The Question of Miracles (3 page)

And Sarah double-knotted her laces before every match, pulling them so tight that sometimes later she couldn't get them undone and had to ask Iris's dad for help.

Afterward they'd get ice cream if it was summer, or fluffy warm drinks from the coffee shop if it was winter. There had never been a day when they'd had to skip a game on account of rain. When they lost, Sarah was always gracious about it, but when they won, she couldn't help but gloat and rub it in. Together like that, with her parents and Sarah, Iris had felt comfortably, unremarkably content.

Sarah's racket leaned against the wall inside the hall closet. Sarah's parents had given it to Iris when she had been packing to leave town.

“It's a good racket,” Sarah's mom had said tearfully. “And Sarah wouldn't have wanted it to go to anyone else.”

Corvallis weather was not tennis-friendly. Iris hadn't touched the racket once since her dad had set it in the closet under the stairs. Not that Iris felt like playing, anyway.

 

They watched a movie in the living room after they finished in the kitchen. Iris's dad built the fire up higher, and Iris sat wedged between her parents on the couch. They'd all changed into flannel pajamas, and their feet, lined up together on the leather ottoman, looked like a set in gray wool socks.

Charles was purring at last, curled up like a skin ball on Iris's mom's stomach. Iris's eyes didn't stay on the screen. Instead she focused on the fire, watching the flickering yellow and orange, the glowing log that collapsed, finally, throwing off a shower of sparks amid a burst of crackles.

It was cozy. Iris didn't like to admit it, but there were some okay things about their new house. Their new life.

But then Iris glanced at her mom's face. She wasn't watching the movie, either. She looked lost, and her face looked older, in a way that scared Iris.

Her mother must have felt Iris looking at her. She snapped out of her reverie and turned to Iris, smiling. “Hey there, Pigeon,” she said.

Iris smiled back. “Coo,” she answered.

Iris loved that her parents called her Pigeon. They had called her Pigeon as long as Iris could remember. The story was that when Iris was a baby, her happy gurgling noises sounded just like a pigeon's.

They watched the movie after that, and eventually Iris felt tiny little weights pulling at her eyelids. The next thing she knew she was pressed into her father's chest, his unshaven chin brushing her forehead as he carried her upstairs. She pretended to still be asleep as her mother pulled back her covers, as her father laid her down, as they tucked the blankets up around her shoulders, as they kissed her cheek—first the soft, fragrant touch of her mother, then her father's roughness—and as they left the room.

The next day at lunch, Boris told Iris, “I have something for you.” Then he pried open the Velcro on his camouflage-printed reusable lunch bag and extracted an apple.

It was mottled green-pink-red and felt cool in Iris's palm.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It's a Pink Lady,” Boris added, his level of enthusiasm way too high for an apple, Iris thought. But he looked at her so expectantly that she bit in.

Sweet-tart juice squirted into her mouth. Her eyes widened. She took another bite. Then another.

“Wow,” she said at last. “This really is good.”

Boris nodded, as proud as if he had farmed the apple himself. “I told you so.”

After that, Iris decided that it might not be completely terrible to be sort-of friends with Boris. It would make her mother happy, she reasoned, for her to have a friend. And it would be easier to hang out with Boris than to go through all the trouble of getting to know someone else. The girls all seemed nice enough, but none of them brought her an apple or anything, and the thought of getting close with any of them . . . well, it wasn't appealing, that was for sure.

So being friends with Boris was one good thing. And the new routine of switching classes every hour—the ringing of bells, the four-minute rush in the hallway between periods, the different desks, each with something carved into its surface, and having six teachers instead of one—those were good things too.

 

It took less than a month for Iris to learn everything she thought there was to know about Boris: he was a die-hard Magic player. He thought Minecraft was way cooler than Cubelands. He had four siblings, all sisters—two older and two younger. The oldest was Margaret. She was away at college in Eugene. The next oldest, Eileen, was a junior in high school. His younger sisters were twins—Molly and Charlotte. They were nine.

Because he was the only boy in his family, Boris had his own room, while his sisters had to share. Since Margaret had left for college, Eileen had a room to herself, too, during the week, but Margaret came home most weekends—“to get home-cooked meals and make our mom do her laundry. And to visit her loser boyfriend, Steve. Well, Dad says he's a loser. I think he's okay because he lets me use his employee discount at Max's Cavalcade of Comics, where he works. I just got a Liliana of the Veil last weekend.”

Iris didn't ask what a Liliana of the Veil was. But of course Boris told her anyway.

“Liliana is this incredibly amazing Magic card. She's a Mythic Rare. I saw one for sale on eBay for twenty-five dollars. And the auction was still going on! I got mine for seventeen fifty.”

Iris's house was the bus driver's first stop in the mornings, and before long, Iris started saving a seat for Boris. Once a girl named Heather tried to sit down next to her, before Boris's stop. Her hair was light red, like Sarah's hair, but curly instead of straight. She had a nice smile and wore interesting socks—argyle one day, plaid the next—but Iris put her hand across the bench and told her that the seat was saved.

Of course some of the stupid kids decided that Iris and Boris sitting on the bus together and sharing a table at lunch meant that they were girlfriend and boyfriend, and Iris pretended that it didn't embarrass her when they made kissy noises as Boris slid onto the seat next to her.

Boris seemed oblivious most of the time, but once, when one of the big eighth-graders, the boy who scored the most points at lunchtime basketball, announced, “The fat kid's got a girlfriend! I guess miracles really can happen, huh?” she saw Boris's brow furrow in a way that showed how he really felt.

Neither Boris nor Iris spoke about the incident, seeming to tacitly agree that the best way to handle stupid people was to pretend they didn't exist. She wondered who Boris had sat next to before she moved to town, but didn't ask. If Sarah had been there, things would have been different. She never let people get away with that sort of stuff. At home, whenever Iris pointed out stuff like that, Sarah had known what to do.

Iris remembered something Sarah used to say, about Iris's name—how an iris is the name of a flower, but also a part of the eye. She used to say that Iris was sweet like a flower, but a “seer,” too, someone who noticed things that might not be obvious to everyone else.

Iris had loved that, the idea that just by noticing what was around her, she was doing something maybe important. She'd point things out to Sarah, and Sarah would act.

But without Sarah, Iris didn't know what to do with the things she noticed—the way so many of the kids mocked Boris, the way he pretended not to care but really, Iris knew, he did.

Back home, with Sarah, Iris felt that she had been better in every way. More complete. With Sarah, she had been balanced and whole. Here, far from home and from Sarah, amid all the rain and all these strangers, Iris felt . . . halved.

She and Boris had most of their classes in common, though Boris was in a more advanced math and Iris was a year ahead in Spanish.

Most of the time Iris could float along, minding her own business. But the girls from the first day on the bus—the heart drawers—were in her Spanish class, too. Starla and Isobel.

And, watching Starla and Isobel's steps fall in unison as they headed together out of class when the bell screamed the end of the period, Iris felt a sharp tearing inside, of sadness and envy, too.

 

A few times, Boris invited her to visit his house, but Iris always made up an excuse, until one day when her dad drove to Portland for some special gardening supplies and her mom needed to stay late at the university to do something with a culture she was growing in her lab.

Her parents said she could go home by herself if she wanted, or she could walk over to her mom's office and wait there, but neither of these options sounded very appealing to Iris.

“Hey, Boris,” she said at lunch. “Can I come to your place this afternoon?”

Boris grinned.

 

Iris borrowed Boris's cell phone to call her mom and pretended not to hear the surprise in her mother's voice when she said where she was going. She promised to call again from Boris's house and got off the phone as quickly as possible, hoping no one else on the bus had been listening to the conversation. At Boris's stop, Iris climbed out along with the mass of kids who all lived in his housing tract.

Walking down the street toward Boris's house, the hood of her rain slicker pulled up over her head, Iris looked at all the houses. They really were like a wetter version of the houses in her old neighborhood in Seal Beach. But things seemed looser here, messier. Lawns were overgrown and wild, not edged around the driveways and walkways. Bicycles lay slanted across front porches; helmets sat beside them like flipped-over turtles. The cars here were older, too, some rimmed with rust, many with bumper stickers that Iris didn't really understand but that seemed vaguely political.

Back home in Seal Beach, the houses in her neighborhood had been packed close together like these, maybe even closer, but she'd never really noticed. Probably it was living out at the old farmhouse—her dad had started calling it “the homestead”—that made her see how these houses were all so alike, and how narrow their yards were.

Boris led the way, staying half a pace ahead of Iris. When they got to his house, Boris stopped abruptly before turning up the walkway. Iris almost bumped into him.

“Here we are,” he said.

“Yep,” Iris answered.

Boris's house had a tired-looking minivan parked in its driveway and a gray-blue front door, which he shoved open unceremoniously before dumping his backpack on the bench in the hallway. He kicked his boots underneath it, so Iris did the same.

The entry hall was jam-packed with kid paraphernalia, almost all girl stuff—pink and purple rain slickers doubled up on the hooks above the bench, sneakers with sparkly laces and Crocs with iridescent butterfly charms, and sweaters and sweatshirts in a rainbow of colors.

After taking off her boots, Iris started following Boris toward the kitchen, where she could hear girl voices. Halfway there she stepped on something sharp and cried out.

Boris turned back and watched as Iris hopped on one foot, rubbing the other. He picked up something small and green from the floor.

“Lego brick,” he announced solemnly. “Here's a question—what's the plural of Lego?”

Iris felt distinctly annoyed. She was beginning to wonder if maybe she should have gone to her mother's office rather than here.

Boris mistook her silence for interest and answered his own question. “It's funny,” he said. “People fight about it all the time on the Internet. Some people say that the plural of Lego is Legos, and some say that the plural is just Lego. You know . . . like the plural of buffalo is buffalo, not buffalos?”

Iris's foot felt better. She stood straight and crossed her arms, waiting for Boris to finish. She'd learned that when Boris got really revved up, it was best to just let him get whatever he was talking about out of his system.

“But really,” he said, laughing a little, “they're
both
wrong. Lego is the name of the company, not the individual pieces. The pieces should really be called Lego bricks, not Lego or Legos. But no one wants to hear
that
little piece of information.”

Including me,
thought Iris, but instead she said, “I'm hungry. Do you have any snacks?”

One thing that Boris could always be counted on for was good snacks. He brought all kinds of stuff to share at lunch, and once she was in his kitchen, Iris could see why.

His two younger sisters were sitting at a round white table, digging into a bowl of cut-up fruit, dipping the pieces into melted chocolate. Behind them on the kitchen's longest wall was an enormous cabinet with glass-fronted doors completely packed with colorful containers, each bearing a neatly printed label:
CHEERIOS. FRUIT ROLLS. BEEF JERKY. TURKEY JERKY. SALMON JERKY. GOLDFISH. DRIED FRUIT. ALMONDS. WALNUTS. PISTACHIOS.

“Have whatever you want,” Boris said. He took out a couple of the nut containers and shook their contents into a bowl, then he grabbed the container marked
CHOCOLATE CHIPS
and poured a bunch of those in too.

“Who's that?” one of the twins asked.

“This is Iris,” Boris said begrudgingly. “Iris, those are the twins.”

A more obvious statement had never been made, Iris thought. The girls were identical down to the ribbons in their hair—light blue velvet. They had Boris's same brown curly hair and thick short bodies. They wore red and white striped tights under blue corduroy jumpers and red turtleneck sweaters.

“Is she your girlfriend?” the other twin asked.

“Gross,” said Boris, and Iris was glad to hear her own thoughts voiced out loud.

“You're the first friend Boris has brought home in years,” one of the twins said.

“Years,”
said the other.

Boris looked half angry, half embarrassed. Iris wasn't sure if she was supposed to respond.

The first twin dipped the last apple slice into the bowl of chocolate before sliding down from her chair. “C'mon, Char,” she said. “
Dance School Dropout
is about to start.”