Jer says he bought a brownie every day for a week from that bake sale and they weren’t half as good as cookies from Ms. Dacie’s.
Everyone’s starting to get excited until Matthew says, “A cheerleading uniform is way cheaper than Ms. Dacie’s rent. We’d have to sell like a gazillion cookies.”
“Or charge fifty dollars a cookie,” Alia says, and everyone shakes their heads because we’re running out of ideas.
“It’ll never work.”
Then we hear the front door open and Ms. Dacie saying she’ll grab a couple of glasses of water and they can tour the grounds. The slick suit man says OK, and through the window I can see him on the front stoop staring out over the tangled gardens.
Ms. Dacie’s footsteps shuffle down the hall and Alia quickly erases Operation Save Ms. Dacie’s from the whiteboard and we all go back to normal, pretending to work on superhero comics and math homework, but really all of our brains are trying to make one hundred clicks to come up with a better plan.
Chapter 26
Best Hot Chocolate Ever
On our way out from Ms. Dacie’s Frankie says, “I’ve got the perfect place for us to go. We can keep talking about the plan.” Then she takes off down Ms. Dacie’s front steps, past the slick suit man, who’s measuring the side yard, and around the corner faster than I can say, “Wait!”
I have seventy-two minutes until I’m late, and I want to keep brainstorming a plan for Ms. Dacie, so Amelia, Ana, and I take off too and catch up to Frankie on Broadway and we try to jog side by side by side by side but the sidewalk is busy with deliverymen on bikes, weaving in and out of people strolling and chatting, and hustling to the subway, and others who are dragging plastic chairs into the sun and gathering on the corners to enjoy the weather.
Frankie stops outside a place called La Cocina. “This is it,” she says and pushes open the door. There are six stools at a counter, all taken, and three little tables with mismatched chairs. The music playing is in Spanish and so are all the words on the menu hanging on the wall.
Frankie sees me looking and says if I think some new café in the neighborhood has good hot chocolates, I haven’t tried anything yet.
A woman behind the counter calls out, “Hola,” and something else that’s too quick for me to understand, but must be seat yourself wherever, because Frankie, Amelia, and Ana start walking to one of the tables. I follow them and we all sit down. Everyone at the counter turns around and nods and smiles to us, and one man says, “Hola,” to Frankie and, “¿Como está tu padre?” and Frankie replies in Spanish, and he tips his hat, and no one is typing on laptops.
My chair wobbles, and there’s yellow foam stuffing sticking out of a rip in the fabric, but it’s comfortable and I lean back and sink in just the right amount.
“Cuatro,” Frankie says to the woman behind the counter and holds up four fingers, and she doesn’t even have to say cuatro what because the woman just knows and nods and in three minutes there are big steaming mugs of hot chocolate in front of us.
And Frankie is right. This is the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had, and that’s a fact, because I know my hot chocolate. It tastes like there are at least two extra ingredients that I’ve never tasted in hot chocolate before that are melted up in the mug with the milk and cocoa. It makes it a tiny bit spicy, but then the milk washes it away and it’s perfect.
My face must tell Frankie exactly what I’m thinking, because she says, “I told you so.”
For some reason, this place and the hot chocolate make me feel even more determined to save Dacie’s, and before our mugs are half-empty we’re trying to come up with better ideas than a bake sale.
“I wish Reggie were here,” Frankie says. “She’s the best at coming up with ideas and organizing this kind of stuff.”
“I wish she were here too,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
She takes another sip. “It’s not your fault.”
But I still feel like a rotten, wrinkled tomato, long fallen from the branch.
And I want to tell her how it is my fault. That it’s my fault that my mom needed to hustle all the way away to New York City, and how if my family weren’t here, maybe Reggie’s still would be. And how it’s not working anyway, that we hustled off to New York City for a fresh start, and after eight days my parents already need more space.
Maybe it’s because I’m looking down into my hot chocolate and not directly up at them, but I just start talking about my parents and how they want to separate, and how if anything can save them it’ll be winning the relay.
“How can the relay save them?” Ana asks.
I take a breath and remember. “They used to come to all my track meets together and get excited, and cheer, and be happy. They need to do something that makes them happy like that again. So if we win . . .”
They all nod like they understand, and Amelia runs her finger around the rim of her mug and a smudge of hot chocolate lodges under her nail like dirt.
Our mugs are empty, and the waitress takes them away and fills them up without even asking if we want more.
“We’ll w-w-win,” Amelia says and reaches out and covers my hand on the table with hers.
Then Ana reaches out and covers Amelia’s so our hands are stacked up like three pancakes. “We’ll make history,” she says.
Then Frankie stacks her hand on top and says, “We’ll win the relay. And we’ll save Dacie’s. We have to.”
And just then, with our hands all stacked up like that, I stare at the smudge of chocolate beneath Amelia’s fingernail and my brain makes one hundred clicks and I’m 91 percent certain I’ve got a plan to save my parents and Ms. Dacie’s.
So with our hands still pressed together I say, “I’ve got it! I’ve got a plan.” And I tell them all about what my brain is thinking and how not only will it save Ms. Dacie’s house, it could help my parents too, and with winning the relay and this, Ms. Dacie and my parents can defeat the odds. And no one moves their hand, not an inch, the whole time I’m telling them. And they’re nodding and saying yes and this might actually work!
Then we start chanting, “One, two, three, four!” and throw our hands up and laugh, and how is a big who-knows because we didn’t plan this cheer out ahead of time, so it must be that we’re really good at sending little secret messages. Like a team.
Frankie looks at the clock above the counter. “I have to get home.”
Amelia and Ana say, “Me too.”
I look at my watch. I have thirty-three minutes until I’m late, and even though at first I didn’t feel as comfortable here in La Cocina as I do in the café, I like it here more now, even if my skin doesn’t match and the Spanish is too fast for me to pick up. Maybe it has something to do with the free refill and the easy smiles.
It means I’ll have to walk home alone, but I say, “I think I’ll stay for a bit,” anyway. Walking home alone doesn’t feel so scary anymore, because I know at least twenty-four other people will be on every block the whole way home, and some I might even recognize and nod to, and that’s not so alone at all.
“You s-sure?”
“Yeah, I might try to work on Mrs. Baldwin’s poems,” I say.
They nod OK and take their last sips, push in their chairs, then we all do the team handshake before they leave. The six people at the stools sipping coffee chant along with each of our fist bumps, cheering us on—¡eh eh eh eh!—and I get up from my seat to do the last part, the full-body spin and head nod. At the end, everyone breaks into cheers and laughter, even the waitress, and calls us las chicas rítmicas and I’m 98 percent certain that means that we girls have a good rhythm together.
“We got this,” Frankie says.
And for some reason that makes my throat feel tight and my eyes get blurry and stingy. They each leave a couple of dollars on the table and everyone at the counter goes back to their coffee and chitchatting. The doors chime when Frankie, Amelia, and Ana walk out and I reach into my book bag for my notebook and turn to the pages wh
ere I’ve been working on poems. The last one is in Nestor’s handwriting.
Change is hard. Don’t be
Sorry. Be something great while
You are still so young.
And now I’m thinking that instead of wasting time writing poems, I should be starting to plan the details for Operation Save Ms. Dacie’s. I’ve got one hundred ideas in my brain, and I’ve got to write them down so I can start making them real. Then I’m thinking maybe I can write them into poems.
What makes a poem is still a big who-knows, but I think it’s kind of in the way it sounds, so I’ll only know if I’ve written one if I try. If it sings a little like music when I say it out loud, or makes a big punch sound, then it might be a poem.
I draw out twelve dashes across my notebook page.
Sorry Mr. Slick Suit. Ms. Dacie’s is ours. We’re not for sale.
That one feels a little like a punch, and that makes me feel good, so I try another.
That garden will be growing in no time. It just needs love.
If everyone lends a hand we can pull out all the weeds.
When the weeds are all gone something new can grow up tall.
I read them out loud, and even though I’m not the only one at La Cocina I don’t feel embarrassed at all, and they sound kind of like songs, and it still feels good, so I keep going. This time I try to do the rhyming ones like Ms. Dacie taught me.
A: We’ll need the whole neighborhood,
B: Even Dad.
A: And we’ll make change for good.
B: Mr. Slick Suit will be mad.
A: We’ll sell cookies and we’ll rent plots
B: Everyone’ll own a piece of Dacie’s place
A: It’ll take work, lots
B: Sorry, Slick Suit. Close your briefcase.
The waitress raps her knuckles on the table next to my empty mug and raises her eyebrows, wondering if I want another refill. I shake my head no thanks, and she smiles and takes away my mug. I have to be home in eleven minutes.
I leave her a 50 percent tip because even though she heard everything I told Frankie, Amelia, and Ana about my parents, and that’s a fact because she refilled our mugs with hot chocolate without us even asking so we had something to do with our hands while we sat there, she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t give me sad eyes.
On the walk home I pass the café and for the first time notice a faded Almonte’s Laundry painted on the brick above the new wooden Hamilton Heights Café sign. I pass the bar next door where everyone sits outside with fancy French fry cones, and then the lady selling tamales from her cart on the corner. The next block down, a man stands on a short stepladder and hammers boards over a restaurant window that used to advertise especiales del día. I’ve been here eight whole days and I haven’t been in there yet, and now it’s too late. I wonder what will open behind those doors, and where the man on the stepladder will go.
And I can’t believe it took me eight days to have the actual best hot chocolate in the neighborhood, and I hope La Cocina stays here forever.
I check our mailbox in the lobby, and there’s just one thing in there—a long white envelope with Izzy’s bubbly handwriting on the front. Seeing her name in the top left corner and knowing that just seventy-two hours ago this envelope was in Vermont, and in her hands, makes my throat feel tight and my eyes burn.
I’m early by two minutes, but my parents are still standing right there by the door when I get home.
“I’m not late.”
They both act like they just happened to be by the door doing something else, not waiting around for me, or listening for my footsteps, or the sound of the key in the front door. My dad starts looking through the pockets of his rain jacket that hangs from our front hooks, like he lost something important, but it’s so obvious he’s not really searching for anything.
“What are you looking for?” Mom asks, trying to hide her grin.
“My—uh—the—” Then they both just crack up.
Mom stops pretending to dust the windowsill with her shirtsleeve and covers her face.
“OK, OK, the truth comes out. We’ve had our ears pressed against the door for five minutes.”
“And peeking through the peephole,” Dad adds.
The image of them doing that gets me laughing too. “I’m not even late!” I say through my laughs. “I’m two whole minutes early.”
“I know,” Dad says. “We just— We’re not used to not driving you everywhere and picking you up. This is a big change for us.”
“Change is hard,” I tell them.
Dad nods his head. “We just—”
“Love you so much,” Mom finishes.
“Maybe even enough for a cell phone,” Dad says.
I’m expecting Mom to sigh and say, Henry! We’re supposed to be on the same page about this! but instead she just nods her head and says, “I think so.”
Dad kisses me on the forehead, then the oven timer goes off and Mom hustles into the kitchen to take out roasting sweet potatoes and beets, and Dad walks back into the bedroom.
“Dinner in fifteen minutes,” Mom calls. But right now I just want to be alone and read Izzy’s letter and try not to get too excited that for ninety seconds it seemed like they were on the same team again.
I close the door and drop my bag and carefully open the sealed envelope because I don’t want to rip through any part of Izzy’s writing. I unfold her letter and start at Dear Rain and don’t stop, not even at the periods, until I get to Your Best Friend, Izzy.
It makes me sad that everything she wrote on all the lines in between—like how they’re having a field day, and how she has a solo in the final chorus concert, and how the whole class is making Ms. Carol a T-shirt—has already happened now, between the time she wrote them down with her pink pen to the time it arrived in my apartment-number-thirty-one mailbox.
That makes me feel even more than 288 miles away.
I start a letter back to her right away because I want her to know about Frankie and how she used to hate me but now we’re teammates, and how she, Amelia, Ana, and I are the first-ever all-sixth-grade relay team to go to the state championships, and about Nestor, and how I actually can write poetry, and how I finished The One and Only Ivan, and all about Ms. Dacie and how she might lose funding for her house, but not if I can do something about it. And I want to write it quick because I don’t want anything to change before I drop the letter in the big blue box on the corner and it arrives in her green plastic mailbox that sticks out from her front yard at the end of her driveway.
I sign it Love, Rain, fold it into three equal parts, and seal it in an envelope.
It feels a little weird that I didn’t tell her about my parents, because I told my relay team already, and I used to tell Izzy everything, but if my plan works, then maybe they’ll be back together and forget their whole plan to separate before this letter even gets to Vermont.
Mom knocks on the door with two garden bowls—sweet potatoes, beets, and spinach all mixed up with brown rice cooked with butter that you can still taste. “I thought we’d have a girls’ dinner in here,” she says.
I say OK, even though Dad invented the garden bowl, and none of the vegetables in this bowl are from our garden, and I know the only reason we’re having a girls’ dinner in here is to get me used to a table for two.
I was just getting used to three.
We sit on the edge of my bed, and Mom spreads a towel across my comforter for a tablecloth. We take a bite of our garden bowls at the same time and even though we don’t say it out loud, we’re both thinking the same thing—it doesn’t taste quite as good here. And that’s a fact, because we don’t say, Now that’s good! like we did every time we took our first bites in Vermont. And Dad isn’t here to say Like a garden in a bowl! Vegetables just taste better when you planted them from a seed and watered them every day and watched them grow up from the soil toward the sky.
But the garden bowl makes me think of my plan for Ms. Dacie�
�s house and how I know it can work.
Mom asks me about school and track, and I ask her if Izzy can visit this summer.
“Of course!” she says, and I’m already thinking about how I’ll open the letter and add PS: My mom says you can visit this summer! Ask your mom!
I can’t finish my bowl, probably because I’m full of hot chocolate. Mom says it’s OK and takes our dishes to the kitchen. “Ice cream?” she calls.
“That’s OK,” I call back, and I’m 75 percent certain it’s the first time I’ve ever turned down ice cream.
She pokes her head back into my room. “You feeling all right?” she jokes. “I found a store that sells Ben & Jerry’s. I have cookie dough.”
And I’m 100 percent certain it’s the first time I’ve ever turned down Ben & Jerry’s. “Just full,” I say. “I’m going to read.”
“OK, then,” she says.
In the kitchen window across the alley, I can see the woman wiping down her counter. I can’t see the man anywhere, so I still don’t know if they’re living in the same apartment or are just side-by-side neighbors. I watch her for a few minutes hoping she walks into the room with the TV, the one where I’ve seen the man sitting, but she doesn’t. She turns out the light and disappears down the hall. So it’s still a big who-knows.
I change into my pajamas and clip my book light to the pages of The Crossover by Kwame Alexander from Mrs. Baldwin’s library. I read beneath my comforter more poems than I’ve read before in my whole life combined. All of his poems sing and all of them punch and every one of them follows a rhythm that’s as clear as the music bouncing around the alley outside my window.
My eyes get droopy, and all the lights in our apartment are turned off except the little glow from my book light. I push the button on my digital watch. 10:12. Then I turn off my book light, let my eyes get used to the dark, slide the comforter off my body, and walk up on the balls of my feet, quietly, out of my room so I can go find what I’m looking for.
Their bedroom door is closed. I wonder if they say good night to each other or not, or if they draw an invisible line lengthwise down the bed like Guthrie and I used to when we had to share hotel beds on vacation.
Right as Rain Page 13