The only other kids who get picked up at our stop are the Warrens. There are five of them. Stringy blond boys who do not know that Gesar, who is nine and loud and likes to get in fights, is the son of a Tibetan Rinpoche, that he is practically royalty. The Warrens are poor and mean, with badly trained dogs and a mother who screams at them from across the road. Vermont is so unlike California.
People are poor in a different way.
With more space around them on which to collect the evidence of their poverty. I am thirteen, wearing blusher, not dressed for the weather. It is my first winter in Vermont and it is not the cold that bothers me so much, although for the first time I experience frozen snot, but the chance that I might learn something I don't want to know. When I am eleven, I step off the plane in Boston and discover my stepmother is hugely pregnant. My father had not mentioned this to me on the phone, and, because I am disoriented and unsure, I say nothing.