She keeps going and yells back to me, "And you're going to eat them."

I stand up and all my bones creak. I wonder if we've switched bodies somehow, or minds. By the time I've walked over to her she's already in the refrigerator, or at least her head, shoulders and arms are.

I put my hand on her shoulder and feel the bones of it, the blade of it pushed out through the cloth, and it reminds me of a bird's wing, a fragile bird that's fallen out of a nest and for no reason at all I ask her, "Grammy, have you ever been in love?"

She doesn't hesitate. "No."

"Not with Grampa?"

"He was not an easy man."

"Oh," I say. "Do you think Dad loved my mother?"

"Maybe," she says, breaking an egg. "Who is to know?"

I am to know. I want to know something, something solid. It seems like too much of life is like flower smells-just fragrances. They waft past your nose, you get a good sniff and then they are away, off to somewhere else. How can you hold onto that?

I want the feel of Paolo's shoulder, not the feel of Mike O'Donnell's hand ripping my shirt.

"Can I help you?" I ask her.

"Yes," she says and smiles.

One thing I do know is that in the kitchen it's possible to help another person, to break an egg, to throw away a shell, to wipe up the mess.

My mother calls me and my grandmother forces me to the phone.

"I was worried sick," my mother says, but her voice sounds like acting to me.

"Uh-huh."

I play with a pencil on the counter, start scribbling on the prescription note pad, drawing circles over and over until they lose their circle look and become knots.

She keeps lecturing, all cranky-voiced. "You're in big trouble, young lady, you just can't do that. Sneaking out a window. Then Jessica leaves in a huff. Is she there too?"

"Yep."

She's silent, and that's when I do it. That's when I saddle up. Wagons ho! One big swallow and I launch the words out.

"Mom, he tackled me. He hit my head into the floor. He's freaking scary, Mom. He's not a good man," I say and it's like there's this great big hand pressing down on my chest and it's threatening to turn my whole entire soul dark if my mom doesn't answer the right way. That horrible feeling is already spreading because I know she isn't going to answer the right way, because she didn't before, with Uncle Mark, and that was so much worse. I manage to say it again. "He hurt me."

"Come home and we'll talk about it."

I watch the seconds on the clock go by. When I was little before the divorce and my family all still lived together, my father would come home from work and the first thing he'd do was lift me onto his shoulders and we would wind all the clocks. We'd fix all the minute hands on all the clocks in the house and make sure they all said the same time.

My dad used to tell me that it was important in a family to have that kind of consistency, the same truth in all the clocks' times. Maybe it wasn't the real time, he'd say, but it was family time.

I cut off my mother's sentence, which is just about how awful I am, and I ask her, "What time does it say on the kitchen clock?"

"9:42."

"And how about the clock in the living room? Can you see that one?"

"Yes, why?"

"What time does that one say?" I ask her. Grammy looks over at me, away from her poetry book.

"9:38," my mother says, sighing.

"That's the problem," I say.

There's silence on the other end for a little bit, but I can tell that she's there because I hear her breathing. She breathes heavy because she smokes too much.

"You hate me, don't you?" she asks, begging.

I don't answer. Meanness is all bottled up inside of me, I guess, and I can't answer. I think of her that time on the boat with my step-uncle. I think of her noises with Mike O'Donnell. Then I say, "I want him gone. He scares me."

Now she's silent. I wonder if she'll listen. She didn't listen about my step-uncle. On the other end of the phone, she starts to cry.

"I get lonely, Lily," she says. "I'm human, you know. I'm just human."

"He is not a good man. He. Is. Not. Good," I say. I take a big breath. I fire my gun and it feels like I'm shooting my own self in the gut, making a big black hole. "It's him or me."

She says, "That's not fair, Lily. That's not fair. You'll be leaving for college soon and where will I be? All alone without ... "

But I don't hear anymore because Grammy wrenches the phone out of my hand as I howl. I howl so loud that even my mother should be able to hear it with a phone or without one. It's a long howl, like that of a cat who has been alone on the fence too many nights, a cat who can't find its way home and it's raining, raining hard.

The tension in my father's house is too much, with my sister hiding and my father trying to make everything jokey like it's a happy, sitcom-family reunion and my Grammy wringing her hands, so I beg Sasha to let me sleep over and she lets me.

"What a great idea!" she says. "We can go over our lines."

In the afternoon, I go to Sasha's house and as usual she has some really good ideas about what to do.

First, we go over our lines by repeating the lines of the person before us. Then they repeat our lines before saying theirs. This is supposed to help us with the intentions of our character and the objectives of the other character.

Sasha's mother listens to us and applauds once in a while. She's a big-hugging woman, whatever that means. She's the type of mother who understands that alone time is a good thing when you're a freshman in high school. So after a while she tells us to buzz off and go hang out in Sasha's room.

"Come here," Sasha whispers when we're in her bedroom alone. There are all kinds of cool lava lights everywhere, and beads dangle around her bed. On the walls are pictures of John Lennon. She loves John Lennon. That song about imagining there's no people is her favorite. She says it's better than the national anthem.

I think it's funny how we both like dead Johns, but how our Johns are so different. It's hard imagining you singing Let it Be. Or maybe it's the other Beatle who sings that. Paul?

I go to where she's sitting on the floor by her bed. "What?"

"Let's make prank calls."

I stare at her. "Why?"

"Hone our acting skills."

"Isn't that kind of mean?"

She shrugs. "We'll do nice ones."

I don't want to, but say I will.

"You do the first one," she says, holding out the phone.

"Me?"

"You need to loosen up."

"I'm loose," I say.

Sasha just laughs and dials a number. I take the phone. A nice old-lady voice answers.

"Hello," I say. "Is your refrigerator running?"

Sasha rolls her eyes.

The old lady says, "What dear?"

"Is your refrigerator running?"

"Why, yes it is ... " she says.

"Oh, um, that's good," I say. "I must have the wrong number."

I slam the phone down and Sasha laughs so hard she rolls on the floor like a dog.

"What?" I say.

She starts snarfing out her juice. It spills on her shirt, which makes me laugh too. We grab each other's shoulders, but it takes us a long time to calm down.

"Why did you laugh so hard?" I ask her. "I screwed it all up."

"Your problem, Lily," she says all serious, looking into my eyes, "is that you're too afraid."

"I'm not afraid," I say. "I'm not afraid at all."

I tell her I have a plan. And then I tell her the rest of it. I tell her about my mother's man and what he says he is, and what I think he's done.

Sasha and I decide that we'll go on a double date with Paolo and Stuart Silsby tomorrow night, since it's a long weekend and we don't have school Monday. Sasha thinks Stuart's a bit too pedestrian, but good to practice kissing on. "When I have enough practice, I'll move on to Tyler," she says.

We stand in front of her bathroom mirror, which stretches the entire length of the wall and has big lightbulbs all along the top like a mirror backstage in a theater.

Sasha's mom is good at the makeup thing. She puts gold eye shadow on the inner part of my eyelids to make my eyes look wide. Sasha puts some gloss on my lips.

"Wet and kissable!" she says and I blush.

Then she rubs it in more and starts singing a song from the play, "Some Enchanted Evening." I throw a cotton ball at her and she says in an over-big voice, "Oh, roses from my fans. Thank you dahlings."

I brush my hair and stare at myself in her mirror. I look better than usual, but it doesn't really feel like me.

"Do you think I look Irish?" I ask Sasha.

She puts her head next to mine. It's longer and her eyes are big and brown. She has little freckles on her nose.

"Do you think I look Jewish?" she asks back.

"What does Jewish look like?"

She shrugs. "Who knows? What does Irish look like?"

"I think you're beautiful," I say. "Plus, you know all those Christmas carols. You're the beautiful Jewess who croons Christmas carols, the shining star of Merrimack, Maine."

This makes Sasha laugh. "So are you dahling, so are you."

Then she puts on her serious Sasha face. "It doesn't matter who your father is or isn't. It matters who you are."

I shrug.

"Paolo likes you a lot," Sasha says. "Is he a good kisser?"

"Sasha!" Olivia sticks her head into the bathroom. "You're so nosey."

"Like you don't want to know," Sasha said.

"Inquiring minds want to know," Olivia says, holding a lipstick dangerously close to my face. "Tell us or you get the famous lipstick torture."

Her voice is like a vampire's.

"Ves, tell vus," Sasha vamps.

"No. No. I have sworn myself to secrecy," I say. "I must not tell you what the infamous Paolo Mattias kisses like, what the fantabulous Paolo Mattias kisses like ... it is a secret I shall take to my grave."

They laugh and Olivia drops the lipstick back onto the counter. I sigh inside because how can you explain a kiss, how can you explain it without a million words and a poem and a painting?

A fist, that's a lot easier to explain.

I have found some things that say Hannah Dustin felt guilty about what she did, about how she killed all those Indians, scalped them, so that she could escape slavery, go back to her family. It says she had nightmares. I hate that people fought and killed and died and had to live with what they did. I hate that people still do.

I can't imagine just having a baby, seeing that baby die, being kidnapped with another woman. At the camp of your captors you see a young man who's been stolen from another town. You live there, with the kidnappers, the women, the children. Go to a wide angle shot. See them camped out on the island.

Zoom in on your face. You, Hannah Dustin. You live there and you long for home. You live there and you learn that you will go further north, be sold into slavery. The young man knows how to scalp, and that's what you do, you scalp. Not just the men. You kill the women. You kill the children and you escape. You bring the scalps to prove what you did.

It makes my stomach sick. The colonists did so many, so many crappy things; they murdered, raped, kidnapped, stole land, spread disease, lied. People do this over and over. People do this now in our country, to other countries. People do it on a smaller scale to each other every single day.

But what you have to think about is that on the individual level, the smallest level, this is a mom. This is a mom who will do anything to get back to her home. Anything.