that the money goes directly into the bank, so nobody can get it. I’m not even sure how to get it myself.
“Do you know how a bank account works?” I ask Dumpling.
“I think you just walk in with your account number and school ID and tell them what you want,” she says, but I know she doesn’t know, either. Her mother wraps dollar bills in foil and stores them in the freezer in case the house burns down.
I imagine a pretty bank teller with gobs of hair spray looking at my picture, smiling at me, and saying, “How much money would you like, Dora Peters?” It seems too easy, like a movie or a dream or someone else’s life. Dumpling’s dad said he’d go down with me and we could put it into an account where it wouldn’t be allowed to be touched until I was eighteen.
I’m thinking about that, but there is a part of me that thinks it might be nice to have some money. So far, it seems safe.
After almost a month the newspaper stopped bugging me, and then my mom and her friends stopped dropping by, so I figured maybe everybody had forgotten that I’d won, which shows how a person can get soft living with a family like Dumpling’s.
—
I also got sidetracked watching Ruth Lawrence get on a bus one night all by herself. She had a small brown suitcase and a ratty red coat, and from Dumpling’s upstairs window I saw her sitting on the merry-go-round, waiting for the bus. It wasn’t the suitcase or the way she obviously looked like she was leaving or running away that shocked me, but that Dumpling was sitting with her. When had they started doing that?
It made me dizzy watching them, as if I were the one spinning around and around, because I should have been. We had rules in Birch Park, and those rules did not include Ruth and Dumpling sitting together, talking like friends, keeping secrets from me, like the scrap of blue paper that Ruth gave to Dumpling. I’ll admit that I was more than happy to see Ruth get on the bus with its Yukon license plate and squeaky brakes, so loud that you’d think someone inside the Lawrence house would have come out to see—or say good-bye. A curtain fluttered in their kitchen window, but that was all. Not even Lily?
Inside the bus, Ruth just stared out the window straight ahead as if there was nothing she wanted more than for that bus to shift into gear and take her away, too.
After the bus pulled out, Dumpling’s dad went outside and sat down on the merry-go-round next to Dumpling, his bulky frame out of place where only us kids usually ever sit. I wanted to know what they were saying and how Dumpling could possibly be friends with Ruth, and why she’d never even told me. Her father put his arm around Dumpling, as if something about Ruth Lawrence leaving could make them sad, or had anything to do with them.
It hit me like a meteorite: I’m not really part of this family, no matter how nice they are to me. It’s possible that someday they might send me back.
The next morning I watched Dumpling as she braided her hair. I waited for her to tell me what she and Ruth were doing on the merry-go-round and what Ruth had given her—there had to be a good explanation. She pulled a red ribbon out of her cigar box, and I saw the blue note, tucked into the pile of ribbons as if guarded by a bunch of fraying red snakes. But Dumpling just shut the lid without even mentioning it.
“That Ruth Lawrence is sure getting pudgy,” I said.
Dumpling tied the ribbon to the end of her braid without saying anything.
Normally I am unflappable, like a still, still pond without one single ripple. I have had years of practice. But like I said, living with Dumpling’s family has softened me around the edges. I have started to let my guard down and not just wait for someone to beat the living daylights out of me. It’s not the big things that are undoing me anymore, but something as simple as Dumpling having a silly secret involving Ruth Lawrence. It feels like my best friend has just skipped a pebble across the glassy surface of my soul.
If you chopped open my body, you’d see every jealous little wave as it slapped against my sternum.
She