have nightbloods of their own, and expect nothing of you. Indra set up what basically amounts to a small reservation in your backyard for trikru in the area to get together and observe their fire days and sun feasts, and teach their kids the sleng and basically be connected to their heritage at home.
Nyko is 20 and moving out to the reservation to become a healer. Anya is 16, practicing for her license and hoping to be initiated into the local gona-kru. Lincoln is 15, and finally made up the year he failed, so he’s not in your classes anymore; he’s a freshman this year and dating a girl in your grade named Octavia. She’s trikru so Indra doesn’t say much as long as his grades stay up. He’s on the JV football team and wants to try out for basketball. Aden is 18 months, another naitblida that Indra has taken in. It’s weird to have a baby in the house, but also nice. You spend more time with him than anyone else when you’re home. You don’t have friends, exactly, but you don’t spend many evenings at home, either. There are kids to smoke with, to skate with, to do teenage hoodrat shit with. You’ve been out less in the last few months since Aden came. He’s grounding for you, and doesn’t expect anything in return.
You’ve kept up with the news from the space station, hoping to hear something about Jake since there’s no way to get in touch with Clarke; the one time you mentioned it, Indra had given you a look that made you very glad you weren’t in arm’s reach when you suggested it. You haven’t said her name since then. One day you read about a catastrophic explosion and send up a silent prayer to whatever gods might be listening that Jake wasn’t involved.