Saints of the Household by Ari Tison EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Ari Tison
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction on Physical & Emotional Abuse
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
FIRST DAY BACK
People try not to look at us in the hallway. After we’d been suspended for
two weeks, our classmates scatter like we might swallow them. Us, these
angry brown boys ready to snap. What does it mean when we scare
everyone—the good and the bad?
Maybe someday I will walk down the hall, and someone will see the
human in me. It won’t be just Mom, God, and Max. Is Nicole in that group?
I haven’t seen her since the woods, only DMing her my apologies. No
response.
Max follows close behind, his coyote eyes averting, and I feel all my
pull-ups bulk in my shoulders, my stomach, and in the veins that plump
thick down my forearms. I keep my chin up. Keep my lips tight, and I am
grateful that we are taller than most. This way, I can’t see their eyes, their
fear of us. This way, I am not tempted to want more.
NICOLE
I go through the day without seeing her. Nicole and us, we are cousins, the
complicated kind, but cousins nonetheless. She’s my father’s stepniece; her
mother is his stepsister. Before Nicole’s parents divorced in fifth grade, she
grew up just a few miles from us. She went to the same schools, and we
were friend-cousins in class, inseparable, and family-cousins on holidays.
She, her mom, her dad, her sister—Tia—were the only Native family we
have on our dad’s side. She, her sister, and her mom enrolled at the Red
Lake Nation. Dad’s side entwined by marriage.
Tia is a clothing and jewelry designer studying in New Mexico. She was
the one to smooth-talk all the adults, the one with the coolest clothes,
wearing designer brands she’d revamp from the steals she’d find at thrift
stores or save up for at the mall. But Nicole has always been book brilliant.
She’d be the first one to teach us something new. Psychology, herbology,
ecology. The cousin who would take some distant relative’s baby in her
arms and show us their reflexes. A finger for their hands to clasp, a graze to
the cheek and they’d get all wide-eyed and hungry.
I wonder if she
somehow knows what everyone thinks. I know she now studies the mind,
reactions, attachments, and misplacements. What did she learn about Max
and me from that day in the woods? My stomach turns.
But she’s always had empathy—even for the bullies. Befriended most
people at school. And I remember how Nicole cared for herself, too,
making meals, doing her own laundry. Meanwhile, Max and I were just
figuring out how often to shower.
Grandpa taught us to respect our relatives here and to know whose land
we are on. The ever and always truth is that we, all of us, are on
Anishinaabe land here in northeastern Minnesota. We are all on Nicole’s
land.
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