***
“That was kind of stupid, giving a surprise vocabulary quiz so close to the last day of school,” Tanya said, sitting next to me on the bus that afternoon.
“And on a Monday!” Courtney agreed, peeling a banana.
A corner of my vocabulary quiz sheet was sticking out from my notebook. I lifted it up and peeked at my grade. Only one out of all six answers was right. I sighed and stashed the folded sheet at the bottom of my backpack. I’d bury it in my closet later.
I didn’t see what the big deal was. I didn’t think one little quiz could harm us. School would be over soon anyway.
I slouched in my seat and stared out the window to count the dandelions, the different colored flowers that were popping out from the grass, and the bushes along the street. I wondered how many bumblebees were flying over the blooming buds. Wide green leaves in the trees above fluttered from the light breeze, waving at me to get off the bus and play under them.
I wanted summer to arrive fast.
“I forgot, where’re we going?” Tanya asked.
Nobody answered.
“Oh, right, Cheri’s.” She suddenly remembered we were bringing back Cheri’s graded homework. Cheri studied at home all week so that she wouldn’t fall behind.
At her stop, we stepped off the air-conditioned bus and out into the bright, hot sunshine. The back of a third-floor air conditioner was dripping water on the new baby buds that were starting to bloom on the narrow lawn alongside the building. I guessed the people who lived on the third floor were already bothered by the coming hot weather.
“Don’t be long,” Courtney said. “I want to get started calling up places to see about making our reservations.” She pulled out her summer pamphlets from her backpack.
“I thought you started that last night,” Tanya said.
“It was too late,” she explained. “Besides, there’s no office open on Mother’s Day.”
A butterfly with bright wings soared past her nose. More were leaping from flower to flower on all the lawns around us. Birds whistled from high branches.
I felt warm sunlight cover my skin, the same way it covered the plant leaves, which we learned about in science. I wasn’t made up of chlorophyll, but I felt my skin tingle with energy just the same.
Courtney waited downstairs in front of the building, going through her pamphlets, while we brought Cheri’s homework and notes from the blackboard up to her. This act of treason wasn’t our idea. Sister Bernadette had suggested it. We wouldn’t do this to Cheri. We wouldn’t do it to our worst enemy, but Sister said that it wouldn’t be fair for Cheri to miss out on important notes just because she was bedridden. Cheri had agreed.
“Come on, hurry up!” Tanya nudged me in the back, hard.
I glimpsed at Courtney leaning against the fence. She shrugged.
I didn’t know why she was so rushed, but Tanya pressed the elevator button five times before it came. On our way up, I saw she had a funny twinkle in her right eye, but I couldn’t figure out why.
When the door opened, Tanya rushed down the hall. Cheri met us at her apartment door, and Tanya handed her the graded work and a sheet of paper with the notes written down on it.
“You guys want to come in and study with me?” Cheri asked.
“No, that’s all right,” Tanya told her and grabbed my arm.
“Where’s Courtney?” Cheri hollered as we headed back down the hall.
“Downstairs waiting,” Tanya yelled back. “See you tomorrow.”
I heard Cheri shut her front door.
When we got back to the elevators, Tanya snatched my finger as I reached out to push the button. “Stop!” she said. “It’s better if we sneak up the stairs.”
“Huh?” I said.
She pulled me to the stairway at the other end of the hall and crept up to the 11th floor. I caught up with her at the door as she raised her curly head to the window.
I dropped onto the stairs and waited. She threw her book bag down at me. “Can we leave now?” I asked after five minutes had passed.
“No!” she whispered loudly. “We’ve only been here a couple of seconds!”
“What if nobody’s home?”
“Then he’ll be coming home!” she retorted. “Now, will you shut up?”
I leaned my head against the banister and daydreamed while staring at layers of dusty beige paint peeling off the wall.
Suddenly I heard something below. It sounded like the hinges creaking on a door farther down. Maybe a maintenance man had entered the stairway. I watched the row of steps below and waited for more sounds, but nothing else came. I tightened my grip on my backpack and looked up at Tanya. She wouldn’t move her head away from the window. “I think I heard something,” I whispered.
“Shhh!”
Frowning, I braced my back against the wall and tried to hide behind both book bags.
How could Tanya go off on some wacky idea just like that? She never thought about the trouble she could be getting into or getting somebody else into. She was different from Courtney by a mile. I wished I were downstairs in front of the building with her now.
“Oooo! The elevator’s opening!” Tanya whispered before her face went blank.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“Some dumb woman,” she said. “She went down the other way.”
“She might come back.”
“She’s not coming back,” she told me.
I peered down the steps. “What if somebody else shows up?”
“No one else is out there.”
I frowned harder. “Well, then, let’s go.”
She grunted. “I want to find out where he lives.”
“What’s the big deal in finding out where he lives?”
“Will you stop asking me these stupid questions?” she snapped.
I sighed. This was Cheri’s building, not mine. She had the right to go wherever she wanted, but I didn’t. It would be different if she was with us on Tanya’s wild adventure, but she wasn’t.
“Tanya let’s go. We’re going to get into trouble.”
“Will you shhh?” she said. “Nobody can see us and he’ll be here any minute now.”
“Why can’t we wait in front of the building with Courtney?” I pleaded.
She twirled, her mouth ready to say something, when suddenly her eyes widened. Not at me, at something behind me.
Slowly I turned my head back, directly into the face of a security guard, not the one who had gotten my keys out of the shaft, but the other quieter one. I got a good look at his sleepy brown eyes and trim mustache, and I figured he got a good look at me.
I cringed, trying to hide behind my book bag. Tanya grinned and saluted him.
Still not speaking, he directed us to follow him down to the 10th floor. Then he pressed for the elevator.
I suddenly had a pretty good idea how Courtney felt when she rode the elevator. I froze like a statue and kept my eyes fixed to the door. I couldn’t even move a finger in case somebody might notice. My heart was pounding. Tanya stood next to the guard with a dopey expression on her face as if she was being escorted to some important event like a ballroom dance. Couldn’t she see what was happening? I wanted to vanish into the hot air.
Finally, the elevator door opened on the lobby, and I followed a grinning Tanya outside.
Courtney, still waiting, asked, “Where were you?”
“Just come on,” I whispered, grabbing her arm and tugging her past the high bushes. I shut my eyes a minute to wring out the tears of embarrassment.
That guard would remember my face each time I stepped into Cheri’s neighborhood. The tip of my ears and the back of my neck stung and shivers went down my spine as the thought raced back and forth in my head.
Tanya and Courtney stopped at the bus sign. I kept going farther down the block.
“Justine, where are you going?” Courtney called after me.
I ducked my head and zigzagged between passengers coming in and out
of the train station. I wanted to get out of the neighborhood as fast as I could.
Courtney and Tanya ran to catch up with me when they heard the train pulling in. We hopped aboard; the doors shut; and the train rolled away from the station. I lowered my backpack, leaned my head against the window, and watched the tunnel lights speed by.
After we were safely home, I told Courtney not to tell anyone about our adventure. If my parents ever found out that I’d been sneaking around Cheri’s building, I would really get it.
“But you don’t think this will affect our summer plans, do you?”
“It could if they wanted it to.” I wondered how many people in Cheri’s building knew by now.
“But there’s no crime committed,” Courtney explained. You were only delivering a person’s homework, that’s all. And even if your parents did find out what could they do? They wouldn’t punish you for standing in a stairway.”
“Sitting,” I corrected her. “I was sitting.”
“Same difference,” she said.
“I don’t think they’d see it that way.”
“Well, there’s no other way to see it. If it wasn’t for the homework, we wouldn’t have been there at all.”
I sighed, wishing I could believe her. I kicked off my loafers and slid them under my bed. Courtney and I were so happy to be home that we forgot that we were still wearing our uniforms. Usually we pulled them off before we removed our shoes.
“You do plan on going back to see Cheri, though, right?” she asked, leaning against the dresser.
I scratched my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Her ankle won’t be that way forever.”
“Yeah, but it will tomorrow.”
We plunged down the staircase. My brothers were scattered somewhere; lucky for us, they weren’t in the kitchen.
“What do you want?” I asked, pulling the fridge door wide open.
“What you got?”
“The regular,” I said.
“I’ll pass.”
I released the door, snatched a box of crackers from the cabinet, and we sat at the end of the dinette table, safely hidden from any more prying eyes.
That night, behind my desk buried in homework, I kept wondering about that security guard. Did he think we were troublemakers because I had dropped my keys down an elevator shaft one day and then hid out in the stairway the next? What if we ran into him again? Maybe he’d quit or get transferred.
I stuffed my book bag, cut the lights, leaped into bed, and wondered if criminals started out this way.
Three days had passed and nobody from security had come looking for us . . . yet. Because Cheri’s mom said that she could report back to school Monday, we only had to deliver her homework one last time.
I hadn’t seen Cheri’s neighborhood since the Monday we were caught in the stairway. I had let Tanya deliver the work by herself. But she said that she couldn’t carry her weekend work and Cheri’s books at the same time. She had begged me to come with her. I had told her that with her grades, Cheri didn’t have to worry about turning anything in on time and she could do it all at school Monday. But, then, Cheri wouldn’t hear of that.
Tanya didn’t speak to me as we got off the bus and searched the area. I walked slowly toward Cheri’s block, making sure that nobody in uniform was watching. They might have thought that we were trying to sneak back into the stairway, and all I wanted to do was bring Cheri her work and get out of there.
“Tch! Come on,” Tanya snapped, adjusting her backpack and continuing to take wide strides toward Cheri’s building. She acted like she didn’t care about what happened before, almost as if she wasn’t even there.
I scanned each nearby path and around every tall bush. The sun was at an angle, dripping light through the trees, leaving patches along the ground and whoever walked under the boughs. I didn’t see anybody walking in a uniform.
Still, I kept looking back, feeling eyes staring from behind me. I only saw three boys. They were trying to catch bugs by holding empty glass jars under the leaves of a thick bush they had surrounded. The grown-ups didn’t pay them any mind as they passed by them. Those boys probably lived there and could go wherever they wanted. I was the trespasser. I wished I had a mirror so that I could see both front and back all at once, and then I’d know if I was being watched.
I looked up at Cheri’s 10th-floor living room window and the top of the high-rise next to her building. Her neighborhood, with its red brick buildings, was a city of towers, tall and erect. With all those rows of windows lining the buildings, somebody could have been looking out at least one. Were we being watched?
I lowered my head. The ground felt shaky or maybe my knees did. I felt like I was walking into a trap. Why didn’t I just leave? Cheri was my friend, but were we both needed to deliver her homework?
When we came closer to the entrance, the scent of onions, sausage, and fresh-baked garlic bread soared out a first-floor kitchen window.
My nose took in the smells and my stomach growled. Quickly, I covered my midsection with my backpack. Had anybody heard it? Then I wondered if the person living in that good-smelling, first-floor apartment knew what had happened yesterday.
I snuck behind Tanya into the lobby. It was empty, but I wondered if that guard was watching us now, through a peephole or a hidden camera. Sweat poured down my neck, soaking the front of my blouse.
Tanya pressed for the elevator and I held my breath. The doors opened, but no one was inside it. On the way up, I checked each floor out the tiny car window to make sure nobody was looking through from the other side. After we reached the 10th floor and the doors opened, I leaned out. The hallway was empty. I followed Tanya to Cheri’s apartment and waited as she rang the doorbell.
Cheri answered.
“You took the bandage off?” Tanya asked her as we headed into the living room.
“Yeah,” Cheri said. “I got tired of it itching my skin.”
I listened to her shut the door and lock it. Then I sat down on the sofa with my back against the wall, away from the window. Finally I could breathe.
“Where’s the practice sheet Sister handed out?”
Cheri asked, going through the stuff we brought.
“Folded up on the last page,” Tanya told her.
Cheri pulled it out and read it. I gave her the rest of the papers and her textbook with all the important notes highlighted the way she liked them.
Cheri looked like a business-woman going through her stuff. “She didn’t give out any more notes on our math?”
“Just read through chapter 13 again.”
“Are you guys staying to study with me?” she asked, opening her notebook binder.
“That’s okay, we’ll study at home,” Tanya said, heading back down the hall.
Slowly I got up.
“Well,” said Tanya, “I guess we’ll see you Monday. Do you want us to come by and get you?”
I flinched.
“No,” Cheri said, opening the door. “Mom’s driving me.”
We went back to the elevators. I pressed the button and waited. I looked down both sides of the hallway, wondering if anyone was spying from the stairway the way we had done on Monday, when the elevator came down. I checked to see if a shadow of a head could be seen inside the car window. It was dark.
The doors opened. I went inside but stopped short and clutched my book bag again.
Tanya got more than her wish. Three guys were standing in the corner, dressed in outfits you only find on fashion magazine models.
Tanya’s face began to shine. She swooped in first and stood right beside them, swinging her book bag.
I froze between the doors. Then I saw that one was holding the open-door button for me. I stepped in quickly and backed up against the wall.
The doors closed.
I became a statue again and stared at the floor. My head was clogged and my heart was pounding.
Brown and black leather shoes pointed out from the bottom of their neatly
pressed pants. Their dark jackets partly covered their fancy trimmed shirts and ties. I ran my eyes up to the top and noticed that they were smiling at us.
I switched my eyes to the door fast.
What was so funny? They didn’t know us. But maybe they knew that guard! Maybe everyone in the whole building knew that guard!
After the doors slid open and I caught sight of the exit, my feet didn’t stop till they reached the train station.