Page 31 of Throwing Shade
“I appreciate it, but no.”
The Lonestars’ actions that night were made worse by the speed at which they’d responded. Our house was too far from any neighbor to see or hear the struggle and I didn’t tell anyone about the murders until I got to Uncle Jake, Dad’s best friend, around dawn at the local lumber mill where he worked the graveyard shift. The Lonestars must have known ahead of time that this hit was planned and they either didn’t care enough to protect us, were paid to look the other way, or were part of it.
I never found out, and I’d never trust any of them for that reason.
Jake hid me until he was convinced that no one was after me, at which point he’d reached out to Goldie on my behalf. He’d cut off all contact at that point so that I’d appear to be another Sapien kid, but birthday cards with money in them had shown up with no return address every year until I turned forty. I’d found his obituary in my old hometown’s paper. Jake had passed away after a long bout with cancer, leaving me alone with the secret.
Even though we hadn’t spoken in years, it reassured me that someone else out there had the real facts, because retelling the house fire story hurt. It made me dissociate. I wanted to scream that it wasn’t a tragic accident, even as I sadly told the lie to my daughter. Without anyone to back me up, I sometimes questioned my own memories—and sanity. Remembering that Jake was aware of the truth had helped me cope, and his loss had hit me hard, my grief yet another secret to hide.
Ava put her hand on my arm. “You okay?”
I shook off my reverie. “Yeah.”
“You know the chances of your parents’ killers finding you are tiny,” she said.
“Intellectually, sure, but it’s hard to overcome a lifetime of conditioning. My magic is really rare and now everyone out there has seen it.”
“True.” She nudged my leg. “You’re the first Banim Shovavim I’ve ever met. Though, technically, calling yourself that is wrong on a couple levels.”
“How come?”
“First of all, that’s the plural form.” She picked up my empty soda can and shook it in question. I shook my head that I didn’t want another one. “You’re a single person,” Ava said. She tossed the can in a recycling bin. “Then there’s the issue that Hebrew is a gendered language. The phrase translates as rebellious or wayward children but by children they meant sons. So you’d need to use both the singular and the feminine, which would be an entirely different term.”
“And you gave me grief for my weird bowling fact? Why do you know this? Are you Jewish?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that impossible because I’m Black?”
“No. It simply means that we have to now perform the mandatory ritual of figuring out every single Jew that we have in common and how our grandparents may have been related.”
Ava laughed. “My parents do that with Jamaicans. Nah, I followed a boy to a kibbutz many years ago.”
“How’d that work out?”
She flashed me a thumbs-up. “I met a really great Israeli girl who’s now my wife, so pretty good.”
“Hey, mazel tov.”
“You married?”
“I was,” I said, “until my husband admitted he preferred men.”
Ava winced. “That had to do a number on your self-esteem.”
“I’m not sure it’s entirely past tense, but I’m also glad he’s being true to himself.” I swiveled from side to side in the desk chair, nervous about crossing this one last rule I’d made for myself, but wanting a friend who knew about all this stuff. Who knew about me. “I should get going, but uh… if you’re still up for a coffee sometime?”
“Definitely.”
We exchanged contact info and Ava walked me to the front door. None of the patrons gave us a second glance, easing a knot of tension inside me.
“Hey, that wolf shifter—Laurent—watch yourself with him, okay?” she said. “He’s an alpha.”
“I got that impression,” I said dryly.
“No, I mean he literally is an alpha. Or was. I don’t know what happened, but it was bad enough for him to walk away from it. I’ve heard everything from he slaughtered his pack himself to he murdered an entire community of Ohrists who killed the pack.”
My slim understanding of wolf shifters was that some chose not to live in packs, but you didn’t become an alpha and then leave. “Is this a ‘friend of a friend of a cousin said’ kind of thing?”
She shrugged. “Whatever went down, it was bad enough that he now voluntarily kills people on a regular basis.”
