The Stars Beneath Our Feet by David Barclay Moore

Author:David Barclay Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

The McDonald’s restaurant we went to in Midtown Manhattan for lunch was so crowded we had to locate a corner booth on the second floor upstairs. I was glad because from the second floor you could watch all the people racing and rushing down below.

Rose wasn’t tired, but I was. We had spent most of the afternoon hunting all around Midtown for famous buildings that were in my architects book.

I treated Rose to lunch. All she had wanted was chicken nuggets and apple slices. I guessed it was my fault that she had had to wreck her own lunch by pounding Gully upside his ugly head with it.

“That boy pointed in your face,” she told me. “He shouldn’t do that.”

I decided to never stick my finger in her face.

This Rose was okay, I thought.

We both sat up there eating and looking out. I took a chew out of my double cheeseburger and reached for my phone. I had bagged pictures of all the different buildings Rose and me had spotted.

“Here’s the Chippendale Building,” I said, showing her. “That was the first one we found. Designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.”

She nodded, and spoke with mashed-up chicken in her mouth. “Fifty-Fifth and Madison.”

I thumbed a page in my book. “It says it’s nicknamed the Chippendale Building because it looks like a piece of furniture. Huh!”

“What?” Rose asked.

“That’s what it says. The top of the building is built like the top of a old cabinet.”

We went on like that for a while, eating and talking about what we had seen that day. My favorite was the Chrysler Building. To me, it was a building from another planet. Rose’s was some building we had explored at 300 West 57th Street. It took a minute for me to figure out that she had meant that Hearst building.

It was weird and shiny. Well, the top was. The bottom was old stone.

Rose was always so exact in how she talked. When she talked about a building, she didn’t say, “You know, the big one shaped like a tube of lipstick.” Instead, she would say, “The oval-shaped reddish orange one at Fifty-Third and Third Avenue.”

This girl was different, but that’s nothing new. I was a little different too, I had come to realize over the past few months. I mean, how many grown kids spend all their free time building Lego cities in dusty old storage rooms?

“Hey, Rose,” I started, “what makes you so different?”

She shrugged and slid my book across the table toward herself.

“You know,” I said. “I mean, you like to be by yourself so much. You got a solid memory too. Real solid. Is that because you’re homeschooled? You gonna build all the buildings we saw today? In our city room?”

She nodded, eyes down in the book.

“All that, from memory?” I asked.

She nodded again, flipping a page.

I whistled. “I couldn’t do that, man. That’s why I took pictures.” I sipped the last of my orange drink. I noticed the sound of the straw slurping made her frown, so I cut it out.

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