“Is it empty?” he asked her.
“Uh. Well. I brought an extra book along. Sorry about that. I'll get rid of it.” She reached nervously into her pack and brought it out.
He didn't take the bait as hoped. He let her keep her book. “Is that all?”
Ama couldn't lie. She couldn't. She coughed and spluttered.
Jared grabbed her pack and stuck in his arm all the way to the bottom of it. She cringed as he brought out her hair iron and all three packs of batteries. He held the iron up in the air and examined it, -which drew many other pairs of eyes to it.
Jared shook his head. “What is this thing?”
“It's, uh … it's — “
One of the girls tittered, and Ama felt her cheeks burning.
“It's not on the list,” Jared said. He picked up a box by his feet that contained a few contraband toiletries, a PSP, two cell phones, and an iPod. He dumped her iron into it, along -with the batteries.
She gasped. “You're not going to throw it away?” She thought of Polly, who had bought it for her in sixth grade after seeing it on an infomercial. Ama couldn't let it go. Ama was rational about most things, but not about this.
Jared shook his head. “I'm going to leave this stuff in a locker at the airport. You all can pick it up on your -way back. That's why -we do this check now and not later.”
For a moment, Ama believed she was going to get away -with her bottle of Kiehl's Creme with Silk Groom, the finest of fine hair products, her single big indulgence, but Jared was pitiless. He reached into her bag a final time and brought out her precious bottle.
“Please,” she begged. “Can I just bring that?”
He shook his head. “The bottle's too big. Once we give you the rest of your equipment, it's not going to fit in your pack.”
He glanced at her tragic face. “Listen, if you had a travel size or something, I might let you get away with it, but this is too big.”
“I've heard they have a travel size,” Ama lamented, half to herself, “but I've never seen it.”
He made a move to throw it in the garbage.
“No! You can't throw it away!”
He looked at her as though she'd grown a second set of ears. “Is this really worth storing for almost two months?”
“Yes! Do you know how much it costs?”
He shook his head again. He looked tired. “Fine. You can get it back at the end.”
Ama nodded sadly as Jared checked off her name.
“No jewelry!” she heard Jared shout at the next girl in line. Ama smoothed her hair and watched the girl obediently drop her big hoop earrings into the box.
BRryn met Jo at the door of the restaurant, wearing an identical baby blue SURFSIDE T-shirt. “Oh, my God. I'm so psyched! I can't believe you're starting already!”
Jo was psyched too, but also a little nervous. She had no idea what bussing tables involved, though she'd pretended she did on her application. “How's it going so far?” Jo asked under her breath.
Bryn led Jo back to the kitchen. She showed Jo the lockers where the waitstaff kept their purses and stuff and the girls’ bathroom, which, according to Bryn, also served as the unofficial girls’ lounge.
“That's Megan.” Bryn pointed to a girl talking on her cell phone outside the kitchen door. “She's from D.C. She goes to one of the private schools, I think. She's, like, a senior. She's a waitress, so you have to be nice to her and make her job easy so she'll share her tips.”
“How do you make her job easy?” Jo asked.
Bryn didn't have time to answer, because she spotted a guy in the dining room. “Do you see that guy?”
“Yeah.”
“He goes to South Bethesda.”
“Really?” Did anybody work here who wasn't in high school?
“He's a junior. We'll be in school with him next year. Isn't that awesome? Isn't he hot?”
“Uh …” He wasn't that hot, Jo didn't think. He was stocky and had very long arms.
“He asked me for a piece of gum yesterday.” Bryn looked at Jo expectantly.
“Wow.” Jo nodded. “So, what kinds of things are we supposed to do first? Is somebody going to train me?”
“Do you see that girl at the hostess station?”
Jo nodded again. “That's Sheba Crane. She goes to SBH too. She's a sophomore. She's, like, a cheerleader. I'm not kidding.”
“Wow.” Jo saw how Sheba and the older girls wore their hair up. She made a note to herself to wear hers like that too.
“She could really help us next year. You know?” Bryn was the same way here as she was in school. She knew who everyone was and what role they were supposed to play.
“You think so?”
“Totally.”
“So what time does the shift start?” Jo asked. “I guess those people sitting down over there … they're customers, right?”
Bryn didn't look at the customers. She was preoccupied by the two teenage guys who came in the kitchen door at the back, one of -whom immediately took off his shirt and tossed it into his locker. By the time that drama was over, there were two more tables of customers and some raised voices in the dining room. Bryn hurried to check it out. She came back looking slightly irritated.
“Jo, come on. You're on section three tonight. You're supposed to do water and bread.”
“Hey, Dia?”
Polly's mother -was just getting back from her studio the following evening, putting her things down.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Polly, I'm exhausted and hot. Do you mind if I get a drink first and sit down?”
“Okay,” Polly said, following Dia into the kitchen, trying to be patient as she took a bottle of gin from the cabinet and a bottle of tonic from the refrigerator and poured herself a drink. Dia took the glass and sat down at the kitchen table by the window.
Polly slipped into the chair across from her. “How did it go in the studio today?” she asked cheerfully.
Dia shook her head. “It was fine.” She took a sip. Polly was hoping to warm her up for conversation, but Dia clearly didn't want to talk about her -work today.
The house was completely quiet. Not even the refrigerator -was acting up. Sometimes, if it wasn't too late, Dia used to come home from the studio and put on music—raucous punk rock or Bach choral music, usually. But she hadn't in a while and she didn't today.
“What's your question?” Dia asked.
The sun slanted in behind her mother's head, so Polly had to squint to look at her. “Well, when I had chicken soup with Uncle Hoppy he said—”
Dia was shaking her head again. “Right. What did Uncle Hoppy say now?”
“Well, he was telling me about my … grandmother.”
“What grandmother?”
“You know, my father's mother, I guess it would be.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, and he said she was really beautiful and … did you ever meet her?”
“No. I never met her.” Dia had the guarded look she got whenever Polly tried to talk about her father. Polly remembered there was a time when Dia used to like to tell her things about him, like that he was part Romanian. She used to tease Polly that she was very possibly related to Count Dracula. Dia had told her once that her father -was good at tennis and bad at dancing, and though he was kind of square, he liked the Sex Pistols. Polly figured that her very existence had probably come about because her father, at least for a time, liked the Sex Pistols.
“But did you know about her? Did you know that she was … Uncle Hoppy said—”
“Oh, Polly. I don't know about her.” Dia stood up and went back to the refrigerator. “I never met her. I -wish that Hoppy wouldn't tell you these things.”
Polly didn't want to let it go. “Did you ever see her picture? Did my father ever say anything about her?”
“No. No.” Dia turned away.
“He must have! You're not even trying to remember,” Polly said.
Polly's mother f
aced Polly again. “Polly, there is nothing to remember! Do you hear me? I wish Hoppy wouldn't take you out for soup anymore. Next time he calls, you tell him no, okay? He's a sweet old man, but he doesn't know what he's talking about.”
Ama had the wrong kind of ankles for hiking. That was what she told herself as she nervously watched the backpack of the next- slowest person disappearing into the trees. She had the wrong kind of everything for hiking. She was tall but thin- boned and delicate. Her body didn't grow muscles like other people's did. Her limbs ached, the skin on her feet blistered easily, her hair defied gravity. What if she got left behind and lost? She tried to pick up her pace, her sholders aching under the straps of her pack, her ankles wobbling over every rock and crevice.
What was this thing, hiking? she wondered. Why did people like it so much? Was it really anything more than just kind of walking along? It seemed to her that there should be more to it than just walking along in order for it to deserve its own name and all this devotion and so much gear.
Her parents had never taken her hiking. They themselves had probably never hiked. She was pretty sure that people in Ghana, real Ghanaians, didn't hike much. She remembered that people in Kumasi, her hometown, walked a lot, and through rough terrain, but the point of it was to actually get somewhere. They called it traveling. Here, it seemed, people had so many cars and buses and subways that walking became practically like a novelty. Hiking -was walking for nothing. It was walking for nothing to nowhere and for no reason. With big, uncomfortable boots on.
Was she alone out here? She had to go faster to catch up to the group. What if she broke her ankle? Would anyone notice or care? Probably only the bears would notice. Maybe wolves. Did they have wolves around here?
She stared at the treacherous ground, -which kept tripping her every five minutes. She was the slowest person in the group by a mile. What if she lost the trail? What if she was already going the wrong -way? She felt her anxiety mounting. Would she know how to gather food to prevent herself from starving? Would she know -which stuff -was poisonous? She pictured herself rolling around on the ground after ingesting poisonous mushrooms. She pictured the bears feeding on her carcass.
“In Belgium, I think they call it a butpuck.”
Ama startled, jumped, and pivoted. A guy from her group -was standing there.
“What?” she said. Her heart -was galloping—the only fast thing about her.
He -was pointing at her towering pack. “A backpack. The -word in Flemish sounds like ‘butpuck.’ I don't know how you spell it, but that's how you say it.”
“Oh.” Ama looked down. Where had he come from? What-was he talking about? She -was terrible at conversing -with boys to begin -with, and this made for a very difficult opener. She -was supposed to laugh, maybe. She felt the seconds tick by. She'd lost her chance to laugh, hadn't she?
“I lived in Belgium until I -was in first grade. That's just an odd fact that stuck in my mind from then.” He stopped for a second. “No, wait a minute. Maybe that's not how you say backpack. Maybe that's how you say bathing suit.” He shook his head. “You can see I didn't keep up that well -with my Flemish.”
His name was Noah, she recalled. He was from New York. He had longish, kind of greasy hair but a very big and very cute smile.
“I lived in Ghana,” Ama blurted out, before she could talk herself out of it. “Until I was in first grade.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“My mom -worked at a software company in Antwerp,” he offered. “That's why we lived there.”
“We were just … from there,” she said. “I mean Ghana. From Ghana.” Why -was she such a loser?
“Believe it or not, I used to speak Flemish fluently, and now I've forgotten almost all of it. As you can tell. Except butpuck, -which either means backpack or bathing suit. Do you still speak … -what do you speak in Ghana?”
“English, mainly. And a bunch of other regional languages. My family speaks Akan. And my mom's from Côte d'Ivoire, so -we speak French, too.”
“And you can speak all three?”
She -wasn't sure -where the line between interesting and abnormal should be drawn. “Yeah,” she said uncertainly. And Spanish and some Arabic, she could have added, but she didn't want to make her family sound like complete freaks. “My parents and my older sister speak them, so I don't really forget. In Ghana most people speak at least two or three languages. It's nothing special.”
Ama took a quick look at his face. She was pretty sure she did know where the line between special and boring was drawn, and she wondered why she was in such a hurry to put herself on the wrong side of it.
“Are you here to stay?” he asked. “In the U.S., I mean. Or -will you go back?”
“To Ghana? No, I don't think so. My parents have spent their life savings getting us green cards, so I doubt it. Well, I mean, my brother didn't need one. He was born here. He's the American in the family. We all have traditional Ghanaian names and his name is Bob.” Ama snuck another look at him. She'd forgotten for a moment that she'd been talking to a boy.
Noah seemed to get a kick out of Bob. He laughed. And suddenly she worried he was laughing at her. Her ankles wobbled.
She realized he had to walk slowly on account of her. He appeared to be as graceful and quiet on his feet as a bobcat, and yet here he was plodding along beside her. He was probably sorry he'd ever stuck himself -within a hundred yards of her.
“You can go ahead,” she said nervously, tripping. “If you want.” She tried to pat down her horrific hair.
“What do you mean?”
“I know I'm slow. You don't have to walk -with me.”
“I'm sort of going at my own pace,” he said. “I took a detour back there and I found a stream and a tiny -waterfall. As you can see, I'm not in a big hurry.”
“All right,” she said warily.
“But if you want to walk by yourself…,” he began.
No! I want to walk with you! Please don't go! But she didn't say that. She said, “Whatever.”
“No, Mrs. Rollins, I don't mind at all,” Polly said as Mrs. Rollins hectically emptied her purse, looking for her car keys. “I don't have to be home until dinner.”
Mrs. Rollins almost always needed Polly to babysit at least twice as long as she originally proposed on the phone, and Polly almost always said yes.
“Thanks, Polly.” Mrs. Rollins turned to Nicky, her six-year- old, who was playing a game on the kitchen computer. “Nicholas. Did you take my keys?”
Nicky shrugged innocently, though it was a fair question. The kids were frequently attracted to the remote-control aspect of the car keys, especially the red alarm button that made the car go berserk -with honking until someone shut it off.
“Katherine!” Mrs. Rollins bellowed up the stairs. “Did you take my car keys?”
Katherine took a minute or two to surface at the top of the stairs. “Huh?”
“Have you seen my keys?”
“No!”
Polly quietly surveyed the kitchen. The main challenge of babysitting for Mrs. Rollins was not Nicky or Katherine but Mrs. Rollins herself. She was always losing her keys or her credit card, always running late, and though she was quite nice and often funny, she talked a lot more and a lot more loudly than anyone in Polly's house.
“Are these them?” Polly asked as she spotted them next to the phone and held them up.
“Yes!” Mrs. Rollins grabbed them out of Polly's fingers and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Oh, my goodness! Polly, what would I do without you?”
Polly smiled. Unlike some grown- ups, Mrs. Rollins had problems Polly found easy to solve.
After Mrs. Rollins left, Katherine materialized from the TV room and Nicky abandoned the computer. They sat on the soft- carpeted floor in the big center hallway, as they often did, and played games. They played cards and Tumblin’ Monkeys and the game where the alligator snapped your finger if you pushed on the wrong tooth. Polly always lost that game
on purpose and hammed up the pain of the injury -which sent Katherine, who was five, into happy hysterics.
Most teenage babysitters liked to park the kids in front of the TV or the game system and spend the hours talking on their cell phones and texting their friends, but Polly didn't do that. Polly took pride in the fact that Nicky and Katherine almost never -watched TV -when she -was there. They almost never complained or -whined. Polly suspected it -was because she genuinely liked sitting on the floor, playing -with them. She liked their games. She liked drawing pictures at the kitchen table -with them. She liked eating chicken nuggets and pudding -with them. And not just because she -was a good babysitter either. It -was -what she felt like doing -when she -was there.
She -was serving up the nuggets and mini- carrots -when she heard the doorbell. She put down the plates and -went to get it.
She opened the door to a tall, very good- looking guy of about twenty. She'd met him at this house before.
“Hey,” he said. “Polly, right?”
Polly nodded. She -was so amazed and happy that he remembered her name, she -was too stunned for a moment to move out of his -way and let him in.
At the sound of his voice, the two kids came barreling toward the front door.
“Brian!” they screamed. As he walked in, they both jumped on him at the same time.
He laughed and pretended to lurch and stagger around the front hall.
She watched him pretend- roughhouse with the kids and then effortlessly toss them onto the puffy living room couch one at a time. They were wild with happiness. Brian was their favorite person in the world, she knew.
“Do you want to share our chicken nuggets?” Katherine asked, pulling him by the hand into the kitchen.