Chloe went over and put her arm around him, but he was too mad to be comforted by her touch.
“She just wants to put the screws to us,” he continued. “Like always, Janna has to prove that she’s the one who knows everything. I can’t believe she would do that to you, Ari!”
“Ari probably qualifies for free lunch,” Nate said.
“Not until we can put an address on the form,” Gage replied.
I probably could have started the circle game with that line, but I knew Gage wasn’t in the mood to play.
He sat down on the couch beside me and held open my backpack while I tried to fit in some clean clothes and my schoolwork, too. “I promise I’m going to fix this,” he said.
I struggled to slip my Paper Things folder into my backpack.
“Do you believe me, Ari?”
I looked at Gage and nodded.
“We can do this. I know we can. We’re a team, right?”
“A team,” I said.
I’m writing the next section of my report when Daniel walks into the room.
“Did you get permission to be here?” I ask. I’m afraid that he’s going to get us both in trouble.
“Which items on my list do you want to do?” he asks, ignoring me and flipping a chair around so he’s straddling it backward.
“There’s one more round of leadership announcements before the end of the year,” I say. “Can you guarantee that one of those jobs will be mine?”
He shakes his head. “Face it, Ari. The odds of getting one of those final positions are slim.”
I look away for a moment, wondering if everyone in the school has noticed how badly I’m doing.
“But,” he continues, “I can give you a suggestion.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Invent your own leadership role,” Daniel says.
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“Come up with something helpful to do and then ask a teacher if you can do it. I bet you’d even get extra credit for having come up with the role yourself!”
Extra credit sounds good. I can use all the credit I can get. “I volunteer at Head Start,” I say. “Do you think that would count?”
Daniel makes a face to show that he’s thinking, but I can tell he’s not especially impressed. “Lots of kids volunteer,” he says. “I think you need something else, something that really sets you apart. Though having volunteer work on your application can’t hurt,” he adds, likely noticing my sadness.
“OK,” I say slowly. “So, what sorts of helpful tasks could I volunteer to do?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel admits. “But there must be something that needs doing here at Eastland — something besides safety patrol and tutoring math.”
I shrug. “Yeah, maybe,” I say, when what I really want to say is Thanks for nothing.
“So, which of the items on my list do you want to do?” he asks again, opening his little book.
“None,” I say. “You didn’t get me a leadership role.”
“True,” he says. “But all you’ve got to do now is come up with an idea, and you’ll have a leadership role to put on your application. So, which one should I put off till you’re ready?”
I can’t help myself. I look at his list. I’m definitely not going to sneak into Ms. Finch’s room again, no matter what I think of poor Gerald. And I’m not sliding down the math hallway either.
I consider making snowflakes. I’d missed making them back in November when we had the first snowfall, even more than I expected. I’d been in Mr. O.’s room, studying the American Revolution, when Linnie announced that the first flakes were falling. We’d all cheered and started putting our textbooks away in anticipation of paper and scissors. But Mr. O. had sighed and said, “Not this year.” We just kept on reading about Paul Revere as if nothing exciting were happening right outside our very own window, as if the traditions of the Eastland Tigers — traditions that my mom and dad and Janna and Gage had all participated in — had never even existed.
That’s when a tiny little idea rests on me, like a fluffy six-pointed snowflake that has to be examined quickly before it melts away.
“A traditions club,” I whisper.
Daniel leans in. “What?”
“I could start a club for the kids who still want to do the Eastland traditions.”
“Like snowflakes and crazy hats?”
I nod. “And maybe even the fifth-grade campout!”
Daniel looks unconvinced. “That would be cool. But you’d have to follow the procedures for establishing a club: presenting the administration with the club’s mission statement; conducting a student survey to see how many kids want to join; finding a chaperone; requesting a room; sending home permission slips. It’s a lot of work,” he cautions.
I’d forgotten that Daniel had tried to establish a robotics club last year. And if Daniel couldn’t get kids to stay after school for robots, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get them to give up their free time for snowflakes. Besides, half the fun of the Eastland traditions was breaking up the boring school-day routine.
“This is useless,” I say, dropping my head to my desk. “It’s too late to get a leadership role; there’s not enough interest in starting a club. . . . Let’s face it: I’m not going to have anything impressive to put on my application to Carter. I don’t know why I’m even bothering to apply.”
Daniel is quiet for a minute. “Maybe you could start a campaign to get the Eastland traditions back — get them back for everyone,” he says.
I look up. “A campaign?”
“Yeah, you know, like those kids who campaigned to get the street out front renamed in honor of Ms. Taber.” Ms. Taber used to be our school librarian. “You could put up posters, get kids to sign a petition. . . . I’ll help. Give me your number.”
“I don’t know. . . . A club suggests that you’re adding something to a school. A campaign sounds like you’re challenging the rules. I don’t want Carter to think I’m a troublemaker.”
“Better than Carter not thinking of you at all,” Daniel says.
He has a point. I scribble Gage’s cell phone number on a slip of paper and pass it to Daniel.
It’s not till after the bell rings that I remember that Gage’s phone number no longer works.
Since I spent most of my lunch period talking with Daniel, I didn’t get much farther on my biography. What will my final term progress report — the one I have to attach to the application to Carter — look like? I’m going to have to work très, très hard to bring my grades up — which hopefully will be easier once Gage and I move into our new apartment.
But Daniel’s suggestion has been spinning around in my mind since lunch, and I am more determined than ever to do what I need to get into Carter. Maybe it won’t be enough, but at least I won’t have gone down without a fight.
So as soon as the last bell rings, I head to the office and request an application.
I expect Mrs. Benoit, the secretary, to ask me why Janna isn’t the one picking up the application, and I’ve got a lie all ready to go, but she just smiles and hands over the form as though kids ask for applications to Carter all the time.
As I walk out of the office, I hear a voice calling my name.
It’s Ms. Finch, standing by the bench in the front hall. “Ari,” she says. “Everything OK?”
I pause, wondering what she means, and then I realize: she thinks I’ve just come from the principal’s office. Because in her eyes, I am no longer Arianna Hazard, star pupil. Instead, I’m Arianna Hazard, the girl who did Mr. O.’s assignment during computer lab, who is often late and disorganized, and whose hair looks like it hasn’t seen a brush in a month.
I feel pressure behind my eyeballs and blink furiously. I will not cry in front of Ms. Finch. “Everything’s good,” I say as brightly as I can manage. I want to tell her that things will be better from now on — that Gage and I are on our own now and that we’ve been struggling, but Gage has a full-time job
and soon we’ll be getting an apartment, which means no more tardies and no more doing my homework during computer lab. But I don’t dare. Not just because Gage told me not to, but because I’m not going to do one more thing to jeopardize my application to Carter. I’m pretty sure they’re not looking for a kid who’s homeless. (Which I’m not, of course. I’m just a temporary . . . What does Briggs call me? Floor surfer.)
“I’m on my way to Head Start,” I offer instead. “I volunteer there in the afternoons.”
Ms. Finch raises her eyebrows, like she’s surprised. Another reminder of just how far I’ve fallen in her estimation. Like Daniel said, lots of kids in fifth grade volunteer. It’s so they can say on their middle-school applications that they’ve done service learning. “Maybe one day you can come by my room and tell me more about it,” she says. “I’d like to hear.”
I nod, not sure what to make of that. Is it possible that she doesn’t believe me — that she thinks I’m making up an after-school activity just to look good?
Has it really come to that?
I’m sitting at the cutting table at Head Start. Juju is next to me, cutting a shiny stove from a Home Depot flyer. Omar is tearing paper in his usual way. A couple of other kids have gravitated to us today as well. There’s a page in the catalog I’m flipping through that says, “May Day’s Coming!” and it has people dressed in white, playing games like croquet, ringtoss, and horseshoes. I’ve only played games like that once. Back in third grade, this girl Tori, who Sasha and I were friends with before she moved to Buffalo, invited us to her eighth birthday party, which was at her grandmother’s house in Falmouth. We took turns playing lawn games — though none of us wore white. I remember how Tori’s dad had coached her from the sidelines, telling her how to hold the horseshoe, how to take aim, how to throw it high enough and far enough that it circled and landed around the stake. I wondered at the time if my dad would have taught me how to play horseshoes in our little backyard if he hadn’t died in Afghanistan. I cut out the horseshoes for my paper dad.
After that, I don’t feel like cutting out Paper Things. Instead, I pick up a catalog page that Omar has discarded, fold it, and cut out a snowflake. It’s small but complicated, with a little star in the middle. I picture the halls of our school covered in snowflakes, and that gives me an idea. What if my campaign started invisibly? What if Daniel and I secretly hung snowflakes all around the school like some sort of spring blizzard to bring attention to the lost traditions?
I think about enlisting Sasha, but I know that at this stage, I could never persuade her. First of all, she thinks Daniel is weird. Second of all, she has a leadership role and wouldn’t want to jeopardize it by sneaking around after hours and bending school rules. Third, she still isn’t talking to me. Fourth, she thinks Daniel is weird.
But what if the spring blizzard isn’t enough to get kids — and administrators — excited about bringing back the traditions? Or worse, what if no one gets it? Maybe we need something else, something to make our mission perfectly clear.
The ideas are percolating as I grab another catalog page and start cutting. If the snowflakes got some kids’ attention, we could maybe get them to fight for our cause. They could help us stage an impromptu Crazy Hat Day. We’d have to come up with a way of spreading the word and finding kids who’d be willing to risk getting in a bit of trouble by wearing a hat to school. But once everyone saw the great hats — hats like the upside-down ice-cream cone that Briggs bought me — surely excitement would spread for all the other great Eastland Elementary traditions.
“Ari, what are you doing?” asks Juju, pushing a catalog closer to me. She’s clearly disappointed in my choice at the cutting table today.
“I’m making a snowflake, see?” I unfold my triangle to show her the lacy shape I’ve cut.
“Snowflakes?” Carol says as she passes by us. “It’s April, Ari! We don’t want snowflakes now. We want warm spring weather!”
I smile and tell Carol about my campaign to bring back the Eastland Elementary traditions, starting with a surprise spring blizzard.”
“What a great idea!” Carol says. She brings me white paper.
Fran pulls up a chair next to me. “I’ve never made a paper snowflake,” she says. “Have you guys?” she asks the group of Starters at the cutting table. They shake their heads. “Would you show us how?”
She’s surprisingly fast with scissors. In no time at all, she’s cutting really complicated snowflakes. The little kids’ snowflakes are a lot simpler — random shapes cut out of pieces of paper folded just in half — since it’s too hard for them to cut through multiple layers of folded paper. Soon they’re bored by the assignment and start to get restless.
“I know,” says Fran, and she goes and gets glue bottles and glitter. “Let’s make our snowflakes sparkle!”
This the kids know how to do! They squeeze glue onto the snowflakes, shake glitter on top of the glue, and then slide the excess glitter off into a tub. Later, Fran or Carol will ask me to refill the shaker bottles with the glitter from the tub; they both hate that job. “You have glitter in your hair and underneath your fingernails for a week,” says Carol. But I don’t mind. I like the sparkles.
At one point, Fran tears a page from a catalog, but she doesn’t fold it into a snowflake. Instead she sets the page to the side.
I look more closely. It’s a page of bikes.
“I’m hoping to buy a bicycle this spring,” she says when she notices me looking. “To ride to work. But they’re much more expensive than I imagined.”
I nod. The past two months have shown me just how expensive things are. Once again, I am so, so grateful that Gage now has a job. I can still barely believe how lucky —
“Hey!” I say. “I think I might know a way to help you get a bike!” I tell her about Reggie and the wishing plane.
“Did he know that your brother was applying for a job at Jiffy Lube?” Fran asks.
“No! I didn’t even know! Reggie just happened to give me a plane that had the ad. I made a wish and flew the plane out a window.”
Fran is quiet as she cuts a six-pointed flake.
“I could take that catalog page to Reggie . . .” I offer.
Fran laughs at my persistence. “Why not?” she says. “Wishing never hurt.” She slides the picture over to me, and I walk into the hall to carefully place it and the snowflakes in my backpack.
“Wait —” Fran joins me in the hall with her purse. She takes three dollar bills from her wallet and hands them to me. “Would you give him this from me, for his time — and his talent?”
“I don’t think you have to pay him,” I say. “He makes free airplanes for kids all the time.”
“I know,” she says. “But it seems like the right thing to do.”
I wonder what Reggie will think of my request. Will he mind that I’m asking him for another plane — this time for someone else? And what will he think when I tell him that his paper airplane made my wish come true?
After the good-bye song, Fran races off to an appointment. Clusters of parents arrive to pick up the Starters, until only Carol and I are left. This is really unusual. Gage typically picks me up in the middle of dismissal, not at the end. “Why don’t you call Gage, see how close he is?” Carol suggests, handing me her phone.
I start to dial Gage’s number but quickly realize that it won’t do any good. “I can’t,” I say. “Gage doesn’t have his phone today.”
“No phone?” I can tell that this frustrates Carol. I can also tell that she is eager to leave. She has to pick her baby girl up at day care.
“It’s OK,” I say. “Gage will be here soon.”
“I can’t leave you —”
“If Gage doesn’t come in fifteen minutes,” I say, “I’ll go to Lighthouse and tell West.” I won’t, though. I know that West has looked the other way before, but that’s because he really believes Gage is doing what’s best for me. If I show up at Lighthouse complaining that Gage never picked m
e up, I don’t know if West would be able to keep that one to himself.
Instead I’ll go to Chloe’s. Surely Gage would think to look for me there.
Carol is still uncertain.
“The bus stop is only two blocks away,” I say. “And it will be light for another hour or so.”
“All right,” she says. She takes a receipt out of her purse and writes her number on it. “Call me when you’re with Gage.”
Carol keeps looking back as she walks down the street to her car. We both want Gage to show up before she’s gone.
I don’t know whether I’m more mad at Gage or afraid for him. What if something happened during his training at Jiffy Lube? I don’t know a whole lot about mechanic shops, but they seem like the kind of place where accidents could happen. Maybe Gage was distracted because of what I’d told him this morning about Janna no longer buying my school lunch. Maybe he’d been thinking about that instead of focusing on what he was doing and —
I force myself to stop thinking like that. He’s probably fine. Maybe he just lost track of time, or maybe his training went on longer than expected.
I wait around for what feels like about fifteen more minutes, and then I head to the bus stop. I see the bus coming as I approach, and I race the last block and catch it just in time.
The bus going into town isn’t crowded at this hour, since most people are leaving their jobs in the city and heading for their homes in the suburbs, so I have no trouble finding a seat all to myself. But now that I’m actually on the bus, I’m plagued by a new set of worries: What if Gage arrived at Head Start right after I left? Would he be mad at me for leaving? Would he think to look for me at Chloe’s? Should I have left him a note somehow, maybe tucked in the door to the Head Start building, letting him know where to find me?
I try to put myself in Gage’s shoes. If I were Gage and I showed up at Head Start late and saw that my little sister was missing, who’s the first person I would go to for help finding her? It would definitely be Chloe, I assure myself. She’d keep a level head and would know just what to do.