Escape from Windenburg | 8

I remained petrified at the thought of having an actual conversation with my father, so Aarti suggested I try writing a letter instead. To my surprise, the words flowed freely on the page. Without the threat of immediate interruption or argument hovering over my shoulder, I could express myself fully, and it felt unexpectedly cathartic to finally articulate everything that had been building up inside of me for so long.

I hesitated over whether or not to put a return address on the envelope. In the end, I decided I would. Maybe he would send the police after me or come track me down himself, but I had a feeling that once he knew I was somewhere safe, he would let me decide when to come home for myself. He should realize just as well as I did that there would be no chance of repairing our relationship if he forced my hand.

I was so caught up in my thoughts that I was shocked when I looked up from the mailbox to find everything covered in a layer of white. Snow! The first I had seen since arriving in Evergreen Harbor. I felt immeasurably lucky it had waited until after the Uchiyamas offered to put a roof over my head. I doubt even the inside of a dumpster would have offered me much protection against sub-freezing temperatures.

When the others saw the snow, they all rushed outside, determined to make the most of it before it inevitably melted away. Alejandro and Rahul exchanged mischievous glances. "Snowball fight," they said in unison. "You coming, Rav?" Rahul called back to his sister, but she just shook her head. The absence of a snarky remark could only be attributed to the fact that her attention was focused elsewhere - namely, on the knitting project in her hands. Presumably, this was her unique skill set.

The four of us found a wide open space in which there was plenty of room for us to absolutely pummel each other with snowballs. I expected the boys to automatically team up, but instead Alejandro yelled in my direction, "Let's knock him out!" We swiftly packed our snowballs and took aim before Rahul could even react.

My snowball only landed at his feet, but Alejandro's nailed him squarely in the face. "Come on, guys! Let's keep it below the neck!" he shouted back at us, wiping slushy chunks of snow out of his hair. "And give a guy a chance to defend himself, won't you?"

Across from him, Lux couldn't stop cracking up. "Oh, man, that was classic! He never saw it coming."

Then, before she could see it coming, Alejandro made her his next target, and his aim was still decidedly above the neck. "What the hell?" Lux shrieked. "I thought you were going after him!"

"Oh, sorry," Alejandro replied, not sounding the least bit contrite. "I thought it was implied you'd be on his team when I picked Rowan for mine."

But Rahul had decided to abandon the concept of teams altogether and took advantage of the opportunity to pelt Lux again while she wasn't paying attention. She fell flat onto the ground. "Oh my god," she muttered. "This is why I hate men. You have no sense of what it means to play fair."

Rahul was clearly pleased with himself. He laughed until he was bent over, breathlessly clutching at his sides. The rest of us decided we should go three-on-one after all and stockpiled as many snowballs as we could while he tried to gather himself. We couldn't wait to absolutely demolish him. Being silly with them, I felt purely happy for the first time in a long time, without any qualifiers or caveats.

But I knew that staying with the Uchiyamas couldn't be all fun and games. I had to pull my weight, and that meant finding a talent that would prove useful to them. I figured the best place to start would be trying everyone else's on for size. My first attempt, figure painting with Lux, resulted in unmitigated failure. "That's what took you two hours to create? It looks like a kindergartner drew it in five minutes!"

"Hey," I said, suddenly feeling defensive over a painting I knew was irredeemable. "You don't have to be so rude about it! Not everyone has perfected the nuances of the human form, okay?"

Her voice went high in disbelief. "The nuances? Girl, you don't even have the basics! If I didn't know better, I'd think you'd never seen a human in your life." I couldn't argue with that. It was obvious painting would not be my forte.

I tried Alejandro's violin next, but I could barely stand to listen to the squawking, creaking, moaning sounds - which could hardly be called music - that the bow produced beneath my hand. I began to consider the possibility that I was actually tone-deaf. For his part, Alejandro did his best to remain supportive. "That's already starting to sound better," he told me, but the hesitancy in his voice betrayed his words for what they were: a lie.

"Dude, don't even pretend," Rahul piped in. "Your instrument is being slaughtered. It's literally crying out for help."

Alejandro refused to succumb to the negativity. "Well, everybody has to start somewhere. Let her give your guitar a try. Maybe she'll have better luck there."

Rahul rolled his eyes. "They're both string instruments. If she can't play one, odds are she can't-"

"Just give it to her," Alejandro interrupted.

He only had to take one look at me fumbling to hold the guitar up and strum the strings at the same time to determine I was a lost cause. "Don't take it too hard," he said flippantly before heading back downstairs. "Some of us are born with a musical ear and some of us aren't. I'm sure you'll figure out your thing soon."

Could my thing be woodworking? Enji was initially enthusiastic to let me serve as his apprentice for a day, but he began having second thoughts as soon as I started wielding his carving knife. Apparently, I lacked the finesse for patiently whittling a basic block of wood into a sculptural masterpiece. I was disappointed but not surprised. Months ago, the only skill remotely resembling a talent I'd considered myself to possess had up and abandoned me for no reason. I doubted I would ever find anything worthy of taking its place.

At least I had plenty of other tasks to keep me occupied - and prove myself an asset to the household - in the meantime. There were always simple everyday chores to be done, and I didn't mind taking on the grunt work that everyone else tended to put off as long as they possibly could.

"You know, I'm beginning to think it isn't so bad to have you around after all," Rav said brightly one morning while I was mopping in the kitchen, and my ears immediately perked up. Was she finally starting to come around? But my hope vanished as soon as she continued speaking. "I could definitely get used to the idea of having a live-in maid."

"It might be good for you to wash a plate every once in a while, Rav," Alejandro shot back. "It builds character, which you seem to be sorely lacking." She only rolled her eyes and sulked off to her room with her slice of leftover honey cake.

The more Rav bitched about me being there, the harder I worked to prove I was worthy of staying. Nothing she said could keep me down for long. It only took me a few days to master the juice-fizzing machine.

Candle-making proved trickier, and I nearly burned my fingers off more times than I could count, but I persisted, committed to paying for my continued room and board in any way I could, though Aarti and Enji hardly seemed the sort of people to kick me out the second I stopped fully pulling my weight.

I soon found yet another way to contribute. As Lux's lesson on dumpster-diving protocol that first day might have suggested, the household's members scouted the various garbage bins in town daily, on the prowl for any carelessly discarded materials they could repurpose in their various money-making endeavors.

When it was my turn to see what treasures I could uncover, I was momentarily waylaid by a swarming cloud of flies.

"What the hell?" I exclaimed, furiously patting at my clothes to clear any lingering insects. "You could've warned me!"

Rahul chuckled at my plight. "Consider it an initiation rite. Congratulations, young grasshopper. You've finally completed your training." He bowed with exaggerated solemnity.

Flies aside, it felt good to feel like part of a real family again, even if it was an unconventional one. No matter what, you could always count on having someone around to talk to. After spending so long on my own, I greedily basked in the convivial atmosphere. I couldn't get enough of it.

Sid was starting to feel like a part of the family, too. He and Chiyo had sorted out their differences and now often spent the evenings dozing lazily together on the front porch like two old friends.

In some ways, maybe we had gotten a little too comfortable. One morning, I walked into the kitchen to find Sid chowing down on a bowl of fruit salad without a care in the world, like he had crowned himself king of the manor.

His misbehavior might have flown under the radar if the fruit salad hadn't belonged to Rav. "Can you please teach your cat some manners?" she moaned dramatically. "You need to train that thing to keep its filthy, disgusting little paws out of my breakfast!"

At least I wasn't the only one subjected to Rav's scorn. Her default state seemed to be a general apathy toward the world at large. Nothing and no one impressed her. Like Rahul had put it the first time we met, she was clearly "going through" something. She only ever seemed content, maybe even happy, when she was knitting. I wondered if this might be the code to cracking her.

A couple days later, I mustered up the courage to enter her room for the first time. It was immediately like stepping into another house entirely, the muted earth tones favored by her parents giving way to bright pops of pink, purple, and yellow. The first thing that caught my eye was a mannequin wearing a dress of many colors and patterns - it was chaotic but in a charming way. "Did you make this?" I asked, amazed. It seemed knitting was only the tip of the iceberg of her talents.

"Yes, I created the pattern myself, and it took me months to sew." Then she seemed to realize who she was talking to and narrowed her eyes at me suspiciously. "What do you want? Can't you see I'm busy?"

"Sorry," I mumbled automatically. "I was just wondering if maybe I could borrow some yarn and knitting needles. I'm trying to figure out what I'm good at, so I just thought-"

"You just thought you'd steal the thing I'm good at?"

"No! I just thought it'd be worth giving a try. I don't want to steal anything."

She sighed heavily, as if our brief conversation had already exhausted her. "I guess I have some extra needles lying around here somewhere. But it's not as easy as it looks, and I don't have time to teach you, so good luck."

"Of course. Thank you."

A couple minutes later, as she shoved an armload of yarn at me, she added contemptuously, "And take your cat with you, for God's sake."

I whirled around to find that Sid had crept in behind me and managed to swat a ball of yarn onto the floor, where he was now rapturously unraveling it between his teeth and paws. He hissed and snarled up a storm as I painstakingly wrangled it out of his grasp.

Rav was right: knitting was hard, especially when you had no choice but to be your own teacher. I seemed to possess as little natural capacity for this as I did for painting, playing an instrument, or woodworking. "I must be the least talented person on the planet!" I exclaimed in frustration, thinking no one but Sid would hear me.

I hadn't even noticed Aarti sit down on the sofa beside me. "I refuse to believe that's true," she said. "But you can't force a talent to arise, and you certainly can't master any skill in only one try. You'll know what you're passionate about when you find it, and then the work it takes to get better won't feel like work at all."

Her words made me think of only one thing: magic. I had been passionate about spellcasting and willing to put in the effort to become more skilled. But then the universe snatched it away from me just as I was getting somewhere with it. I knew what my real talent was. What I didn't know was how to regain access to it. By now, I was too scared of failure to even try.