The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma

short that I was looking straight at bare leg. WeiWei peeled us off and let us try on her big mirrored sunglasses, which slid down our bridgeless noses.
    â€œDo you girls want to stay here with WeiWei for a while?” Robyn asked, smiling down at us from under a baseball cap. She had slathered sunblock on both of us in the morning, but we got browner while Robyn’s nose turned pink. I remember the heavy crunch she made on the path when we walked behind her that day, so she must have been wearing her hiking boots. She was quick and springy in her step; the whole family hiked and camped and skied, sometimes taking me with them. Robyn knelt and drew off A.J.’s shirt, and I saw with envy that, underneath, A.J. had on a stretchy tank top like the one that WeiWei was sporting. Charlie let me choose my own outfit every day; I was wearing my favorite corduroy jumper and jelly shoes that were chafing. Charlie hadn’t come, but she had packed me a lunch big enough for three, which she did whenever work called her away.
    â€œI don’t mind,” WeiWei said. “We’ll wait down there.” She walked us to the water. I showed A.J. how I didn’t have to take off my plastic shoes to stick my feet right in the ocean. I passed my lunch around, and we sipped at juice boxes while WeiWei told us the difference between a peninsula and an island.
    â€œAriadne got stuck on an island,” WeiWei said. “You can pretend you’re waiting for Dionysius.”
    â€œThat’s her name,” A.J. said, pointing at me.
    â€œIt’s Greek,” I said. “She was a goddess.”
    â€œShe was a troublemaker,” WeiWei said, “and a hero.” And then she told us the story of Ariadne, how she gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of the labyrinth after he had killed the Minotaur.
    â€œWhen he sailed away, he took her with him a little ways and then abandoned her on the island of Naxos.”
    â€œHe left without her?” A.J. asked.
    â€œAbandoned her,” WeiWei said. “Took off and left. Just like what happened to us.”
    â€œOn an island?” I asked. I was confused by what she was saying. Had I, Ariadne, lived on an island at some point? Anything was possible, my past was so unknown.
    â€œYour mother had you, then abandoned you someplace. Where was your Finding Day place?”
    â€œThe police station,” said A.J.
    â€œA department store,” I said.
    â€œI was worse,” WeiWei said proudly. “Probably they tried to kill me. Somebody found me in a burlap sack on the roadside.” A.J. and I were silent, trying to figure out what she meant. Could a baby breathe inside a sack? What about cars, how come she didn’t get run over? I didn’t know what burlap was, but I could imagine it, rough and smelly.
    â€œBut I screamed so loud that I got found and taken to the orphanage, and then I got adopted. I was oh-ohld,” she drew the word out. “Almost as old as you are. It was my last chance.”
    â€œTell that story,” A.J. said.
    â€œDid Ariadne die on the island?” I asked.
    â€œNo, the god of wine, Dionysius, came and got her. He married her and made her immortal, so it all turned out okay.” She lay back and let me arrange her long hair in a fan around her shoulders. “You should read the Greek myths,” she said, wiggling her toes in the sunlight. I twisted off her silver toe ring and put it on my thumb.
    â€œTell your Gotcha Day story,” A.J. asked.
    But WeiWei shook her head. “Not today,” she said.
    We couldn’t see her eyes behind her mirrored glasses. We lay down next to her, afloat on our island bed.
    A fter that, I borrowed from the library all the Greek myth books I could find and put them on the shelf next to the book by WeiWei. I had looked at her book so often I knew every photograph and could recite every word, though she left out the part about being stuffed in a