Blood rushes to my face, and my vision blurs. “I was curious.”
I wanted our last day together to be special, a throwback to the days when I was little and we’d work all day and then Mom would brush my hair and tell me stories about a crew of happy cactus mice who lived deep in the desert on insects and rainwater. But here we are having the old fight again.
“The important thing is, I’m fine. Nothing happened.” I muster my resolution like a clenched fist. “The Glare doesn’t actually make people put drain cleaner in their eyes. I mean, you know that, right?” Please tell me you know that.
Mom keeps looking straight at me. “When I worked at your dad’s company, I was exposed to the Glare at least seventeen hours a day. I have a very good idea of how it affects people.”
“I know that.” When we lived in California, Mom designed games that people play in the Glare. The goal is to get the players addicted; the goal of everything in the Glare is to addict you, to unstick you from reality, and you never know you’re unstuck until it’s too late.
But getting addicted or unstuck isn’t the same as getting possessed. The babysitter’s story still makes me sad, but it no longer sends shivers down my spine.
Mom goes on. “And you haven’t forgotten the things that happened to you, have you?”
“The Glare knocked me off-kilter. I know. But I barely even remember that stuff, Mom. I just know what you’ve told me.”
She’s told the stories so many times they’re emblazoned on my brain: How I screamed when she took my Glare-screens away. How I climbed out my window and sat on the roof. How I switched on the gas burners so the whole house could’ve burned down. Bad, scary, unmanageable Hedda, who had to be taken away for her own good.
But I haven’t been that little girl for so long.
I rise and brace myself on the edge of the table, frustration simmering in my gut. “Whatever I did when I was six, I’m not unstuck from reality now, as you can see. And I don’t ever plan to be.”
This argument never ends well, but I keep going, my voice rising: “You need to get it through your head that you can’t control me forever, and I don’t give a flying… freak about the Glare. I don’t want the Glare. I don’t need the Glare. All I want is not to spend the entire rest of my life in the middle of nowhere taking care of goats.”
Mom doesn’t snap back. I can see to the blue bottom of her eyes.
“Hedda,” she says, “you’re sixteen now. If I thought I could control you, here or in California, I’d be stupid. So that’s why I’m begging you—don’t tempt fate. You’ve seen the Glare for yourself—now let it alone. Or if you have to use it occasionally, use it carefully, the way I do. Control yourself.”
She closes her secret phone with a neat clap. I turn around, blinded by tears, and stumble outside into the August heat to do my chores for the last damn time.
Just an hour ago, the knowledge that I’m leaving was a pool of brightness inside me. Now I want to kick everything—the red dirt, the feed bucket, the dusty stalls, a stray hen.
Instead, I take a deep breath and start the routine that keeps me grounded, day after day. When I’m done feeding the goats, I pet them, feeling sorry for what I said about them earlier. They butt against my hand longer than usual, staring at me through their alien horizontal pupils. The chickens ignore me, too busy having peck fights and pulling up grubs.
The scrubby red desert stretches like a basking lizard to where Wedding Cake Mesa slices the horizon. As far as it’s concerned, I’ll be back here tomorrow to throw feed for these hens, and the day after and the day after that, till the sun has turned my face to leather. How could someone like me ever come unstuck?
I could’ve said more. I could’ve challenged Mom to prove the Glare had anything to do with my bad behavior—or with the babysitter hurting herself, for that matter. I could’ve picked apart the logic that made Mom bring me here to live on the ranch she inherited from her uncle, twenty miles from the nearest town, where she can homeschool me and keep me safe from screens.
I could have pointed out that normal people don’t even call it “the Glare.” That was my word originally, something I cried out in waking nightmares when we first came here. Whenever Mom left me alone in the house for more than a few minutes, she says, I’d run to her saying the Glare was after me—sneaking through the cracks, creeping along the floor, looming on my bedroom wall like an intruder. It had got the babysitter, and now it would get me.
We both had plenty to be scared of back then—the desert silence, the snakes. But little by little, as we fixed up this run-down place, it started to feel like home. I’d read to Mom from instruction manuals, sounding out the big words, while she fumbled underneath the water heater or the solar generator, muttering (usually) sanitized curse words.
The first time we helped a nanny goat birth her kids, we broke out the sparklers like it was New Year’s Eve. We learned to milk, to make cheese, to slaughter and pluck chickens, to plant the garden, to fix the roof. We turned a wreck into a ranch with tidy outbuildings and beds of chard and kale and rioting tomato plants.
It’s still so quiet, though. Sometimes, like now, I close my eyes and stretch my inner sensors out and out in every direction like insect antennae, looking for someone or something to connect to. All they ever report is echoing emptiness.
I open my eyes to the dazzling horizon, then examine my calloused fingertips and the sludgy white scars on my inner arm. I got those when I was six, climbing a cottonwood tree and falling in barbed wire.
Everything here is rough, dangerous—no playgrounds carefully designed to be kid-friendly. I’m not complaining. But after all the hard work we’ve done together, all the things we’ve both given up, all the years without friends or a father, she has the gall to tell me to control myself.
Well, I can—but not because she says to. From now on, I make the rules for me.
After chores, I finish packing and take a long look at the stuff I can’t take with me: the rock collection, the snake skins, most of the books, the stuffed animals, and the long scrolls of paper that unfurl across the robin’s-egg-blue walls of my room.
Soon after we got here, Mom found twenty paper rolls in the crawl space under the porch—from an old accounting machine, she said. For years afterward, I filled them with cartoonish images of the home I’d left behind: a brown-shingled, gabled house on a tree-lined street. There’s Daddy with his curly black hair and his Glare-box, Mommy with her wide smile, and me in a red shirt with my own Glare-box. There’s the babysitter with her tattoo of a blue flower. I drew her with sparkly eyes, the way she was before she hurt herself.
There are my two best friends and neighbors: Ellis with his freckles and shy smile, and Mireya with her glossy black hair. Ellis was the babysitter’s little brother, and in the pictures, we’re always happy and having fun. At the beach, on the playground, in school, at Mom and Dad’s office. On my ninth birthday, I filled a yard of paper with the party I dreamed of: friends, a sparkly dress, fireworks, a movie. For the movie, I drew blue light exploding from a black rectangle.
Blue light. That’s all I really remember about the Glare in my life before.
Blue light bathed me as I sat beside Ellis at Mom’s desk, pressing keys. Blue light bathed the babysitter as she stared at flitting shapes on a screen. “Don’t look, this isn’t for kids!” she snapped, but I kept looking because I wasn’t a baby.