Right as Rain Read online

  So whining about gym seems kind of small.

  Frankie starts mumbling, “Gym should be every—”

  “Just shut up,” I say, but it’s too late to pull it back. That was supposed to stay in my brain not fly out in Frankie’s face, and shut up is another thing I’m not supposed to say, and she hates me enough already, and why is a big who-knows.

  When I look up, she’s glaring at me.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  But the bell is ringing and Frankie is already yanking the zipper closed on her book bag and pushing past everyone toward the door. A girl from another discussion group is shaking her head like why the heck did I say that, and Amelia starts asking me something, but it’s turning over and over in her mouth like a lawn mower that won’t start, so she jots on the side of my schedule. Are you OK?

  I nod yes, but my eyes are filling up, so I bend down and pretend to be busy with my book bag. When I sit back up, Amelia is gone, but on my schedule she added, Are you sure? We can talk, even though I suck at it.

  And I’m thinking maybe having that stutter does actually suck.

  The only class I really like is English. Mrs. Baldwin has quotes hanging all over her room, which gives me something to look at while they all discuss poems they read earlier in the week. It’s weird to think that while they were sitting in this classroom reading poetry, I was sitting 288 miles away in Vermont reading the first forty-six pages of The One and Only Ivan in Ms. Carol’s room during independent reading. Which makes me wonder where the library is in this school because I want to finish my book.

  I scribble on a page of my old English notebook: Where’s the school library? Then I hand it to Amelia. She hands it back. All it has is a frowny face, and Amelia’s gesturing behind us to Mrs. Baldwin’s classroom library in the corner, which has bins and bins of books all labeled with her own genre signs. Sports, Romance, Friendship, Family Drama, Mrs. Baldwin’s Weekly Favorites . . . There are forty-two bins, which is a lot, but it’s not a whole room like the library in my old school, where there were shelves and shelves and a whole system for finding all the books you could ever wish to find, and a librarian, Ms. Trish, who could get a book for you overnight like magic if you couldn’t find it on one of the shelves.

  No art. No school library. No librarian.

  Mrs. Baldwin asks to see me after class for a minute, which makes me nervous for two reasons. First, in every book you ever read, if the teacher wants to see you, it’s bad news. Two, if I talk to Mrs. Baldwin even for forty-five seconds the whole class will leave without me and I’ll have no one to follow through the halls to last period, and I have no idea where the gym is. But I nod my head and put my notebook back in my book bag and hurry up to the front of the room.

  “I just wanted to show you our classroom library, in case you want to check out a book. You’re always welcome.”

  I smile and hope she’s like Ms. Trish and knows exactly where to find any book I ask for.

  “Do you have The One and Only Ivan?”

  Mrs. Baldwin grins and puts her hand on my shoulder. “Oh, we are going to get along great.” We walk to the corner classroom library, and she pulls Ivan out from Mrs. Baldwin’s Weekly Favorites. “This one is in here every week.”

  She teaches me how to fill out the card from the back of the book. It’s not like the system from my old library with a bar code that scans and puts your name in the computer and prints out a receipt that tells you when the book is due. It’s just an index card, and it’s written in the same handwriting as all the genres on the bins and all the quotes on the walls.

  The last person to sign out this book was Reggie, on April 22, and I’m not sure if Reggie is in our class and I just haven’t figured out who it is yet, or in another class and I’m just the lucky one who gets to share all the Reggie-graffitied desks.

  I sign my name and write June first on the card, and Mrs. Baldwin slides it into a pocket chart that hangs on the wall. “You’re number thirty-four,” she says. “Monday I’ll catch you up on some of the poetry we’ve been reading, but for this weekend, just enjoy Ivan.” She pats my shoulder and I smile. And for one second I don’t feel like the only kid who doesn’t understand Spanish and who isn’t wearing navy blue and white, and who gets lost in the hallways, and doesn’t have a locker or any hours of community service. I’m not feeling so much like I don’t belong.

  And when I zip Ivan into my book bag and leave the classroom, Amelia is waiting for me outside the door. She holds up a scrap of paper that reads, Gym. This way. We walk side by side down the hall and up the stairs to the second floor. And just when I’m feeling like everything might be going OK, we swing open the big doors to the gym and the whole class turns to look at us.

  The gym teacher is younger than Mrs. Baldwin and looks like he played football in high school. He wears tear-away warm-up pants and a tight Under Armour T-shirt, and keeps his chest puffed out like some tough guy. A whistle hangs around his neck.

  “New kid?” he shouts, and it echoes across the gym. “You’re late!”

  Amelia and I hustle over, and as I’m sitting down with the rest of the kids on the gym floor, he sees my shirt and says, “Run like a girl, huh?” He raises his eyebrows and nods his head in a way that makes me not want to sit because I don’t want him looking down on me any more than he already is.

  The boys who snickered at Amelia’s stutter in homeroom snicker again now, and I swear I see Mr. Meathead sharing a secret nod with them. But then I accidentally share a look with Frankie, who’s sitting in the front row too and turned around like everyone else to read my shirt. It’s the first time I’ve caught her looking at me that she doesn’t seem like she wants to squash me.

  She rolls her eyes. But not at me. At Mr. Meathead. And even if I can’t get my messages to my dad, I think Frankie gets my secret little message right now—Let’s show this stupid teacher how girls run—because she’s nodding her head and there’s a little smirk growing on her face. And I don’t even care that stupid is another one of the words I’m not supposed to use.

  I want to raise my hand and tell him what a stereotype he is. Actually, I want to just shout it out. That all gym teachers in books are just like him, but I just give my knuckles a good crack and wait.

  He goes on about how middle school gym is serious and important and it sets the stage for our athletic lives and how we need to start stepping it up and end the year with a bang.

  “This isn’t about playing anymore,” he says. “Today we run.” He explains that we’re going to do a quick stamina test. A few kids groan and call out that he’s never made them run before and can’t they just shoot hoops? Then everyone starts chiming in and saying it isn’t fair and they don’t want to get sweaty. Everyone except the boys in the front row. And Frankie and me.

  “The sidewalk that circles around the school is exactly a quarter mile,” he says. “You will run that twice. No stopping.” He blows his whistle through the complaints and starts walking toward the gym doors, and we’re all following him down the stairs and outside into the afternoon sun.

  I’m not wearing navy blue gym sweatpants and sneakers like everyone else is. Frankie’s got on her Nike Flyknit Racers and navy blue warm-ups. She starts unbuttoning her white school shirt to the T-shirt she has on underneath.

  “New kid,” Mr. Meathead grunts, looking at my jeans and Converse high-tops. “You can sit out today.”

  “No thanks.” I push up my sleeves and go join Frankie at the starting line.

  The front row boys are stripping down to their T-shirts too and pushing up to the front, where Mr. Meathead has his hand raised and his whistle between his lips. Frankie’s bending down for a real track start, even though we don’t have starting blocks, and I know how to do that too, so I crouch into my position and feel the rough sidewalk beneath my fingertips. A couple of boys join us in starts, but they’re positioned all wrong, and it’ll take them longer to get up and out. I’m not about to say anything because they th
ink they look all cool doing it, and I intend on beating them.

  I can feel the edge of Guthrie’s guitar pick against my thigh. Then the whistle screams through the air and we’re off.

  Frankie pulls out first and moves toward the inside of the sidewalk. I’m right on her heels, but my muscles are tight and cold and my feet fall hard on the concrete in my Converse. I match Frankie’s pace and stay right with her. We’re already rounding the front of the building, and I can hear footsteps turning over fast behind me, someone with a short, quick stride, and it’s making me turn up the heat. I use my arms to dig like Coach Scottie taught me and I’m starting to feel my rhythm, like I’m flying over tree roots and slippery rocks on the way to Izzy’s house. We round the first lap and dash past Mr. Meathead.

  “Pace yourselves, girls!” he calls. I can see Frankie shake her head and I’m shaking mine too. Going out of the gate too hard is a rookie mistake. And we’re no rookies.

  We round the front of the building for our second lap, and the footsteps are pulling up fast behind me. I’m picturing one of those front-row bad-start boys who shared a secret nod with Mr. Meathead gaining on me, and I want to look so I can see who I’m racing, but I know it’s bad technique and could cost me my lead, so I exhale hard and turn my stride over faster and faster. The steps stay right on my tail and no matter how hard I push I can’t pull away from them, and I can’t pull up next to Frankie.

  We round the back of the building. Just a straightaway to the finish line and Mr. Meathead.

  I stretch long and gain half a stride on Frankie, but she crosses first and pumps her fists toward the sky. “Yeah!” she exhales, and slows to a stop.

  I finish just behind her but ahead of the footsteps that chased me the whole way. I’m bent over my knees when I feel a pat on my back. “G-g-good race.” I look up and see Amelia, little wispy, tiny, stuttering Amelia.

  “That was you?” I pant.

  She smiles, her big mouth full of braces.

  “Th-th-th-third place,” she says. “But I’d still r-rather have art.”

  I give her a high five and check out her sneakers—Brooks Adrenalines in a bright aqua that matches her braces and glasses.

  Frankie saunters over and puts up a hand for a high five, and Amelia and I both go for it at the same time, so our hands all kind of meet. And even if the high five feels kind of off and goofy at first, and makes us all giggle a little, even Frankie, I can’t help but think about how a triangle is the strongest geometric shape.

  Everyone has crossed the line now, and the bell is ringing for us to return to our homerooms.

  We three walk past Mr. Meathead, who’s talking to a group of kids about some knee injury he had when he was playing football in high school and that’s why he couldn’t do the run with us.

  We kind of slow down as we pass him and I wait until he looks up.

  “That’s how you run like a girl,” I tell him.

  Chapter 11

  Hamilton Heights Café

  At first I wish I could rewind seven hours and tell my mom I do want her to pick me up from school, even if it makes me look like a little second grader, or makes me stick out even more, because 152nd Street feels farther away than sixteen blocks. There are three other schools letting out at the same time on this one street, so the sidewalks are crowded with kids chasing each other, pulling on each other’s book bags and laughing, shouting quick phrases in Spanish, lining up to buy shaved ice in tiny little cups from carts with green-and-white-striped umbrellas, and bumping into people who are trying to pass through.

  I should have told her to meet me around the corner at Starbucks and to not even talk to me in case kids from my school were watching, and we’d just walk home side by side. I wish I had thought of that before.

  But once I get to Broadway, I start subtracting the numbers from 168 to 167 to 166, and each block I feel better. I even recognize some of the people who were opening their shops on the walk to school this morning, and I smile at them and they smile back.

  The churros women, both of them, are now selling tamales, and I buy three. One for me, one for Mom, and one for Dad. And I tell my brain to remember to look up whether or not you eat the corn husk that’s wrapped around the meat and cheese.

  The man who was watering the sidewalk is now stacking hairy coconuts outside his market, and he gives me a nod and an hola and I nod back.

  And just like that, walking home with my tamales, and my own set of apartment keys, and nodding to all the people I saw this morning, and my legs a little shaky from running so hard, I’m starting to feel a little more cool and urban, like my mom said.

  Before I can feel cool and urban for two whole minutes, I see somebody lying down right on the sidewalk, curled up in the corner of a vacant storefront. They’re covered by a tattered green sleeping bag with dirty brown stuffing that bursts from the seam, and one bare, cracked foot sticks out from the bottom. The sleeping bag is pulled over their head and face, and I can’t even tell whether this person is just sleeping or isn’t alive. I stand there, staring at the bare foot, waiting for a twitch, and twenty-nine people pass by before I take a deep breath and walk off just like them.

  On the next block, two kids race on scooters and a dog squats and poops right there on the curb.

  The same guys are out in front of our building playing dominoes, and they smile and say hola and wave like I’ve been living here three years instead of one day. I smile back and hop up the three steps and unlock the two doors into our building. I race up to the third floor because I can’t wait to tell them about how I showed Mr. Meathead, but I can hear my mom’s voice before I reach our apartment door.

  “Not once all day?” She’s not exactly yelling, but I can tell she’s not patting his shoulder and trying to understand either.

  “We don’t all have team-building events to attend,” he responds.

  I stick the key in the new dead bolt on our door and hear Mom say, “Shh, she’s home. Just act happy, if that’s not too much to ask.”

  “Act?” he whispers. “You want me to act?”

  I push open the door.

  “Rain!” Mom says. “You’re home!”

  Dad is wearing the flannel shirt he was wearing yesterday in the moving van, and it’s still off a button, and I wonder if he ever even changed or if he slept like that. If so, he’s been in that shirt, buttoned all wrong, for at least thirty-two hours. And that makes me feel terrible because before, Dad only wore shabby flannel shirts when he was gardening. And now he’s wearing a shabby flannel and he doesn’t even have a garden anymore.

  “How was your first day? How was the walk home? Tell us everything,” Mom says.

  “It was OK.” Except now it feels bad to talk about how I think I made a friend, maybe even two, so I just add, “I like my English teacher.”

  “That’s good!” Mom says.

  “And I need navy blue pants and white shirts for Monday.”

  She claps her hands once and grabs her keys from the counter. “Well, let’s go!” But just then there’s a knock at the door and it’s a guy in a denim shirt.

  “Cable,” he mumbles.

  Dad disappears into the bedroom and closes the door.

  “Come in.” Mom gestures toward the living room, and the cable guy starts unpacking a small box and playing with our new TV.

  “And the landline here,” Mom says, pointing to a spot on the wall by the kitchen.

  I roll my eyes because I’m the only kid in middle school who doesn’t have a cell phone. Mom says there’s enough research now to show how “all this technology” affects the brain and I have to wait until I’m thirteen.

  She knocks on the bedroom door and calls to my dad that the cable guy is here and to come out because she has to leave with me to go shopping, but Dad’s not responding.

  “It’s OK, Mom.”

  The cable guy is asking her a question and she’s half talking to him, a quarter talking to me, and a quarter calling to my dad.


  “I saw a couple of shops on Broadway with clothes in the windows,” I tell her. I can just check them out. Really I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going in any of those shops on Broadway by myself, but I’m definitely not staying in here for one more minute either, and maybe I’ll just sit on the front stoop and read Ivan for a while.

  The cable guy is drilling into the wrong spot for the landline phone, and Mom tells him to hold on.

  “Are you sure? If you can’t find anything, we’ll go together this weekend. Promise.” She hands me fifty dollars and tells me to put it in my wallet in the bottom of my book bag and not to take it out unless I’m buying something.

  I nod.

  “Sorry,” she says, and puts her hands on my shoulders. “Be back in an hour. No later.” She looks at her watch and I look at mine.

  I nod.

  Frankie’s sitting on the stoop when I get outside.

  “Hey!” I say, and she looks up.

  “Hey yourself.” Then she looks back down, like we didn’t just smoke our whole class in the half mile, like we didn’t just show Mr. Meathead to watch what he says about girls, and like we never made that triangle high five with Amelia.

  And now I’m feeling stupid because even though she doesn’t seem like the shopping type, neither am I, and for one second I thought maybe she’d come with me, and I wouldn’t have to go in those shops alone. I thought maybe she could help me pick out navy blue pants and a white button-down shirt so I wouldn’t stick out so much in school, and if they didn’t speak English in the store she could translate for me because even though I know blue is azul, I don’t know what navy blue is.

  But she doesn’t even look at me again.

  “Guess I’ll see you Monday,” I say.

  She crosses her arms over her knees and puts her head down. “Guess so.”