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little boy and praying and watching for the first flakes to fall. If they stuck to the streets and turned slippery, that meant no school tomorrow. And if it got deep, then Dad couldn’t drive home from wherever he was playing cards and we’d all have a free day. I prayed for snow that would never melt.
    At Patuxent, I used to watch it from my cell window. The glass had a spiderweb of wire in it so you couldn’t break it and cut your wrists. As the snow came down and covered the yard, I got more and more excited, hoping when it was knee deep they’d let us go outside and have a snowball fight. Of course they never did.
    After dinner I’m in bed hissing the snow sound on the roof when Nicky shouts that I’ve got a phone call. That has to mean Mom or Candy, and because I’ve been remembering winter in Maryland, it’s like the call’s an answer to a brain message from me. But then I’m always remembering them and they almost never call.
    From the top stair I watch Nicky at the bottom. She’s a big woman and blocks my way to the phone. I wait for her to move. She grins and makes me squeeze past, knowing I hate to be touched.
    One night right after I moved to Slab City, she rubbed up against me in the hallway and I felt static, like I do walking over a rug on a cold day in the wrong shoes.
    “Anything the matter?” she asked, seeing me jerk back.
    “You surprised me, is all.”
    She crowded in close again. She always wears baggy cotton dresses, the kind they sell across the border, with bright flowers sewn on the front. There’s no guessing what’s underneath. She has a good smile and her face is dark brown so her teeth shine. She tells people all the time that she has Indian blood. I believe her. When she stepped near me, I dropped back more.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You a homo?”
    I told her I wasn’t. “I just don’t need problems in my life.”
    “What kind of problem can it be working all day and hiding in your room at night?”
    “I’m not hiding.”
    “Don’t you ever get lonely?”
    “I have all the company I need.” I didn’t mention the drawers in the box in my head and how I can be with Candy or Quinn or Cole whenever I want.
    “Me, I’m lonely,” she said. Her husband, who left her this place, died years ago.
    “I’ll be your friend,” I said. “But not that kind.”
    I thought she understood. Still, there’s times she stands so near I feel a shock, and she thinks it’s funny. Now she steps aside, and I walk down the hall to the table with the telephone. The table’s another thing she bought across the border—a big round tray with jagged edges and hammer marks on the copper. I sit on the leather stool beside it, and Nicky stays close enough that she hears what Mom has to say.
    Mom does most of the talking, and she talks loud. She asks me to come home one last time. I say I haven’t ever been home since I left, so this would be the first time. She isn’t listening. She says she has something to give me and something to tell me in person. With her talking and Nicky listening, I start to feel dizzy. But I don’t dare lie down on the floor and rock. Not with Nicky’s broad brown feet in their sandals taking up so much space. Her toenails are blood red.
    When Mom hangs up, Nicky says, “She’s got something to give you.”
    I need to go to my room and think. But Nicky blocks the stairs and says, “I bet it’s money.”
    “She’s not rich.”
    “I hope it’s money.”
    Nicky has money on the brain. In her job I guess she’s got to. You can’t always trust people in trailers. Some of them leave Slab City in the middle of the night, skipping out on months of rent. I pay for my room and meals with chores, not cash. Nicky has to have a machine to keep it all straight in her head—the money she’s owed, what’s dribbling in, and what’s leaking out. There’s a computer on a desk in the dining room, and she shoos me in there to show me the problem.
    The screen