Parked
Page 1
DIAL BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Svetcov
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Svetcov, Danielle, author.
Title: Parked : a novel / Danielle Svetcov.
Description: New York : Dial Books for Young Readers, [2020] | Summary: “Newly homeless Jeanne Ann and wealthy Cal form a vital friendship as they both search for stability and community, finding it through love of books, art, and food”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019021282 (print) | LCCN 2019022313 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399539039 (hardcover)
Subjects: CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Homeless persons--Fiction. | Books and reading—Fiction. | Food—Fiction. | San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.S9 Par 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.S9 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021282
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022313
Ebook ISBN 9780399539046
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Charlotte and Josephine
and their future wings
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
DeparturesMay 8: Jeanne Ann
June 1: Cal
June 1: Jeanne Ann
June 2: Cal
June 5: Jeanne Ann
ParkedJune 8: Cal
June 11: Jeanne Ann
June 11: Cal
June 12: Jeanne Ann
June 13: Cal
June 13: Jeanne Ann
June 13: Cal
June 13: Jeanne Ann
June 14: Cal
June 14: Jeanne Ann
June 15: Cal
June 16: Jeanne Ann
June 16: Cal
June 16: Jeanne Ann
June 17: Cal
June 18: Jeanne Ann
June 18: Cal
June 18: Jeanne Ann
June 18: Cal
June 19: Jeanne Ann
June 20: Cal
June 20: Cal
June 21: Jeanne Ann
June 21: Cal
June 21: Cal
June 22: Jeanne Ann
June 22: Cal
Feeding the MeterJune 23: Cal
June 24: Jeanne Ann
June 24: Cal
June 25: Jeanne Ann
June 26: Cal
June 27: Cal
June 28: Cal
June 29: Jeanne Ann
June 29: Cal
June 30: Cal
July 1: Cal
July 2: Jeanne Ann
July 2: Cal
July 2: Jeanne Ann
July 4: Jeanne Ann
July 5: Cal
July 6: Jeanne Ann
July 6: Cal
July 7: Jeanne Ann
July 8: Cal
July 9: Jeanne Ann
July 10: Cal
July 11: Jeanne Ann
July 12: Jeanne Ann
July 12: Cal
PlaceJuly 15: Cal
July 16: Cal
July 17: Cal
July 18: Jeanne Ann
July 18: Cal
July 19: Jeanne Ann
July 20: Cal
July 21: Jeanne Ann
July 21: Cal
July 18: Jeanne Ann
July 22: Cal
July 22: Jeanne Ann
July 23: Cal
July 24: Jeanne Ann
July 24: Cal
July 25: Jeanne Ann
July 25: Cal
July 26: Jeanne Ann
July 27: Cal
July 28: Jeanne Ann
July 28: Cal
July 30: Jeanne Ann
July 30: Cal
August 2: Jeanne Ann
August 3: Cal
August 4: Jeanne Ann
Back to SchoolAugust 20: Cal
Profit and Loss Statement
Author’s Note
About the Author
“NOBLE DEEDS AND HOT BATHS ARE THE BEST CURES.”
—Cassandra Mortmain, I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
“YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE A FRIEND WHO CAN FLY.”
—Fudgie, Superfudge, by Judy Blume
DEPARTURES
Chicago Public Library, Sulzer Branch
The following titles were renewed by Jeanne Ann Fellows, and are due June 4.
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Frankenstein
El Deafo
Oliver Twist
Nooks & Crannies
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Golden Compass
The Night Diary
Hatchet
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Lottery
The Phantom Tollbooth
The War That Saved My Life
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
A Long Way from Chicago
One Crazy Summer
The BFG
Howl’s Moving Castle
When You Reach Me
Pippi Longstocking
Swallows and Amazons
The Little Princess
Born Free
Ballet Shoes
The Penderwicks
The Saturdays
Brown Girl Dreaming
101 Dalmatians
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Merci Suárez Changes Gears
Redwall
The Railway Children
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Little History of the World
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Way Things Work
Finance for Dummies
MAY 8
Jeanne Ann
I don’t mind the nights. I stay at the library until it closes, which is ten o’clock on weekda
ys, eight on weekends. After, outside, it’s mostly dark. I slouch on my bike seat and read by the light of the Food-Mart sign next door. Tonight it’s Hatchet. I’ve read it a couple times. I like that one tool saves the kid’s life in all these ways, and that his biggest threat is his weird mom, not the moose that charged him, or the bloodthirsty mosquitos, or the tornado. I think about this as I wait. Someone on the library staff stays with me out front till Mom shows. Mrs. Jablonsky made it a rule.
Mom usually arrives out of breath, running from the L. I swear the ground shakes as she gets near, like an earth-moving machine. Her shift at the restaurant technically ends at nine on weekdays and seven on weekends, but since her boss is a poisonous Hydra in track pants who inherited the restaurant from his dad, Mom oversees everything, including the other cooks, most of them Hydras in training who leave for the night without shutting the walk-in fridge or noticing the meat order for the next day never arrived. Mom is always running somewhere to fix everything for someone who doesn’t appreciate it “so I can get to you, kid,” she reminds me.
We walk the same twelve blocks home every night. Mom carries my bike on her wide shoulders and sort of tilts over me like the teapot in the song. My book rides in the front pocket of my overalls. It’s nice on spring nights like this. We can take our time. The air smells like burnt toast. It’s warm. If either of us has breaking news—a guy cooking oatmeal on a camp stove in the library bathroom (really happened), a customer at the restaurant stuffing an entire steak in her purse (really happened)—we share it. But usually we’re quiet. That’s because I feel like a squeezed-out sponge after a day of sixth grade and just as many hours at the library. And Mom feels way worse after a day at O’Hara’s House of Fine Eats.
It’s nothing special, but I love this walk. If we stop on the way home, it’s super fast, and almost always to look in the window of the travel agency at the foot of our apartment building. The store there has been vacant since somebody invented the Internet in 1990-something, Mom says, but no one ever took down the posters that are taped to the inside of the glass, facing out. There’s one of the Eiffel Tower and one of the Taj Mahal. And one of the Golden Gate Bridge. They’re all faded like everything else on this block, but Mom likes to tap the glass over the Golden Gate Bridge poster like she’s got a plan. Which she does. I know she does. She just hasn’t shared it with me yet.
JUNE 1
Cal
I can do this.
I have to do this.
Maybe I should’ve asked to do this.
Just climb, I tell myself.
The bricks are easy once I find the handholds. The wall is only about six feet high. I’ve studied it for two weeks, after school. The tree growing out of the sidewalk on the street side boosts me past the three-foot mark. Thank you, tree. The harder part is climbing with the paint cans. I need to get up and over quick to not be seen, but the cans in my backpack are like carrying another person.
At the top, I know I’ll have to jump.
I pull myself up. Look down. Tug at the knot of my bow tie. I imagine the sound of bones breaking and then someone drawing the outline around my dead, twelve-year-old body.
Then I hug the backpack, open my eyes, and leap.
I wish I didn’t have to do this alone.
That thought slips in uninvited as I fall, air whooshing past me—seaweed, sour milk, pine needles—what a San Francisco scratch-’n’-sniff would smell like if cities had scratch-’n’-sniffs. Then: Fwump! I’m on the ground and on my feet. It’s not graceful, but I’m alive.
Now the good part.
I lay out my panels. The work will cover most of one wall, five feet wide by six feet high. I dig for my brushes and rollers at the bottom of the backpack. I have about eight hours, the length of Mom’s shift—if no one catches me. It won’t be my best stuff—I don’t have enough time—but it will be the most public. The four-panel pencil sketch I’ve put together tells me what I have to do and where, like a map. I’ve practiced all this in my head and on variously sized pieces of cardboard a hundred times. I dip a brush into the green. If this were a school day, there’d be a roar of kids behind me—yelling, trading cards, candy. Looking past me. But it’s Sunday. The courtyard is still and quiet.
I touch the brush to the bricks. They can’t look past this.
JUNE 1
Jeanne Ann
Mom’s beside me on the stoop, leaning over to peek at the note I’m transcribing for her. “That’s it. Read it out loud,” she orders, and closes her eyes. “Please,” she adds.
I read: “Dear Mr. O’Hara, I quit. The green beans with gorgonzola would’ve been great on the menu, if you’d had the guts to let me make them. And the lamb croquettes. And the duck legs. You could’ve just called them ‘Specials of the Day.’ People would’ve ordered. Good luck finding another cook with a brain in her head. You’re a terrible boss. —Joyce”
“What do you think?” Mom says, opening her eyes again.
I think duck legs and croquettes sound disgusting, but I’ve never tried them. Has Mom?
I think everything is moving too fast, that we are playing in quicksand.
She scoots toward me, so we’re hip to hip. She’s pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket. I sit up straighter. It used to be milky blue, this paper, two months ago when it arrived in the mail, but now it’s turned kinda gray. She’s read and refolded it so many times, it’s got tears along all the creases. I’ve never read it. And I’m not sure if seeing it again makes me feel left out or just wound up. I lean in to see, but she tsks playfully and tucks it back in her pocket, like always.
Fine.
“I dunno,” I say about the note she’s asked me to help her write. It’s not the sort of thing you can apologize for later. I take a deep breath. “It’s really final.”
Mom nods vigorously. Final is what she’s after. “I don’t like the dear and Mr. parts,” she says. “Cross those out. They make it sound like I respect him.”
I cross out dear and Mr. “What’s gorgonzola?” I ask.
Mom peers at me briefly, then grabs the note and crumples it. All the worry lines in her face have worked themselves out. “You know what?” she says, ignoring my question. “He doesn’t deserve an explanation. Come on.”
And that’s it. She tugs me gently but steadily toward the van parked illegally at the foot of our crumbling stoop. The van matches our apartment building: They both look patched together by Dr. Frankenstein. That’s our nickname for it, our building, with the eight-lane expressway running past, and the heat that comes on in summer instead of winter and the showers that leak through the floors: Frank. Mom’s already got a nickname for our van: the Carrot. It’s orange. Two taped-up seats in front, curtains that might be cut-up bedsheets over half the windows, aluminum everywhere else. We spent almost our entire savings on it today, my last day of sixth grade. I think a better nickname might be: Rash. As in: bought without thinking.
“Why are we doing this again?” I ask.
Mom’s opened her door.
She swings her thick arm around me and squeezes. I can smell kitchen grease in her hair. “Dignity, kid, dignity.”
And I go to my side and climb in, for that reason only.
JUNE 2
Cal
I was eight the first time. I walked out our front door and handed a man at the corner a loaf of Mom’s prizewinning lemon-pistachio bread. “Here, sir.”
I’d seen the man through the living room window, pacing in his usual spot by the stop sign, clutching his knitting needles. He was talking to himself when I reached him—“an invasion of Alexas,” I heard him say—but he stopped long enough to look at me and nod. He had black oceans for eyes. And puffy scabbed hands. And he shivered. I was cold too, even in my footies. This was the closest we’d ever come, but I’d passed him in the neighborhood dozens and dozens of times. On benches and stoops, inside doorw
ays when it rained. He wore a yellow raincoat and red rain boots every day, just in case. I thought that was smart. He accepted the loaf. I returned his nod. “Bye, sir.”
Back in the house, I tucked myself into the warm spot on the couch I’d left a second before, next to Mom, who was prepping a menu. She patted my head without looking up. I love Mom, but she hardly ever looks up when prepping a menu. I thought about telling her what I’d just done—I thought about the man’s face, his shivering, his hand taking the bread—but I wanted this, whatever it was, for myself. A project that was mine. Mom, of all people, understood about projects.
My mistake.
The conversation on the other side of this door would be going differently, I think, if I’d told her about the first pistachio bread four years ago, and all the others.
Because now I’m stuck in the Point Academy office. It smells like cream of tomato soup, and the school’s secretaries are sneaking looks from under lowered eyelids. Like lizards. I wish it were still yesterday.
If it were yesterday, Mom and I would be eating early-bird takeout and watching Julia Child French Chef reruns like usual. She’d load up on hot sauce and I’d load up on soy sauce. I’d eat with a fork and she’d eat with chopsticks. After, I’d locate her purse, and we’d cross the street to Greenery, where Mom would ref the dining room like a major-league ump, and I’d settle into a bottomless pineapple juice and my sketchbook at the corner of the bar. We’d wink at each other between “customer relations.”
But it’s not yesterday. And nothing is usual. Today is the second-to-last day of sixth grade, and the dean of the middle school has just asked my mom what could “possibly be going through” my head. Like I’m a mystery.
They’re on the other side of this door. I can picture Mom at the edge of her chair, whapping the toes of her clogs together, waiting for Dean Cappo to take a breath so she can pounce all over him with my defense.
“Cal is a very good boy,” I hear Dean Cappo say. Mom knows that. “The teachers all agree. But they also tell me he spends all his time alone—at lunch, at recess. Not talking. Drawing those . . . wings. Kids find them in their books and backpacks. He doesn’t seem to have his friends around him anymore.”