She crosses her arms over her chest.
“Why do you ask me that?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Someone told you you’re too emotional?” I can hear the edge in her voice, the rare tone that makes whitecoats falter when telling her something they were so sure of a moment before. I feel closest to my mother when she’s angry: she lights up, fierce compared to the calm, cool scientist’s manner that she usually carries.
“No,” I lie. As much as I like to see her when she’s fired up, I don’t want it directed at my father. “I’m just wondering why I fainted.”
My mother hmms and goes to the kitchen, where cupboards dug into the clay wall are filled with round fruits of orange and green, plus the long thick sticks of zarum, which are dried plant tubers but taste, I overheard my father say once, like something called meat. My mother takes down one of the green hava fruits and slices it with the bowed knife that hangs on the wall. The sliced fruit goes into a misshapen ceramic bowl my grandmother had made, another artifact of her life.
“Passion, compassion, is not a weakness,” she says. “No matter what your father says.”
Seeing her now, her cheekbones still visible but less defined, I suddenly remember my dream, the one I had when waking in the room at the Beak. I open my mouth to tell her, but she’s moved on to talking about a project she’s working on in the neurology department, studying the brain of a kalu they’d found dead outside the compound. She loves talking about brains almost as much as I love hearing her talk about them.
“Have you finished your research for tomorrow?” She’s cleaning up the hava skins, feeding them into the biotube in the kitchen.
“Yes, I finished most of it before class was over.”
“My girl.” She smiles without looking up.
The lights flicker a little as the hava skins are fed into our energy surplus.
“Do you know anything about internships?” I ask.
“Internships.” Her eyes are on me now and I shrug.
“Yeah. Dr. Adibuah said something about it at the Beak.”
“Internships for whom?” Her eyebrows are almost touching in the middle where she’s scrunched them.
“Greencoats.”
“Greencoats,” she repeats.
“That’s what he said. But he said he wasn’t sure,” I add.
“Did your father know about this?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.”
“I see.”
She doesn’t say anything else, so I don’t either. It’s easy to be quiet in a house that’s already silent so much of the time. She finishes disposing of the hava skins and wipes her hands on a cloth.
“All right, Afua,” she says. “I have work to do.”
She scoops up the slate and slides she brought in with her and moves toward the hallway, where she’ll disappear into her study and hunch over her desk until well after I’m asleep. She stops at the mouth of the hall and looks back.
“I’d avoid him tonight,” she says. “I think it’d be better if you two discussed things on another day when you’re both less . . . stressed.”
I raise and drop one shoulder. No answer necessary.
I sit alone for a while at the platform in the kitchen. My body feels heavy. I look down at my white skinsuit—which is almost like an actual second skin, as tight as it is—and realize I’ve been wearing it all day. My scalp is gritty at the root of the braids that my mother calls cornrows. At one point I asked what this word meant and she couldn’t remember. But the word survives, stitched into my head, part of Faloiv now. The grit in my hair motivates me to take a shower and I finally drag myself up from the kitchen platform. I pad down the hall, unfastening the neck of my skinsuit. I’m halfway to our bathroom, the material peeling off, when my mother’s voice, soft and low, floats to my ears from her study. I drift closer.
“I knew nothing about the internships. And, yes, they do give me great cause for concern.”
She pauses.
“I imagine it would be the entire age group,” she says. “Pulling Octavia and no one else would be unusual. I don’t want to draw attention to her.”
My stomach lights up with anxiety. She’s talking about pulling me out of the internships? The internships that haven’t even been announced yet? My grip on the skinsuit slips as my fingers begin to tremble. I press even more closely to the door, determined to learn more.
“Yes, she had an episode today. With a philax. No, I don’t think she understands.”
Silence for a long moment: whoever she’s talking to goes on for a while. I hold my breath.
“It’s not the time for that kind of talk,” she says. “They wouldn’t understand how she . . .”
The rest of her sentence is lost as my ears pick up a sound from the front of the ’wam: the sigh of our front door opening. My father is home. Lungs fluttering, I scramble away from my mother’s study and into the bathroom, turning on the water in the slim bathing cell. I don’t step in the water yet: I wait, my hands shaking, still half-dressed, until I hear my father make his way down the hall and into my parents’ room.
I finish shedding the skinsuit, unfastening my chest wrap, and finally step into the cell, careful to keep my mouth closed. I rinse my body off thoroughly, letting the water run over my scalp and through my braids. I don’t have time to wash them tonight. I must finish quickly: it takes a lot of energy from our surplus to bathe, and I don’t need another grievance to add to the list my father already has. I step out, drying myself with the largest size cloth from the wall holes and wrapping myself in it.
When I slide the door open, I poke my head out into the hall. There’s a light in my mother’s study and a light in my parents’ room. Separate again, I think. I pause in the hallway one more time, and I can hear each of their voices murmuring: two rooms, two conversations. I enter my own room, where I unsheathe from the wrap like a hatching insect. I take the little bottle of jocada oil from my desk and sit on the edge of the bed to oil my scalp. Usually the feeling of the warm oil and the pads of my fingertips relaxes me, but the events of the day churn through my head in an endless parade of shadows. When I lie down, restless, it’s as if the philax is lying beside me, his fear shortening my every breath.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but my room is bathed in midnight when the sound of my parents’ bedroom door wakes me. My father’s long stride moves almost soundlessly down the hall, toward the front of the ’wam. A heartbeat later, the whisper of the front door gliding open and then shut.