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this XXL version of a puffy-logo Seth sweatshirt that she already owned and hated. This is what the sweatshirt said: STOP IN THE NAME OF SETH, BEFORE HE EATS YOUR HEART . The Chief had ordered dozens of these. So far as I knew, nobody in the history of our gift store transactions had ever exchanged legal tender for one.
    “Thanks, guys,” Osceola said drily.
    The Chief unwrapped Osceola’s old shoes for her, hog-tied together in our mom’s red ribbon.
    “Remember how much you liked these moccasins?”
    Ossie did not really remember, no.
    “Do you want to do a birthday show, honey?” The Chief was smiling and smiling at her, pop-eyed with the strain, a smile that looked almost frightening in the dim Swamp Café. “Do you want to … what do you want? More cake?”
    My sister shook her white head very slowly behind the tiny fence of birthday candles.
    Ossie was polite, licking icing off the twisty candle stripes, pretending this was exactly the sixteenth birthday party she’d wanted. But Iknew better—I thought she must be pretty lonely. I’d seen her on the ferry docks, trying to talk to the small knots of mainland teenagers. The only boys her age we’d ever met were tourists. Sometimes, to impress them, Os would corner a posse of older boys and play them her favorite songs in the blue iceberg glow of our jukebox. Yet this jukebox had not been updated since Dwight D. Eisenhower ruled the land.
    “Cooool.” The boys would drone, catting their eyes at one another. “Who sings that one? The, ah, the Scroobie Brothers, huh? Never heard of them …”
    In fact, those Scroobie Brothers were playing right now, song after song off their only album,
Scroobing the Tub
, Ossie’s jukebox pick. I think Ossie liked them because they sang about things that were exotic to us, like corn and car accidents. Between bites of cake I caught her mouthing along the words, but even these hokey songs weren’t cheering her much. After the presents were opened nobody could think of what to say, so the Chief cut us second helpings of the rock-hard cake.
    “What, you don’t like your presents?” the Chief asked out of the blue, his voice alive and crackling. “Is that it? You don’t think that sweatshirt is going to fit you?”
    We all looked up. The thin whine of the jukebox seeped into the crater his voice had dug into the café dining room.
    “No, Chief. It’s great.”
    Ossie stretched the shirt between them like a fence.
    “Try it on.”
    “Dad?”
    “You’re right, it looks too small to me. Kiwi, go get your sister the next size up.”
    Osceola stood. “Dad, I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. She tightened the ends of her long white braids. She’d smoothed three different shades of Mom’s powder onto her eyelids. My sister, I realized with a funny dip in my gut, looked very beautiful. I think the Chief must have noticed this, too, because his face did something funny.
    “What are you talking about?” He glanced down at his watch. “It’s nine o’clock.”
    “I know. I’m going on a walk.”
    “Now? Baby, sit down. As long as we’re all together I thought we could have a tribal meeting. We’ve got some important business to discuss …”
    But Ossie took a step toward the door, where a fat green anole was clinging to the metal hinge and silently watching everything.
    “I want to. Walk.” She paused. “It’s my birthday.”
    Ossie made it across the room. When her hand closed around the doorknob he finally spoke.
    “Well, you’re going to miss some really good news, Osceola.”
    “Okay. Ava can catch me up.” She smiled at him sweetly. Her sweatshirt, all her birthday stuff, was still on the table. “Good night, guys. Thanks for a good party.”
    And then the door closed, and somehow we were not allowed to ask:
where is she going?
The Chief turned his attention back to us.
    “As you may have noticed,” he said, in his booming chieftain’s voice, “we Bigtrees have a serious enemy. We