When Nasedo died, the Skins moved in, and I had to leave the house. The day after I went to stay at the Valentis, I went to pack up my clothes (for I had no things, no cluttery knick-knacks or old family pictures, just clothes), and that was when I found it.
It was buried at the back of the drawer, under a mess of bras and panties, and in finding it I was struck by his ever-present pragmatism, hiding it in the one drawer I was sure to empty. It was a small book, blue, with a human baby on the cover smiling up at me with the same dull surprise I felt in my heart. I flipped through the pages and discovered that it was a book full of names -- hundreds, thousands of names - and almost laughed.
And then I saw the turned-down page, dog-eared in the same way I always dog-eared them, in the same way he had always scolded me for. There it was, three-quarters down a page in the "T" section of the girls’ names: "Tess" in small, black letters, the meaning beside it circled and starred and impossible to miss.
~~
I first saw home when I was calling myself fourteen, in the middle of a routine concentration exercise. It was wholly unexpected.
“I saw it,” I said as my eyes flew open, and I let out a sigh that sounded a little bit like a laugh. “I saw home.”
“I know,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
There was a warmth in his gaze that was unfamiliar, one that I pinned down later as recognition, for what he meant in that moment was that he could see her in my eyes -- the her I had been before, the her I was to become. It felt strange.
It felt strange but I didn’t care then, my mind crowded with out-of-focus images of places I couldn’t quite recognize but almost knew. I felt as if my smile was going to break my face. “It was beautiful.”
The warmth fell away then, quickly. “You’ll make it beautiful again,” he said, and the tone was familiar: autocratic, distant, edging on rude.
~~
I asked him often about who I had been before, but he rarely answered. He always said that I had to look within me, and that reminded me of bad New Age psychics. I told him that once and he was, as always, unamused.
“You can laugh if you want, but it doesn’t make what I say less true.”
“It just makes it more annoying,” I replied quickly, leaning against the doorjamb of his study. “Can’t you tell me anything, Nasedo? A hint? Was I stupid? A horrible dancer? Did I wear bad clothes?”
“You didn’t wear clothes.”
I was stunned silent for a moment. “I didn’t wear clothes?”
There was no response.
“Wait, you’ve got to clarify. I didn’t wear clothes as in I was an exhibitionist, or I didn’t wear clothes as in it was the cultural norm?”
Again, nothing.
“Nasedo,” I said, stomping one foot. I had watched enough American sitcoms to know how teenage girls whined.
“No one wore clothes,” he answered wearily. “It’s a moronic human tradition.”
“Oh.” I considered his words for a moment. “Well, that’s a relief. I think. So you guys were naked, like, all the time?”
“Don’t say like.”
“Sorry,” I said, in a tone that showed I didn’t mean it. “What else?”
“What else?” His exasperation shone through and I feared he would throw the pen he was writing with at my head.
“Come on, who was I? Tell me something. I won’t go away until you do.”
“Do you promise you will go away if I do?”
“Yes,” I replied quickly. “I absolutely promise.”
He stared at the wall for a while and I took that as a good sign, a sign that he was really thinking. Finally, he spun around in his chair.
“People used to say,” he considered quietly, “that you caught the light. They said that your eyes reflected more, seemed blacker than everyone else’s. They said that in the moonlight, your skin was silver instead of gray.”
I waited a moment before speaking. “So I was beautiful?”
“Not really,” he said, and the quickness of his answer startled me. “You were too stocky, and your eyes were a little uneven. You weren’t beautiful. You were just very, very determined for it not to matter.” He shook his head, then a mass of red curls, and narrowed his eyes at me. “Satisfied? Now, go. I have to finish this. Do something productive, like -- ”
“Convincing Mrs. Brighton that she owes me money for Girl Scout cookies?” I asked.
‘Yes,” he said, “Do that. Try to see how long you can keep it up.”
“All right,” I called out on my way to the front door, almost drowning out his voice telling me to be back before dinner.
~~
A hundred miles from our new house in Roswell, he told me.
“Tess?” I grimaced and turned to look at him in the driver’s seat. We were on the highway, had been for a long time, and I was cranky. “It’s ugly.”
“No it’s not,” he said tersely. “It’s a fine name.”
“Yeah, if you’re…someone who likes crappy names,” I said, still fine-tuning my razor-sharp wit.
“Tess—“
“Don’t call me that.” I hit myself in the leg with the folder containing information about the other three, my frustration causing a resounding thwack. “Why can’t I pick, Nasedo? I’m old enough. I’ll pick something nice and normal and non-nursing home. Let me pick.”
“No.”
I sighed and turned to stare out the window at the passing scenery, the excitement I had felt at the beginning of the trip petering out rapidly.
After a few minutes, I turned back. “How are we going to get home if I’m supposed to make a boy I’ve never seen before fall in love with me with a name like Tess?”
He turned to me. “If you do it right, your name won’t matter at all.”
“Then why can’t I change it if it doesn’t matter?”
“Because it does,” he said, his eyes back on the road, “just not to him.”
~~
Nasedo died and he left me with a message circled in a paperback book, one I understood: to reap.
I could have started sooner, and maybe that’s my one mistake, but I had to plant the seeds of trust around me in the beginning so that I could gather a journey home in the end. Michael and I worked on blowing things up, Isabel and I went shopping, Max and I walked in the park, I moved in with the Valentis – I even tried to be civil to Liz in Las Vegas. It worked.
Before, Max said my name with annoyance or confusion or fear; now, he says it with a wonder in his eyes that takes my breath away. The difference is that now I’m winning, and to him my name doesn’t matter at all. It matters only to me, every time I create another memory and hear my triumph in his voice.
“Tess,” he breathes softly, and it sounds like Nasedo, calling me home.
END
AUTHOR’S NOTE: For those of your with actual lives, who don’t spend inordinate amounts of time looking up the meanings of names online, Tess means “to reap” according to babynames.com. The word “reap” can also mean obtain or win, so I took that info and ran with it, as I had already been thinking of doing a Tess/Nasedo fic. This is where I ended up.
