Chapter One

Because of You

One week after you stuffed a coil of rope into your backpack and walked uphill into Osgoods' orchard where blooms were still closed fists

my father looked up summer airfares to Tokyo

why? I protested it wasn't my fault I didn't do anything!

exactly! my mother hissed and made the call to her older sister my aunt in Shizuoka

nothing would change their minds

all my mother would say as I followed her through garden beds transplanting cubes of seedlings she'd grown under lights in hothouses

all she'd say row after row in tight-lipped talk-down do-as-I-say Japanese was
you can reflect in the presence of your ancestors

not that I'm alone in being sent away-- 
Lisa's off to summer school
Becca to Bible camp
Mona to cousins in Quebec
Emily to help in her uncle's store
Erin to math camp
Abby to some adventure program
Noelle to her father's
Gina to her mother's
Namita to New Jersey . . .
all twenty-nine eighth-grade girls scattered, as Gina said, like beads from a necklace snapped

but we weren't a necklace strung in a circle we were more an atom: electrons arranged in shells around Lisa, Becca and Mona first shell solid, the rest of us in orbitals farther out less bound less stable and you-- in the least stable most vulnerable outermost shell

you sometimes hovered near sometimes drifted off some days were hurled far from Lisa our nucleus whose biting wit made us laugh spin revolve around her always close to her indifferent to orbits like yours farther out than ours

after you were found in the grove of Macs and Cortlands that were still tight fists of not-yet-bloom and the n...