“Duke’s mowing the lawn,” Amelia said. She stood by the kitchen window, holding a bowl of Cheerios.
“I know,” Diane said. “He’s been at it since six o’clock this morning. It’s a miracle he got the lawn mower to work. He said he fixed it with some wire he had lying around.”
“This is so, so nice of him. Like, really helpful and considerate.”
“Yes. Well. I offered to bring him out a coffee, but he didn’t want it.”
Amelia watched Duke mow a neat strip along the side of the walkway. He was wearing baggy orange shorts, a T-shirt with the sleeves torn out and a blue bandanna around his head. When he got near the house, he glanced up and waved. Amelia waved back.
“I wish you would sit down to eat your breakfast,” Diane said.
“Can’t. Gotta go.” Amelia put her cereal bowl in the sink and grabbed her backpack.
“Amelia?”
“What?”
“I decided I was a bit…hasty yesterday. With Gabriella. The whole situation caught me by surprise. I’ve decided to give them a month to find somewhere else.”
Amelia held back a grin. “What made you change your mind?”
“Nothing made me change my mind. For heaven’s sake. I changed it myself. I reconsidered, that’s all. Weighed all the facts.”
“Oh.”
“I do pride myself on keeping an open mind. No one could ever accuse me of being unbending.”
“Then can you unbend a little more? And let them stay as long as they want?”
“No, I can’t. I want them out by July 23. I’ll be putting an ad on Craigslist for the apartment, available August 1. That’ll give me a week to get the animal smell out. I’m sure we’ll get someone…normal. And that’s the end of it. Now off you go.”
Amelia looked for Duke when she got outside, but he had disappeared around the side of the house. She heard the lawn mower sputter, roar to life, burp twice and then die. Uh-oh. She admired their tidy lawn and headed down the street.
Mom was wrong. The apartment smelled like vanilla. Like Gabriella.
As Amelia walked to school, she thought, Now our yard looks like everyone else’s. It’s not so humiliating.
Well, maybe not like the woman next door’s, whose garden was a blaze of yellow, purple and pink blooms.
Amelia always stopped at the blue house near the end of their block. It was where all the cats lived. There was a low white picket fence around it and a gate in the middle. She stopped now and peered over the gate.
A tortoiseshell cat sat on the front step, washing its foot. Two black cats were sprawled across the concrete walk, sunning themselves, and a gray cat with one white front paw (Amelia’s favorite) jumped up on the fence and walked toward her, purring. She rubbed it under its chin and looked up at the house. One, two, three, four cats peering out of the windows. Some days she’d counted as many as seven.
A man’s face appeared behind one of the cats. He was black and had a shaved head. He watched her for a moment and then vanished.
Amelia gave the gray cat one last pat and broke into a jog. She didn’t have to hurry, as there were only two days of school left and no one would care if she was late. But she wanted to get to school because she couldn’t wait to tell Liam and Roshni what had happened.
At the end of the block, a girl with frizzy blond hair and long, skinny white legs in skimpy shorts was struggling to push a stroller down the sidewalk and talk on her phone at the same time. The stroller had three seats, and Amelia had never seen anything like it before. Triplets, she guessed. She smiled at the girl, but the girl was arguing with someone and kept going without even noticing her.
It wasn’t the same as their old neighborhood, where everyone was friendly. Nothing in her life was the same. She made a list in her head—their poky little house, her mom tired all the time from working at Miss Jane’s, hardly ever seeing Dad (not that she wanted to). And she was positive Starla was hanging out with Amber all the time now and had forgotten all about her.
She blinked back sudden tears that surprised her (she refused to cry anymore, for sure not about stuff like this) and ran the rest of the way to school.
“I love doing this,” Roshni said. “Here goes!”
She tipped her desk sideways, and an avalanche of crumpled papers, magazines, pencil shavings, pens and rulers crashed onto the floor.
“My April copy of Star!” Roshni grabbed a magazine out of the heap at her feet. She flopped down and started flipping pages. “I’ve been looking everywhere for this! There’s the best-ever picture of Justin Bieber in here.”
Amelia sat cross-legged on the floor, ignoring the commotion around her. She pulled things out of her desk and sorted them into two piles, throwaways and keepers. Most went into the throwaway pile. She had got as far as a crumpled art project of a sunset when Mr. Howard said, “Less noise in here, people. Two minutes and your desks should be emptied. Then we’re all going to the gym to set up the chairs for Awards Day tomorrow.”
She tossed the sunset picture onto her throwaway pile, scooped everything up and dumped it on top of an already overflowing garbage can.
“So are you guys coming to my place or not?” she said to Roshni and Liam as they headed down the hallway to the gym.
Liam was supposed to be going to his Mandarin lesson. His parents had decided it would be helpful if he could speak to his grandparents when they came from China at Christmas. Roshni still hadn’t forgiven her for the science poster. And she had decided to be mad all over again when Amelia told her about Duke and Gabriella’s animals. I knew you were hiding something. I thought we were supposed to be best friends, Roshni had said.
In her head, Amelia still gave Starla best-friend status, but she had kept her mouth shut.
Liam texted something on his phone and then said cheerfully, “My Mandarin teacher’s sick. I’m coming.”
“Me too.” Roshni shrugged. “There’s nothing else to do.”