"He's having her over for dinner?"
"Yeah," I said. I had more or less made peace with the idea of having Mia around, and apparently I had also made peace with Bonnie, who was acting like nothing had happened. When I had arrived at class she was there in her seat, doing her pen trick and, by all appearances, waiting to talk to me.
"Like, he's bringing her home to meet you and eat dinner like a family?"
"Yeah." The way Bonnie had said this made me slightly uncomfortable - she seemed as though she was getting ready to deliver terrible news. "What's wrong with that?"
"He's probably gonna sleep with her at your house."
I shrugged.
"What, you don't care?"
"Well, it's not like I'm in line or anything." I wasn't letting on, but it did bother me. A little. After so long I had begun to think of Russell as mine, or more accurately, to think of myself as his.
Bonnie appeared to have given the story I'd told her some thought during the long weekend, and at lunch she had a list of questions and requests for stories. What was it like trying to find a place to sleep? Wasn't that difficult? Why didn't I go other places, like walk to Fort Point or the Mission? By all appearances, she'd accepted my story, or at least suspended her disbelief well enough to enjoy it. You had to admit that it was at least interesting. Out of some sense of duty to my original narrative, I didn't make anything up, and what I couldn't answer effectively (why didn't I go anywhere else?) I met with a shrug. At times there was no satisfying Bonnie's curiosity or her insatiable desire for "why," and we nearly ended up in another spat when I was unwilling to examine Derek's brief presence in my life, or the legal ins and outs of being homeless and under 18. She seemed eager to adopt an indignity on my behalf that I didn't feel entitled to, as though the people who surrounded me during my time in the city were full of fault, and my brother particularly. Why hadn't Zachary stepped in, before he was killed? What about Timothy's family? To both our annoyance, I had to cite the day's discussion on moral degeneration and shades of gray in Lord of the Flies before she let me change the subject.
But it was good, talking about it. Bonnie gave off a fuck-you attitude in class but she was passionate about things when the mood grabbed her, and my story had given her something to focus on, at least for the time being. I thought about asking her why she wasn't that interested in important things like school, but I thought I knew the answer, and anyway, I liked the attention. It would have felt like deep, thorough scrutiny coming from Russell, but Bonnie, though fierce, was benign. She couldn't do me any harm.
And she didn't. At least, not directly.
It occurs to me that my portrayal of Russell conveys an unpredictable man, quick to fly off the handle and have a good shout, and that is far from the truth. I had projected onto Russell my interpretation of a parent and expected him to act accordingly (which, for the most part, he did); meanwhile, I filled a hole in his life that he didn't know the shape of, and that I didn't know he had. Anyone watching us at almost any time we were together would have thought we were father and daughter, and furthermore, that neither of us was very good at it.
I was self-centered enough to believe that Russell was simpler than he was, and happier than he was; it never occurred to him that he could be grieving someone himself. Bonnie and I went over the story again and she picked up on something that I had forgotten as unimportant, or worse, an invasion of Russell's privacy. "Who do you think Emily is?" she said. "Before you. Em, there has got to be a story in there somewhere. Think about what you could find out about him." Her tone spoke of concern, but her eyes spoke of a hunger for more story. And the truth was, I was curious enough to look for it.
