PART ONE

1

THERE IS A SONG THAT GOES ALL THAT YOU have is your soul. The singer has this tragic, low voice—like the way someone sounds right after they’ve been crying for a long time—and she sings the line over and over again until way deep in your heart you believe it’s true.

It is true.

When it comes down to it, every single other thing can be taken clean away from you. Or you can be taken clean away from it. Like home. More and more and more, Denver feels like a dream I used to have. A place I once belonged to.

When the memory of Denver gets too blurred, I pinch myself and say, Your name is Toswiah. There was a time when the Rocky Mountains were just outside your window. But my name isn’t Toswiah anymore. And now, this tiny apartment in this crowded city is supposed to be my home. At night, the building echoes with emptiness—the apartments below and above us are empty. When I ask my father how come no one else lives here, he tells me they will come. That eventually someone else will move in, that the Feds thought it’d be best to move us into a building that was empty. I don’t believe my father, though. My father is losing his mind. Maybe all of us are.

Yesterday, I saw a girl who looked like a girl I used to know in Denver, and I got so scared and happy all at the same time that my head felt like it was going to lift straight up off my shoulders. As she got closer, I wanted to scream her name. I wanted to say It’s me, Toswiah Green! Then the girl got closer and I realized it wasn’t who I thought it was. She smiled and I smiled back. That was all. Two strangers being nice. She probably didn’t even remember it an hour later. But I did. And hours and hours after that, too, even though I was relieved I didn’t know her. Relieved, but sad. Is sad the word I’m looking for? No. It’s not big enough. What happened inside of me is much stronger than sad. Sad is stupid. It doesn’t hurt like this. It doesn’t tell even a little bit of the truth—that this missing is like someone peeling my skin back each time—peeling it back and exposing everything underneath to air. Hollow? Empty? Frustrated? Lost? Lonely? There’re so many words, and none of them work.

Some mornings, waking up in this new place, I don’t know where I am. The apartment is tiny. The kitchen is not even a whole room away from the living room, just a few steps and a wide doorway with no door separating it. Not even one fireplace. Daddy sits by the window staring out, hardly ever saying anything. Maybe he thinks if he looks long and hard enough, Denver will reappear, that the cluttered corner store filled with canned stuff, racks and racks of junk food, beer and cigarettes will morph into the hundred-year-old cedar tree at the end of our old street. Maybe he thinks the tall gray buildings all smashed against each other will separate and squat down, that the Rocky Mountains will rise up behind them. I want to say Daddy, it’s never gonna happen. But I’m afraid he’ll break into a million pieces if I do. Become the skin-dust floating around the room. I want to say Daddy, you did the right thing.

But I don’t know if that’s true.

When Daddy looks over to where me and my sister, Anna, sit watching TV, he looks surprised, like he’s wondering why we aren’t downstairs in the den. No den here, though. No dining room. No extra bathrooms down the hall and at the top of the stairs. Just five rooms with narrow doorways here. Floors covered with linoleum. Walls all painted the same awful shade of blue.

At night, the sounds outside are unfamiliar. Cars honking and people yelling. Fire trucks and ambulances. Anna in bed across the room from me is too close and strange. Every morning, I wake up expecting to see the mountains outside, then sit on the edge of my bed and force the memories to come. I try to push back what is true—that this place is not that place. That we are gone from Denver. Everything about who we were is gone—our names, our pictures, our old clothes and old lives. All that we have is our souls. If a soul is the way you feel deep inside yourself about a thing, the way you love it, the way it stops your breath, then mine is still in Colorado.

Close your eyes and imagine the floor beneath your feet—cool hardwood maybe. Or softly warm and carpeted. Sit down and lift your feet up off of it and imagine you can never put them down on it again. Ever. See how quickly the feeling of that floor fades? See how much you want to feel it again? How lost you feel with no place solid to put your feet?

It’s okay to put your feet back down on it. Maybe in your lifetime that floor’s not going anywhere.

IMAGINE YOUR BEST FRIEND’S SMILE, HOW YOU remember it from its front-teeth-missing days till this moment. A year after the braces have come off and she’s finally learned how to comb that mass of hair. The boys falling over themselves for her. Her name is Lulu.

Toswiah—we have to get the same outfit. On the first day of school, we’ll say we’re cousins.

Imagine Lulu in second grade and third grade and fourth and seventh. The way she shot up past you last year and got beautiful but had her same silly Lulu laugh—even when boys were watching. Lulu in a black turtleneck and jeans—except on the first and last days of school and on our birthday. Then it was something amazing—a long metallic-blue dress made out of silk, shoes with mile-high soles, or a hundred yellow ribbons in her thick black hair and a retro tube top with TONY ORLANDO AND DAWN embroidered across it, halters and miniskirts, a blue leather coat soft as butter falling to her ankles, bright pink lipstick and blue eye shadow. Lulu with her mama’s dark skin and her own beautifully slanted eyes, pressing her bleeding finger against mine, whispering Now our blood’s all mixed up. We can’t ever leave each other.

Imagine yourself whispering back I’m not going anywhere. I’d never leave here in a million years!

And Lulu laughing, throwing her head back like a grown-up. And Lulu’s warm head on my shoulder—the day so perfect, we’re speechless.

Lulu. My friend.

My name is Evie. From the jump-rope game. Maybe you’ve heard the little kids singing Evie Ivie Over. Here comes a teacher with a big fat stick. I wonder what she’s got for arithmetic! One and one? Two! Me and you. Who?

It came to me as I lay in bed one night—in a half-dream—after me and Lulu had spent the afternoon jumping rope and eating ice-cream sandwiches from a jumbo box of them Lulu’s mother had bought, one right after the other until we both swore we’d never eat another one as long as we lived. That night, my father had sat down at the dinner table and told us he was going to testify. It might mean us leaving here, he said. Changing our lives, our names. Everything. And the ice-cream sandwiches sat heavy in my stomach for a few minutes, then slowly circled around and came back up again.

My name is Evie now. I am tall and skinny and quiet. I’ve never kissed. Sometimes I think about it, about how it would feel, how it would happen. But maybe it won’t ever happen. Not here. Not now. The boys here call me Neckbone, say that’s all I am—lots of bone and a little bit of meat. They collect in circles on corners and pass bottles of bright, nasty-looking liquids around. When I walk by them, I feel like a third leg grows out of my butt—my walking gets strange and my body feels all wrong. Hey Neckbone, one of them always says, making the others laugh. If I was brave, I would look full at them and say I’d like a little taste of that. Then I’d take that bottle and put it straight up to my lips, take a long, hard drink of that stuff and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. If I was brave, I’d slide one of my hands past the waistband of my pants and just stand with it there like they do—holding on to whatever.

If I was brave, I could belong somewhere.

My name’s Toswiah, I’d say. Toswiah Green. Have you ever heard of me?

But my name is Evie now. And I’ve never been brave.

When we lived in Denver, we skied and snow-boarded. Cameron wasn’t afraid. She’d go up to the expert slope and take off. Sometimes I’d stand all bundled up at the bottom of the mountain watching my sister moving toward me. As she got closer, I’d see that she was smiling. Smiling with the snow flying up around her. The sound of her snowboard swishing toward me always made something inside me jump with love and the beauty of it all. Cameron was the brave one. Popular. Smart. If you try really hard, she used to say, maybe a little of me will rub off on you. And although I stuck my tongue out at her when she said this, I did try because I wanted to know what it felt like to come down that mountain—grinning and beautiful and free.

Hey Neckbone, one of those guys always says. Show a brother some love.

I CAN NEVER TELL ANYBODY THE REAL TRUTH. But I can write it