Chapter 13: The Storm

My aunt led us through a door behind the folding table into a small yellow kitchen.

She pointed at the ceiling.

"There," she said.

"I thought it was a smoke detector. Then it blinked at me."

Torsten pulled a chair over and climbed up.

The white disk above the stove had a pinhole in the middle and a thin cord running into the wall.

"It's a camera," he said.

"It has a phone card in it."

"So it sends," I said.

"Live, to whoever has the number."

He looked down at me.

"Since you walked through the front door," he said.

My stomach dropped.

I had cried in that laundromat.

I had held a stranger's photograph of my mother and let a woman hold my face.

Somebody had watched all of it.

"Lydia," I said.

Torsten tore the cord out of the wall and pried the disk open.

He took out a tiny memory card and held it up between two fingers.

"It records here too," he said.

"Everything from Tuesday is on this."

"Keep it," I said.

"I'm not letting it out of my sight," he said.

He put it in the inside pocket of his jacket and buttoned the pocket.

My aunt sat down hard on a kitchen chair.

"That girl sat in my house and ate my banana bread," she said.

"I held her hand at the door when she left."

"I'm so sorry," I said.

"Don't you apologize for her."

She said it fiercely and looked me over again.

"Did you look in the mirror this morning?" she said.

"You are the first Stuyvesant I've seen in twenty-eight years who looks like one."

I laughed, and it broke in the middle.

Outside the kitchen window the first snow had started.

By the time my aunt had fed us soup, it was coming down sideways.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Name Was Banned, But My Success Was Unstoppable from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.