Oh, Saturday, how I love you!” I sigh to my ceiling when I wake up on Saturday morning. Having another day of being jinxed in front of you is much less depressing when that day will not be spent being ignored by your friends at school and spending a weirdly quiet lunch reading in close proximity to a girl who can spit fire. Actually … I had lunch with Zooey on Friday, too, and have to say those lunches were kind of the high points of the last couple of days. It was the only time in school that I didn’t have a drumbeat of BREAK THE JINX! BREAK THE JINX! BREAK THE JINX! pounding in my ears, the only time I didn’t feel like I was walking on eggshells and swallowing boulders that threatened to burst into sobs at any moment. It was thirty minutes of sweet relief, spent with a girl who has made it clear she doesn’t give two hoots about me, outside of needing a warm body for our social studies project.

This weekend, though, I’m going to hang out with people who love me unequivocally and will shower me with attention: Salvatore Maletti and Martha Rowe. My parents. Dance floor sweethearts, New York City ex-pats, and the only people I plan on speaking to this whole weekend.

Except they’re not home.

Dad has Saturday hours at the office, and a note left on the kitchen table downstairs tells me Mom is covering someone’s shift at the hospital, so Champ and I have the house to ourselves. Actually, maybe being showered with attention isn’t what I need. Maybe what I need is some “Hattie-Champ Quality Time!” We celebrate by playing Chase the Laser Pointer up and down all three floors of the house, and then sitting on the couch and eating Saturday Cereal and watching cartoons. Saturday Cereal is not to be confused with Other Days Cereal, because it has more sugar and sometimes even artificial coloring. Sometimes there are marshmallows! I eat two bowls and then have to lie down on the couch because that was just too many marshmallows.

Mom left me a Hattie-Do list along with her note, starting with washing my now grody and probably moldering field hockey uniform. I open the accordion door to our little laundry nook off the kitchen, half hoping that part of the jinx means my uniform has disappeared. No such luck. I shove it into the washing machine, turning my face away from the smell, and turn the dial to hot. I stand there listening to the water gush into the machine, thinking about the first time I wore the uniform. How I felt sort of embarrassed, sitting in the back of my parents’ car on a Saturday just like this one, being driven to my first field hockey game, wearing a uniform. I can’t even say that I looked the part, because I feel like I looked as wrong as I felt. My shin guards didn’t feel right, and I was driving Dad crazy by ripping apart the Velcro and refastening it again and again as he drove through town. “You nervous, Hattie?” my mom asked. “This your first … ” She paused.

“Sporting event of any kind?” I offered, giggling nervously.

“Hey, you played soccer,” Dad said.

“I was three! And you didn’t even have to kick the ball; you just had to not eat grass.”

“You were so cute,” Mom said, getting drippy with the memory. “You and Rae ignored what was going on and just played huggy-roll.” It’s true. There are pictures of the two of us hugging and tumbling on the ground and cracking up laughing.

“Man,” I said, finally getting my shin guards on, “I would so much rather play huggy-roll.” I saw Mom and Dad exchange a glance, and said quickly, “But I love field hockey, I really do.”

And I do. I love every single part of it that does not involve actually playing or practicing or discussing field hockey. I love hanging out in the library with Fee and Piper before practice, and hanging out on the stone wall by the field waiting for our parents after practice. And I love the bus rides to away games, crammed into one seat with both Piper and Fee, cracking jokes and being silly. And I love halftime, when we suck the pulp out of fat slices of oranges.

One evening, coming back from a game that went longer than any field hockey game should ever go, Piper spread out on a seat and conked out, so it was just Fee and me sitting together.

“Tell me about Brooklyn, Hattie,” Fee said.

I cleared my throat. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” she said. I never know what to tell Fee when she asks me about New York. Nothing I say seems to be enough, nothing seems to fit the image she has of what life in the city is supposed to be.

“Well, we lived in this apartment … ”

“With a doorman? Were you friends? Did he hail you cabs when you went out?”

“Um, no doorman.”

She looked so disappointed, I said, “But Mr. Bakowski, our first-floor neighbor. He’d sign for packages and let the meter reader lady in when she came by.”

This did not seem to impress her.

“But what’d you do for fun? You and … ”

“Rae? We just did … I don’t know, stuff. Hung out at the park.” Reading Tilde’s Realm.

“Shopping?”

“Sure!” I said. “We shopped sometimes.”

“On Fifth Avenue? In those fancy stores?”

I thought hard. “Um … once we went to Saks to buy a dress for my cousin Gina’s wedding,” I offered. I didn’t tell her I was six at the time. I kind of knew from the start that Fee’s family has a lot of money, mostly because she told me. The first time I went to her house, she gave my mom and me a tour and told us how much everything cost. I know that if Fee lived in New York, she would probably have the kind of life she pictures for me. Lots of Broadway shows and summers in the Hamptons, that sort of thing.

“You’re different than I thought,” she said then. “I mean, when Piper told me she met this cool girl from New York City, I thought you’d be, like … different. Like, cool different. I was worried that Zooey and the Ts would want to, like, snatch you up.”

I glanced over at Piper, so asleep her mouth gaped open. I wished she would wake up.

“But you’re just like”—Fee furrowed her brow—“really normal. Just like us.”

I shrugged, wanting to say, But isn’t that a good thing?

And she said, “But you’re GREAT!” so loudly that it woke up Piper, and the conversation ended.

The washing machine switches and starts to rock a little, bursting the bubble of my memory. I close the accordion doors and set to work on the rest of my mom’s list. My memories can wait. I just hope I don’t lose those, too.