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off, Twiss tried to slip out of the kitchen and up to her room. When her mother asked her where she thought she was going, Twiss coughed a little.
    “I should really be in bed.”
    Her mother motioned to a chair. “You should really sit down.”
    Before A Day in the Life of … began, she fixed a cup of tea for Twiss and one for herself. Into Twiss’s cup, she drizzled honey. Into her own, she drizzled milk. Then she pulled out her secret stash of sugar cubes from the back of the cupboard, which Twiss had ransacked on more than one occasion because she liked to see how long the cubes would take to dissolve on her tongue.
    “Looks like I have to find another hiding place,” her mother said, amused rather than angry. She dropped a cube into her cup. She said that was the way the English took their tea. Twiss wondered what people who spoke other languages did with their tea.
    Her mother looked at the cuckoo clock, and then turned up the radio. “This one’s about a man who lives with polar bears.”
    “With?” Twiss said, perking up.
    “In the vicinity of,” her mother said, and Twiss slumped back down in her chair.
    The program announcer introduced the day’s story by saying there were three kinds of people in the world: the kind that respected animals, the kind that got killed by them, and the kind named Hux. “No one ever dies on this program,” her mother said. “Although there was a near death once.” She took her tea bag out of her cup and placed it on the tiny plate beneath it.
    “That’s better than nothing,” Twiss said, taking hers out too.
    She looked out the window to make sure her father was gone before she crossed her legs the way her mother had crossed hers. She didn’t altogether hate acting ladylike, but she could only act for so long before her instincts took over. In school plays, she was cast as a tree or a lamppost, whatever could appear or disappear without wrecking the show.
    “It’s called gunpowder,” her mother said.
    Twiss picked her cup up again. She liked the idea of being able to drink what you could load into a gun. “I should have been a boy,” she said, puckering her lips at the bitter taste of the tea and letting her legs fly out in opposite directions.
    Her mother uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again. “Being a girl takes practice. You have to learn how to do things boys never have to do.”
    “Like what?” Twiss said.
    “Like painting your fingernails,” her mother said. “Or holding your tongue.”
    The two of them stopped talking in order to listen to Hux talk about life in the Arctic Circle. Since the sun didn’t rise or set at the normal hours there, Hux said it wasn’t important when he woke up or went to sleep. Sometimes, he’d start his day with a cup of coffee at midnight. Other times, it would be four or five in the morning with a bowl of beef stew. Every day (or night) began with warming up his tundra buggy, which he’d drive over ice and snow and narrow crevasses to survey land for the Canadian government, which was hoping to uncover a bounty of natural resources, namely gold and uranium, to tap into.
    Giddy up, old girl , Hux would say to the buggy before expeditions.
    Queenie, he’d named it.
    “What does it look like?” the announcer said.
    “Picture a tractor,” Hux said. “Then picture your best friend.”
    Twiss pictured the John Deere and then Milly.
    Her mother looked around the kitchen as if a tractor might materialize from one of the cupboards or a best friend from the pantry.
    “You’d be amazed how quickly you grow to love whatever you’re capable of moving,” Hux said. He lived in a government shack on the edge of the polar bears’ habitat. He cooked on a kerosene stove and slept on a mattress made of straw (there must not be pine needles in the Arctic, Twiss thought). When the wind rattled the tin roof of his shack and he felt the most alone, he’d drive around with Queenie hoping to come across the polar