Sincerely Read online

  Two

  JESSIE WAS AHEAD of me as we walked upstairs to our classroom, and I took the steps two at a time to catch up with her.

  “Hey,” I said, pulling at her arm. She turned around.

  “I didn’t do the reading for English,” she said. “I really hope I’m not called on. Can you tell me what the chapter was about?”

  Jessie never read our English homework, so I was used to filling her in on what the books were about. Whenever we had book reports to do, she would come over and I would tell her what to write down. I didn’t mind because Jessie always brought snacks with her. Besides, she was my friend, so I was supposed to help her out. That month we were reading Little Women. It’s a book about four sisters. They don’t have a lot of money and their father is off fighting in a war. Parts of it are pretty sad, but I liked it a lot. The sisters made up plays and acted them out, which is actually something Jessie and I used to do. Sometimes Haley wanted to play with us, and we always made her be the pet. She would roam around on all fours while Jessie and I acted out the real parts. Anyway, I had already finished the whole book, even though we were reading it chapter by chapter and we only had to be up to the ninth chapter at that point. I had reread chapter 9 the night before, so I knew it really well, but I didn’t really feel like helping Jessie.

  “How come you didn’t invite me?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you go to Bloomingdale’s tomorrow,” I said. “How come you didn’t invite me?”

  “What’s the big deal, Soph?” Jessie asked. “We don’t have to do everything together. You don’t even like shopping. Besides, I’m going over to Melissa’s after and I can’t just invite you to someone else’s house.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Maybe I can see you on Sunday,” Jessie said. “Now can you please tell me about the chapter from last night?”

  I filled Jessie in, but she didn’t get called on during English. I didn’t get called on either, which was a good thing because I was pretty distracted for the rest of the day. I wondered what Jessie would do at a sleepover with her new friends. I bet they didn’t know she was scared of the dark. Whenever she stayed at my house, we always left the light on in my closet so she didn’t get scared. Haley liked it better that way anyway.

  The afternoon dragged on. I kept looking up at the clock at the front of the room to see how much longer we had to go. Finally, there were just fifteen minutes to go before three o’clock. Just fifteen more minutes before the final bell and I could go home. I had to meet Haley in the lunchroom, where all the second graders go for dismissal, and walk home with her. It’s kind of a pain to have to walk home with Haley, but my parents said if I wanted to be able to walk home without one of them or a babysitter, I had to take Haley, too. Haley had ballet after school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I worked on the school paper on Thursdays. But on Tuesdays and Fridays we walked home together. Haley loves walking home with me, because I like to stop at the deli next to school on the way home and buy a cookie or a doughnut, which Mom never lets us do.

  Ms. Brisbin was saying something about our country’s geography, but I wasn’t paying attention. I looked over at Jessie. She sat across the table from me, and I could see the glitter on her eyelids sparkling. On second thought, it wasn’t altogether babyish. It did look kind of pretty. Maybe I would start wearing some myself. I needed a new look, anyway. I pulled the cap off my pen and started a list of things I thought I should buy over the weekend: glitter eye shadow, lip gloss, dangly earrings.

  Suddenly someone kicked me underneath the table and I looked up. Jessie was looking at me funny. “Sophie Turner, do you care to join us?” Ms. Brisbin said. A few people started to snicker. My face got really hot, the way it does whenever I get embarrassed or upset. Why do teachers always feel the best way to get your attention is to humiliate you? I muttered “Sorry,” lowered my pen, and folded my arms over my paper to cover my shopping list. Ms. Brisbin turned back toward the front of the class.

  “As I was saying,” she said, “the sixth grade scored very poorly on the state geography test last month. We don’t want you to go through sixth grade without knowing the geography of the United States, so we’re going to start a grade-wide project. It’s pretty exciting, and I hope you will all enjoy and learn from it.”

  It already didn’t sound too exciting to me, but I knew I had better pay attention since I had just been caught. Ms. Brisbin explained that the other sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Warren, had read about a nationwide pen pal project. Schools could sign up to participate, and then all the students’ names were entered into a big database, and everyone was matched up with someone from another state. Once you were matched up with a pen pal in another state, you were supposed to start writing to each other once a month about what it was like to live wherever you live, and what things were in your neighborhood, and what you and your friends did. Mr. Warren had signed up our entire grade to participate. I thought the whole thing was pretty silly. Our state tests had been four weeks before, and I’d gotten only one question wrong. I thought the capital of Texas was Dallas, but really it’s Austin. Why should I get extra homework if I wasn’t one of the people who’d done badly on the test?

  Ms. Brisbin said we had all already been matched up with a pen pal and that we should write our first letters over the weekend. We weren’t even supposed to have homework on the weekends. That doesn’t start at Victor until seventh grade. A few kids groaned.

  Ms. Brisbin forgot all about being angry with me. She seemed really excited about this new project. “Come on,” she said. “This will be fun. I know you girls are used to instant gratification with e-mail, but when I was young we didn’t have computers in our homes and you got letters in the mail. Trust me, getting something in the mail can be very exciting.”

  Grown-ups are always telling kids about the things they didn’t have when they were young, like remote controls, and DVD players, and cell phones. If you ask me, it doesn’t sound like it was much fun to be a kid back then.

  Ms. Brisbin said we should think about what kids in other places would want to know about New York City and what makes it different and interesting. “Any ideas?” she asked.

  Lindsay raised her hand. She always has something to say.

  “Yes, Lindsay,” Ms. Brisbin said.

  “We mostly live in apartment buildings instead of houses, so we live closer together to a lot more people.”

  Ms. Brisbin nodded. A girl named Alyssa called out. “It’s pretty noisy here, even at night,” she said.

  Jessie said, “A lot of really famous buildings are in New York.”

  Ms. Brisbin said we should think about how some of the kids we would be writing to might never have been to New York. They may have misconceptions about it being dangerous and a bad place to grow up. She said we should write about the things that are great about New York, like Central Park, and the views from skyscrapers, and our class party at the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center.

  As far as I am concerned, one of the greatest things about living in New York is that you can pick up the phone and order food from restaurants and they will deliver it to your house at any time, just like room service in a hotel, but I didn’t think that was what Ms. Brisbin had in mind.

  Ms. Brisbin started calling our names and handing out the forms with our pen pal assignments. “Samantha, here you go. You were matched with someone in Arkansas. Claire, your pen pal is from Pennsylvania. And Amy, your pen pal is from Washington, D.C.” I thought, Washington, D.C., is not even a state. Ms. Brisbin walked over to our table and I looked at the stack of papers in her hands. They looked very official. In big block letters at the top of the page were the words: “PEN PALS ACROSS AMERICA.” Ms. Brisbin said, “Here you are, Sophie. Your pen pal lives in California.” She handed me the piece of paper. A couple inches below the heading, I saw my name and address, and right beneath that was the name of my pen pal and her address: Katie Franklin, 40 Ridgewoo
d Court, Redwood City, California.

  The first thing I noticed about Katie Franklin was that she had two first names. My dad’s boss is named Ed Simon, and Dad doesn’t like him very much. Once I asked him why, and he said he didn’t trust anyone with two first names. Even though I knew he’d been teasing and that was a stupid reason not to trust someone, I still wondered about Katie Franklin. Did it count that Katie was a girl, and that her last name was a boy’s name, so it couldn’t be her own first name, anyway? There is a girl in the grade below me at Victor named Jordan, which can also be a boy’s name, so maybe Franklin could be a girl’s name too. Either way, I wasn’t sure I had much to say to Katie Franklin. I love writing, especially writing short stories, but writing to a perfect stranger all the way across the country is completely different.

  The final bell rang. Ms. Brisbin reminded us to write to our new pen pals over the weekend. I packed up my bag and put my jacket and scarf on. Mom had made me bring a hat with me too, but I don’t really like wearing hats, so I left it in my backpack. As long as Haley and I were walking home alone, my mother wouldn’t have to know, and I wouldn’t get in trouble.

  I met Haley in the lunchroom. She ran over to me when she saw me and threw her arms around me as if she hadn’t seen me in a year. “Sophie, you’re here!” she cried. “It’s my sister Sophie!” Haley loves to show me off to her friends.

  I helped Haley gather up all her stuff. Besides her jacket and backpack, she had a few paintings rolled up to take home. “I even made one for you,” she said. “It’s a portrait. It really looks like you. Do you want to see it now?”

  “It’s all rolled up,” I told her. “We can look at it at home.”

  “Please can we look at it now?” Haley said. “I made it just for you.” Sometimes she can be very cute and I don’t mind having her around. I pulled the rubber band off her paintings and she unrolled them.

  “Here,” Haley said. “This is it.” She held out her painting and looked up at me. It didn’t look like me at all. Haley had painted my skin too dark and my hair too light. There was a big bow on the top of the head, even though I don’t think I had worn a bow in my hair ever in Haley’s lifetime. The lips took up half of the face and she had forgotten to paint in ears. I hoped she didn’t expect me to hang it up on my side of the room. “Do you like it?” Haley asked anxiously.

  “It’s really great,” I told her, and she beamed.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go to the deli.”

  I rolled Haley’s paintings back up and helped her with her jacket and backpack. We went to the deli and decided to get a black-and-white cookie to split. I broke the vanilla part of the cookie off for Haley and kept the chocolate half for me. We had to eat it on the way home, because if Mom saw us, she would want us to save it for after dinner. Our apartment building is only four blocks away from school. We ate quickly and got crumbs all over our gloves, but it was worth it. I shoved the last bite of cookie into my mouth and we walked into the building.

  Three

  I DIDN’T GET to see Jessie on Sunday because we went shopping for pumpkins so we could make jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween the next week. Even though eleven is a little too old to be interested in carving pumpkins, I still like going to the pumpkin farm. The weather had warmed up, but Mom told Haley that she still had to wear pants because we would be outside for a while picking out pumpkins. Luckily it was warm enough that we didn’t have to wear hats, because I would have hated that. Haley put on her jeans and a sweater with puppies on the front. Then she pulled her purple skirt back over her jeans. I was getting used to her new look.

  I decided to wear my pink shirt again, but I couldn’t find my pink sneakers anywhere in my room. “Look under the beds,” I told Haley. “I’m going to check the living room.”

  I walked out to the hall and heard my parents’ voices, louder than they should have been. “You’re right. There’s no reason to come,” Mom said, her voice thick with sarcasm.

  “Don’t try to guilt-trip me, Andrea. It’s not going to work this time,” Dad said.

  “Of course it won’t,” Mom said. “You don’t think about anybody but yourself anyway.”

  “There you go,” Dad said. “You don’t know how to talk without trying to make me feel guilty. Well, I’m not giving in this time. You’re just going to have to accept that it can’t always be what you want. Some of us have to go to work.”

  “I work too, Jack,” Mom said. “This isn’t about your work, and you know it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Dad asked.

  “You know exactly what it means,” Mom told him.

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “I can read minds.” I heard him starting to walk toward me, and I stepped back so he wouldn’t see me. I went back into my room even though I hadn’t had a chance to look for my shoes.

  “They weren’t under the bed,” Haley told me.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m just going to wear my brown boots.” I hated hearing my parents argue. It happened a lot, but it was the kind of thing I never got used to. Whenever Haley and I fight, Mom and Dad tell us to behave and apologize to each other. I doubted that would work if I tried to tell them that, and I felt a little shaky as I bent down to get my boots from the closet. Haley didn’t notice that anything was wrong. “You look like a cowgirl,” she said once I had my boots on.

  “Girls,” Mom yelled out a few minutes later, “let’s go.” Her voice sounded sharp and mean. Mom’s voice always changes after she fights with Dad. I knew it would go away after a little while. Dad is just the opposite. Whenever he fights with Mom, he acts extra cheerful and happy in front of Haley and me, like nothing at all is wrong.

  We go to the same place for pumpkins every year. Without traffic it takes about an hour to drive there, and you need to take the highway. Dad usually drove because Mom hates driving on the highway. That’s part of the reason why she loves living in Manhattan. Most things you need are right in the city so you don’t have to use a car.

  The four of us rode down in the elevator together. Dad turned to Mom. “So you know where you’re going?”

  “Of course I know where I’m going,” she said. “We’ve only gone to this place every year since Sophie was two.” I could tell she was still angry with Dad.

  “You’re not coming with us?” Haley asked Dad.

  “No, sweetheart. I have to go in to the office,” Dad told her.

  “Then where’s your briefcase?” Haley said.

  “I guess I forgot it,” Dad said.

  “If you’re going to work, how come you’re not wearing a suit?” Haley said.

  “Because it’s the weekend,” Dad said.

  “What if Ed Simon is there?”

  “You ask too many questions,” I complained.

  “That’s all right, Soph,” Dad said. He turned back to Haley. “If Ed is there, he won’t be wearing a suit either.”

  We got to the car and I opened the door to the front seat. Haley stamped her foot. “How come Sophie gets the front?”

  “Sophie is old enough,” Mom said. “Seven years old is too young to sit in the front.” Mom opened the back door. “Come on, Haley, get in.”

  The thing about Haley is that once you give her a reason for something, she usually accepts it and stops complaining. She got into the backseat. Dad bent down and helped her put her seat belt on, even though Haley was old enough to do it by herself. “You know, Sophie,” he said, “you were never this pliant.”

  I turned around in my seat and glared at him. “Do you know what ‘pliant’ means?” he asked.

  My dad always tries to make every conversation a vocabulary lesson. It can be very annoying. “Yes,” I said, even though I had no idea what “pliant” meant. I just knew it was something he thought I should be but wasn’t.

  “Use it in a sentence,” Dad said.

  “I don’t feel like it,” I told him.

  “Come on,” he said. He was smiling a goofy smile. />
  “I wish my dad was not obsessed with the word ‘pliant,’” I said. “There you go. There’s your sentence.” I turned back around so he would leave me alone. Dad laughed and patted my shoulder.

  “All right, girls,” he said. “Have fun.” He closed Haley’s door and walked around to Mom’s window. She rolled it down.

  “I know how to get there, Jack,” she said.

  “What will you do if you get lost?” Dad asked.

  “I won’t get lost,” Mom said.

  “Well, I have my cell phone,” Dad said. “Drive safely.” Dad slapped the side of the car and Mom turned the ignition key. Mom shook her head. I knew she was still angry. I turned around and watched Dad standing on the sidewalk, waving to Haley, until we turned the corner and I couldn’t see him anymore. “What does ‘pliant’ mean?” I asked.

  “It means someone who listens to her parents,” Mom said.

  “Come on,” I said. “What does it really mean?”

  “It means someone who’s willing to go with the flow,” Mom said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  We drove through Manhattan and then got onto the highway. Another car zoomed in front of us and cut us off. My mother cursed softly, but I heard her. “Mom!” I said. I hate when she curses.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” I said. “What if Haley heard you?”

  “I won’t do it again,” she said. I glared at her for emphasis. “Sophie, I promise,” Mom said. Haley was singing in the backseat about pumpkins, so I doubted she’d heard Mom anyway.

  “Hey, Sophie, do you know this song?” Haley asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s brand new. I’m making it up now,” she said.

  “Can we put on a CD?” I asked. Mom nodded, and I opened the glove compartment. I picked out a Tori Amos album and slipped it into the CD player. I don’t think many girls my age listen to Tori Amos, but I do. Mom loves her, but Dad doesn’t like her at all, so we only get to listen to her when Mom drives—and that doesn’t happen too often. The music started and Mom said, “Good choice.”