Help Wanted by Gary Soto

Author:Gary Soto [Soto, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Sounds of Love

When Norma Lucero opened up her locker, she wasn't sorry to find that her flute was gone. In fact, she smiled and stomped her shoes, an action that made her skirt jump around her knees. And was that a rush of blood into her heart? She touched her heart, then her cheeks. Her temperature had risen.

"Yes," she said to herself. She raised a fist and repeated, "Yes." She closed the locker, turned, and leaned against it. Her smile was like a bright orchid on a cold winter day.

It wasn't that Norma hated playing the flute or the long hours of band practice in the musty basement of Franklin D. Roosevelt Middle School, a dingy room where the furnaces clanged, rattled, and messed up everyone's musical timing. And it wasn't that she hated looking like a nerd as she carried her instrument in a black case. No, the disappearance of her flute meant love: Samuel Ortega, a boy she liked a lot, had pulled her case from her grip the week before, and she'd had to run after him until he relented and gave it back. Now, she assumed, he had stolen it. Love was a kind of thief, she believed. Love involved taking something and giving it back.

She didn't have to dig deep into her memory to recall the day when Samuel had spit a mouthful of sunflower-seed shells and then asked, "Why don't you kiss me instead of that flute?" That a sunflower-seed shell stuck to his lower lip didn't destroy the beauty of that moment for her. It would soon fall off, and he would return to being the perfect boy for her. Sure, he was a little heavy, but wasn't she, too? Didn't that make them a perfect match?

That Samuel knew nothing about her music didn't keep her from liking him, either. "You'd like that, huh?" she told him, not too loudly, then giggled with a hand in front of her mouth. She had to admit that the way she pursed her lips when she played the flute was something like kissing—or so she believed. She had never kissed anyone, except Mom and Grandma, and her dad, when he was still around.

"Samuel's taken it," she told herself, and strode off to the cafeteria to buy some hot chocolate. "I'm sure of it."

"Hey," Rachael Duran called. Rachael, a member of band, was carrying a flute, too. "Let me copy your math."

Norma stopped in her pigeon-toed tracks. "Oh no," she moaned.

Rachael was a girl who wrote answers to quizzes up and down her arm, who pestered you with e-mail ("How do you spell Venice?" or "Who's Thomas Jefferson again?"), and who borrowed things and never gave them back. Norma noticed that Rachael was wearing Norma's barrette. She had lent it to Rachael during a parade march and never got it back.

"No, I can't," she yelled, and hurried toward the cafeteria to buy herself a morning treat. She let sixty-five cents, mostly in nickels, rain into the outstretched palm of the cashier.

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