21

Life is hard
And hardly ever fair.

— Llama Parade

«I CANT BELIEVE WERE GOING TO homecoming,” Zion whined as he sadly took a bite of his sandwich.

“I can’t believe it either.” I swung my bag onto the lunch table and eased my head out from under it. I sunk down in my chair. “Like I said . . . ” I leaned forward and whispered, “Y. M. C. A.”

I glanced over at Lando’s table and saw him laugh about something. I’m not sure why I made a special note of the fact that he and Janessa weren’t sitting next to each other. Connor’s words echoed in my head. You like him, like him. Lando looked over at our table and waved at me. I quickly turned away from him.

“So Comic Con was fun,” I said casually.

“Yeah, it was okay,” Zion said.

“I’d totally go again next year.”

“As long as you don’t start any more fights.”

“I didn’t start the fight.” I stuck my chin out. “I ended it.”

“Yeah, about ended up in jail.”

I snorted. “You’re such an exaggerator.” I sat there for a moment. “What do you think they would do about my fingerprints if I went to jail?”

“I guess they’d have to print your toes.”

“Cool,” I said. “I kind of wish I had ended up in jail.”

I opened my bag and pulled out my pretzels. I popped one in my mouth as a smarmy voice behind me said, “Leave some food for the rest of us, Lardon.”

Zion stared down at his sandwich, all crawled back into himself. I could see what Joshua was starting to do to him again—the power he had over him. I wondered how much of Zion’s terrible shyness and insecurity about his weight was because of Joshua. My heart pounded with anger.

“You like your finger foods, don’t you, Aven?” Joshua went on. “Or would those be toe foods for you?”

Was I going to let him have that same power over me?

I whirled around to face him. “I do like toe foods,” I said. “Just not as much as you like butt foods.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Joshua said.

“It makes sense to people with half a brain.”

“And apparently to people with half a body.” Joshua laughed at his own stupid joke. I glared at him, willing my eyes to not fill with tears as he joined his friends at their table.

I turned around and slumped in my chair.

“Maybe you were right,” Zion said.

“About what?”

“Maybe we should eat outside.”

I shook my head. “I am not going to let that guy beat us.” I leaned forward. “And you’re not going to let him do this to you. We shouldn’t care at all what he says or does.”

But I could see that Zion cared. And as much as I tried to deny it, I cared too—so much that when a kid burst into the cafeteria and screamed, “It’s raining!” Zion and I just sat at our table, sadly glancing at each other while everything around us erupted into chaos. Kids pushed past one another, laughing and screaming and grabbing and shoving, in their eagerness to get a small sprinkle of cool desert rain on their faces.

Zion and I just focused on making it through lunch.

The air had slightly cooled for a few hours as a result of the sprinkle we’d had, and it smelled amazing at Stagecoach Pass as I walked through the park that day after school. There was nothing quite like the smell of the desert after a rain. Too bad it had to come with humidity, making my clothes feel sticky.

I sat next to Spaghetti in the shaded covering of the petting zoo and rubbed his soft fur with my foot. He barely acknowledged me. “He’s still so sluggish,” I told Denise. “Has he been eating?”

“A little,” Denise said as she filled the water troughs with a hose. “It’s still so darn hot. I wish that rain had lasted longer. How could anyone act spry in this muggy weather?”

I shrugged. I had to admit I felt sluggish myself, like I could crawl in bed and sleep for, oh, the next four years.

“I wish I were a llama,” I said to Denise. “Then I could live here in the petting zoo and not have to worry about anything.”

“But what if you didn’t live in a petting zoo?” Denise said. “Then you’d have plenty to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Like getting eaten by a mountain lion.”

“That’s why I would be a petting zoo llama. They live a life of leisure.”

At least my career options were growing: hermit, llama.

Denise smiled. “I suppose. But it seems kind of boring to me.”

I saw Trilby walking by. “Trilby!” I called out, but she didn’t seem to hear me. “Trilby!” I cried again. “Trilby!”

She finally looked over. She waved and pulled an ear bud out of her ear. She made her way into the petting zoo and sat down in the dirt beside Spaghetti and me. “You have to hear this new band I just discovered,” she said. “They’re called We Are Librarians.” She laughed. “Isn’t that awesome?”

I smiled as she put the bud in my ear, and I tried not to think about how we were sharing ear wax. I sat there listening to We Are Librarians in one ear while Trilby went on about how excited she was to go to homecoming with Zion and me in the other ear. She rubbed her hands all over Spaghetti while she talked, and I thought if anyone could pep him up, it would be Trilby. But still he sat there all lifeless.

“I better get back,” Trilby said. “I was just enjoying the smell of the rain.”

“I’ll walk with you,” I told her.

While we walked, I told Trilby how Dad couldn’t believe that her dad was in a punk band because he’d once seen him wear a polo shirt, which she thought was hilarious. “They still get together and play every now and then but not often. You know, I don’t think you can ever turn it off.”

“Turn what off?” I asked.

“The love of playing music,” she said. “I think my dad will still rock out even when he’s super old.”

“Have you ever thought about starting a band?” I asked her.

She stopped and grabbed me, like this was the most serious subject ever. “All. The. Time.”

I looked shyly down at me feet. “I, uh, play the guitar a little.”

“What?” Trilby practically screamed right in face. “How could I not already know this? We have to start a band, Aven. We have to.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said, still looking down at the ground. “I can’t perform in front of people.”

“Why not?”

I looked up at her. “I like to keep a low profile.”

Trilby frowned. “I think it’s time for you to start keeping a high profile.”

I smiled. “I’ll think about it.”

Trilby threw her head back and groaned. “Man, that’s what people always say when they mean no. Like when I ask my parents if I can open a chicken sanctuary. They always say ‘We’ll think about it.’ Do I have a chicken sanctuary?” She crossed her arms. “Nope.”

“You kind of have a thing for chickens, don’t you?” I said.

“Have you ever seen them wearing pants?”

I giggled. “No.”

Trilby narrowed her eyes. “I strongly suggest Stagecoach Pass puts all the chickens in the petting zoo in pants. I predict attendance will go up by . . .” she scratched at her chin. “Twenty percent at least.”

I giggled again. “I’ll suggest it to my parents.”

I left Trilby at Sonoran Smoothies and went to visit Chili. She reached her head down to my foot when I walked into her stall. “Smart girl,” I whispered as I slipped my foot out of my flip-flop and rubbed at her head. Then I laid my body against her side, feeling her breath. “We have to figure out how to work together,” I told her. “I know I’m a different kind of rider. But we have to figure this all out. I don’t want to give up on you.” I stood back. “And I don’t want you to give up on me.”

Chili didn’t seem nearly as worried about the horse show as I was. I wished I could be so carefree. Being a horse must have been amazing.

I decided to check on Henry. I couldn’t stop thinking about him growing up in orphanages. And those things he said about the nuns hitting him with a brush—it all made me so sad. I wondered what he had been like as a kid. He was so old, it was tough to imagine him as any kind of kid at all. I kept picturing a three-foot tall Henry with wrinkles and white hair.

He was busy talking to a woman at the counter when I walked in. I sat down at a table and waited while he sold her some saltwater taffy, then she left the store.

Henry smiled when he saw me. “Hi, Aven.”

“Hi, Henry.”

“Would you like some ice cream?”

I stood up and walked to the counter. “How about a scoop of mint chip?” I said. I didn’t care if he got it wrong today.

He nodded and picked up the scoop. I watched as he struggled to get ice cream into the scooper—like he didn’t have the strength to do it. Then he dropped the ball of ice cream on the floor before he could get it in the bowl. He went to grab a rag, and I saw how his hands shook.

I walked around behind the counter. “Go sit down, Henry. I’ll clean this up.”

He nodded and shakily walked out of the store. For a moment I was worried he was going to wander off. I’d heard about old people with memory problems walking off and getting lost. But I saw he sat down in one of the rocking chairs.

I worked at cleaning up the ice cream mess on the floor and dumped the rags in the sink. Then I went out and sat next to Henry in a rocking chair on the porch. “Are you okay?” I asked him.

He nodded. “I’m tired.” He rocked gently. “Just really tired.”

We rocked in silence awhile until I asked him, “How long were you an orphan, Henry?”

He stared out at the park. “All my life.”

“No one ever adopted you?”

He rubbed at his wrinkled forehead then ran an age-spotted hand over his white hair. “No. No, I guess I wasn’t lucky like you.”

I smiled, glad he remembered who I was, though it was getting later in the day.

“Where did you go grow up?”

“In an orphanage, of course. Back then we had to go to orphanages. That was . . . a long time ago. Nineteen thirties when I was born. There was the Depression. Lots of kids went into orphanages.”

“But where was your orphanage?”

“Mostly in Chicago,” he said.

“Was that the Angel Guardian orphanage you mentioned?”

“Yeah, that one. And others.”

“So were you born in Chicago?”

“I don’t know. I was shuffled around a lot. Not sure. I tried getting my paperwork once, but no one could find it for me.”

“You don’t remember having a family ever?”

“Nope. Must’ve been too young to remember when I went in. Don’t even know what happened to my parents.”

“So you could have brothers or sisters then,” I said, mostly to myself.

Henry shrugged. “I suppose. But it’s been so long. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to find them. And they might be dead.” He rubbed at his forehead. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Okay.”

That night I searched for all I could find about Chicago orphanages in the 1930s. It was difficult to find any good information about them. There were thousands of children in Chicago orphanages in the 1940s, over 1,200 of them in Angel Guardian alone.

What I did find, however, were lots and lots of people on message boards trying to locate their records, trying to figure out who they were, where they’d come from, and if they had any other family. There were people on there looking for brothers and sisters who they’d been separated from—a woman searching for her older sister, another woman trying to find her three little brothers, and a man searching for his younger sister and baby brother, who’d be about Henry’s age by now. My heart sunk when I saw the post was already over ten years old.

There were also stories of abuse—of growing up in a world where no one cared about them or wanted them. Had Henry grown up like that? No matter what was happening in my life, at least I knew there were people in this world who cared about me. I went to bed that night, my heart broken for Henry. And for all the people searching for their lost family members.