totaled up what I’d bought.
Excitement and secrecy and wildness zinged off of her, and the second we were out of sight of the store windows, I grabbed her arm.
“What is it?” I said.
“You’ll see.” She jerked away and kept walking, fast.
“What did you do?”
“You’ll see,” she repeated.
I’d thought we were going straight home, but instead she turned down Soto Street. To the rooming house where Danny lived.
I had barely seen him since the incident at Chafkin’s the week before. That wasn’t unusual—Danny had a gang of boys he hung out with, just as Barbara and I had our own girlfriends—but even when I’d waved to him on the playground, he’d pretended not to see me.
“What do you want?” he challenged when he answered Barbara’s knock. He stood in the doorway, not asking us in.
“Is your father home?” Barbara whispered.
“No. Why?”
“Can we come in?”
He shrugged.
Barbara went over to the small wooden table that Danny and his father used for eating and as a writing desk. She folded back the flap of her school knapsack. “Look!” She took out several cans, a stick of butter, a bag of rice—about a dozen things in all—and placed them on the table.
“So?” Danny said.
“Barbara, where did you get that?” I said, thinking for a moment that she must have raided our own pantry before we’d left for school that day.
“Where do you think? Chafkin’s,” she answered. Then she said to Danny, “It’s for you.”
“We don’t need you to buy us food.”
“I didn’t buy it.”
Her words hung in the air.
“You stole it?” Danny and I spoke at the same time, with, I sensed, similar shock at this act, which every Boyle Heights kid understood on a small scale—swiping a piece of bubble gum—but which we had never encountered at this magnitude.
Then my disbelief turned into fear, and Danny’s became anger.
“You stole this while we were in the store?” My knees wobbled with the inevitability that we’d be caught and held equally guilty.
“We don’t need you to steal for us, either!” Danny snatched up the cans and shoved them back into her knapsack.
“Fine, take it back, then,” Barbara challenged him.
“They’ll think I stole it.”
“Then you’ll have to eat it, won’t you?”
“I’ll take it back,” I threw out, but it was impossible. Either I’d be branded as the thief or I’d have to tell on Barbara.
“I don’t care what you do with it.” Barbara raked us both with a scornful glance and made her exit, slamming the door.
Danny surveyed the booty still on the table. Butter. Half a dozen eggs. Two cans of tuna fish, his favorite food.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was doing it,” I said.
“You were right there, and you didn’t have any idea?” But another quality entered his voice: admiration. For Barbara stealing! I thought of telling him about my letter then, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
“How was I supposed to know she was stealing?” I’d figured she was up to something, but my imagination for transgression was so limited, all I could think was that she was getting back at Eddie Chafkin by sticking chewed-up gum someplace or jumbling items on the shelves, putting a box of cereal with the canned peaches.
“Was Eddie around?”
“Just Mrs. Chafkin.”
“Guess that’d be easier. Still.” He rolled his eyes. “Your sister’s nuts! Well, you take this.”
“I can’t. Mama …”
“I guess it’s stupid for it to go to waste.” He picked up the stolen items from the table and started putting them away.
In just two days, the East Side Journal would come out with my letter in it. Then Danny would really have something to admire.
On Wednesday I put on my nicest school outfit, a navy jumper and crisp white blouse. The East Side Journal got delivered (by Mr. Berlov; it was one of his ways to earn a little money) sometime during the morning, so it should be at our house when we came home for lunch.
Novice author that I was, it never crossed my mind that the newspaper might not publish my letter. But as a matter of fact, they did. I saw my letter in print when we returned to our classroom after the morning recess. Mrs. Villiers picked up a newspaper—the East Side Journal!—from her desk. Mrs. Villiers was one of my favorite teachers, a feathery woman of about forty who had been widowed in the Great War. She loved to quote famous sayings and always kept a pencil tucked into her blond chignon in case she was seized with the inspiration