“No, he is not hiding out here,” Mrs. Herrera said. She seemed to be relaxing a little. “This is only the second time he’s come to the classroom.”
“Isn’t that against the rules?” Becca asked.
(Typical Becca question, Felicity thought.)
“Yes, Sam and I have discussed that,” Mrs. Herrera said. “It’s one thing for him to come see me before or after school. It’s another thing for him to be in this classroom when he should be elsewhere. It won’t happen again.”
Garrison raised his hand. “Is it true that Sam’s homeless?”
Mrs. Herrera paused and took a deep breath. Everyone turned again to look at Sam. Sam looked back at everyone, and Felicity noticed his ears had turned so red they were almost purple. He nodded.
“You might be surprised to know how easy it is to fall through the cracks,” Mrs. Herrera said. “Sam’s mom lost her job in June and couldn’t pay rent. She found a new job in September, but it can take a while to earn enough to pay a first and last month’s deposit on an apartment. For now, she and Sam have to live in a shelter.”
“Why doesn’t Sam hang out at his own school?” Bart asked. “I mean, I don’t mind him being here, but why not go where you’re supposed to go?”
“It sucks,” Sam said, and everyone turned to stare at him. “Especially LA. All we do is grammar. You have no idea how lucky you are to be in this class.”
Mrs. Herrera took a few steps so she was standing in front of the class, and Felicity wondered if she was trying to get everyone’s attention off Sam. “Sam comes here sometimes in the afternoon and writes and does homework while I do my prep for the next day.”
“I saw him in the bathroom on Friday morning,” Henry said. “Which, strictly speaking, isn’t Friday afternoon.”
“I don’t like the bathroom at the shelter,” Sam said. “And there’s a lady in the cafeteria here who gives me breakfast.”
“That’s a long way to come for breakfast, bro,” Matt pointed out.
“Sometimes she brings cinnamon rolls from home.”
Felicity turned to look at Sam. “I saw you this morning behind the building. Are you coming here and staying all day?”
“Not in this classroom, no,” Sam answered. “But sometimes I hang around. There’s eight hundred students at this school. No one really notices.”
Felicity shook her head. It was bad enough going unnoticed by your two so-called best friends. Imagine going unnoticed by eight hundred people. Whoa.
“We can’t stop you from coming here,” Ben said, turning around so he was facing Sam directly. “But you could get Mrs. Herrera in a lot of trouble.”
“Maybe you should stop hanging out in the classroom during lunch,” Garrison added. “Maybe you could hang out with us on the playground instead?”
“Just put up the hood of your hoodie,” Stefan said. “No one will ever realize who you are.”
“If they even remember in the first place,” Sam said, scowling.
“I remember you,” said Ariana in a quiet voice. “I thought it was sad when you left.”
Felicity leaned back in her seat. So Ariana had feelings that weren’t a hundred percent chirpy and positive. So maybe she was human after all. Interesting.
Ethan raised his hand. “Mrs. Herrera, are you going to get in trouble for not telling someone Sam is here?”
“I’m working on a plan to help Sam,” Mrs. Herrera said, but her expression was a little less than confident. “But yes, I could get in a lot of trouble.”
Ethan turned to Sam. “Come on, dude, let’s go outside.”
Garrison and Ben stood and walked to the door. “Okay, guys,” Garrison said. “It’s time.”
Felicity watched as everyone crowded around the door. Ellie led Sam up the aisle and gently pushed him into the middle of the group. “Hoodie up, Sam,” she instructed, and Sam pulled his hood up over his head. Felicity stood up then and walked around the island of desks to the front of the classroom. She passed Mrs. Herrera, whose face was a mix of wonder and worry and—well, maybe pride, Felicity thought. It looked complicated, whatever she was feeling.
“This is a good class,” Felicity said as she followed the group out of the room, turning to smile at Mrs. Herrera before she walked out the door.
“It’s a very good class,” Mrs. Herrera agreed, sounding like she’d never doubted it for a minute. “I’m glad you’re back.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Elizabeth
Monday, October 23
“I think what you should do is some stream-of-consciousness writing,” Mrs. Herrera told Elizabeth when she’d gone in for help with her book report during recess on Monday. “Take a seat at the Editor’s Roundtable and try to remember some of the thoughts you had while you were reading the book. Look over your reading journal. Don’t worry about getting it right or about analyzing. Just get your feelings down on paper. We’ll take it from there.”
Elizabeth took her LA notebook and her reading journal to the back of the classroom. She hated writing papers about books she loved, because she hated having to pick them apart and write stuff like, There are three important themes in this book, or Some of the symbols the author uses in this book include… Books weren’t about themes and symbols! Books were about people. On Friday, Garrison had done a book report on Hatchet, and he’d talked about the main character, Brian, like he was an actual person, a close, personal friend. Elizabeth totally got that.
(Was Garrison the one who’d stolen Hatchet from Mrs. Herrera’s special collection? Mrs. Herrera wasn’t saying who brought her special signed copy back, but Elizabeth had her suspicions.)
The sounds of basketballs hitting backboards and feet pounding across the pavement filtered in through an open window behind Mrs. Herrera’s desk. Elizabeth knew if she got up and looked out, she’d see almost everyone in their class playing soccer on the far edge of the sports field. Would Sam be there? Every morning now there was an unofficial Sam report—had anybody seen him yet? If so, had they made sure he had something to eat, maybe a book to read?—but no one had seen him so far today. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t show up. Last week he didn’t come around on Thursday, but he was there on Friday at lunch, waiting outside at the far end of the soccer field, hood pulled up so no one would recognize him.
Elizabeth wondered how much longer Sam would show up. He had to start going to his new school sooner or later, didn’t he? He’d told Ethan on Friday that a lot of kids who stayed at the shelter didn’t go to school on a regular basis. “He says it’s hard to do your homework at the shelter,” Ethan reported to the class after lunch. “And some kids don’t like leaving their moms all alone. In Sam’s case, he’d just rather be here.”
But sooner or later, Elizabeth thought now, he’d have to be there—at his other school, right?
She opened her reading journal to an entry about whether she would have been Auggie’s friend if she’d been a character in Wonder. She’d written that she hoped she would be, but was afraid she might have been too worried about what other people thought. That made her feel ashamed, because she wanted to be a nice person, not someone who cared about people’s looks.
What’s more important, how a person looks or how they act? she wrote, and then she erased it. Blah. Of course the answer was how a person acts, everybody knew that. Elizabeth didn’t want to write something boring. She wanted to write about how the book made her feel, but she didn’t know how to put her feelings into sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes at night she liked to sit at the piano and make up little tunes that matched her mood, and Elizabeth wished she could do that for this paper instead of having to use words. She started tapping out pretend notes on the table, da da daa, de de—
“We need to talk!”
Becca exploded into the room, heading straight for Mrs. Herrera’s desk, and there was something about the way she moved—like an animal that had been caged up for a long time or a ball thrown hard from one side of the room to the other—that made Eliza
beth want to hide under the table. It definitely didn’t seem like the right time to say hi, so she bent her head lower over her notebook and tried to be invisible.
“Matt told me I should ask you something, and I guess I’m going to,” Becca said, panting a little as though she’d been running. “When school first started, like for the first month, I brought you stuff. I was trying to be nice—” Becca stopped, mumbled to herself, then continued. “I was trying to make you like me. But you never ate any of the snacks I gave you. You didn’t eat one single Oreo. It’s like you didn’t even care. And it really hurt my feelings.”
Elizabeth lifted her head slightly so she could see Becca. Becca’s eyes were red; she looked like she might start crying at any second.
“Becca,” Mrs. Herrera said softly. She looked like she might cry too. “I’m so sorry. I should have said something to you earlier, but when you stopped bringing me gifts, well, I guess I thought I didn’t need to.”
Becca stared at the ground. “What were you going to say to me? I mean, if I’d kept bringing you stuff?”
Mrs. Herrera seemed to think about this, as though she wanted to use the exact right words. “I would have told you that I appreciated the gifts you gave me,” she said after a moment. “And maybe I would have told you that there are two reasons I didn’t eat the snacks. One, I’m very careful about not having favorites. You are the sort of student I appreciate very much. You work hard, you help out in the classroom, and you do your best. But to make you my favorite would be unfair to the other students. So I kept the things you gave me to remind myself that no matter how much I appreciated you, I couldn’t allow myself to like you more than my other students.”
“Really?” Becca asked with a sniff. “But if you did have a favorite, it would be me?”
Mrs. Herrera stood up and walked around her desk so that she was standing by Becca’s side. “I think you should stop trying so hard to be your teachers’ favorite. I think you should believe your teachers will like you for just being Becca Hobbes.”
Becca nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “That’s sort of what Matt said.”
Mrs. Herrera smiled. “I’ve noticed that you and Matt have become friends. Interestingly, he seems to have been a good influence on you. I hope you’ll be a good influence on him.”
“I’m trying,” Becca said. She sighed and shook her head. “It’s not easy. So what’s the second reason?”
“The second reason I didn’t eat the snacks you gave me—even though I love Oreos very much—is that my doctor told me that I’m prediabetic and that I needed to stop eating sugar and junk food.”
“I didn’t know!” Becca gasped. “I never would have given you those things if I’d known!”
“It’s perfectly okay,” Mrs. Herrera said. “And I’m perfectly okay. Sadly, my days of eating Oreos are behind me. I would appreciate you not telling the rest of the class about my condition. It’s private information that I’m sharing with you because I know I can trust you.”
Elizabeth wondered if she should slip under the table and try to sneak out of the room. She hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop, well, not really. Okay, sort of. But now she wished she’d left when Becca came in.
“You, too, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Herrera called over. “I’m going to trust you to keep this private.”
“You can trust Elizabeth,” Becca said authoritatively. “She won’t tell.”
That was so Becca Hobbes—always the expert! True, Elizabeth was pretty sure she could be trusted, though she still decided to go straight home after school instead of to Ariana’s, just in case the temptation to tell Mrs. Herrera’s secret became too much.
“There’s one other thing I want to ask you about,” Becca said to Mrs. Herrera, and Mrs. Herrera nodded for her to go ahead. “Why haven’t you told anyone that Sam is here and not at his new school? Isn’t that wrong? I mean, you’re a teacher. You’re a grown-up.”
Mrs. Herrera didn’t say anything for a minute. Elizabeth wondered if this was another conversation she shouldn’t overhear, but she was dying to know the answer. No one in the class could figure it out. Mrs. Herrera was such a stickler for rules, but wasn’t she breaking a huge one by not telling someone that Sam was here and not where he was supposed to be?
Mrs. Herrera walked back to her desk and sat down. “I’ll be honest with you, Becca, since you’ve been honest with me. This is a situation where I’m not sure what the right thing to do is. If I want to stick to the letter of the law, then I should report to the front office that Sam is spending time on school grounds when he should be at his new school. I know that I’m breaking the rules by not telling anyone about Sam.”
“Which means you’re wrong.”
Mrs. Herrera nodded. “Yes, I believe so. But the first day Sam went to his new school, someone took his notebook—the one he writes his stories in—and threw it in the toilet. He was also put in remedial classes, even though he’s a very bright student. Apparently they put all the shelter kids in remedial classes. So I’m working through back channels to reenroll him here, even though he’s no longer in this school district.”
A thought occurred to Elizabeth, but she wasn’t sure if she was part of this conversation. Still, it seemed important. “Mrs. Herrera? What would happen if you did report that Sam was here?”
“That’s the funny thing,” Mrs. Herrera replied with a sad smile. “I think what would happen is—nothing. Nothing except that the security team would be told to keep an eye out for him.”
“So you have to wonder, why bother to report it at all?” Becca said. “It doesn’t change anything.”
“That’s what I’ve been grappling with,” Mrs. Herrera said. “I really don’t know if I’m doing the right thing or not.”
Becca nodded. “Sometimes rules aren’t very helpful.”
Elizabeth nearly fell out of her seat. Those were the last words she ever thought she’d hear coming out of Becca Hobbes’s mouth. She couldn’t wait to tell Ariana… except that Ariana might roll her eyes and say something—well, something that sounded nice on its surface but was really meanness disguised as niceness. It would sort of ruin this moment when Elizabeth thought about it again. Which she planned on doing, because it was one of the more interesting moments she’d had lately.
“Okay then,” Becca said, and Elizabeth thought she sounded like she’d run out of steam. “I guess I’m going to go play soccer. But, Mrs. Herrera?”
“Yes, Becca?”
“My next-door neighbor, Mrs. Quentin, is pretty old and she’s looking for a live-in companion. Do you think Sam’s too young to do that? Because if he lived with Mrs. Quentin, he’d be back in our school district.”
Mrs. Herrera started to laugh. “Oh, Becca! Yes, Sam’s too young—” Then she stopped short and her eyes went wide. “But his mother’s not. Could you e-mail me Mrs. Quentin’s contact information? Maybe she and Sam’s mom could talk.”
Later Elizabeth would swear that even though it was a cloudy day, a beam of sunlight had come through the window and lit up Becca’s face. “I’ll do it as soon as I get home! And Mrs. Herrera, when I do? Would you e-mail my mom and tell her you’re happy I’m in your class this year? Because… well, that’s what my teachers usually do.” Now Becca stopped short, bit her lower lip. “You don’t have to say I’m your favorite or anything. You just have to say I’ve been good.”
Mrs. Herrera looked like she might cry again. “Becca, I’ll send that e-mail right now,” she said, turning to her computer. “And I’ll also tell her how much I love your new haircut.”
Becca grinned. “I look pretty awesome, don’t I?”
* * *
“You got something in the mail,” her grandmother said when Elizabeth walked into the kitchen that afternoon. “Strike that. Someone left you something in the mailbox. It wasn’t actually mailed. No stamps on it, anyway.”
“You’re confusing me, Bela,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve got mail that isn’t mail?”
“Isn’
t that what I just said? It’s on the counter next to the toaster. What do you want for snack? Peanut butter on apple slices?”
“Maybe later,” Elizabeth said. “My teacher gave me some Oreos she had in her desk.”
“Not stale Oreos, I hope.”
Elizabeth laughed. “A little stale, but still good.”
The envelope on the counter was large and padded. Someone had printed her name and address on it, but there was no return address. It was all very mysterious.
“So, open it!” Bela said, sitting down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. “Aren’t you dying to see what’s inside?”
“It’s probably nothing,” Elizabeth said, wishing her grandmother wasn’t so nosy. She’d rather take the envelope upstairs and think about what it might be for a little while. It probably was nothing, but who knew? Maybe it was something. Maybe it was a gift from a secret admirer, or, or—a ransom note! Not that she was aware of anything (or anyone) missing, but maybe somebody had stolen her bike out the garage or taken one of the garden gnomes without anyone noticing.
“Open and see!” her grandmother urged. “It’s been a boring day around here. I could use some excitement.”
Elizabeth carried the envelope over to the table and sat down. Usually she was glad Bela had moved in with them over the summer—it meant she didn’t have to go to extended-day study hall after school, for one thing—but on days like today, she wished she could have a little privacy. Bela wasn’t very big on privacy.
She carefully peeled back the flap and gently shook the envelope. A folded piece of notebook paper taped to a picture frame slid out. She unstuck the paper and unfolded it.
“Read it!” her grandmother ordered. “I want to know what it says.”
Elizabeth held up her hand. “I’m going to read it to myself. Maybe it’s personal.”
Her grandmother sighed. “If you’re going to be that way, I’m going upstairs. It’s time for Love It or List It.”
Elizabeth waited until she heard Bela’s footsteps on the stairs to read the note. She didn’t recognize the handwriting, though clearly it belonged to a girl. Should she peek at the bottom? No, she wanted to be surprised.
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