Pavi Sharma's Guide to Going Home

by Bridget Farr

  When I return to our table to get my backpack, Piper is making a plan with Hamilton.

  “Let’s just finish it tonight so we’re done. You can come over to my house right after school. Dad says he can order pizza after his meeting, so maybe your mom can come over and eat with us. We’ll do it right away and still have some time to make a video.”

  Piper has her own YouTube channel. She shoots videos of herself doing makeup tutorials and DIY crafts that she copies from someone else’s Instagram.

  “Yeah, maybe, if I can use your phone to text my mom. Pavi, what do you think? Do you want to walk to Piper’s after school? Then we can do math when we get home?”

  “I can’t right after school,” I say as I push my chair in and move toward the back of the line to leave.

  “Why?” Hamilton asks.

  “I have some stuff to do.”

  “What? What do you have to do?”

  “Just things.”

  Hamilton frowns. “Are you meeting that eighth grader again?”

  “Why are you being so nosy?”

  “Why are you being so secretive? Are you going out with him or something?”

  “You are far too young to have a boyfriend,” Piper says, her hands back on her hips. “We are not developmentally ready.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” I say before turning to Hamilton. “He’s not my boyfriend. Remember, I’m going to Crossroads?” I don’t normally lie, but I can’t tell him I’m going to the Nickersons’. He’d freak if he knew I was headed to the “bad” part of town. Kids like Hamilton and Piper, who have only lived in one type of neighborhood, often judge the people living in other ones. My favorite family before Marjorie lived with five kids and their abuela in the “bad” part of a town. My second-to-worst family had a pool in their backyard and a woman to clean their house every Monday. Money doesn’t make a good family. Love does that.

  “Oh, right,” he says, instantly backing down, though I hear him mutter, “Why didn’t you just say that?”

  The bell rings, and Piper pauses at the door, blocking me in.

  “Hamilton and I will take care of the poem. We’ll rock it, just like Davy Crockett!” She beams at her own poetry. “And since Hamilton and I are writing the lyrics, it seems only fair that you type them up and e-mail them back to me.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You know Mr. Ramirez’s rules? Black. Twelve-point font. And only Times New Roman or Arial.”

  “Got it,” I say, now really considering making a redrover-style attack and getting out of here. “I do know how to use a computer, Piper.”

  She gives me a look that suggests she doesn’t agree. “You haven’t taken keyboarding yet.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hamilton argues. “Pavi’s really good with the computer. She is a crazy-fast typist.”

  Piper frowns, clearly hoping he was on her side. I’ve had enough.

  “I have things to do tonight, Piper, other than having you review my keyboarding skills. I’ll have it to you tomorrow. Hot-pink font.”

  “Wait! No!” she says, her eyes wide before she sees Hamilton laughing and realizes I’m kidding. “Just get it done. Right.”

  Finally safe in the hallway, I check the clock and realize I have only eight minutes to get to the bus stop. I start to walk faster when I hear Hamilton calling my name.

  “Are you really going to Crossroads?” he says, breathless when he catches up to me. I continue to power walk down the stairs and toward the side exit of the building.

  “I’m going to Crossroads.”

  “Weren’t you there yesterday? You’re going two days in a row?”

  “Yes. A friend is moving out soon, and I want to see her before she goes and I never do again.”

  “You sure you’re not meeting the eighth grader? It’s okay if you are. You can tell me.”

  “I’m going to Crossroads, and if I don’t run I’m going to miss my bus.”

  Hamilton pushes up his glasses, which have inched down his nose. “Okay… well, thanks for typing the lyrics. Then we can finish that math homework from yesterday?”

  “Sure. Fine. I gotta run, Hamilton. Tell Marjorie I’ll be home before dark.”

  I take off running before I can hear his response.

  GOING TO THE NICKERSONS’

  I get off the bus at the local grocery store. The stop is full of people with worn faces, overflowing plastic bags propped next to their feet. The construction guys’ bags must be full of the bits of their uneaten lunches and the button-down shirts they wore to work but now can’t stand in the heat. A few moms sit with their kids on their laps. There are a few homeless men, one standing with his head resting against the glass, the other sitting on the cement sidewalk with his back to the bench. The old woman beside him doesn’t mind his head resting on the side of her knee.

  I scan the bus stop, knowing the Nickersons probably aren’t here, but wanting to be careful anyway. This is their part of town. If they still live here. They might have moved. That’s what I’m investigating. Their neighborhood looks almost the same as the one I grew up in, but here, people have houses instead of apartments. Not fancy houses, but still—houses.

  Out of my backpack I pull a baseball cap from Hamilton’s Little League days and a pair of binoculars from when he was in Boy Scouts. I attempt to pull the cap low over my eyes, but it’s not much of a disguise. I doubt they had many foster kids who looked like me.

  I strap the binoculars around my neck and take off down the sidewalk.

  The streets are empty as I make the ten blocks to Lovely Lane. Sweat is starting to accumulate under my backpack. I stay on the opposite side of the road, trying to keep behind cars and trucks as much as possible. I pause when I’m across from Ms. Bell’s bright-pink house; I miss sitting on her porch and eating her sugar-free candies. I used to wish she would adopt me. That was back in the days when I had big hope, fairy-tale hope, the kind of hope that makes you believe that if you just gathered enough balloons, you could really grab on and float into the sky.

  For a long time, I hoped my mom would change. That she’d show up with her face clean and her clothes ironed, her once-vacant eyes actually seeing me again, and she’d take my hand, and we’d walk out the door together. Then, I hoped Ms. Bell would adopt me. Or my first-grade teacher, Mr. Kim. Then the bus driver or the woman I saw walking dogs near our elementary school.

  Soon, my hopes got smaller. I hoped that I could stay one night with Ms. Bell, maybe for my birthday or a holiday. I hoped for the dogs to stop barking, to stop getting sent to the school counselor for a change of clothes, since mine hadn’t been washed all week. My hopes got so small that I couldn’t see them, even though I knew they weren’t gone.

  But that hope has come back, started to return like flowers in spring. It’s not a rose garden of hope, not even a large bloom, but a bud, pushing its way through years of dirt. I don’t hope Meridee’s mom will get better. I don’t hope she gets a perfect family. It’s a small hope, a growing hope that has led me to the sidewalk outside a door I promised I would never again enter. Suddenly I hear the sound I was hoping, stupidly hoping, didn’t exist anymore.

  Dogs. Vicious, barking dogs mixed with the whine of small ones that are hungry or lonely or too young to have been taken from their mothers. I hide behind a black Suburban across from the house with a cracked porch light and a white screen door that doesn’t sit quite straight. I crouch down beside the wheel, knowing I can pretend to tie my shoe if anyone comes by. The red pickup truck I was looking for isn’t in the driveway. If they still live here, Mrs. Nickerson will be home, but she’ll be in her room with the TV blasting. Even if she did hear me, she would never come to the door. She never even leaves her bedroom.

  Thankfully, there is a FOR SALE sign in the front yard of the neighbor’s house, and from the look of it, no one has lived there for a while. I crawl around the front of the Suburban so I can inspect the backyard with my binoculars, but all I can see are the neighbor’s ov
ergrown weeds and the big wooden fence. I’ll have to go back there and look myself.

  My heart pounding, I race across the street to the neighbor’s yard, hiding behind the side bushes separating the houses. I stay close to the hedge that turns into the wooden fence a couple of feet taller than my head. The shuffling of the dogs increases, and I can hear them clanging against their metal cages. I wonder if I will recognize any of them. Would they recognize me?

  Safely hidden in the backyard, I set my backpack down on the ground. The fence has two ledges, one for my feet and one for my hands, so I can look over, though I know from the sound and the smell what I’m going to see. The dogs sense someone nearby, and the barking is so loud that I can barely hear myself think. I don’t worry someone will come out and yell at them, because they do this all the time. A cat, a piece of garbage blowing in the wind. I carefully put one hand on the fence, and it sways. Not giving up, I put one foot on the bottom rung. I take a deep breath, the barking filling my ears, and I use the little arm strength I have to pull myself up. Beyond the fence is the row of cages full of dogs I can’t recognize from here, and the same worn circle of grass in the center of the lawn, and suddenly I’m taken back three years, to a memory I’ve always wanted to forget.…

  I was used to the barking. I knew the voice of each dog, shuddered at the calls that reached out to me from their metal cages when I dropped old, sometimes moldy dog food into their bowls. I would never have reached out to touch one, but in the daylight, they were still dogs. Sometimes they played with their bowls or dropped their tongues through the fence, slobbering the edge of my fingers or the back of my legs. During the day they were dogs, but on certain nights, fight nights, they became monsters.

  One night was different. I woke up to the barks while I lay on the plastic-covered mattress, the rhythms of growls to yips to whines so familiar, but something was off. Still groggy, I struggled to recognize a sound inside the rumble. Then I noticed the empty spot at the end of my mattress. It was Lucky.

  Lucky was my puppy as much as anything can really be yours when you’re living in someone else’s house, eating someone else’s food. One of the dogs had a litter a few weeks earlier, and Mr. Nickerson had sold most of them within the week; they seemed too small to be taken from their mother, but I didn’t know anything about dogs then. Didn’t know anything about life.

  No one wanted Lucky. She was small, with a slightly deformed back paw. It didn’t stop her from rolling around with her brothers and sisters, but she ate less, since she couldn’t get to the bowl as fast.

  “She’s a runt,” Mr. Nickerson told me when he saw me running with her around the front lawn, her body flopping onto the browned grass when her feet couldn’t keep up with her joy. “No use bothering with a runt.”

  But she licked my nose and snuggled me at night when we both laid beneath the threadbare sheets. In a house where I felt like a ghost, passing through the rooms unnoticed, she was someone who loved me. Someone who waited for me at the door after school when no one else would. Someone I could talk to. She wasn’t perfect, but neither was the person I loved most.

  Lucky wasn’t in my bed that night when I woke up to the barking, and I whispered her name, pausing to check under my bed. I hoped to find her curled up in a pile of my dirty clothes the way she’d be when I got home from school, her nose tucked in a sleeve.

  She must have escaped to the backyard through the screen door that never quite closed.

  I snuck out the front door and headed around the side of the house. I pushed through the crowds of dirty jeans and work boots, everyone too focused on the dogs to notice me. I pushed my way up to the back step, hidden in the shadows of the work lamp that lit up the backyard.

  That’s when I saw her, Lucky, hobbling near the edge of the ring, an enormous pit bull with scarred jowls pulling at its chain as she hopped around it.

  She’s playing, I thought as her hind legs moved from side to side, her growl barely audible over the crowd. She loved the other dogs.

  “Little dog wants to be a fighter,” someone shouted, his mouth open in a booming laugh.

  “She can’t fight; look at that bum leg.” Another voice, this one I couldn’t place.

  “Let’s see what she can do!” another said, laughing. I scanned the crowd for Mr. Nickerson, knowing he couldn’t let this happen, wouldn’t let this happen, but I couldn’t find him among the faces. Where was he? This was his show; he had to be close.

  Then the first man leaned down beside Lucky, picking her up and holding her close to his face, her legs whirling as she squirmed. Her small tongue reached out to lick his nose. With Lucky clutched between his hands, he neared the pit bull, holding her in front of its chomping jaws.

  “You wanna fight this big guy? Think you can take him?”

  He grabbed her paw with one hand, giving the pit bull a swat on the nose.

  “Put her down,” I screamed, but no one heard me over the growing barks. Mr. Nickerson led a new dog out from one of the back kennels, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He would get her back. He knew Lucky was mine.

  But he didn’t notice the men as he went about tying up the second dog. He fiddled with chains and locks, pausing to whisper to a man with a microphone beside him.

  “Next up, Killer and Macho…,” the announcer started, and the crowd turned. The man laughed as he set Lucky down.

  It happened so fast.

  A growl. A yelp.

  Only I saw the tiny dog with the curled foot lying motionless on the dirt.

  “Oh geez, what happened?” Mr. Nickerson sighed when he noticed her. He gently picked her up, cradling her in his arms, and walked toward the back fence. “I’ll be right back.”

  I raced toward the alley, not wanting Mr. Nickerson to know I had snuck outside, but needing to see Lucky, still hoping she would be okay.

  She wasn’t.

  My arms scratch against the fence when I sway, and suddenly I am back in the present. The fence leans under my weight, and I scream as I begin to lose my footing.

  And then someone grabs my shirt and pulls me to the ground.

  I look up to see Hamilton standing over me, looking both confused and horrified.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper, though you couldn’t hear a yell over the racket happening next door. “Aren’t you supposed to be at Piper’s?”

  “What are you doing? With my binoculars? And my hat? Are you trying to rob this house?”

  “What?” I shout, dusting the grass off my back. “I’m not robbing anybody.”

  “Is this your boyfriend’s house, then? Is this where the eighth grader lives?”

  “Your first thought was robbery and then that I’m seeing a boy? You are nuts!”

  Hamilton shrugs. “Well, I thought you were going to see your boyfriend.…”

  “You followed me?”

  “Obviously. Stop interrupting! You were acting so strange after school that I canceled on Piper so I could follow you. I thought I was going to catch a romantic rendezvous, but then you didn’t go to the front door like a normal person, you snuck back here and then you were climbing the fence, and I realized I had to stop you before you started your life of crime!”

  “Why would I rob a house like this? Don’t you hear the dogs? Climbing over the fence would get my leg bitten off.”

  Hamilton huffs, now pacing along the side of the fence. “It was a working theory! I only had time to make observations and think of interesting questions and formulate a hypothesis! I did not get to developing testable predictions or gathering data before I had to make a decision to save you!”

  I roll my eyes. “Wow, Ms. Olson would be so proud of your use of the scientific method.”

  “This place is creepy. And smells bad. So you need to tell me what you are doing here.”

  Hamilton’s face is red, and the look in his eyes tells me he’s not kidding. I don’t know what to tell him. What I want to tell him. I’ve kept my business from him, from everyone, but
right now, with this house from my past screaming into my future, I realize I don’t want to go back there alone.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you. But I’ll have to do it on the way home because we need to get out of here.”

  The red pickup truck has just pulled into the driveway.

  HAMILTON’S IN

  “Let me get this straight,” Hamilton says as we sit together on the bus, scrunched between two moms, their toddlers, and grocery bags. “You run a detective slash spy agency…?”

  “More of a consulting business with a bit of private detective work thrown in,” I explain.

  “I’ll come back to that detail later.… So, you work for other foster kids to help them.…” He pauses, raising an eyebrow.

  “To help them adjust to a new home. I do some background research on families, but generally that’s all done online. Climbing fences is not a normal part of the job. I also help with first meets, new houses, relationships between them and any other kids who live there, foster or biological.…”

  “Am I in your brochure?” Hamilton asks with an excited smile.

  “Brochures are so old. And no, you’re not, but you’re not a regular Bio Kid. What we have is special.” I add lots of syrup to my smile, and Hamilton laughs.

  “Special, indeed. You do all of this work for other foster kids and they pay you in school supplies and Hot Cheetos?”

  I nod.

  “I wondered how you got all those new Sharpies! And Ticonderogas!”

  I flash a what-can-I-say smile, still grateful that I never again have to be the kid showing up with an empty backpack and having to ask the teacher for supplies. I push the button for our stop, knowing we better run to our house because Marjorie will be mad we’re late, me for the second night in a row. We’ll have to think of a cover for Hamilton.

  As we rush, Hamilton asks about the Nickersons. “And today you were at the house in Creepsville because…”