Counting Thyme (5 page)

DRAMA

AFTER I FOUND OUT ABOUT THE SONG, IT WAS HARD NOT TO
blush every time Jake Reese glanced in my direction. Dad had played the record for me. There were all these lyrics about a “true love of mine.” Was Jake thinking about that when he'd mentioned it? Or had the song just popped into his head when he'd heard my name? He listened to his earbuds all the time, at least until Mr. Ellison flagged him down for it. He probably just liked music a lot, but I still felt weird every time I looked at him.

Instead, I kept my head down and focused on my classes.

I had to admit I liked Mrs. Harris, my fourth-period math teacher. She wore the strangest clothes—vests with embroidered cats, and bright plaid pants. Dad would have called her outfits unique. Cori would have called them hideous. But Mrs. Harris called people up to the board like a game-show host, and that made me smile in spite of myself.

As expected, Emily didn't glance in my direction, much less say a word to me after that first day. But neither did Jake,
to be fair. He and Lizzie with the pigtails were both in Mrs. Harris's math class with me. We all went to lunch together. Lizzie sat with Emily, while I ate with the twins, who were annoying, but mostly argued with each other and left me alone. I was fine with that, though I felt lonely without Shani at my side, cracking jokes about the seaweed snacks in my lunch. Mom had finally bought me some turkey, but I had to make my own sandwiches. She and Val had joined a support group at the hospital that met first thing in the morning.

Unlike me, Cori was having no trouble getting right into the swing of things. On Thursday afternoon, she walked into the apartment and announced she was joining the drama club at her school. I was doing my homework at the dining table while Mom and Val read in his room. She was determined to keep him caught up with kindergarten, and for that, he had to concentrate. I guess I was too much of a distraction to share a table with them.

“You've always had a flair for drama,” Dad told Cori as he hung his coat by the door.

She put her hands on her hips. “I have
no
idea what you're talking about.”

Dad laughed and went straight to his laptop. He was working on a freelance project for a big advertising agency. It had to do with selling dog food, which sounded really different from the ads he'd made at home, but he'd said it was time to try something new. He spent every spare minute on it.

“Seriously, Dad,” Cori said. “My friends say drama is the best club at school.”

“Since when do you have friends?” I asked. “We just got here last week.”

She flipped her long, dark hair over her shoulder. “Since always, loser bait.”

“
Cori,
” Dad warned.

“What? All she does is mope around the apartment.”

“I do not!”

Cori stuck her tongue out at me, and Dad held up his hands for us to stop. “All right, calm down, you guys,” he said. “I've got work to do. Was there a point to all of this?”

Cori stopped giving me the death stare and looked at Dad. “The
point
is, we're working on proposals for spring projects until our adviser gets the new budget, so I need to stay after school. And I want to get a student pass to take the train home with everyone else.”

“There's a pass?” Dad said right as I said, “Mom says you can't go by yourself.”

Cori ignored me. “It works like a regular train or bus pass, but it's for students.”

Dad glanced at the ceiling. That's what he did when he was thinking. When I was little, I used to think the answers were written up there somewhere, like some kind of magical answer map that only he could see. I was sure the only answer he would find for Cori was
no
.

“We'll think about it,” Dad finally said, and Cori smirked.

“Well, maybe I already signed up.”

The smile vanished from Dad's face. “Cori. We talked about this. You can't just do things without asking us first.”

“When should I ask you, exactly? You're always working or taking Val somewhere.”

“That's not fair,” Dad said.

“Fair,” Cori huffed. “You have no idea.”

They stood there, neither of them giving way, until Dad shook his head and said, “I'll talk to your mother. But I can't promise anything. And you know that if there's any trouble, any at all, it's over.” Then he put his headphones on, which meant he was working and we should leave him alone.

Cori gave me a smug look and strutted off to our room.

I went back to my homework, though I found it hard to concentrate after what she'd said. I wasn't loser bait. I just wasn't like her. I didn't want new friends. I wanted to ride the bus with Shani and have sleepovers on the weekends. I wanted to fall asleep in my own room at night, and wake up in my own house and eat pancakes on the back porch. Just because New York was new didn't make it better.

On Friday, when Mrs. Harris excused us for lunch, I reached into the front pocket of my book bag and found it empty. Either I'd forgotten to grab my lunch bag off the counter or I'd forgotten to make one in the first place. So, instead of heading into the cafeteria to meet the twins at their table, I joined the lunch line. Mom said school lunch was full of chemicals, but she still made me hide a twenty-dollar bill in my
book bag in case of emergencies. Because emergencies were a thing that tended to happen to us—people got left at school, or at swim practice, or even at the grocery store, because when you're trying to keep one family member alive, losing someone else for a little while doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

It was chicken nugget day at MS 221. I followed in line, adding food to my tray, getting closer to the lunch lady and her tapping red nails. Her name tag read
S. Carlson
, and she didn't smile once, not even a crack. “Next!” she called, waving at me like she was directing traffic.

I stepped up to the register and held out my twenty-dollar bill.

She looked at me like I had two heads. “No cash,” she said, pointing to a sign in front of the register that read:
EASY PAY LUNCH ACCOUNT
S
ONLY
!

“What's your account number?” Her nails hovered over the keyboard, waiting.

“I don't know my number,” I said. My face grew hot. “I'm new.”

“Fine. Name?”

I spelled my name for her. The nails tapped. All I could think was that it sucked so much being new.

“I'm not showing any money in your account. If you can't pay, you have to take a free and reduced lunch.” She pointed at a tray of sandwiches near the end of the lunch line. “Next!” she called loudly.

I felt like the biggest loser ever. Cori was right. I would
have to put all my food back in front of everyone in line. There were sure to be stares.

I gripped the edges of my plastic tray. Turned around . . . and ran right into Emily.

She was wearing a sparkly gray sweater over black leggings. With her perfect high ponytail, she looked like she'd stepped right out of a commercial.

Emily looked past me, to the lunch lady. “I'll pay for her, Mrs. Carlson.”

The lunch lady sighed, entered Emily's lunch number, and shouted, “Next!”

“Come on,” Emily whispered. “Get moving before people think I'm taking on charity cases.”

I followed her out of the lunch line and into the cafeteria, which was in the basement and super loud thanks to the voices bouncing off the cinder-block walls. Emily kind of paused and looked at me. I felt like the word
LOSER
was printed in big block letters across my forehead. I was sure she was about to say something snappy.

Instead, she just said, “See you around,” and walked off to her usual table, where her friends were waiting. It was only after she left that I realized maybe she'd been waiting for me to say thank you. She had just paid for my lunch, after all. I felt like a total flake, but more than that, I was surprised. Maybe there was more to Emily than I'd thought.

That weekend, I finally got to call Shani again. We used our tablets so we could see each other while we talked. I hadn't
realized how much I'd missed seeing her face until she showed up on the screen. She had an easy smile that made me want to smile, too. She also had high cheekbones that came from her mother's side of the family and made her look older than she really was. Shani said people could think what they wanted. That if it were up to her, she'd rather be the best soccer player in the world than the prettiest girl at school.

I carried the tablet around the apartment so she could see how tiny the rooms were, and I made sure to tell her all the worst parts about being in New York so that she wouldn't think I was having any fun without her—how it was so cold some days I couldn't feel my fingers inside my gloves, how we had to drag our laundry to the Super Sudz and wash our clothes next to a bunch of strangers, how Cori left her stuff all over our room
all the time
.

Then Shani said she had news. I thought she'd come up with some brilliant new ideas to help me earn more time so I could get back home even faster. Instead, she started talking about our big social studies project, the one I'd left her to finish by herself.

“Mrs. Bellweather says I have to work with Jenny Hargrove on the pyramid model now.”

“Jenny, chews-her-hair Jenny?”

“The one and only.”

Jenny Hargrove lived two blocks away from us. She had long strawberry-blond hair that she chewed on all the time. When she switched sections, you could hear the dried spit crunch between her teeth, which gave me the shivers.

“Gross. I wish I could be there.”

“I know,” Shani said. “Why can't you just come back
now
?”

“I'm working on it.”

Shani smiled, but I could tell she was sad. “I have to go,” she said. “I have a game at ten.”

We promised to talk again soon, crossed our hearts, and said good-bye. After she hung up, I sat on my bed and counted the paper slips in the Thyme Jar. Thirty hours. Not even two days' worth of time. It wasn't enough to make an impression on Mom and Dad. Plus, we'd only been in New York for a little over a week, and Val was about to start his first round of treatment. There was no way they'd let me go back home. Not yet.