I exhale, then laugh. I didn’t know I was holding my breath. I didn’t know I needed to ask her all this. I’ll be looking up catastrophizing in the dictionary tonight.
“Kids are probably nicer in California anyway,” she tosses out. She surprises me and reaches forward to tap the Band-Aid on my face, inspecting it, I think, to see if the skin has scabbed.
“Yeah? Yeah. I bet that’s true.” I pull my jacket tighter around my shoulders. “I mean, I bet I’m nicer than any kid you knew in Chicago.”
She can’t help it: She smiles. Again!
Jeanne Ann
Cal leaves the classifieds, and before bed I place them on Mom’s sleeping bag.
I leave notes with wage-to-rent analyses.
How long will Sam, the cook we’re supposed to stay with—who took vacation at the exact wrong moment, eleven days ago—put us up? A week, two? Then what? We’ll have to live rent-free for practically six months to save enough for a place with real walls. We’ll have to beg Sam to keep us longer. That’s the only way, unless . . .
Mom, would you be ok if i got a full-time job too?
—JA
I leave this note on her sleeping bag as well.
I wake up to her reply but not her:
Forget it. You’re starting school in a month.
—Mom.
P.S. Hang in there. That’s your job. Food in the front seat.
I tuck the note under my pillow. It’s the best bad news I’ve had in weeks.
JUNE 28
Cal
“Chase me!”
Nathan shows up while Jeanne Ann and I are trying—unsuccessfully—to peer through Sandy’s tinted windows. She thinks Sandy may be hoarding bicycles, jewelry, and other stolen goods in his van. But when I think of his face, his tea, the food he leaves for Jeanne Ann, I can’t imagine him doing any of those things. When he smiles, he kinda twinkles.
“Chase!” Nathan is wearing an argyle vest over his camp shirt, and a straw hat. He bops me on the head with his hand.
“Hey!” I yelp. “That hurt.” I lunge. He sprints out of reach. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the Bees over there?” The Bees are playing capture the flag again, and I think I see his mother with other gardeners by the shed. She’s always near but never quite near enough. No wonder he’s always up in our business.
Nathan loops the van and, coming around, kicks Jeanne Ann’s flat tire. “The Bees are boring. Someone’s always peeing in their pants.” He throws himself in Sandy’s vacated lawn chair and kicks the underside of the folding table with a repeating thunk. “How come you’re always out here anyway?”
Jeanne Ann grimaces, then looks at me. I still get the sense she’d prefer me gone. Nathan and me.
“We’re undercover investigators,” I say. I don’t know where this lie comes from. “See those ladies in blue?”
The Marina Beautification Committee is studying a patch of weeds by the bathrooms and occasionally frowning in our direction.
Nathan scowls. “The Blueberries? My mom is the boss. They say I’m not supposed to pull the grass or run over people on the grass or talk to strangers in the grass . . .” He looks from Jeanne Ann to me, deciding something.
“That’s good advice. Don’t talk,” Jeanne Ann grumbles.
The Blueberries, though. I kind of love that.
“I could watch them for you,” he offers. He springs up and runs in a circle around us.
“I’ll put ’em in handcuffs. I’ll throw ’em in jail.” He pulls out his invisible magnifying glass and holds it up to Jeanne Ann’s face. “You’re dirty,” he announces.
I squeeze in between them. “It’s her special disguise,” I say, and catch the briefest flash of relief on her face.
The afterglow of that look will last me all day.
JUNE 29
Jeanne Ann
This morning my stomach wakes me up. When I look for the jar of peanut butter, I find it empty, under the foot of my sleeping bag. I must’ve polished it off in my sleep. I grip the sides of my bag. I’ve got nothing to eat for the rest of the week unless Sandy comes through. But I don’t want to rely on Sandy. Then I remember Mom’s found a job, and there’s a bag of groceries under her seat. Chips, pretzels, food that will survive unrefrigerated. I crawl toward it, feeling the blood flow to my head again.
When I slow down my chewing and finally look up, I notice two things. First, the van smells like dish soap and sweat; second, a new parking ticket waves at me from the windshield.
I go out to get it.
$225.
One of my neighbors, the guy in the yellow raincoat—Sandy calls him Gus?—passes by and nods at the ticket in my hand like he’s more than familiar with it. Like it’s the reason he’s endlessly circling the block, preparing for invasion.
Crapinade.
JUNE 29
Cal
53 DAYS TILL SCHOOL STARTS!
We pedal past the middle school, and I try to imagine myself in the pinhole windows, behind the concrete cinderblock walls. It’s like a little Alcatraz. I’m glad we’re not stopping.
“Where are we going? This is hell,” Jeanne Ann squawks behind me. She’s huffing like it’s the two-thousandth mile of the Tour de France. “We don’t have uphill in Chicago!”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
I had a feeling she’d say that.
“You said you missed your bike.” I pedal harder. We lucked out with a foggy morning—natural air-conditioning—otherwise I’d be a puddle of sweat. I swerve around a pedestrian.
“Whose bike am I riding, anyway?” she grumbles. “It’s too fancy.” I glance back—she’s smacking the rear basket of the bike I tuned up the day I met her.
“It’s my dad’s,” I yell.
“Well, nice of him to lend it to me,” she adds, pulling alongside.
“He didn’t lend it. It’s been in the garage forever. I’d have to know his phone number to ask for a loan.”
We ride side by side for the next block, straight uphill, then stop at an intersection.
“Bad dads,” she wheezes as we wait at the light.
Down the street, a truck honks. We edge out into the intersection.
I turn my head just enough to look at Jeanne Ann without her knowing. Her eyes are fixed on the road ahead, knuckles tight on the handlebars. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I say.
She smiles without looking my way. “Don’t be a sap.”
I think she means it as a compliment.
Jeanne Ann
This is the surprise?
“The library is closing in two minutes!”
I’m at the circulation desk, staring down a guy with long hair who sounds like an amplified Darth Vader over the PA system. The pin on his jacket reads HEAD LIBRARIAN. I don’t believe it. He’s chewing gum.
The overhead lights flick on and off to signal our time is short. We haven’t even picked books yet. I haven’t identified a desk that I can read under.
This is Cal’s surprise; if only he’d checked the library’s hours beforehand.
“Address?” The head librarian lays his hand palm up on the desk while shuffling papers. I’ve already told him I don’t have an address.
“We just moved,” I explain again.
The head librarian rolls his chair a few inches to the right. I slide along with him.
“Driver’s license?” he says, messing up the papers he just organized.
Has he looked at my face? “I’m twelve years old.”
Mrs. Jablonsky treated new library card registrations like magical events. She’d have released balloons from the ceiling for every single one if the library had had a budget for it.
Cal bounds up, pushes books across the desk, and waves something in front o
f my face—his library card. “I went to the staff favorites shelf. I grabbed the first two books my hands touched.” He’s out of breath.
I step out of his way. I can’t even check out a book on my own.
This place is too bright. Too hard to get to. Crummy hours. Gum. Desks too wide for curling under . . . Even the smell is wrong—instead of applesauce, it’s musty and . . . A draft passes over us. Someone has opened a door. The breeze from outside carries in something ripe and funky, like old cheese mixed with . . . dog. I look around. Another whiff sails over me.
I pull my shirt toward my nose. Then I lean back and let the desk take my weight.
Cal pokes my shoulder. “Jeanne Ann? You okay?”
I close my eyes. I should’ve let Mom wash my stuff when she went to the Laundromat this week. I thought I could wait it out—take the first bath, wash my stuff, after we moved into a real place. I thought we’d already be there.
I touch the money stuffed into my overalls’ pocket.
Sam will be back from vacation soon. We will come up with $4,500 for rent. We will move out of the van. I will wash my hair in the ice-cold public bathrooms tonight. I will . . .
I pull my shirt toward my nose again.
This is how the van smells.
This smell is me.
The librarian’s chair spins on its wheels, his hair swings. “The library is closed!” he squawks. Then the lights blink out and leave us all in the dark.
Cal
She’s scowling at the library’s front door.
She won’t touch the books, she won’t roll her eyes, she won’t bark out one of those things that sounds mean but is actually nice.
The library was a terrible idea.
“At least it’s downhill all the way,” I offer, strapping the books to her bike basket. She doesn’t blink.
I fumble with the cord. I should’ve checked the library hours. How could I not have checked the hours? I watch her kick her leg over the bike seat. “Jeanne Ann?” She rotates the pedals twice and disappears over the lip of the hill. “Jeanne Ann?”
I release my brake and start to follow.
“Jeanne Ann?”
That’s when I hear it: “Ayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
The sound of Jeanne Ann flying home on two wheels.
I pedal to catch up.
“Whooooohaaaaaaaaaaah!”
That’s the sound of me listening to the sound of her.
In my mind it lasts hours. In reality, more like two minutes.
When we reach her van, she jumps off the bike and throws herself into the grass. Her cheeks are wind-streaked and her eyes are wide when she announces: “We don’t have downhill in Chicago!”
Finally, a point for San Francisco.
Jeanne Ann
I stare at the hill I just flew down. Next to me, Cal’s talking.
“Do you ever wonder how these people got together?” he says. We’re slouched in Sandy’s chairs. Cal’s watching the throngs of people on the marina green. Bad Chuck stomps by, led by his mom, who’s telling him in an exhausted voice how long grass takes to regrow.
Cal’s sketchbook’s open, but he’s not drawing. He’s rolling and unrolling a questionnaire from Marina Pacific Middle School that he’d been hiding in his backpack, afraid to show me, I think, which is polite, I guess, but also kind of dumb. I can survive hearing about school. The questionnaire asks if he’s allergic to nuts, fish, undercooked hamburgers, nitrates, bullies, etc.
In a little bit, I will have to slink away to the public bathroom, hover over the sink, and plunge parts of my body into ice-cold water to get marginally cleaner.
But for now I’m replaying the ride home—Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—and wondering when I’ll get a chance to ride down that hill again. It is the only thing I can say for sure I’m looking forward to doing again in this town. That and reading the books Cal picked out. I have never been to a library before and not picked out my own books. But they’re still books. And I’ll read them cover to cover, a dozen times—I’d do it even if they were phonebooks. I will never go back to that library, though. Cal will have to return them.
“Which people?” I say.
“All of them. That soccer team over there. That group by the barbecues.” He points.
I think I understand. “Somebody sends a text to somebody?”
“No. I mean, what did they say to each other, the first time they met? And what kept the conversation going . . . for—for forever?”
I pick up my lawn chair, turn it to face Cal, and let it drop. “What happened to you?”
He straightens. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you like this? Where are your friends?”
He lays a pencil on his open sketchbook and spins it. “I told you, I’m between friends.”
“Yeah, but, what does that even mean?”
He half shrugs. “A few of us—we used to draw, like as a group—on weekends, at lunch, after school.” He stops the spinning pencil, leans over to inspect his shoes. “We swapped lunches. Everybody was nice. We hung out like that for a while, and then—I don’t know.” He looks at me and sort of through me at the same time. “It was like I missed a signal, and they went one way and I went another.”
I’m tempted to interrupt, but I don’t.
“I’m not sure if I was officially, like, shunned? Or if we just disbanded, because all last year I didn’t see any of them together. I still can’t figure it out. Maybe we should’ve named our group. Maybe that’s what went wrong.”
“Maybe they didn’t like something you drew.”
Cal’s eyes grow wide, like I might have a clue.
“That’s a joke,” I tell him.
“I’d rather talk to someone at school than no one,” he says.
I wouldn’t.
“So, then what happened?”
“What?”
“After you lost your friends.”
“Oh.” He flips a few pages in his sketchbook. “I started drawing and painting more.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like a lot lot more.”
There’s something missing from this story. I readjust my chair so it’s facing the same direction as his again—then raise one of my library books and poke at the cover. “Best friend you could ever have. No missed signals, only missed pages.”
He smiles, but I can tell it takes effort. “That’s why I like you, Jeanne Ann. You say exactly what you think.”
“No, I don’t.” He likes me?
He looks surprised. “Yes, you do.”
“What am I thinking right now?” I say.
“I dunno, but you’re going to tell me.”
“Crapinade.”
“See?”
I think he’ll be smiling when I turn to glance at him, but his face is slack and his eyes have a gray weather system passing over. “It’s just me and my mom,” he says. “And now not even that, really.”
I whack him on the back. “Join the club.”
JUNE 30
Cal
The Marina Pacific Middle School gym is buzzing.
“Is it me, or does it smell like French-fried armpit in here?” Jeanne Ann says, ducking behind me as we approach the crowd at mid-court.
I still can’t believe she came to the mixer. “You’d hide in a corner if I didn’t come along,” she said before we entered, but that’s not true and she knows it. She got kinda dressed up too—dressed up for Jeanne Ann. She’s wearing a clean shirt and overalls and smells like soap-dispenser soap. Also her hair is bouncier. Maybe she washed it? I try not to think too hard about what washing hair must be like in the public restroom.
We’ve brought a board game—Monopoly—which we’re supposed to play with the kids we meet, and two servings of dessert, which we just placed in the middle of the gy
m floor, on plates with labels. Later, there’s going to be a white elephant dessert swap.
“You won’t be trading lemon cake with these kids when school starts. Why are they having you do it now?”
She’s made this point three times since we left the van.
51 DAYS TILL SCHOOL STARTS! A duplicate countdown banner hangs over the scoreboard on the far wall. I really don’t like that banner.
I set up Monopoly while Jeanne Ann leans against a wall, looking bored already. She brought one of the library books I got her, “just in case the party’s a bust”—but I told her we’d leave before things got that terrible.
There aren’t many kids here—maybe sixty—and most have come with parents. Mom says she’d have come along if she didn’t have a shift at work that no one else could cover. I believe her. I don’t think she wants to miss this sort of thing; I don’t think our separate “spheres” stretch this far.
I walk a circuit around the gym. A lot of kids are playing SPIT, the card game. A few look up and smile as I pass. Principal Dan waves me over from a spot near the beverage table.
“Morse Man! Wound check,” he says when I reach him, bending for a look at my elbow.
“Mostly healed,” I say.
“And your friend, the non-reader—is she healed?” He is looking at me, serious.
“She’s probably read the entire library, actually.”
I watch Jeanne Ann kick her heel against the wall on the other side of the gym, nose buried in her book. Principal Dan follows my stare. “Huh. Interesting.”
“She had to sell all her books.”
“Had to?” His face goes still.
I nod. “That one she’s got, that’s from me, from the library,” I make clear, not wanting to say more.
“Well, she needs you over there, then, for moral support.” He gives my arm a pat.
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