Right as Rain Page 4

  Whether they belong together or are total strangers is still a big who-knows.

  The Garden box thuds on the floor, and I can hear my mom mutter, “Impossible.”

  This isn’t feeling like such a fresh start at all.

  Chapter 9

  That Night

  “When will you be—”

  But he held a finger to his lips.

  “I’m not going to tell you when,” he whispered. “Because I know you, and you’ll start counting. No counting, Rain. No worrying.”

  I nodded OK, but I was 98 percent certain that I couldn’t keep that promise, because counting is what I do when I want to erase my brain, and I didn’t want to think of all the scary things that could happen when you break a rule like curfew.

  Chapter 10

  Like a Girl

  “Wakey, wakey!” Mom’s pulling on my toes. “I’m walking you to school.”

  “School?” I’m wide awake now and sitting up fast. “Today? It’s Friday. I’ll just wait until Monday.” I pull my comforter back over my head.

  “Rain—”

  “Can’t I just wait until next school year? It’s already June.”

  “No, Rain. We talked about this.” She pulls the comforter back down. “Your principal’s expecting you today. Plus I have to stop by the hospital for . . .” But she’s hustling off somewhere, so I don’t hear the end.

  “Mom!”

  “Let’s get some of those doughnut sticks we saw yesterday for breakfast!”

  I want to yell that there’s no reason I need to start school today. All my stuff is in boxes and I don’t even know what supplies I need, and I just don’t want to. I’ve had enough new.

  I give my knuckles a good crack and push the comforter off.

  My clothes box is full of jeans, T-shirts, flannel shirts, sweatshirts, running warm-ups, tank tops, and sneakers, but what kids here even wear to school is a big who-knows. I pull on a pair of jeans and my Run Like a Girl shirt. This is what I would wear if I were waking up in Vermont and getting ready to go meet Izzy at the bus stop, but for some reason it feels all wrong now.

  I slip Guthrie’s guitar pick back in my pocket, and dig for my book bag in my school supplies box. It’s full of notebooks from my old school, but I didn’t think to ask for new ones, for my own fresh start.

  I pull out a box of envelopes and book of stamps and tear Izzy’s letter out of my notebook carefully along the perforated edge. I fold it into three even parts and seal it in the envelope. Then I realize I don’t know how to mail it. At home, I’d put it in the mailbox at the end of our driveway and raise the little red flag so the mailman knew I had a letter to take. But our metal locked box downstairs with #31 etched on it doesn’t have a little red flag to raise. It doesn’t even have the right name on it.

  Mom’s in the kitchen slurping coffee. “Ready?” She takes a last sip, leaves the mug in the sink, and picks up her bag.

  “How do I mail this?” I hold up Izzy’s letter.

  She smiles. “I’ll show you on the way.” Then she puts her arm around my shoulders and steers us toward the door. “Oh, my little Raindrop. I love you so.” She’s been saying that for as long as I can remember, all the way back to the dirt, and it makes me feel like maybe today can be OK, and maybe even New York City can be OK.

  But when I’m tying up my Converse, I see that their bedroom door is closed, and if Dr. Cyn is right and a fresh start can help, I wonder how long it’ll take for him to open up and come out. I try to send my dad a little secret message like I do sometimes. Get up, Dad. Come out. But the door stays shut because sending someone secret messages has never put their heart back together again. And that’s a fact.

  The doughnut sticks that the woman sells from her cart are called churros, and I will never be able to roll my rs enough to order one in Spanish. But they are delicious and I wish I had gotten two because I eat mine before we get to 157th Street. And the way you mail something in New York City is to find one of those blue post office boxes on the street, pull down the handle, and just drop it in.

  Before we get started walking again, Mom takes me by the shoulders. “This is a new place, Rain. You have to be aware of your surroundings at all times. Things can happen anywhere, but here there are more people, more cars, more trucks, more streets, more lights.”

  I nod.

  “Follow the signals at each crosswalk. Don’t walk against lights. Ever. And remember the streets just count up and down, from 152nd Street to 168th Street, so you can’t get lost. Just look at the numbers.”

  I nod. And even though it doesn’t feel anything like walking down Cloverfield Lane and taking a right on Elm, walking up Broadway past all the numbered streets isn’t as scary as I thought.

  It’s already warm outside and the sun hasn’t even gotten high enough to sneak over the tall buildings and shine down over us on Broadway. Store owners are unlocking big gates that roll up like our garage doors at home, and carrying big boxes down into dark basements through clanging metal doors that open up from the sidewalk. Then all of a sudden I realize that not only are people filling the sidewalks and living six stories up and up, but below my feet in deli basements and restaurant kitchens, there are people moving about and working, and whooshing by on rumbling subway trains.

  The Spanish whooshes fast by me too. In four blocks I don’t recognize any of the words or phrases from my two years of Spanish class. It flies too fast, and before I can grab a word or sound, it’s gone and bouncing back and forth between passersby on the street.

  “There are so many people here,” I say to my mom.

  “I know,” she says, with a mouthful of churro, and it makes me jealous that she hasn’t finished hers yet. “I told you. Isn’t it wild?”

  Four people hustle down the stairs to a bakery, and a line winds around the corner from a Starbucks just one block up, and there are at least ten tiny stores with ripped awnings between.

  A tall, skinny boy with a backward Yankees cap holds the hand of a small boy with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book bag that hangs down to his knees, and a woman kisses the forehead of a little girl in a school uniform and watches her hop up the stairs of a bus labeled M4 and wave from her window seat.

  “Guthrie would love this.” I say his name before I can pull it back, and it drops hard on the sidewalk between us. Mom hasn’t said his name since that night. She hasn’t opened his door. She hasn’t even cried. She’s hustled around and planned his memorial, and applied for new jobs, and shown our house to new families, and packed up boxes. But she hasn’t said his name. Not once. And that’s a fact because I’ve been listening.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  Mom puts her arm around me and says, “You never have to be sorry, Rain.” She points to another woman selling churros from a cart on the corner. “Round two?”

  We approach the woman and I hold up one finger and point to the churros, and as the woman is handing me a sugar-and-cinnamon-coated doughnut stick in a sheet of wax paper, Mom says, “He would. He would love it here.”

  I take a bite and nod my head.

  “Can you imagine?” she asks. “He’d have chowed ten churros by now and stopped in every store along the way to say what’s up.” She’s smiling, but her eyes aren’t happy. It looks like she’s squinting against something too bright to look at, but we’re still walking in the shadows of the big buildings that stretch up and up and up. “He’d know everyone in the neighborhood already.”

  “That’s a fact,” I say.

  It feels OK to talk about Guthrie. Even though the remembering rises up heavy from my gut, it feels like it’s supposed to be there. Like when Mom washes my cuts and scrapes with warm salt water. It stings worse than you can imagine, but it also feels right and good.

  The school is three stories high and takes up half the block. Middle School 423 is stamped in the concrete over the doorway, and the first people we see when we walk in are wearing security uniforms and have tiny, static-hissing walkie-
talkie radios pinned to their collars.

  We sign in and an agent points up the stairs. “Second floor, to the left.”

  The hallways are empty because it’s only eight fifteen, but a few teachers are walking quickly in and out of classrooms carrying stacks of copy paper and rolled-up charts under their arms. My stomach does flip-flops, and I tug on my mom’s hand. “Can’t I just come to the hospital with you today?”

  She stops outside the principal’s office and looks right at me. “You’re going to be great, Rain. First days are hard, but you just have to jump in and start swimming.”

  “And if I sink?”

  “No chance.” Then she knocks on the office door and it swings open, and before I can even tell my brain to remember to look up the Mirabal Sisters because there’s a poster of them on the office wall, the principal gives me a paper describing the school uniform she says I’ll need to have by Monday and a copy of my schedule, and points down the hallway toward Ms. Merrill’s homeroom class.

  The bell’s ringing, and I hug my mom.

  “Are you sure you want to walk home yourself? I can come get you,” she says, and I blink back all the tears I want to cry.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Remember. Just count down the streets to 152nd. And if you feel uncomfortable—”

  “Stop in a store. I know, Mom.”

  “See you at home, little Raindrop.” She kisses my forehead like that woman kissed the little school-uniformed girl as she hopped up the steps of a big city bus on her own. If a second grader can travel alone, so can I.

  Then more kids than I’ve ever seen in one place at one time, except when we went to Disney World when I was in third grade, swarm up the stairs and through the doors into the hallway. They are all wearing white button-down shirts and navy blue pants or skirts, and Spanish words roll off their tongues and slide among all the bodies in the crowded hall. The beads braided into one girl’s hair clink and clank as she tells a fast story to another girl, and I don’t understand one word, but now they’re laughing and I wish I were laughing with them. Boys tip basketballs over the heads of their friends and off the walls. They laugh and shove each other and open their lockers and squeeze their basketballs inside.

  And as if I could feel any more wrong—wrong clothes, wrong language, wrong hair, wrong skin, and like this whole New York City move was the worst idea my mom ever had and I ever agreed to—I slink through the bodies toward Ms. Merrill’s classroom, and who’s sitting there but Nike Flyknit Racers Frankie.

  “Figures,” she mumbles and shakes her head.

  Ms. Merrill smiles and shakes my hand and points to an empty desk in the third row. At my old school, we sat at tables of four and had exactly sixteen kids in our class.

  I slide into the empty seat and start counting the blue-painted bricks of the classroom wall. Two, four, six, eight. And I remember how the hiker on the radio said he had to take it one day at a time, one step at a time. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll get through today. But Flyknit Frankie is peering out of the corner of her eye at my desk, and I wish at least that I were wearing navy blue and white so I could try to blend in, but as more students come in through the classroom door and stop their Spanish short when they see my face in the third row, I have this feeling that I won’t be blending in here.

  Ms. Merrill doesn’t make me stand up and say three things about myself or anything like that, which makes me like her immediately. She comes to my desk when everyone is unzipping their book bags and taking their seats and sneaking quick glances in my direction, and she asks if I want to introduce myself to everyone or if I’d rather just meet a couple of people first, which is good, because I count thirty-three kids in this class already, and I’m not even sure everyone’s here yet. Standing up in my Run Like a Girl shirt and regular old jeans with my straight blond hair pulled back in a messy, unbrushed blob and talking about how I’m from Vermont, which feels about nine thousand miles away from here even though it’s only 288, sounds terrible.

  “This is Amelia,” Ms. Merrill says. The girl at the desk next to me is small and skinny. She wears her dark hair in two curly pigtails, and has bright aqua-framed glasses and matching rubber bands around her braces. She says hi, but it takes her a while to get the H started because she’s stuttering. At first I think she’s as nervous as I am, and maybe she’s new too, but then I realize her stutter is bigger than nerves. It’s permanent.

  “Hi,” I answer.

  Ms. Merrill says that Amelia can help me understand my schedule and where all the classrooms are. “She’s very responsible. You’re in good hands.”

  Amelia smiles and nods her head. I can tell she’s shy and doesn’t want to talk much and didn’t volunteer for this, but her smile is real, and that makes me feel 16 percent better.

  Then Ms. Merrill slides a folder onto my desk with Homeroom written on the front. Inside are a bunch of papers about current events, and a canned food drive, and community service.

  Students need to complete twenty-five hours of community service before June eighteenth to be promoted to the seventh grade.

  There’s a grid to fill out with what service you did and for how many hours, and a spot for signatures that prove that you actually helped someone.

  Just as I’m thinking I definitely won’t have to do any community service hours because I just got here and it’s already June first, and eighteen days is definitely not enough time to think of what to do, Ms. Merrill says, “And make sure Amelia explains those community service hours to you. You’re getting a little bit of a late start, so you can just do ten.”

  I nod my head, but I’m already thinking that’s not proportional. That if they had 180 days to do twenty-five hours, I should only have to do two and a half hours. Ms. Merrill is definitely not a math teacher.

  I’ll have to do thirty-three minutes a day of community service, and that’s if I start today, which I can’t because after school I have to go buy navy blue pants and white shirts and notebooks that don’t have my old schoolwork in them.

  I want to yell at Ms. Merrill that this isn’t fair, and she can’t even do simple math, and that I don’t even know anything about my community yet, and it’s almost the end of the year, so can’t I just skip it? But I just give my knuckles a good crack and try not to think of what Izzy is doing right now, and if some other kid has checked out the book I didn’t get to finish from the library yet.

  Ms. Merrill starts playing a song and projects the lyrics on the SMART board screen. Everyone quiets down and follows along. A couple of kids start singing out the chorus in loud voices, and Ms. Merrill is smiling and encouraging them. I’m running my finger over the name that’s sketched on my desk in purple marker. Reggie. And I wonder if Reggie got in trouble for writing on a desk and if Ms. Merrill ever tried to clean it.

  I can feel Frankie staring, and when I peek over at her, it’s not me she’s staring at, it’s my finger tracing over and over the name Reggie. And this time her jaw’s not clenched. Her face is soft, and her eyes look sad like maybe she has some remembering that rises up and up too.

  Then the song ends, and everyone is dragging their desks into groups of three. Amelia’s trying to tell me which way my desk turns, but her stutter takes too long, so she just gestures me over until I’m turned next to her, and face-to-face with Frankie.

  “Discussion groups,” Amelia whispers. The d gets stuck in her mouth over and over, and two boys in the group behind us mutter something in Spanish and snicker into their navy blue sweatshirt sleeves. It makes me mad because Amelia’s being nice and those boys deserve to trip on their faces. I want to whip around and tell them that too, but I already stick out like a cucumber plant trying to survive in a potato patch, so I just watch as Ms. Merrill puts some discussion questions up on the SMART board.

  Frankie’s sitting back in her chair with her arms folded across her chest, and Amelia’s staring at her hands.

  The silence is awkward for a full minute, which feels like
at least three minutes, before Ms. Merrill notices that we aren’t discussing the song lyrics, or anything else.

  She bends down next to our desks. “Have you both met Rain?” she asks. “Rain, you know Amelia. And this is Frankie.”

  Frankie nods, but she doesn’t look up.

  “Maybe you two could help Rain go over the schedule before we go to first period?” Ms. Merrill smiles, then she moves on to another discussion group.

  I pull out the copy of our schedule from my folder and lay it over the purple-markered “Reggie” on my desk. We have all the same classes I had in Vermont, except I don’t see art or music. “When do we have art?” I ask.

  “W-w,” Amelia starts, and the longer she stutters on that W, the more terrible I feel that I asked a question in the first place.

  “We had it first quarter,” Frankie finishes for her.

  “You mean it’s just over?”

  “Yup,” Frankie says.

  “Sucks,” Amelia spurts out all in one syllable, and even if sucks is one of the words I’m not supposed to say, it makes me feel better that she said it. I’m glad that sometimes she can just shoot out an idea while she’s having it.

  “It doesn’t suck,” Frankie argues. “Because now we get gym instead. What really sucks is that we don’t get gym the whole year.”

  I look back down at the schedule, and I focus on the little boxes under Friday. Next is science, then math, then lunch. English isn’t until the end of the day. Gym is last period.

  But what I’m really thinking is that none of this actually sucks. Having art or not having it, or how much gym you get. What actually sucks is that Guthrie’s gone and I don’t know anyone, and I miss Izzy and the two inches of foam on my bed, and no matter how many secret little messages I send, I can’t get my dad out of his room, and that being in apartment number thirty-one makes me feel like an overwatered plant whose soil has no more air pockets and whose roots can’t breathe because they’re drowning.