Right as Rain by Lindsey Stoddard

Author:Lindsey Stoddard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Wash Cycle

There’s yelling on the other side of our apartment door, and it’s climbing up and up. Before I can make out any of the words, or stick my key in our dead bolt lock to let myself in, I turn right around and hop down the stairs two at a time, and head back out the front doors.

Even though I know my parents will worry, like really worry, when I’m not home on time, because when a kid is missing it’s serious business, and they of all people know that, I head back to Broadway, down the five stairs, and into the café with the good hot chocolate.

I order a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream from the same backward-baseball-cap barista. He slides the hot chocolate across the counter to me in a big blue mug, and then punches a hole in a little card and hands it to me. The card says Frequent Flier.

“I’ve seen you here before,” he says. “Your tenth one’s on us.”

I slip the card into my book bag. “Thanks,” I say. And it makes me feel 6 percent better, knowing that I’m a regular somewhere. Like I might have someplace that won’t close its door on me.

I’m worrying that my parents will be worrying when they realize I’m late, but I also want them to stop yelling at each other, and maybe giving them something to figure out together, like where I am, will make them have to think like a team.

I sit in the same seat I sat in before, and I even recognize two of the people from when I was here last time. One is looking through a big stack of papers and reading the same sentences over and over again to himself. I think he’s an actor and practicing his lines. He makes small gestures to the open air, and the steam from his coffee swirls from his mug. The other is a woman who leans forward over a textbook, writing notes in the margin and highlighting big blocks of text.

Everyone else is busy typing on laptops, reading, and sipping hot drinks.

I take out my notebook and I pick the number twelve, because I used to live at Twelve Cloverfield Lane, and twelve is a good, even number. Then I make twelve dashes across my page just like Ms. Dacie did.

————————————

I calculate a few lines about Izzy in my head and list them in my notebook.

This one time we laughed so hard milk came out our noses.

I haven’t laughed that hard, or much at all, since that night.

Then I try doing the rhyming pattern that Dacie taught me. She said that I could use ABAB or AABB to help me keep lines organized. A rhymes with A, and B rhymes with B. It sounds hard, but it’s more like a math problem, so I think I could probably do it.

A: I wonder what Izzy is doing now.

B: Maybe she’s in the tree house thinking about me.

A: While I’m here in the café wondering how

B: Poetry is supposed to be.

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