Gives Light(Gives Light Series) Read Free Page A

few doors down shouted, baffled, "Am I going colorblind, or is that a white boy?"
     
    I hurried back inside the cabin.
     
    Granny--Grandmother--was cooking eggs in the kitchen.  I think I might have stared.  I'd never seen anyone cook eggs before.  Back home, Dad and I tended to use the oven strictly as a closet.  And the only time I'd eaten eggs was when he took me to the local diner on Sundays, this really greasy dive with chrome tabletops and plastic booths that stuck to your thighs.  I liked that dive.  We ordered powdered eggs and burned coffee and sat complaining about baseball and church.  Those Sundays comprised some of my favorite memories.
     
    "Why on earth are you wearing your jacket?" Granny asked.
     
    I'd forgotten that I was wearing it.  Putting on my jacket and zipping it up to the neck was second nature, and unless it was just Dad and me, I never took it off.  Not even in school.  I'd started doing that when I was six, when I realized that I'd rather have people thinking I was cold all the time instead of gawking at my ugly neck.  The teachers in a public school don't really care about what you're wearing.  You can pierce your septum and tattoo your forehead and all they care is that you show up to class.
     
    I smiled apologetically and took the jacket off.
     
    We ate together at the scrubbed pine table, Granny occasionally telling me to sit up straight or tuck my elbows in.  Afterwards she asked me to carry her loom outside the house.  I put my jacket on when her back was turned and went out to the sitting room to pick up the loom.  It was a lot heavier than it looked; by the time I finally got it out of the house and set it up on the grass, Granny was right behind me, complaining that I had taken too long.
     
    "What?" she said, when she noticed me looking at her uncertainly.
     
    I pointed at myself.
     
    "You're asking me what you should do?  Well, how am I supposed to know?  Do I look like a teenage boy?"
     
    What I really wanted to know was whether I could help her or not, but I got the feeling she would have taken offense to the offer.  I was thinking, too, that this woman was my grandmother, and my grandmother was a total mystery.  Had she ever tried to contact Dad and me at all, or had Dad made sure she couldn't?  Why had he never talked about her over the years, and why didn't she talk about him now?  What had happened to estrange them?  Was it my mother?  Was it me?  What had Granny been like as a child?
     
    "Skylar St. Clair?" said a sudden voice.
     
    I looked up from the porch.  There was a girl standing in front of me in a plain white sundress.  She was my age, maybe--or maybe a little younger--with a soft, ashen brown complexion, burnished brown hair pulled up in an elegant loop at the nape of her neck.  Granny had called me "wispy as a cricket" before, but if she had had this girl in mind, she might not have.  This girl was so delicate looking, like a brief breath of wind on a summer day, that I felt like a Titan in comparison.
     
    She knew my name.  I wondered what else she knew.
     
    She smiled brightly.  "I'm Annie Little Hawk," she said.  "It's so rare that anyone new comes to the reservation.  I heard from a trustworthy source you might be needing a tour?"
     
    I looked at Granny to see whether she'd object.  She waved at me dismissively, her attention on her loom. 
     
    I followed Annie away from the cabin.
     
    Annie Little Hawk was a pleasant girl.  It turned out she knew sign language--she said that Natives had invented it, though I wasn't sure how true that was--and that bolstered my mood.  Apart from ASL teachers in school, I'd never had the opportunity to talk to anyone before.  Annie pointed out different houses and told me the histories of the families living in them.  The Nettlebush Reserve, I gathered, was a small, tight, self-sufficient community; everybody knew each other, and I didn't know anybody.  At no time was that