It's Only Temporary (6 page)

“Hi,” Skye mumbled, trying to look around without moving her head, to see who else was on the steps. “You could've left without me, you know.”

“I would never do that,” Maddy said softly.

Skye sighed as they began their walk home. She did
not
want to spend the entire semester walking to and from school with Maddy, but she felt too drained by her first day
at Amelia Ear hart to pursue the topic. Also, she admitted privately, she felt guilty about what had happened in the hallway that morning. Should she have said something to those boys? Tried to protect Maddy somehow?

“Are you angry with me for some reason, Skye?” Maddy asked after a few blocks, sounding more curious than worried.

“Why would I be angry?” Skye asked, not answering Maddy's question.

“I don't know the answer to that,” Maddy said, plodding along.

Skye counted to ten. “Who were those boys?” she finally asked Maddy. “The ones who grabbed you this morning?”

“They bumped into me,” Maddy corrected her. “It was a collision. An accident. Only one of them is really mean, Skye. He's in the eighth grade. He grabbed my arm last summer when I was just walking down the road, and he bumped into my – my front. That was probably only an accident, too. But he calls me names pretty often. He almost made me cry once.”

“Which one?” Skye asked.

“‘
Re-tard
,'” Maddy said, pronouncing
the word carefully as she answered the wrong question. “Only I'm not, actually. I'm something else. So he's mistaken.”

“What do you mean, you're something else?” Skye asked in what she hoped was a casual tone of voice. “Are you saying you have, like, a learning disability?”

“No,” Maddy said, shaking her curly head. “Learning's easy for me. I get really good grades. It's the people who are hard! Except for you,” she added quickly, as if not wanting to hurt Skye's feelings. “You're different, Skye.”

“Well, thanks, I
guess
,” Skye said. “But I don't get it, Maddy. What do you mean, the people are hard?”

Maddy frowned, obviously planning her reply. “Other kids sometimes think I'm strange, right?” she finally said, not really asking. “Like those boys this morning. And hardly anyone talks to me at school, but my counselor is helping me with that. She says I should just say hi to people first, and ask them how they're doing,” she added.

“But what does your counselor say is the matter with you?” Skye asked, hoping the question wasn't too rude.

“Nothing's the matter with me, but I have a
syndrome,”
Maddy said, sounding both important and a little mysterious. “That means like a pattern of symptoms – but not symptoms like being sick,” she assured Skye.

“That's good,” Skye said weakly. “But I think you
should tell people, Maddy. Because maybe then they'd leave you alone,” she said, thinking of those boys in the hall.

“Do you tell people everything that's different about you?” Maddy asked, sounding curious once more.

“Well, no,” Skye admitted, thinking of her sketchbook–and, of course, her brother. And the fights her mom and dad were having. “I guess I don't.”

“Me either,” Maddy said, smiling. “So we're very similar, Skye!”

“Sort of, anyway,” Skye admitted. “But – but who was that boy who grabbed you this morning?”

“That was Cord Driscoll,” Maddy said quietly. “He and Aaron Petterson are friends. Aaron is the mean one, Danko Marshall is the big, scary-looking one, and Kee Williams is the other one.”

“You should have gotten out of the way,” she told Maddy. “This morning, I mean.”

“I couldn't,” Maddy said. “I was worried about you, Skye.”

“Worried?” Skye asked, shocked. “About
me
? Why?”

“Because you were just standing there and standing there, with your head inside your empty locker,” Maddy said. “I thought maybe you were stuck.”

“I wasn't stuck,” Skye replied softly, hiding an embarrassed smile. “Look, Maddy,” she said. “You have to get
out of the way when boys go running through the hall like that. Especially eighth-grade boys.”

“They weren't
all
in the eighth grade,” Maddy argued. “The boy who told Aaron to ease up this morning is Kee Williams, who is sometimes pretty nice. He's just in the seventh grade, but he's on the same football team as the older boys, so he hangs out with them. It's an honor for him, I guess.”

“How do you know all this stuff about everyone?” Skye asked, truly curious.

Maddy shrugged. “Sierra Madre's a small town,” she told Skye. “Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, except for the new people.”

“Well, I might be new,” Skye said, “but I'm right about getting out of the way when boys run by, Maddy.”

“Why? Because they're bigger than us, and they might knock us over?”

“Well, yeah,” Skye said. “And also because they're
boys
.”

“But that's not fair,” Maddy said, frowning as they turned into Eucalyptus Terrace. “I'm a member of the planet Earth just like them. I'm just as much a human being as they are.”

“Not in middle school you aren't,” Skye mumbled, but she wouldn't repeat herself when Maddy asked what she'd just said.

I
n spite of what she'd written to Hana two weeks earlier, the days seemed to be flying by. It was now Monday morning, the last week in September, and Skye was sitting on Amelia Earhart's wide front steps pretending to study as she secretly drew the kids around her, an act that was almost making them seem real.

The kids at Amelia Ear hart were okay, Skye thought as she sketched, if you didn't count those football players in the hall – or their admirers, the bad ballerinas, who had earned their name in part,
Skye had learned, by tying the ribbons of old toe shoes together and tossing the pale pink satin shoes over telephone wires up by the canyon, to claim that neighborhood as their own.

But every school probably had girls like that – even Taft Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She'd ask Hana, if she ever got the chance.

Hana had only e-mailed that one time, though, and she hadn't said much. Miffed, Skye had decided to cut back on her own e-mails to Hana – a decision that ended up being a lose-lose situation, Skye admitted privately. But she'd be back to her real life in Albuquerque soon, and then she could smooth things out.

Skye sighed, and she was looking at one of her drawings as Kee Williams, the maybe-nice seventh-grader, walked by. He was tall, thin, and cute, with dark brown hair, and eyes the color of her grandmother's morning tea.