Just Under the Clouds Read online

  “On its way.” She thinks it over, like she’s tasting the idea on her tongue. Then she winks real fast. “I like that.”

  “Thank you for the graham crackers.” I hold up the crinkling pack.

  “Anytime.” Mrs. Griffin smiles wide.

  And even if I want to stay here forever, I look at Jacob, who stands gnawing on graham crackers, looking at my sister. She shoves the crackers in her mouth, crumbs sticking to the creases of her lips as she stares at a set of hanging crystal chimes.

  I take hold of Adare’s wrist, but she doesn’t budge, stays flat-footed, reaching one arm out to the chimes. I pull at her, but she rips her arm from me.

  “Adare, we have to go.”

  Adare stomps and whines and sounds like the kind of person I don’t want her to be. The slow kid people like Meredith make fun of.

  I pull her out of the boat and away.

  Sometimes I wish Adare could be invisible.

  Sabina stands on the dock with her hands in her pocket. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” I ask.

  “You must think we’re totally weird homeschooling crazies.”

  I laugh. “No.”

  “Snack time. And egg timers for homework. We even have a reading hour before bed.” She smacks her head. “Ugh. I just told you we have a reading hour. Sorry.”

  I want to tell Sabina to stop sorrying, because it sounds nice, having snack time and a reading hour and knowing you’ve always got to be somewhere doing what you need to do. “I like your place,” I tell her. “Your mom’s cool.”

  “Cool? Well, let’s not go that far.” She lingers on the dock. “You guys can come back to see the screech owl. And the cat. I mean, if you want,” she says.

  “I want to,” I say.

  “Good.”

  And I think this means we’re friends. “I’ll see you in math tomorrow,” I tell her. And I remember the test, let the dread of it sink into me.

  But before I go, I look back at the houseboat and, on the other side of the canal, at the tree of heaven.

  I’ve found Daddy’s favorite tree.

  We’re only three stops from Willa’s place, and I sit on the subway train, facing into the car, while Adare kneels backward on the seat, her nose pressed against the window. Strips of light scan her face, the way the chimes did, and I watch her reflection. Her shape sways and shifts with the train.

  I map everything in my Tree Book—the cherry blossom at school, the sky above Adare while she waited at the steps, the brushwood in the canal, and the flowers hanging from Sabina’s houseboat. Then I sketch the tree of heaven, whose trunk I draw to the edge of one page but whose branches disappear past it into the wide-open space of the subway, through the windows, out the tunnel, and back into Brooklyn, where it started.

  Then I close the book and hold it at my chest.

  I wonder how I’ll tell Mom all we saw. I sift through my bag for an inky pen and press it to my palm, trying to steady it against the bump of the train. I draw the eyes of an owl and flap my fingers over its gaze.

  But it turns out Mom’s not back yet. It’s Willa who stands with her elbows slumped at the kitchen counter and shoots up like a daffodil when we toss the door open.

  “There you are.” It surprises me. She says it like she has some kind of stake in us, like we’re hers. She eyes my muddy sneakers. “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere,” I say quickly, letting the lie drip out. The tree feels like a secret no one else can know.

  She folds her arms, as if she can’t decide whether to believe me, and I know we don’t belong here. Not with Willa, who stands as tall as her windows, who has stacks of pillows and sheets in neat folds, whose fridge is always full, and whose view of the sky, behind her, spreading along the wraparound glass, is bigger than any I’ve known.

  For a moment, I wonder if I can tell her the truth. Then I think of the empty warehouses and the strays and the lingering old houseboats and know that Willa won’t like that even a little. If I want to go back—and I have to go back—there’s no way she can know.

  “Do you like staying here?” she asks, like she can read my mind.

  I’m about to nod, flap my mouth about the cupcake shop and the snack fridge. But I stop myself, fast.

  I don’t know how to answer Willa with her folded arms and her long legs, ankles crossed over each other, one foot tapping out her question. It’s something Mom asks when we end up somewhere new. Do you like it here? And I never answer straightaway. I look to see Mom’s face. I look to see if she thinks we should go or stay.

  I can always tell whether Mom can picture us in a place. I watch how she circles it, walks it. Whether she takes her hair from her face, giving her pink cheeks air, or leaves it hanging limp down her back. I can tell how she sees us inside the four walls. And once I know, I follow real quick with the same answer.

  But Mom’s not here. And the starched apron on the wall is splattered with frijoles charros. Our ugly patchwork quilt stretches across Willa’s stiff white couch. There’s a brown smudge on the cushion from Adare’s filthy feet. There’s no way Willa wants us to stay.

  “I dunno,” I say with a shrug, like I don’t care—when really, if it were up to me, I’d stay here forever and a day.

  “Because you can, Cora. You know that. Don’t you?”

  I watch her eyes and they don’t skid around the room, the way Mom’s caseworker, Tilda’s, sometimes do, like she’s about to tell us the kind of story we want to hear, the kind she later rips away. “We can?”

  “Your mother and I have known each other a long time,” she says. “I mean, look at this place.” She swirls around. “What’s the point in having it if you’re going to be all alone?”

  I look at it. So white and empty. She doesn’t have beanbag chairs or greenhouses or beet-stained curtains dripping to the floor.

  “You have to stay.” She smiles.

  And even though I know I shouldn’t, I let myself believe we will.

  Then Willa unfolds her arms and says, “Now, what shall we order for dinner?” She makes her way to the menu drawer, sliding takeout menus between her fingers. “I don’t feel like Thai, not tonight. Do you?”

  “Not tonight,” I agree because I’d agree with anything Willa said if it meant we could stay between her bare white walls, settling at the edges of her memories, getting closer and closer to this place she calls home.

  That night, I sit at one end of the couch and Adare sits at the other. We bunch our knees up and match our feet while Sookie warms our toes. I hear the murmur of Mom and Willa’s easy conversation from Willa’s room and I sit with algebra and my Tree Book in my lap.

  I should be studying for tomorrow’s big exam, but instead I draw the spring’s first leaves into the book’s pages.

  “I’m gonna climb it,” I say out loud. I don’t even know if she’s listening, if the thoughts that are falling from my head and twisting out my tongue make any sense to her.

  “Specially when it flowers,” I continue.

  “Okay,” Adare agrees.

  She sits with her butterfly wings sticking out from the quilt. She’s worn them so long, the glitter’s gone gray across the faded pink. They used to be mine until I decided real living things were more interesting than pretend ones.

  The sky is dark and full along the huge wraparound windows, and with the city and the bridge lit, it feels kind of like we’re floating across it. Like the floor disappeared and, with Adare’s wings and the branches of my Tree Book growing and growing, we’re lost in the swirl.

  I close my eyes and feel us weightless.

  Then I hear Mom’s voice rise from Willa’s room. The walls are a thin paper sheet. “Don’t start, Willa.”

  Willa’s voice withers and swells.

  Mom’s voice is even. “It’s none of your
business.”

  “They do as they please,” Willa says, and I wonder, Who does as they please? Us?

  Mom says something I can’t make out, but Willa’s voice is big now. “And Adare—she needs more than you can give her.”

  “She has what she needs.”

  Willa’s voice is a rolling roar. “How much longer can you live like this?”

  But the conversation is done. Mom’s left the room. Adare straightens up and her wings catch the sparkling lights from the city. I turn over onto the book and press my head into the couch, like I’ve been sleeping, like I haven’t heard a thing.

  I hear Mom at the closet where Willa stacks the pillows and the sheets. There’s some rummaging, but my nose is smashed into the scratchy white of the couch, breathing new-furniture smell and the warmth of my own body. I keep my head stuffed there, my arm wrapped around the book’s smooth cover. I can still feel the glow of the city through the glass. It stays trapped behind my eyelids, jumping in fizzing light patterns.

  So Willa thinks we’re wild and set loose in Brooklyn. She thinks Adare hasn’t been given what she needs. What does she need? Something special. Those are Adare’s needs. I imagine Sabina sounding it out like species—spee-cial.

  I trap my book tighter and tighter against my chest, and my hand goes numb. The owl on my palm is crushed.

  I hear Mom, closer now, at the wide white matching chair. She breathes in like she has to blow her nose. She breathes in like she no longer can.

  At math the next day, Sabina slides into class with a big old grin at me and I try to smile back, even if everything in me is sinking.

  I don’t want to take this test.

  But I don’t have a choice. I sign my name in pencil at the top. I run an eraser across the page to see the pink dust swirl, and then I brush it away. The rubber pieces stick to the cold desk. I knock my worn sneakers on the metal bar.

  What is the multiplicative inverse of ½?

  Nothing inside me knows. I don’t have a string of numbers in me waiting to get out. I only have Mom’s painting genes and the pictures caught in my palms. What good are they when you need real answers, a solid number written in no. 2 pencil?

  I glance up at Mrs. Belz, who sits at her desk, her nose pointing out at us all. We catch eyes and she’s got this look like she’s disappointed in me before she needs to be.

  What is the multiplicative inverse of ½?

  I look toward the window, but Mrs. Belz has shut the blinds. I wish I was in art class with Mrs. Folaris and her funky outfits and her soft voice.

  I run my hand across the printed questions, my fingernails like rounded moons. I let my pencil trace the night sky of the page and draw ten fingernail moons.

  Before I know it, I’ve placed a tree beneath each one. Sticks of prickled pine trees go soft in my imagination. I build a row of crows’ nests because crows like to build their homes in evergreens—trees that never lose their leaves. Permanent, no matter how cold. Not like most plants, which have to regrow them each year.

  I let time disappear, and when Mrs. Belz asks us to place our pencils down, my pencil is a dull nub.

  She collects the tests, her heels pattering the floor like an easy rain, and when she comes to me, she looks down at the gray shadows of my drawing. It fills the entire page and the spaces where the answers should be.

  “Miss Quinn. Would you like to keep that?”

  I nod.

  There are no numbers in me. Only pictures. And a stubborn snap of Adare that’s being sent straight to remedial math.

  At lunch, Sabina and I lie out on the concrete, the sun beating down on us. Instead of jumping the river, it’s like we’re floating right in it.

  “I didn’t know any of the answers,” I tell her, stabbing my fist on the pavement. “Is math easy for you?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just good at numbers.”

  “My dad was good at numbers,” I say. “Not me.”

  “You’ll catch up.”

  I don’t tell her about remedial math. I don’t tell her that catching up is no longer possible for me. “Why in the world did you ever want to come to school, Sabina?” I ask, because I’ve got to know why anyone would subject herself to this.

  “I know it doesn’t make much sense with all the moving we do, if we’re just going to the next place and the next one. But it was just like, I’ve got to start being somewhere. For real. Ya know?”

  “You never made any friends?”

  “I don’t know. Not the kind of friends you sit with looking at clouds.”

  “Looking at clouds? That’s what being friends is all about?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You read too many love notes,” I tell her.

  She laughs. “What’s it about, then?”

  “It’s…” I think about this really hard. I think about how I don’t usually talk to anybody because I’m afraid we’ll up and go. I think of Mom and Willa, after all these years. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, so I just say, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I think it’s chatting and looking up at clouds,” she says firmly.

  I smile and look up. “How long have you lived on the houseboat?” I ask.

  “Forever.”

  “Do you get seasick?” I wonder.

  “Nope.”

  “How many places have you lived?”

  “A million,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  “But, then, it’s kind of like just one. We’re always on the boat.”

  So she hasn’t had to leave roaches and an Old Lou on the stairs or go to another new placement with no bathroom.

  “Don’t you want to quit leaving?”

  “I don’t know. Leaving a place is easy when you haven’t really left anything behind.”

  “Mmm,” I say. “I get that.” Then I tell her what I haven’t told anyone, not ever. “Technically, we’re homeless.”

  I can’t see her reaction, not while we’re looking up at the sky, and I think maybe I get why looking at clouds is necessary to a friendship. Maybe you need to not see what the other person really thinks. Maybe you just hope for the best.

  But I feel her beside me and she doesn’t move. “You live on the street?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “It’s not like that. We don’t have our own place. We did when my dad was alive, and then there was this place on Hoyt Street, but then…we just didn’t anymore.”

  While I’m looking up, I guess Sabina’s looking down. She rolls over to her side and I shift my gaze, watch her take hold of an old-looking rag of paper. She sits up fast and unfolds the neat square. I sit up with her.

  “What is it?”

  Her eyes scan the lined notebook page. “Probably somebody passing a note in class.” She frowns. “It’s wet.” She hands the paper to me.

  “Dear Becca,” I read. Then I look over the ruined blue ink. I can only make out some of the note. The beginning of one sentence, the end of another. It’s all blobbed and smeared.

  I turn to the back. Sabina reads over my shoulder at the bottom of the page, “Your former friend, Jen.”

  She looks closer. “Jess,” she corrects herself. “You know a Jess?”

  I shake my head. “You know a Becca?”

  “Nope.” Sabina takes the note from me, folds it back up into a neat little square. “Former friend. Bummer.”

  “Bummer,” I repeat.

  Sabina stuffs the note in the pocket of her puff skirt and leans her head back on her hands.

  “What do you think happened?”

  I shift back to the sky, too. “Could be a million things.”

  “It had to be bad—to write a long note like that.”

  “She probably called her out for being a
jerk or something.”

  “Who?”

  “Becca.”

  “Called Jess out?”

  “The other way around.”

  “Mmm.” She thinks it over. “I bet Becca didn’t lose the note. I bet she threw it away.”

  “Could be a million things,” I say again.

  “We’ll never know.”

  I look up, trying to forget about Becca and Jess, not wanting to think about the million ways a friendship can fall apart.

  Sabina twirls a braid around her fingers. “My dad’s a fisherman, so we lived on the Chesapeake Bay once for a whole year,” she tells me. “There was this humungous houseboat community, near a school and everything. I used to watch the kids play. They’d set out hula hoops and stuff. And jump in them. I kept trying to figure out how to play, just by watching. I made up the name—jump the river. But I don’t even know the real rules.”

  I remember Sabina setting out her hula hoops the other day, how it felt like she knew exactly what she was doing. I guess she didn’t.

  “Staying in one place can be nice,” she says. “But it’s nothing like living in the world.”

  Sitting here, looking up at the huge sky, I want to tell her what I know: that the world is too big and you have to find your piece of it if you want to survive.

  When we get to Willa’s place, I’m carrying two pieces of paper. The crumpled math test with a set of moons and a folded-up note from Mrs. Belz about me switching to remedial math—after I insisted we didn’t have a phone number for her to call.

  Willa jumps from the couch when we open the door and her smile is almost too wide, like it’s got this kind of knowing inside it. “I’m glad you’re back. We have a visitor today.”

  “A visitor?” It sounds so proper.

  “A friend. From school.”

  School? I imagine Mrs. Belz slapping the elevator buttons, stomping down Willa’s hallway to me.

  “From my school?” I ask while Adare runs to the refrigerator and grabs a jar of peanut butter. I lean over her, taking out some plastic-wrapped string cheese.