Bigger than a Bread Box Read online

  Gran stopped singing. “Nice to see you’ve made yourself at home,” she said, kicking at the pile of clothes on the floor.

  When I saw all the things I’d dumped out of the suitcase—and the crappy plastic wand poking out of the pile—I remembered. I sat up right away, even though my bones hurt. “I’m up!” I shouted. “I’m up!”

  “My, you certainly are,” laughed Gran. “Looks like a good night’s sleep did wonders for you. Something sure seems different about you today.”

  Something was different, though it wasn’t a good night’s sleep. It was the bread box—and the thousand dollars! Knowing that the day ahead was full of magic and money changed everything. I could almost feel the bread box in the room, waiting for me.

  I was so distracted that I forgot to be mean to my mom at breakfast. When she asked me how I was feeling about registering for my new school, I didn’t ignore her. I said I didn’t know and ate my cereal, thinking about how, if I had to start at a new school, I’d at least be starting as a kid who could have anything she wanted. When Mom poured me a glass of grapefruit juice, I accidentally said thank you. Then I rushed to my room, but Gran knocked on the door and told me to get ready. I jumped into fresh clothes, but she was waiting for me, so that was all I managed to do before it was time to go. I barely had time to give Lew a squeeze on my way out the door. He was still in his pajamas, playing with some race cars in the hallway.

  “Bye, Babecka,” he said. Then he held up a car and grinned. “Vroom vroom vroomah!”

  “Vroom,” I said back.

  Gran walked me to the school, an old-ish brick building a few blocks from the house. Because it was already late morning and school had started hours earlier, there were kids out on the blacktop, playing basketball behind a chain-link fence. They looked older than me.

  Gran took me into the main office, where she introduced me to the lady sitting at the front desk. Gran called her Judy, but the nameplate on the lady’s desk said her name was Mrs. Cahalen. She made a copy of the transcripts Mom had given Gran from my school in Baltimore, and I had to tell them my birthday and my old address, to make sure they had everything right. Mostly I just sat in a chair and stared into space, thinking about the transcripts and how Mom had been plotting all of this for a long time.

  Then Mrs. Cahalen said, “We’ll contact her old school next week, just to be sure everything is in order, but in the meantime she can go ahead to class. Okay?”

  Gran said, “Okeydoke!”

  “Huh?” I said. “No! Wait! I’m not starting today. It’s Friday!”

  And it wasn’t only Friday. It was late morning, almost halfway through the school day. I’d just finished breakfast, but kids were probably on their way to lunch already. Anyway, nobody had said anything about me actually starting school today. Gran had only said we’d register. I’d been expecting a weekend of getting-ready time. Anyway, Dad and Mom could still work things out in time for me to go back to my real school on Monday. Mom had time to think things over. She hadn’t started her new job yet. Anything could happen.

  I looked up at Gran for help, but she just grinned and said, “Might as well get it over with! Right?”

  Wrong.

  “I don’t even have a notebook with me. Or a pen,” I protested.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Mrs. Cahalen. “We can take care of you, Rebecca.” She looked down at me with a smile and those I’ll-be-your-friend-you-poor-thing-you sad eyes grown-ups make at kids. I knew Gran had probably told her all about my mom and dad. Gran was like Mom that way—she told everybody everything.

  I could tell Mrs. Cahalen wanted to hug me or put her arm around me or something. I tried to frown at her just enough to be left alone but not enough to get in trouble with Gran.

  “I’ll be back for you in just a few hours,” said Gran with a cheerful nod that was supposed to make everything okay. “Make some friends! Have fun!”

  Fun?

  What option did I have? There wasn’t really anything I could do but march off after this Mrs. Cahalen person, down hallways full of art projects made by kids I didn’t know. Past trophy cases and ugly banners. Into a classroom where a sea of strange eyes stared me down.

  I took a deep breath and tugged at my shirt. I wished I’d worn my other jeans. They were nicer. Watching all those kids see me for the first time, it hit me that I was the New Girl. I’d never been the New Girl before. I’d always been a Since Kindergarten Kid.

  Mrs. Cahalen handed me off with a too-long whisper to Mrs. Hamill, who introduced me as Becky to the class and then sat me down next to a girl with long blond hair. “This is Hannah,” Mrs. Hamill said as she set down a beat-up science book, a pen, and a sheet of paper in front of me. “Hannah, you’ll help Becky find her place, won’t you?”

  Hannah looked at me and nodded. I knew if there was ever going to be a moment to fix this Becky misunderstanding, it was now. I opened my mouth. Then I shut it again.

  I didn’t want to start out by correcting the teacher. I could be Becky for a few weeks. It wouldn’t kill me. It might be nice to be someone besides me right now. A kind of disguise. Then, when we moved home, I’d go back to Rebecca, back to myself.

  Hannah waved at me and said, “Hey, Becky,” as Mrs. Hamill walked back to the front of the room. I could tell I’d gotten lucky. Not because Hannah was nice, though she seemed okay, but because Hannah was cool. Her hair was all shiny and layery. Her sneakers were just the right amount of broken in. She looked easy and fine, like she’d never been tossed into a car and driven halfway across the country at a minute’s notice. She was just the kind of first friend the New Girl needed.

  At home I’d always been a regular kid. I hadn’t been cool, but I hadn’t gotten picked on either. Most of the time, Mary Kate and I kept to ourselves. We read a lot. We watched TV. We went to the park, and we liked to cook and bake together. Sometimes we hung out with a few other girls, for the purposes of birthday parties or school projects. I’d never cared about being part of the cool crowd of kids who walked together in a pack, hung around the deli drinking sodas before school, or spent their weekends at the mall.

  Standing there, looking at Hannah’s shimmery, lip-glossy smile, I had a feeling that I could be cool if I wanted. For however long I was here. I’d buy new clothes with my box of money. I’d be Becky Shapiro, the Cool New Girl from Up North. I was pretty sure I could pull it off, if I just didn’t talk too much. That seemed important—not to talk too much. I’d be mysterious. Like Dad always said, “Less is more.”

  “Hi,” I said, trying to look easy and fine too. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling for no reason and Hannah giggled. I shrugged my shoulders, and they felt like someone else’s shoulders.

  Off to a pretty good start.

  The day was surprisingly okay after that. It was good to be busy and away from Mom. Mrs. Hamill mostly just talked. She reminded everyone that we needed permission slips for our visit to someplace called the Fernbank Museum next month. Then she passed around handbooks for an experiment we were going to do on Monday: mixing a bunch of chemicals in plastic Baggies to see if they’d still weigh the same when they turned to gas. I tried not to laugh when she told us about it, because we’d just finished the same project at my school in Baltimore, and nobody had gotten the right results. You’d think teachers would try these things out at home first.

  Still. I knew I would do as well as anyone, since I’d already passed one test on the law of conservation of mass. I figured as long as we all melted our Baggies, I didn’t care how mine turned out. Mostly I spent the hour staring at the other kids as carefully as I could and trying to memorize the names Mrs. Hamill called out. There were two Madisons. Milo was the boy in the wheelchair.

  Everyone seemed nice enough, but to me it was a weird class, different from home. Just like in Baltimore, there were all kinds of kids—black kids and white kids, Asian kids and kids with accents—but even though I knew this was a public school, these kids looked different somehow, mor
e arty or something. Not like regular kids. A boy named Coleman had a Mohawk. Nobody at home in my grade had a Mohawk. I couldn’t help thinking it was kind of cool. I don’t know why, but I liked looking at the back of his head.

  After class ended, it was time for lunch. I followed Hannah to what was clearly the cool-girls’ table and set down my bag. Then I followed her through the line and ordered exactly what she ordered: a chicken salad sandwich and SunChips.

  At the table, the other girls made a game out of teasing each other. Or that was what it seemed like to me anyway. They especially picked on a girl named Megan, who had supercurly bright red hair. They called it a ’fro and, giggling, tossed wadded-up straw wrappers at her head. When the bits of paper got stuck in her hair, everyone laughed, including Megan. But even though she was smiling, she didn’t look like she was having too much fun to me.

  Another girl, Maya, actually did have an Afro, but everyone seemed to think her Afro was cool. I guess it just wasn’t cool on Megan. But I was the New Girl, so what could I do? I ate my chips carefully, trying not to drop crumbs, and smiled in a way that could or could not have been at Megan. I practiced being mysterious.

  I tried not to look surprised when a girl named Cat talked about how she was “going out” with a boy named Henry. Henry was in eighth grade, she told me, and a good kisser—“not too slobbery.” I tried not to blush when she said that. I don’t think I succeeded, but I also think Cat kind of wanted me to be uncomfortable. Anyway, everyone was giggling a lot and glancing over at the table next to ours, which was, I guessed, where the cool boys sat. Coleman with the Mohawk was there.

  After lunch we had gym class, where the other kids ran sprints and I didn’t have to do anything but sit and observe, since I didn’t have any gym clothes.

  Then in English class, a really young-looking man named Mr. Cook read poems aloud and asked us over and over how the poems made us feel. I didn’t want to be the one to answer him, since nobody else was saying anything, but I felt bad for him. He was trying so hard.

  Actually, it was a little bit hard to look like I wasn’t listening, because the poems were really good. A lot of them were about birds and made me think of the gulls, but I could tell they were about more than birds too. One of the poems was about horses, and I couldn’t stop thinking of one summer when Dad and I went to Chincoteague and saw the wild horses.

  “They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs,” read Mr. Cook.

  I felt flutters inside. I could see the horses, lonely. I could see my dad on the beach. I couldn’t stop thinking that line, like an echo.

  Toward the end of the poem reading, Hannah passed me a note from three seats away. I was surprised to see the little folded-up square of paper appear on the corner of my desk. When I opened it up, it said, in extremely round letters, “How do I FEEL? Bored!”

  When I looked over at Hannah, she was smirking at me, waiting for my response. I looked back down at the piece of paper and picked up my pen. I wasn’t sure what to write back. I didn’t feel bored myself, but of course the note passing was a good sign, so in my own roundest handwriting, I wrote back, “Ha!”

  CHAPTER 6

  “Hey, kiddo,” said Gran when I met her in front of the school. “How was it?”

  “Not too horrible,” I said, walking quickly past a long line of parked minivans, toward the house and my bread box, and wishing Gran wasn’t such a moseying person. I could tell she wanted to hear every little detail—what I ate for lunch and who I talked to and what my teachers were like. But I didn’t want to say, “I sat with the cool kids at lunch and one of the girls was talking about kissing a boy and mostly I just kept my mouth shut so people would like me.” I didn’t think Gran would necessarily think those were good things, so I just said, “We read some poems.”

  “That’s always nice,” said Gran.

  After that we moseyed some more. Gran pointed out a gravel alley where she said there was an urban farm with hives of bees and chickens too. “And the best dang rope swing you ever saw!” she said. “We’ll come back here with Lew sometime next week.”

  “He’d like that,” I said, though I really hoped we’d be gone by next week.

  Then Gran said, “Hey! What say we give your old dad a call when we get back to the house? Your mom is out with Lew. I think she took him to a movie.”

  “Oh no!” I stopped walking and stared at Gran.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Dad,” I said. “I never called him. I meant to call this morning.”

  Gran patted my shoulder. “It’s okay, kiddo. You’ve got a lot going on. He’ll understand.”

  But would he? I’d forgotten again! How had I forgotten? I’d sworn to myself I’d call in the morning, but then I’d been so tired and distracted. All the goodness of the day—the coolness and the poems and even the bread box waiting for me—melted away. I ran the rest of the way to the house, with Gran panting to keep up. I bolted up the brick steps to the porch.

  I still had to wait for Gran to let us inside and find her phone, which turned out to be in a bowl of apples on the kitchen counter, of all places. It was black, with paper scraps taped to the back of it, each of them scrawled with phone numbers.

  “You know,” I said to Gran as I dialed, “you can program the numbers into the phone.”

  Gran laughed. “Maybe you can. I can barely get used to having this thing at all. I got rid of my old-fashioned, regular, normal, perfectly fine phone when I bought this little gadget, and I find I can barely work the thing. In fact—”

  The phone was ringing, so I ran to my room and shut the door behind me.

  My hand shook a little as I waited for Dad to answer. It had been two days too many. I was scared he’d be mad at me.

  At last he picked up. “Hello?” he asked. His voice was like usual, calm, happy-sounding. His voice was Home. I stopped shaking, but I couldn’t seem to make any words come out.

  “Hello?” he repeated. “Who’s this?”

  I wasn’t sure why my mouth wasn’t working.

  “Hello?” he asked a third time. He sounded mildly irritated but surprisingly like his normal self, not at all like a man curled up in a lonely ball on the couch. “Helloooo? Anyone there?”

  He was going to hang up if I didn’t say something. So I managed to bleat out, “Dad?”

  “Becks!” he yelled. “Monkey! How are you?”

  It made me feel warm all over when he called me monkey. “Fine,” I said. “I guess I’m fine, sort of. I miss you.”

  “Me too. Oh, man. So much I miss you. I didn’t have your gran’s number. I tried to look it up, but it’s unlisted or something. And your mom’s cell phone is going straight to voice mail. I’ve been going nutso not being able to get you guys on the phone. Tell her to charge that thing!”

  “I will,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I’m just so glad to hear your voice!”

  “I’m glad to hear yours,” I said.

  Then, without any warning, he got serious. “Don’t worry, Becks. Your mom and me—we’ll get it worked out. I want you guys home.”

  “I want to come home too,” I said.

  “I know you do,” he said. “I know.” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “But how was the drive? And how’s everything going? Everything else, I mean …”

  “Everything’s awful.” As I spoke that sentence, I knew it wasn’t entirely true. That wasn’t fair. Everything wasn’t awful. Gran was great, of course, and school hadn’t been so bad. Then there was the bread box. But my anger felt like something I could give him. I could say it was awful for him. Maybe it would even get me home sooner if I did. If I had a lot of fun, it would just be easier for Mom to feel okay about staying.

  “I know, monkey, I know,” he said softly. “I get it.”

  I touched Grandma Shapiro’s locket with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone.

  He asked how Lew was doing, a
nd I said he was fine, though the question made me realize I didn’t really know because I hadn’t been paying much attention to Lew. I’d been too busy thinking about other things. “Gran’s been playing with him a lot,” I added.

  “And how’s your mom doing?” he asked in a serious voice.

  “I … don’t know,” I answered. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.

  “No, no, I guess it isn’t your job to know,” he said softly.

  “Anyway,” I added, “I’m not really talking to her.”

  “Oh, Becks,” he said. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, it isn’t your fault,” I said.

  He just laughed a weird little laugh then, like a breath with a laugh inside it. Then he changed the subject and told me about what was happening at home. He said that he’d started looking really hard for work and had a lead on a teaching job at a boys’ high school.

  That surprised me. Long ago, before he started driving his cab, Dad had been a history teacher at a college, but he always said he liked driving the cab better. He said the people in his cab were smarter than the people at the college. It made other grown-ups laugh when he said that.

  “You’re going to teach again?” I asked.

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  Dad said Mary Kate wanted him to tell me that she missed me. Now that he had Gran’s number, he promised to give it to her. I told him I’d email her.

  Dad said he’d cleaned the house, and he asked me to tell Mom, so I said I would. Then it was like he ran out of things to say. Since I didn’t know what to say either, I told him I’d call again, when I could put Lew on the phone. I knew Lew wouldn’t have much to say. He always gets quiet when you put the phone near his face. But it would make Dad happy, and Lew would smile when he heard Dad’s voice.

  When I said goodbye, Dad said, “There are things, Becks—your mom—I wish I’d done differently.…”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I told him I was sending him a hug. Then I hung up the phone and sat on my bed, thinking. I was glad I’d called. I was relieved that he was okay and that he was doing all the things Mom wanted. I felt better. Ten times better. A hundred times better. One little phone call and I felt like me again.