Wild Awake

time seeing Sukey in almost two months. Mom and Dad had kicked her out of the house the day she turned eighteen, which suited Sukey just fine, because she’d been threatening to go live at her boyfriend Leon’s art collective—Dad called it a loser collective—anyway. We got there late. Dad spent half an hour looking for a parking garage because he didn’t want to park the Nissan on the street. Then we had to walk six blocks, and Dad kept barking at Denny and me to walk faster because there were homeless people on East Pender who were presumably planning to eat us for dinner if we showed the slightest sign of slowing down.
    The place was hard to find, just a dirty white industrial-looking door in the side of a brick building. There was nothing to mark it as an art gallery from the outside, no plate-glass window with paintings on display, not even a street number. Sukey had given Dad directions over the phone, but he still seemed mad as he stood in the rain, fighting with the metal doorknob for a good thirty seconds before noticing the buzzer on the wall.
    Inside, the room was dim, crowded, aswirl with people who all seemed perfectly at ease in such a covert location, who looked like they went to art shows behind unmarked doors all the time. I spied a table set up against one wall with trays of cheese and crackers and dozens of upside-down plastic wine glasses with their feet in the air. I cheered.
    “I’m getting crackers!”
    I started toward the table, but Dad grabbed my arm.
    “Why not?” I wailed. I was ten years old, but still reverted to four and a half when I was upset.
    His nails pinched my skin.
    “No.”
    I stayed, tears of frustration hot in my eyes. Minutes crept by.
    Men in shiny shirts helped themselves to cheese and crackers. Women with laughs like tropical monkeys sauntered past arm in arm. We stood there in silence, damp and grubby from the rain, like janitorial equipment someone had forgotten to put away. Sukey was nowhere in sight.
    Denny pulled out his Game Boy and disappeared into the little green screen. Mom hummed tunelessly, playing with the straps on her purse. Dad stared grimly into the middle distance, his hand still clamped on my shoulder. They didn’t take off their coats. I watched, limp with despair, as the party went on without us.
    Then Sukey appeared in a short purple dress and silver heels that made her legs stretch almost all the way to the ceiling. Her long black hair was swept into an attractively messy high ponytail into which she’d stuck brown and orange feathers. The feathers gave her an exotic look, like the trickster raven in the Northwest Myths and Legends book I was reading for school. Best of all, you could see her new tattoo—the silhouette of a bird on her right arm, just above her elbow.
    “Jesus Christ,” muttered Dad.
    “Hey, guys!” she said, throwing her arms wide to embrace us all at once. When Sukey was in one of her good moods, she acted like everyone in the world was her best friend—even though her last face-to-face interaction with Mom and Dad had consisted of a screaming match after she’d gotten caught stealing champagne from the grocery store near our house for the second time in a week.
    She winked at us. “Hey, Kiri. Den-Den. Have you guys looked around yet?”
    “Well, we had a quick look,” tittered Mom, which was so blatant a lie I twisted around, eyes wide with outrage, to glare at her.
    “We can’t stay for too long,” said Dad. “I’ve got a conference call at eight.”
    Sukey’s face flashed with something sharp and fierce, and for a terrible moment I thought they were about to have one of their fights. Leon’s friends from the art collective had organized the show, and even at ten I had a vague sense that maybe that was why Mom and Dad were acting so weird. Leon was helping Sukey become a famous artist, but Mom thought he was too old for her and Dad said he was a Cradle-Robbing Junkie and that if Sukey thought he was going to help her become an artist, she needed to get her head checked.
    Sukey and Dad stared each other down. Across the room, I could hear the monkey-women hooting and chortling with mirth. Dad’s jaw was clenched, and Sukey’s eyes had narrowed to smoldering points of black. But just when it seemed like things were about to get really nasty, she broke eye contact with Dad and smiled at me and Denny instead.
    “Kiri, Den-Den, did you see there’s pink lemonade?”
    The mention of pink lemonade was