Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian

Author:Maria Padian [Padian, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-89610-1
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2013-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

For some reason I was actually on time for homework help that afternoon. Or maybe it wasn’t such a mystery. Maybe I had some incentive to get my butt right over to the K Street Center. I must have been moving fast, because I managed to shower at school, change into a clean shirt and jeans, and still arrive before Myla and Abdi.

Samira was already there.

It wasn’t one of her hijab days. Instead, she’d tied her hair in this Chamberlain blue bandana. She wore a long-sleeved Chamberlain T-shirt that said VARSITY GIRLS SOCCER, plus big gold earrings. Peeking out from under her long skirt I saw sneakers and the cuffs of a pair of warm-up pants.

She sat at one of the long tables and had set out a stack of blank white paper, an old soup can filled with colored pencils and markers, and a box of crayons. Good thing one of us came prepared.

“Hey,” I said, pulling up a chair across from her. She didn’t glare, which I took as a step in the right direction.

“Hello,” she replied. She leaned to one side, rummaging through the backpack she’d placed on the floor. She pulled out a slim paperback with a bright orange cover and placed it on the table between us.

“Just get off practice?” I said, gesturing to her shirt. Joking. I knew Samira didn’t play sports.

But then she smiled. A real smile.

“I am manager of the girls’ soccer team now,” she said.

“Seriously?” I said. I tried to imagine Samira hanging with the jockettes on our very blond and fairly aggressive girls’ soccer team. The rumor was that they could beat us boys, but we never agreed to play them. “When did that happen?”

“Yesterday,” she said. “My cousin, Fatima? She plays on the JV team, and sometimes I go watch her. When I was at her game yesterday, the varsity coach saw me. And she knows I am Saeed’s sister. So she asks me if I know the rules, and I say, ‘Sure, I know the rules! I watch my brother all the time.’ So she asks me if I can help with the book. You know the book?”

“Sure,” I told her, my surprise growing. The book was where you kept track of the team stats throughout the game. You had to know the players and the game really well in order to accurately record all the assists, goals, penalties, whatever, for the book.

“So I help her that one time, and then she asks if I would like to do it all the time. And be manager. So I said okay.”

“Cool,” I told her. “So now you’ll go to all their games. Away games, too?”

“Yes, but you will have games at the same time, so we can still work with Abdi together,” she said. It took me a second to catch up with her. She’d moved from soccer to scheduling to Project Abdi in a single bound. She’d also switched from smiling to businesslike in a nanosecond. She picked up the paperback she had placed on the table.

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