Chapter 9

Maggie

“What did you do on the weekend?” Brianne asks Maggie. The girls are by their lockers waiting for Lexi and for the first bell to ring on Monday morning. St. Ambrose is an imposing, brick building, over a hundred years old. The bells sound like fire alarms and, even after a month, startle Maggie. She expects disaster, not a class change, when they ring.

Maggie waits a beat before answering. Maggie caught the look Lexi gave her in class when she told Mrs. Weston she wanted to volunteer at Brayside. It was an old-people-ewww sort of look, which Maggie had ignored. She wonders if Brianne will react the same way.

“I went to Brayside to start my hours.”

Hours may as well be capitalized. The volunteer requirement hangs like an ax over the heads of St. Ambrose students. Most of the girls leave the hours until the end of term and scramble to complete them in the middle of exams.

To Maggie’s relief, Brianne doesn’t make a comment. “How was it?”

After the tour, Mary Rose had been called away, so Maggie sat down with Mrs. O’Brien and the other ladies in the games room. When one of them mentioned she liked to play cribbage and Maggie said she didn’t know how, they decided she needed to learn. Before she knew it, a board and a deck of cards had been pulled off a shelf and they were teaching her.

A little while later, Mr. Singh drove up on his scooter. “Do you play piano?” he asked her.

Maggie nodded. She’d been taking lessons since she was six.

“I knew it!” Mr. Singh fist-pumped the air, like she’d made his day. “Usually, Alma plays a tune, but she’s not feeling well today. Why don’t you play us something? We always have a little concert before we go in for dinner.”

Maggie hesitated. She hated playing in front of an audience.

“It doesn’t have to be long. And don’t worry if you’re out of practice. Most of us are deaf anyway,” Mrs. Kowalski, her cribbage partner, said with a laugh.

When Maggie got to the piano, it was five minutes to noon and there were at least fifteen people in the chairs waiting. Mrs. Kowalski sat down beside a man who must have been her husband. She elbowed him and shouted, “Maggie’s going to play,” in his ear.

“Who’s Maggie?” he asked loudly.

“The girl I was playing crib with.”

A tall man with a newspaper folded under his arm and an impressive comb-over walked up to the rows of chairs. “Where’s Alma?” he asked.

“She’s sick. Maggie’s going to play,” Mrs. Kowalski said again. “She’s a volunteer.”

Maggie wiggled her fingers, loosening them up. The old people applauded politely and she gave them a nervous smile. She didn’t know what on earth she was going to play.

At the back of the chairs, Mary Rose appeared, pushing an old lady in a wheelchair. Maggie took a deep breath. This piano was a lot nicer than the one she had at home. The keys were cool under her fingertips. She decided to play a song she knew by heart and that she was sure she wouldn’t mess up on. When she was done, everyone clapped, but no one got up.

“Play something else,” Mr. Singh said. “Alma plays at least three songs.”

“Is she any good?” Mr. Kowalski shouted to his wife.

“Yes! Very good!” she yelled back.

Maggie smiled to herself. The old people were a lot less critical than her piano teacher. She played two more songs and when she was done, the applause was more than polite. “You play beautifully!” Mrs. O’Brien gushed as she moved past Maggie to the line for lunch.

So, in the end, the afternoon had been a lot better than Maggie had hoped for. In fact, she’d sort of enjoyed herself. But Maggie relays none of this to Brianne now. She doesn’t want to appear too eager, so instead she says, “It was okay. I’m in charge of organizing the library and next time I’ll be able to bring Harvey.”

“What if the boy who dognapped him is there?” Brianne asks.

Maggie isn’t sure dognapped is the right word for what Austin did, but it sounded appropriately dramatic when she relayed the story of Harvey’s rescue to her friends last year. “He’s only there on weekdays,” Maggie explains. She doesn’t add that once the old people found out she was Harvey’s owner, almost all of them said kind things about Austin and told her how well he had looked after Harvey. Maggie wonders if maybe she judged him too harshly. Maybe Austin the Dognapper deserves a second chance.