Skylark

Copyright © 2014 Sara Cassidy

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cassidy, Sara, author
Skylark / Sara Cassidy.

(Orca soundings)

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN
978-1-4598-0591-0 (bound).--
ISBN
978-1-4598-0590-3 (pbk.).--
ISBN
978-1-4598-0592-7 (pdf).--
ISBN
978-1-4598-0593-4 (epub)

I. Title. II. Series: Orca soundings
PS
8555.
A
7812
S
49 2014              j
C
813'.54              
C
2013-906742-6
C
2013-906743-4

First published in the United States, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number:
2013954150

Summary:
After Angie's father leaves town to find work, her family ends up evicted and living in their car. Struggling with the realities of homelessness, Angie discovers slam poetry and her own voice.

Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through
the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Cover image by Dreamstime

In Canada:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 5626, Station B
Victoria, BC Canada
V8R 6S4

In the United States:
Orca Book Publishers
PO Box 468
Custer, WA USA
98240-0468

www.orcabook.com

17 16 15 14 • 4 3 2 1

For those who
are between homes.

Contents

Prologue

Backseat Dreams

Through-Line

Electrified

Landlord

Gloves

Dad

Pity

Home

Getting Clean

Skylark

Payday

Scars

Semifinals

Composing on the Fly

Acknowledgments

Prologue

The Spiral Café was a place of movement and color and noise and silence. The windows would be fogged from our breathing and from the evening's rain, which migrated from the damp sweaters slung on the backs of our chairs. We spoke intently there. We listened intently. The air was spiked with words.

“Spiral” was the right name for that café those nights we took our stand at the front of the crowd, adjusted the microphone to the right height—mouth height—and let loose. The words would loop and twirl through the damp air, funnel and
spiral
into waiting ears, banging against eardrums and fueling brains.

All of us would be running on the same fuel, the same drug. Mom says a good story or poem is the only drug. We'd laugh when the story called for it, cry sometimes, hoot and holler “yeah!” We would jump to our feet and cheer when it was done if it had been a good thing, a good trip. If it hadn't been, if it had just been so much talk, if the words hadn't been the right ones to tell the story, we'd clap politely and wait, hopeful for the next performance.

I had my favorite performers. When the
MC
called their names, I'd settle back into my chair—or I'd lean forward. Ready for something new, something not normal, something that would carry me, nudge me a little to the left or to the right, push me forward or pull me back.

But every time the
MC
approached the microphone, my heart would drop, too, because one of those times she would call my name, and then it would be up to me to make the words spin and whirl, to give everyone a fine ride, one that would stay with them into the night.

Every Tuesday evening, I would walk through the door of the Spiral Café into that moist, noisy air to find my feet and my voice and let my words tumble out, just the way I'd crafted them, into something whole and sure and living—into something like a home.

Backseat Dreams

That was when we were living in the Buick Skylark, and Mom still managed to look like a million bucks every day. I'd get to school early, sneak through a side door, hustle into a bathroom and wash my hair in freezing water, neck bent hard so I could fit my head under the short tap. I'd have a headache afterward, the water was so cold.

Mom slept across the front seats—every night she laid a small cutting board and a folded towel over the plastic console. Clem and I stretched out in the back, side by side, trading off who would cling to the edge of the seat and who would spend the night squashed against the rough upholstery.

Mom was always neat. She kept her clothes in a small suitcase tucked into the footwell of the front passenger seat. The glove compartment was for toiletries and important documents. My “closet” was a backpack behind the driver's seat, Clem's a sports bag behind the front passenger's. In the outside pockets of our packs we each kept a toothbrush, library card and current two books.

The library was our savior. The librarians never asked questions and answered every one of ours. We'd spend long evenings in the library, moving between the city's seven branches so no one would suspect. Not that there was anything to suspect, Mom would remind us even as we snuck around guiltily. We weren't doing anything wrong, only going somewhere warm, with solid surfaces to do our homework on.

Mom always loved us and looked after us. It wasn't her fault that rent was two grand a month and the waiting time for public housing at least half a year, so we were told. When I tried to fall asleep at night, Clem's bony knee hard in my back, I'd visualize our family name, hand-printed in blue ink—KILPATRICK—inching up a list at the public-housing office, ticking upward to the top spot. Then shining keys lowering from on high. The three of us climbing the last few stairs to a freshly painted door, fumbling with the lock and arguing—the best kind of arguing, the kind you do to pass the time, the kind that is tangy with teasing;
come on, butterfingers!
My goodness, Angie, didn't I teach you
how to unlock a door?

I'd drift into sleep with that picture in my head—Mom, Clem and me on the top step, fighting for the keys to our subsidized palace. But the keys always shrunk in my hand, and I'd wake to the rough seat beneath me, my neck crooked against the door, Clem's heavy arm over me. I'd frown into the dark. Lie there in that black soup. Until I heard Mom purring in the front. She refused to let the bare-knuckle hours of our days get in the way of a good sleep. I'd join her in the forgetting place. We always slept well in that car.

Through-Line

Actually, some nights we slept less well in the Buick Skylark. One time, four teenagers rocked the car, and we opened our eyes to their squashed faces at the windows. To them, we must have been like fish in an aquarium—blurry, bleary, unwary, swimming in our sleep. One of them licked the glass. Mom made a move to open her door, and they ran down the street, whooping.

At least they weren't the police, who had rapped on the windshield once or twice, stung our eyes with their flashlights, told us to move along. But they stopped. Got used to us, got to know Mom and understand that we were neither lazy nor criminal, only unlucky. One cop even dropped things off for us, tucked them under the car if we weren't “home”—a twenty-pack of Timbits, scratchy blankets, pairs of black acrylic socks and, at the start of September, two binders and a five-hundred-sheet pack of loose-leaf paper.

I was embarrassed by my binder. First of all, it matched Clem's—close as we are, that wasn't cool, not when we went to the same school. And the binder felt brutally clean somehow. Righteous. I walked down the hallway my first day back at school and felt like I was marked. Like everyone knew that it wasn't mine, not really.

There was a guy in our old neighborhood who walked with his shoulders heavy, head down, dragging his feet. His old coat was too big, and his dark pants were oil-stained. The shoelaces in his cracked shoes were nothing but brown parcel string. Mom said he slept in the woods of the ravine. One day the guy shuffled past our car wearing a hospital bracelet and holding a plastic bag with big letters announcing
Patient
Garment Bag
. He'd been in the hospital, Mom explained, likely for mental health reasons, and when he'd checked out, they had given him his belongings in the big bag. It looked like he was being made a fool of, with that bag. Everyone being told about him. That's how I felt with the binder. As though it glowed and exposed me.
PITY BINDER
, it might say.

At the end of biology class, I asked the teacher if I could use some duct tape—she had rolls of the stuff on top of her filing cabinet. “Sure,” she said, hurrying off for lunch, “just close the door behind you when you're done.” I covered my binder with that silver-gray tape, then marked it up with a pen—
Angie's Binder
, I wrote, between a thousand Sharpie hearts and stars and even a couple of Saturns with radiating rings. I drew a bird zooming through the cosmos, too, a sweet little bird with a small poof of a crest on its head. I don't know where she came from, that bird. But finally the binder felt like mine. In it, 250 pages of blank loose-leaf paper. Clem got the other 250, and you can imagine that we counted every sheet. It's the perfect thing to do when you're squashed up in the back of a car. That, or play cribbage again.

When things got rough after Dad left, Mom took us to the Single Parent Resource Center. It's an old brick house on a busy street, with nothing around it but gas stations and cheap motels. It's got a bread cupboard—Clem and I nabbed a cheese loaf—a clothing exchange, rooms where you can meet with counselors, and a play area for kids. Clem and I are way too old for the play area—I mean, he's sixteen and I'm fourteen—so we just sat in the waiting area, leafing through Archie comics while Mom talked to the woman at reception. Mom was trying not to cry. She said something like, “How do we stay a family now, without a home and no father? How do we not go flying apart?” The woman answered, “Just keep doing some of the things you always have done. That'll make a through-line. The through-line will carry you.”

That evening, we were squished in the car, doing homework by the light of our fancy solar-powered led lanterns, when Mom said, “Let's head to the Spiral.”

When we lived in the apartment with Dad, we'd hit the Spiral Café once a week for hot chocolate. We'd just bundle up after supper, leave the dishes unwashed and walk together, the four of us, down the gray sidewalks, talking and teasing, stealing each other's hats and running, reading lost-cat posters, sizing up new houses. Just being free with each other.

These days, I get anxious whenever Mom suggests spending money. My heart digs in and I say no. But that night, she didn't even give Clem and me time to pretend we didn't want to go. She put the key in the ignition and shifted the gearstick to Drive.

Electrified

I'd never seen the café so busy. A poster on the door announced that it was Slam Night. The chairs were turned toward the front. There was a microphone under a spotlight, and a young guy was giving some kind of speech. He wore pink skinny jeans and a ragged brown sweater. He was talking about people acting cool. He used repetition and rhymes, and he would slow down and speed up his talking depending on what he was saying. He'd draw everyone in with a whisper, then pop them back to reality with a shout. It was somewhere between song lyrics, a poem, a rap, a presidential speech and a televangelist's sermon—it was all of that and none of that. It was mesmerizing.