CHAPTER 2

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“Six hundred and twenty-five dollars?” Mama shrieks in surprise.

It’s the first day of summer vacation. Mama has just finished mopping the floor. “We have to start the season with a clean house,” she told us this morning.

She’s a little obsessed with cleaning, if you ask me. I am dusting. Samir is supposed to be sweeping the kitchen floor, but he stopped when Mama raised her voice.

Honestly, it takes a lot to make her yell. Like when I fell off the back deck and almost broke my arm. That time, her voice exploded out of fear.

Now she stands in the living room, her hands on her hips. Her mouth is wide open in shock.

I knew this wasn’t a good idea. It probably shocked her when I casually said, “Hey, do you have an extra six hundred and twenty-five dollars? I’d like to go to a cool summer camp at Magnet.”

“Look,” I say, putting my hands out to the side, “I’m just asking.”

“Farah, I would love to say yes.” She sighs. “We just don’t have the money.”

“No problem!” I say. I force my lips to clamp shut and lift up in a smile. I hope it doesn’t look too fake, like the way clowns paint weird smiles on their faces. But it’s the best I can do.

Samir stares at me, his eyes big and concerned.

I wink at him.

“I’m not dying to go or anything,” I say and move the dust rag along the coffee table.

Mama gives me a funny look like she doesn’t believe me.

I knew what the answer would be, right? I wonder as I dust. So why do I feel so disappointed? Why do I feel like someone just snatched a piece of candy right out of my hand?

I turn to the old desk that sits under the big window in our living room and wipe the surface. We found this desk one Friday afternoon outside someone’s house. There we were, just driving to the park, and we saw it on the sidewalk. A perfect desk, with just a few scratches. Abandoned, ready for trash collection the next morning.

Baba called his friend Majeed, who owns a pickup truck. “Quick, quick!” Baba told him. Within an hour, they’d lifted the desk into Majeed’s truck and brought it home. Mama cleaned it really well. Baba even painted it with a fresh coat of varnish.

But as I dust it, a sudden, unhappy thought slips into my mind. It’s a great desk, but we only have it because someone else decided it was trash.

Mama interrupts my pity party. “I’ll talk to Baba when he gets home,” she says. “Maybe we can make it work.”

“Don’t worry about it!” I say again in a cheerful voice.

After cleaning, there’s still half an hour before Baba comes home. Samir and I go play in the backyard.

“Want to jump wope?” he asks me. Being born too early left Samir with a lot of challenges. One of them is that he has speech problems, but they are getting better. Right now, the only letter he can’t pronounce is R.

I shrug. “I guess.”

“How about kickball?” he asks.

“Okay,” I say. “Whatever you want. I don’t care.”

“Come on, Faw-wah,” he says sadly.

My attitude stinks, I realize. I am upset, but that doesn’t mean Samir needs to feel bad. It’s like when one person in class does something wrong and everyone has to miss recess.

“Want to polish my rocks?” I ask.

He nods happily.

I hurry inside to get my rock polishing kit from my room. The “kit” is really just a plastic box with some liquid soap, a rag, and an old toothbrush. I add soap to the box, then fill it up with water until it’s bubbly and frothy. Meanwhile, Samir grabs my rock collection from the bottom shelf of my small bookcase.

I keep my rocks in two old cookie tins. I started collecting the rocks back in first grade. Most are rocks I found myself. Others are ones that Baba found while working in the quarry.

Here are my top five most special rocks:

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“This one is gwoss,” Samir says, picking up a hunk of black stone that is caked in dirt. I found it last week at the park.

“I’ll clean it,” I say. I trade him a flat rock that’s just dusty, one that I found in our yard.

We work quietly, scrubbing the rocks till they shine. But the whole time, I can tell my brother wants to ask me something.

“Faw-wah, why do you want to go to the camp?” he finally asks.

“It’d be a lot of fun for me,” I say. “Imagine if there was a Tommy Turtle camp.” Tommy Turtle is his favorite cartoon character.

“I would love that!” Samir says.

“That’s how I feel,” I tell him. I dig my rag into a crevice in the rock.

“I have thwee bucks,” he says, “and six pennies.” He smiles at me. “You can have them, Faw-wah.”

So now there are two opposite things happening inside of my heart. Number 1: I am still disappointed. But Number 2: I want to cry from happiness because I have a great brother.

Before I can respond, we hear a weird noise in the driveway. It sounds like a giant is crunching pebbles between its teeth.

And it’s getting closer.