Yesterday by C. K. Kelly Martin

die?”
    Garren glares at me with more concentrated rage than I’ve ever felt pointed in my direction. He slams the door in my face. It rattles on its hinges as I feel my heart pound in my chest. I stare at the closed door, out of breath and burning up. My mind’s somersaulting with conspiracy theories. Two dead Canadian diplomats in the same month. Who would benefit from that? And why is my memory of Garren still only a shadow thing now that I’ve spoken to him? Why doesn’t he know me? If it weren’t for the February air breathing cold life into me, I’d be falling to my knees with the weight of wondering.
    I’m hot but upright. Hot but thinking, thinking, thinking as I retrace my steps through the city streets, moving ever farther from the place I want to be most because the one person who I’m sure is caught up in this mystery with me never wants to see me again.

SEVEN
    S oon the sky is violet and as I hit Spadina, I realize that I’ve left my sister hanging for the second time in a week. It’s not that I forgot about her exactly but I lapsed in remembering my responsibility towards her. I call Olivia from the first pay phone I find and tell her I’m sitting in at a yearbook meeting at school and won’t be home for a while yet. Two hours, one subway train and two buses later I’m trudging into my house, throwing off my winter clothes and yanking off my salt-stained boots. My mother meets me at the door and complains, in a voice like a jagged line, that I shouldn’t have left my sister alone after school without warning.
    At first I apologize, my mind still too busy trying to wrap itself around what happened earlier with Garren to pay much attention to anything else, and then I begin to argue with her. My frustration with Garren (how he shut me out and wouldn’t listen) fuels my anger and I tell my mother Ishouldn’t be expected to babysit every single afternoon, that things happen after school that I want to be a part of.
    My mother counters that she doesn’t expect me to be a full-time babysitter, that she’s only talking about a couple of hours after school and suggesting that I tell her ahead of time if I can’t be here so that she can make alternate arrangements.
    In the middle of our disagreement I realize that I don’t care about what either of us is saying. It’s not important.
    I stomp away from my mother and up the stairs to my bedroom where I fling myself onto the bed, thinking about how I need to convince Garren to give me another chance. I was wrong to talk my way into his house with a lie. Maybe I would’ve been less threatening if I’d told him the truth from his doorstep.
    I thought we’d have some kind of breakthrough once I spoke to him. That he’d know me. But the information about his father’s a start. I need a plan for the next time I see Garren. Something to say that will make him stop resisting me and listen.
    Just then my mother hurls my door open and charges into the room, hands on her hips. “I know none of us have had it easy lately,” she begins, “but I don’t like what’s been happening to your attitude, Freya. First changing your appearance drastically without warning and now acting like it doesn’t matter if Olivia is left alone. This isn’t like you.”
    I fold my hands under my head as I meet my mother’sgaze. “No? What am I like, Mom?” Because I honestly don’t know anymore. I don’t know what any of us are like.
    A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on
. Winston Churchill’s making pronouncements in my head again, like when I woke up from my first dream about the blond boy.
    And what Churchill said fits. The majority of my life feels as though it’s been some kind of lie. I don’t know where I’ve picked up his words—they seem to have always been with me, a kernel of authenticity in a web of falsehoods. Is my mother in on the pretense? What does she know that I don’t?
    “
Freya
,” my mother