happen if Mrs. Carmichael ever saw her with it, maybe in the grocery store, how terrible that would be.
Mr. Rowley and Kevin come out of their apartment, both of them patting their stomachs like they have eaten too much. “Why so glum, chum?” Mr. Rowley asks, but he does not wait for an answer. They get into Mr. Rowley’s car and drive away.
The door opens again, and Travis steps outside, leaning over their balcony. Someone has cut off all his curls. Now his ears look like handles for his face.
“What’s the matter?” he asks. He is talking to me. It takes me too long to believe this, and already he is turning around, starting to go back inside.
“I screwed something up,” I yell. I wave for him to come over, the way a crossing guard tells you it’s okay to walk across the street. To my surprise, this works. He closes the door behind him and walks quickly down the wooden staircase of Unit B, his hands in the front pockets of his jeans.
At first I do not think I will even be able to stand up, but then I am standing, walking across the parking lot toward him. He looks at me, waiting, his green eyes large, far away from each other, like the eyes of a fish. “I need a surprise for my mother,” I say. “By tonight. And I don’t have one.”
He tilts his head. “Is it her birthday?”
“Kind of. Something like that.” It’s strange to actually be talking to him face-to-face, like he is just another person. He has become almost like just a story in my head now, someone I made up to make me feel better, to have something to do. There are little gold flecks in the green of his eyes, and they are looking right at me. That little one, when he gets older, look out.
He squints across the highway. “There’s the Kwikshop. You could get her something there.”
“It needs to be something nice. I have eight dollars.”
“You can get her something nice, then. There’s stuff there girls would like.” He turns and starts walking. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”
Again, it’s difficult to move. The afternoon has gone so badly that it seems unlikely that something this good could happen at the end of it. But here it is, standing in front of me, good on the heels of bad.
He turns around, zipping up the front of his sweatshirt. “But if you want to go, we have to go now. I’ve got to be back before my dad and Kevin get home. I’m supposed to be grounded.”
“What about your mom?”
He makes a face. “The Wizard of Oz is on. She’ll be camped out all night.”
I smile. My mother is also watching it, lying on the couch underneath the quilt Eileen gave her for Christmas. She tried to get me to watch it with her, but I’m sick of it. It’s on every year, and I’ve seen it so many times that I can say the lines right along with the movie, from “Auntie Em, Auntie Em” to “I’ll get you, my little pretty,” down the yellow brick road and back again to the scary flying monkeys who turn out to be people and then back off to see the Wizard who is really just an old man who is very nice but not exactly dependable to “You had the answer inside you all the time, Dorothy, just click your heels three times.” My mother said, “Okay, Evelyn, you’ve seen it before. I get the picture.”
She said she knew all the lines by heart too, but she still wanted to watch it. She pulled the quilt up to her eyes, but when Dorothy started to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” she knew I could see she was crying, and she said it was just because she liked the song.
Mrs. Rowley doesn’t like my mother, and my mother doesn’t like her; they won’t speak to each other face-to-face. But I like the idea of them watching the same movie in different houses, both of them so wrapped up in the same old story they won’t even notice we’re gone.
When we walk into the Kwikshop, the bells tied to the door handle jingle, and Carlotta, the woman who works there evenings, looks up from her magazine and frowns.
“Where are your mothers?” she asks, holding up her hand flat out to us, like STOP. Her fingernails are long, painted red, filed sharp like arrows. “We