Salt by Hannah Moskowitz

Author:Hannah Moskowitz [Moskowitz, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2018-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

LOST

“I spy . . .” Zulu looks around, her eyes darting over person after person after person. We’re on the platform now, waiting for the train, and it’s packed. There are four different platforms and four different trains off from where we’re standing, all of them labeled in an alphabet we don’t know, let alone language. Oscar begrudgingly has Zulu by the hand, and Beleza has a grip of the hem of my sleeve, just two fingers, like if she’s subtle enough I won’t notice she’s leashing me like our six-year-old.

“What do you spy?” I ask.

“No, I want to play with Oscar!” I’ll never understand why she keeps trying to be friends with him when Beleza and I are right here to indulge her. The kid’s like me, a glutton for punishment.

Predictably, he says, “Shut up, runt.”

“I think we’re that one?” Beleza says to me, pointing at a platform.

“That’s what I was thinking too. I’m not sure.”

“Yeah, me neither. Shit.”

“Something blue,” Zulu insists.

I say, “Zoo, we’ll play with you on the train, okay?”

“There might not even be anything blue on the train!”

“It’s a whole train,” Oscar says. “Something’s gonna be blue.”

“You don’t know.”

“Pipsqueak.”

“Asshole.”

“You guys,” Beleza says. “Can you please, for one minute in your entire stupid lives, shut the hell up?”

They both mutter, “Fine,” in unison, both in Portuguese—a very, very rare case of them doing something together, and of course it’s accidental.

There’s an announcement over the speakers, spoken so fast that I can’t believe even people who speak Ukrainian could follow. But the rush of movement around us, people jostling us on top of each other and away from each other somehow at the same time, reminds me again that we’re alone, that we’re the only ones who don’t understand. My brother, my sisters, and me. Our own little messed-up country.

I wonder where Hura is now.

“Come on,” Beleza says, pointing to a train pulling up.

“Are you sure?” I say.

“No. Come on.” And of course after that she’s running. I grab Oscar’s shirt and pull him along after me, and I feel him stumble but I don’t look back, because all of a sudden the idea of being separated from Beleza is the scariest thing I can imagine.

Sometimes I would trade all of the little nothing I have just to know what it is I really want.

I scramble onto the train and hitch my falling backpack over my shoulder about a second before it would have slipped into the gap between the train and the platform. God, I need to be more careful. I could have lost our journal.

“I hurt myself,” Oscar mumbles. I turn around and yeah, he’s got a hole in the knee of his jeans and a bloody knee peeking through.

“Ouch,” I say. “I’ll fix it once we’re sitting.” We can’t look for a compartment yet because business people and mothers with hordes of kids even more unruly than mine are pushing past us with their shoulders and their suitcases. The train starts to roll, and I grab onto a nearby pole before I fall over.

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