One Speck of Truth by Caela Carter

Author:Caela Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Where Can I Look for You Now?

MOM WAKES ME BY BOUNCING MY mattress over and over again the next morning. We went to bed early but I still have to shake my head back and forth, back and forth, back and forth before the words Mom is saying can sink into my brain.

“Get up, Alma. Leonor will be here any minute.”

I pick my head up and the room around me spins. The sun is up and slipping hesitantly through my window. It’s early. My head crashes back into the pillow again.

Mom is already dressed in a gray pantsuit even though she’s working from home here the same way she did in Pittsburgh. Her hair is washed and combed and bun-ed.

“Leonor?” I say. “Why?”

“Alma,” Mom says. “Get up.”

I roll over so my head is buried in the pillow. “Why is she coming?” I say.

Something about Leonor makes me embarrassed and annoyed at the same time. She wants to be my cousin. I understand that. She is my cousin whether I like it or not. I just don’t know how to do this cousin-thing. I’ve never had a cousin, but from watching Julia with hers sometimes I know that the point of cousins is that you get to know them your entire life. Leonor and I will never have that. I don’t know how to work around it.

“She’s taking you to your school,” Mom says.

“School?” I say. My eyes fly open. “School starts today?”

“No,” Mom says. “It starts next week. But Leonor says all the kids go in today to sign up for clubs and catch up on their summers or something. It’s tradition or something.”

“I can’t catch up on summer,” I say. “I don’t speak Portuguese.”

Mom rolls her eyes like I’m being ridiculous. “It’s an English school, Alma,” she says. “You think I’m going to put you in a school where they don’t speak English? You wouldn’t learn anything.”

“I don’t want to sign up for clubs,” I say. “And I won’t have anyone to talk to about my summer. I don’t know anyone.”

Mom leans over the bed and pulls all the covers off me so I’m suddenly freezing. “You’re going,” she says.

I sit up so fast I almost knock my head right into Mom’s.

“Mom!” I shout. “You have to stop telling me these things right before they happen! You have to give me some warning.”

I don’t know why I say it. Why I choose to argue now. It never works.

She turns, throws a towel onto my bed, and says, “I tell you things when I think you’re ready to know them. If I told you you’d be going to school today, you’d have been worried about it all day yesterday instead of focusing on your grandmother and the piano.”

I hate when she shuts me up like this. It makes me feel insignificant, tiny, worthless. I watch her walk out of my room, willing myself to yell at her back. But I don’t.

About an hour later, Leonor and I walk through the winding streets of Lisbon.

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