Searching for Sky by Jillian Cantor

Author:Jillian Cantor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-05-15T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

“I have a question for you,” I tell Dr. Banks a few nights later. She has come after dinner tonight, and darkness floods past the window, the moon bloated again, nearly full. From the next room, I hear the noises of the television box, unfamiliar voices, shouting.

“Yes, Megan,” Dr. Banks says. “What’s that?” She smiles her silly this-is-your-safe-space smile, and a part of me wants to reach across her face and hit her now just to make the smile go away. I wouldn’t have hit anyone on Island, ever. My mother, Helmut, they wouldn’t have allowed it. And besides that, I never wanted to. But Dr. Banks’s lips are a terrible shade of pink—lipstick—I know, because my grandmother showed me how to put it on and asked me if I wanted to try some of hers. But honestly, I just don’t see the point.

“Well,” I say now, looking away from her so I don’t have to see that awful pink smile. I hear the sound of tiny footsteps in the other room—my grandmother’s—and I guess she’s listening to us while trying to pretend that she’s watching the television box. “We all had different names on Island,” I say. “I am Sky. Lucas was River. My mother, Angela”—the name still feels funny on my tongue—“was Petal. But Helmut was Helmut.” I remember what Ben told me that first night, that he’d learned about Helmut from the Google, that Helmut had done some bad things. But all the newspapers Mrs. Fairfield has shown me have made little, if any, mention of Helmut, and I don’t know if that’s because the stuff Ben told me was wrong or if it was that Mrs. Fairfield has been leaving pieces out.

“That’s an interesting question, Megan.” Dr. Banks draws her pink lips together in a line. “But first let’s address something else. You said, ‘I am Sky.’ Not ‘I was Sky.’ ”

“So?” I say, suddenly wishing I hadn’t asked anything at all.

“So you have trouble being called Megan, don’t you?”

I sigh. “Maybe.”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t know,” I say because I am not going to tell her the truth, that soon I will be back on Island, with River, and I will be Sky again, always. That I am Sky. No matter what.

Dr. Banks does that annoying thing where she just stares at me. She stares and stares and stares until I say something else. “My mother called me Sky,” I say. “That’s what she told me my name was.”

“She called you Megan once, too.”

“I don’t remember that,” I say, though I think about the last moment my mother spoke to me, when she might have said Megan.

She nods. “But why do you think you get so angry when people who do remember that call you Megan?”

“I don’t,” I say, but even as I say it I realize that, actually, I do.

“All right.” She holds up her hands. “But you don’t like it, do you?”

“Not really,” I admit. “Everything is different here. I don’t know anything anymore.

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