A Summer of Kings by Han Nolan

Author:Han Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

TWENTY-ONE

I was miserable on the train ride home. Not only had I lost King-Roy and my dream of an exotic, summer romance, which, I realized, had been a flop right from the start, but I knew what would be waiting for me when we got home. Before we climbed onto the train I had called Mother to let her know we were on our way, and she had asked, "Where have you been? Don't you know we've been worried sick here? Esther, you're old enough to know better. I'm ashamed of you!"

I let her rant on for another minute before I interrupted her and told her that we were going to miss our train if we didn't get going. Mother said, "Don't think this is over, young lady. Not by a long shot. I'm so ashamed of you, I don't know what to do."

I heard more from Sophia on the train ride home until Stewart, seeing how miserable I was, told her to shut her mouth. "You're giving me a headache," he said.

"How come you're on Esther's side all of a sudden?" she asked.

Stewart looked over at me and then back at her and shrugged. "I guess because she's right sometimes, Sophia."

"Well, she wasn't right dragging us to that horrible Harlem. I will never be able to wash all the dirt and poverty of that place out of my hair." She tossed her head back and lifted her eyes to the roof of the train, and I could just see her mind imagining herself onstage, making her dramatic pronouncement and flouncing off into the wings. Since she didn't have a stage to flounce off of, she turned to me instead and said, "Esther, massage my feet; they're killing me."

I had had enough of her for one day and I let her have it, even if she had said all that about Harlem for dramatic effect and was only six years old. "Why don't you think of someone besides yourself for a change?" I grabbed her right foot and began massaging the ball of it. "None of the people living in those apartments gets a chance to just wash the poverty away. They've got to live in it every stinking day of their lives, and it's our fault, too."

Sophia giggled and propped her left foot up in my lap and nudged me to massage that foot, too. Both her big toes and her pinky toes were rubbed raw and blistered from her shoes and the long walk. "You didn't believe that fat old jelly up on the soapbox, did you, Esther? We're not really made from test tubes, you know."

The man, Ax, had made the whole thing with the test tubes sound possible to me somehow, but Sophia made it sound ridiculous. I didn't say anything, though, and the three of us were quiet the rest of the way home.

My father picked us up at the train station, and when I climbed onto the front seat of the car, next to him, he didn't even look in my direction.

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