Box Girl by Sarah Withrow

Author:Sarah Withrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
Published: 2013-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Clara stands at the corner, leaning against the hydro pole, singing her heart out. She sees me coming and her mouth shuts into a smile. I get to the corner and, without me saying hi, she falls in step beside me.

“I brought a sandwich today. Mom was having a hissy fit because she said that I made her buy those yogurts for nothing. But I said, ‘How was I supposed to know it was going to taste like wet snot,’ and then she wouldn’t talk to me. Garth thought it was pretty funny. He was nice to me all night. You don’t have any brothers or sisters, right?”

I shake my head.

“You’re awfully quiet today, dear,” she says. “Your mom chew you out?”

“No,” I say. I stumble over a crack in the sidewalk. Step on a crack and you break your mother’s back. That’s how the rhyme goes. Crack, crack, crack. I widen my step.

“You never say anything about your mom.” She says it like it’s a question. I step on a crack on purpose. And then another. I jump on a third one with both feet.

“I don’t have a mother, Clara.” I take a deep breath to shove the knot of tears back down my throat. I keep my head down and keep moving. It’s been this way for five years. You’d think I’d be able to handle the question.

“What do you mean?” she says, stopping. We’re three blocks from school. I want to keep going. I want to walk right past this conversation, but Clara’s not going to move until I say something.

“I mean that I don’t have a mother at home.”

“But what happened? Did she die? Where is she?” I leave her there and start walking again. “You have to have a mother, Gwen. Unless you’re an alien,” she calls after me. It’s such a Clara comment that I have to stop. “You’d tell me if you were an alien, wouldn’t you?” She catches up to me and loops her arm through mine.

Half of me wants to shake it off and half of me wants to squeeze it in. I look at the gap between her teeth and stick my pinky finger in it. I’ve wanted to do that since we met. She spits it out.

“Ewwww, you are a cosmic weirdo, dear.”

I take a deep breath.

“My mom’s gone. She left when I was eight.” I stand there with my heart pounding like a sledgehammer as Clara’s face melts.

I wish I could press Rewind and start this day again.

I try to suck the tears back. Clara’s still got my arm.

“We don’t have to go to school,” she says softly. I turn my head away from her and spy Marcia Whittaker’s red-and-blue striped pullover up the street.

The last person I told about my mother leaving was Anisha. We were at her house sitting in her bedroom that had matching pillow cases, sheets and duvet and twelve of those expensive fashion dolls that come with their own stands. I tell Anisha

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