Stealing Our Way Home Read online

  I sit down. Pull on my earlobe.

  “I’m friends with Mrs. Nivens,” she says. “Nibs.”

  Some of the breath I’m holding releases itself, like air from a balloon.

  “I know the past few months have been a very difficult time for you,” Miss Rhodes says. “And it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to talk to anyone right now. But please, Pippa”—she pauses, putting a hand on my arm—“please try to keep up with the work. If there’s something that feels too hard to do, let me know and we’ll figure it out together. But I don’t want you to fall behind. I don’t want to see you get left back because you were worried about asking for help.” Her fingers tighten around my arm. “Okay?”

  I look up. Her eyelids are covered in light blue eye shadow, which make her hazel eyes look green. I nod, sliding my arm out from under her hand, and give her a tiny smile. She’s actually a lot nicer than she looks.

  Maybe it won’t be such a long year, after all.

  Ben’s not in my homeroom, which normally would have bummed me out, since we’ve shared the same homeroom for the last four years, but now it fills me with a strange sort of relief. I don’t need any more weird scenes between us than what’s already going to come. Because I know it’ll be strange. I know he’s probably still mad at me for calling him an idiot and that he’ll ignore me in the halls or pretend he doesn’t know me when someone says my name. I don’t need the added stress of being invisible. Not to Ben, who I thought would be my best friend for the rest of my life. Not right now.

  But when I find out that I’m in Mr. Evans’ homeroom, I get really bummed out, because Mr. Evans is bald and pudgy and seriously one of the weirdest people on the planet. He wears crazy ties that stop halfway down his shirt and belts with huge cowboy buckles. And he has this horrible habit of picking his nose when he thinks no one is looking and then flicking it under his desk. It’s gross. It really is. Every time I leave his room, I feel like I need to take a shower.

  But then Shelby walks in with her pink cowboy boots and white skirt. Everyone turns to stare at her, and I start to feel a tiny bit better about the situation because I know I already have a leg up on everyone else.

  Then she sees me. Almost immediately, she turns around and heads for a desk on the other side of the room.

  Great.

  I knew I should have kept my mouth shut about that dumb rattlesnake guy at the bus stop. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really don’t. I never would have been such a jerk like that in the past. Part of me still wants to impress her in the hopes that she’ll like me. And then there’s another part that doesn’t care, because I know it wouldn’t work anyway. Liking someone means spending time with them, talking on the phone, and finding out all their stuff. And if Shelby found out about my stuff—at least, the real stuff—she’d turn and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction.

  Just like she did right now.

  Ben’s in our usual spot at lunch, sitting at the table near the cafeteria door. I catch sight of him as I come in, but he’s shouting and laughing with Randy Plaska and Matt Piazza and John Davis, who are the three best players on the basketball team and are probably trying to recruit him to play this year. We’re all in the same fourth period English class too. And now they do the exact thing to me that they did when I walked in there: nothing. None of them notice as I pass by. Not one of them looks up.

  I’m not surprised that Ben’s blowing me off, but I am annoyed that he seems to be getting tight with those other guys, who he’s always considered a bunch of dorks. Ben’s never been the sports type, but I wonder if they’ll convince him to try out for basketball because of his height. Or because they can, now that I’m out of the picture.

  But once I stop feeling annoyed, I start to feel nervous. I never used to have to worry about where to sit at lunch. I always just sat next to Ben. Every single day, for the last five years. Now, as I get closer to the end of the line, holding my tray, I can feel myself start to sweat. What am I going to do, go sit by myself in the corner like some loser? Head over to Ben’s table and stand there, waiting for them to ask me to sit down? Slink away like a total moron when they don’t?

  This sucks.

  And then I hear a voice from somewhere behind me. “Hey, Jack!”

  I turn around. Shelby’s leaning out of the line, straining to make eye contact. “Can I sit with you? Just for today? I don’t really know … ”

  “Yeah, sure.” I cut her off, trying to act all cool and casual, but my heart’s beating a mile a minute. Maybe she’s over the rattlesnake thing from this morning. “I’ll wait for you down here.”

  She nods, giving me a thumbs-up. “Thanks.”

  I should be the one thanking her.

  She doesn’t even know that she just saved my life.

  It’s hard to sit for forty minutes across the table from someone who’s so pretty and still remember to eat. It really is. Shelby’s denim shirt makes her eyes look even greener, and up close I can see gold bursts inside the green, as if tiny suns have exploded behind her pupils. Silver earrings in the shape of S’s gleam against her tan earlobes, and her teeth are as white as pieces of Chiclet gum. For as small as she is, she doesn’t seem to have any issues with eating, either. Her tray is loaded with two grilled cheese sandwiches, a pile of French fries, creamed corn, two chocolate milks, and an Oreo cookie pudding sundae.

  She digs right in, devouring a grilled cheese in less than two minutes, dipping the corners in a mixture of ketchup and mustard, and wiping her mouth with a napkin after each bite.

  “Hey, listen,” I say after a few minutes. “I’m sorry about giving you a hard time at the bus stop. About the rattlesnake guy and all. I didn’t mean to be a jerk.”

  “You weren’t a jerk,” she says, still chewing. “I couldn’t care less if you believe me or not.”

  Her answer sounds like a scolding, or worse, a brush-off, and I can feel a heat rising in my cheeks. I bend over my milk and pull on the straw. Laughter and shouts fill the room, and the heavy smells of melted cheese and butter hang in the air.

  “Lunch is always the worst part of the day,” Shelby says, coming up for air. “I hate lookin’ for a place to sit.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Where are your friends?” She straightens up a little, looking around. “Don’t you have a group you usually sit with?”

  “Don’t do that.” I hunch down, nervous that Ben or his new crew has seen her glancing in their direction. I don’t need any of them thinking that I’m talking about them. “Come on, just sit still.”

  “What’re you so jumpy about?” Shelby shoves three fries into her mouth. “I thought you were popular here.”

  I give her a look. “Who told you that?”

  “No one.” She shrugs. “You just look like you would be.”

  I look like I’m popular? What does popular look like? What do I look like?

  “Were you popular at your old school?” I ask.

  Shelby rolls her eyes.

  “No?”

  “We have three groups of people at my old school.” Shelby holds up three fingers. “Upper trash, middle trash, and lower trash. I was lower trash. Prob’ly about as unpopular as you can get.”

  I don’t know what Shelby is talking about, but I do know that I’d never put the word trash in the same sentence as her. She’s about as far removed from trash as anyone I’ve ever known. “Well, you’ll be popular here. Just give it a few days. You’ll see.”

  “I better not be.” She scoops a mouthful of creamed corn into her mouth, blotting her mouth again with the napkin. “I do better flying solo. I don’t want any friends.”

  “Why not?”

  “Waste of time. No point.”

  “What are you talking about?” I take a bite of my hamburger. “Everyone wants friends.”

  “I’m not everyone.” She pulls on her straw, watching me with her green eyes.

  “What about Pippa and me?” I point out. “W
e’re your friends.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “We’re not?” I push down a flash of annoyance. Who is this girl?

  “You’re just people I know,” Shelby answers. “Who happen to live near my aunt and uncle.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.” She wipes her mouth a final time and stands up from the table. Every last morsel on her tray is gone.

  “Why’d you want me to sit with you, then?” I ask quickly. “I mean, if you don’t care about having friends?”

  “You don’t have to be friends with someone to have a conversation with them,” she answers. “It’s nice to eat and talk, don’t you think?”

  She’s the strangest girl I’ve ever met, I think as I watch her walk away. Weird, even.

  So why does that make me like her even more?

  One day, a few months after we found out that Mom had cancer, she pointed to the movie marquee as we drove past the mall. “There’s that goofy movie you’ve been wanting to see,” she said. “Fat Dog Takes the Cake?”

  I looked out the window and pretended not to hear her. We had just left a store that sold wigs, and Mom’s new one was in a hatbox in the backseat. She hadn’t lost all her hair yet, but the little she had left clung to her scalp in strange, wispy little patches. Still, I thought the wig, which the saleswoman had told her was an “adorable pixie cut,” looked even worse than her missing hair. It was a dull brown color and chopped in short, raggedy layers. I bit my lip when she first put it on and tried not to cry. It made her look like a stranger. But when Mom turned around and asked me what I thought, I smiled and told her it was cute. I was afraid not to.

  A few days earlier, she and I had been arguing about something, and I stormed off the way I used to do whenever I didn’t get my way. I slammed the door to my room and plunked down on my bed. Two seconds later, Jack walked in. I raised my head, ready to yell at him too, and then changed my mind. Something about the look on his face stopped me.

  “What?” I asked instead.

  “You know she’s not going to make it out of this, don’t you?” His voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet. And his lower lip was quivering. I just lay there, holding myself up on my elbows, and stared at him. “She doesn’t have a lot of time left, Pip. You might want to spend the rest of it being nice to her.” And then he turned around and walked out of my room.

  I still didn’t know whether or not I believed him, but I did make up my mind right then and there that I wouldn’t say another bratty or unkind thing to Mom again. Ever. Which was why I lied about the wig. And why, when she asked me about the movie, I knew I would lie again.

  “That’s the one, isn’t it, Pip?” she pressed. “You’ve been talking about it for months. Are you going to go see it with Molly and Susan?”

  I nodded, although I knew I wouldn’t. Molly and Susan had called a few days earlier and asked me to go, but I lied to them too, making up some dumb story about being grounded. The truth was, I couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting in a theater laughing at some stupid dog, while my mom was at home with cancer. And in a horrible-looking wig, to boot.

  “You think they’d be mad if I took you first?” Mom asked. “How about it? You want to go right now, just you and me?”

  I shook my head again, although I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more, and pressed my fingertips against the corners of my eyes. Sometimes that kept the tears away.

  Mom pulled the car over on the shoulder of the highway. She waited for a moment, just sitting there, but I still didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. Every time I looked at her now, I started to cry, thinking about what Jack had said, and how much I was going to miss her. She reached out finally and stroked my hair. “Oh Pippa, honey, I know it’s hard. You won’t ever know how badly I want to stay here with you. Trying to accept that I can’t has been the hardest battle of my entire life. But I’m here now, honey.”

  I moved my head a few inches toward her.

  “I’m still right here.”

  Another inch.

  “Will you go see that movie with me?” she asked. “So we can laugh our heads off at how ridiculous it is and stuff ourselves with chocolate chip cookie dough bites and popcorn?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My face was buried against the folds of her blue gingham shirt, breathing in her rubbing-alcohol-and-hospital smell, and feeling the curve of her arms around my back.

  The movie was the dumbest one I’d ever seen. But sitting there in the darkened theater, holding Mom’s hand and listening to her laugh, turned it into one of the best days of my life.

  That’s what I think about sitting out on the dock the next morning, waiting for the sky to split in two. How Mom and I laughed and laughed that day. I can’t even remember what it feels like to laugh anymore.

  Nibs’ footsteps sound behind me. “You’re up even earlier than me this morning,” she says, handing me a mug of chai. “Back-to-school jitters?”

  I take the mug and shrug a little.

  She sits down next to me, placing the folded newspaper between us, and takes a sip from her own mug. “Well, I’m dying to know. What’d you think of Miss Rhodes?”

  I nod my approval, give her a thumbs-up.

  “Oh, I’m glad,” Nibs says. “She’s a gem, that one. Heart of gold. I’ve known her forever. We started teaching together actually, back in 1984.” She elbows me gently. “We’re a couple of dinosaurs.” She sips again from her drink and balances her mug on her knee. “I hope you don’t mind that she told me you hadn’t done any of the work she assigned over the summer. You know you can come to me if you need help.”

  My embarrassment turns quickly to annoyance. I know Nibs is trying to help, but I don’t need her babysitting me. She did her part, which I’m thankful for, but now she needs to back off and let me do mine. I slide my notebook out from inside Mom’s sweater pocket and write.

  “No babysitting!” Nibs reads aloud, nodding. “Okay, that’s fair.” She watches as I write some more and then reads my words again: “Besides, I’ve already thought about who I am going to do my Spartan paper on.”

  I hadn’t realized it until just this moment. But it’s so obvious that I’ve got to do it on Mom. Trying to accept that I can’t be with you has been the hardest battle of my life. She even used the word battle! And I’ve never known anyone as brave and courageous as she was. Ever. Anywhere.

  “Well, that’s excellent news,” Nibs says, ruffling the top of my head. “I’m very glad to hear it.” She gives me a wink as she shakes open the paper and starts reading.

  I look out at the lake as Nibs loses herself in the day’s news. A thread of excitement shoots through me as I think about the essay. About comparing Mom to a Spartan warrior. It will be great. It will be—

  “Unbelievable,” Nibs murmurs, shaking her head.

  I glance over her shoulder to see what she’s reading. POLICE SAY SUPERVILLAIN HAS STRUCK BEFORE, the headline blares.

  “Can you believe this moron?” Nibs snorts. “They’re saying he tried to rob a bank in Rutland a few months back wearing a Spider-Man mask, but he chickened out and ran off before he could get the money. Then just last week he showed up at a bank in Middlebury wearing a Batman mask and made off with three thousand five hundred dollars.”

  A faint alarm goes off in the back of my head as Nibs shakes her head again. “People are crazy,” she says. “Absolutely, unequivocally bonkers.”

  This time, for some reason, the alarm feels a little bit closer.

  It sounds a little bit louder.

  As if whatever—or whoever—is ringing it is not very far away at all.

  Day Two of school doesn’t feel as long as Day One. Maybe because Ben passes the ball to me at gym, even though the rest of the day slips by without another glance. Or maybe it’s because I eat lunch again with Shelby who, true to her word, ignores everyone who looks her way or calls her name (which, two days in, happens more often than she’d want to adm
it).

  She looks almost prettier than yesterday, dressed in a lemon-colored shirt with little ruffles in the front and dark jeans tucked inside her pink cowboy boots. But man, it’s hard to figure her out. She’s not a giggly kind of girl. She’s definitely not Alice Jamison.

  “You get any books yet?” I ask.

  “Of course.” She takes a huge bite of pizza and chews, dabbing at her mouth again with her napkin. “My teachers couldn’t wait to give them to me.”

  I glance down at the space under her seat, but there’s nothing there. “So where are they?”

  “In my locker, where they’ll stay for the rest of the year.”

  “You’re not going to use them?” I stop chewing. “At all?”

  “I’ll probably pull them out when the teachers start givin’ me grief. But not until then.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” she asks.

  “Why wouldn’t you use them? I mean, it sounds like you’re just setting yourself up to fail.”

  She shrugs. “Maybe I am.”

  “You don’t care if you fail?”

  “I said maybe,” she answers.

  I take another bite of my sandwich. She has an unnerving ability to end a conversation by some of the things she says. And I’m never sure what to do next when it happens.

  “Tell me about your mom,” she says, swirling a tater tot in a puddle of ketchup and mustard. “I mean, if you want,” she adds hurriedly, seeing the startled look on my face. “If it’s not … you know … too hard.”

  It’s the first time I’ve seen her ruffled. And I’m not sure why, but seeing that little crack in her tough-girl exterior makes me forget the directness of her question or the flash of panic that comes from hearing it. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well … what’d she look like?”

  My chewing slows as a picture of Mom in her hospital bed comes into my head, but I push past it and think about what she looked like before that. Way back, before she got sick. “She was pretty. Really pretty. Kinda tall. Long, dark hair. She was always twirling a piece of it. You know, like around her fingers.” I pause, tapping my two front teeth. “She had a tooth right here in the front that crossed over the other one. She was embarrassed about it. She said it made her feel like she had buck teeth, and she always covered her mouth when she laughed. But I liked it. I thought it made her even prettier.” I shrug and look down at my food. I feel like I’ve said too much, which is weird, because I hadn’t been planning on saying anything at all.