Becoming Chloe by Catherine Ryan Hyde Read Free Book Online Page B

space, wondering why things are like they are.
    Then after a while Chloe pokes me. “You’re snoring,” she says. “Stop that.”
    On the walk down to the Port Authority, I hold Chloe’s left hand. She has something clutched in her right, but I don’t ask what. I figure she has a right to some privacy.
    “This was a really bad day,” she says.
    “I know, Chlo. I’m sorry.”
    “But then it turned into my lucky day. It turned around and got good.”
    Her hand pulls away from mine, and she runs to a place under the street lamp. Stands in the round wash of light and dances. Spins around like a ballerina on her toes. Chloe is hav ing one of her ballerina days. “Lawns,” she says, and spins.
    “Bushes,” she says, turning. “Trees.”
    On the word “trees” her right hand flies up and opens and a snowstorm of paper confetti sails. I watch it catch on the wind, settle at my feet. I nudge a piece with my foot. I pluck three or four pieces out of the air, out of my hair.
    “Your house pictures, Chloe. You tore them up?”
    “Won’t need them anymore,” she says.
    I look down at my hand again, and there’s one piece that wasn’t torn from a newspaper or a magazine. The paper is too stiff. I look closely at it and see the carefully drawn head of a snake.
    “My crown, Chlo? You ripped up my crown?”
    “Won’t need it anymore,” she says.
    Then she gives me back her hand and we walk.

THREE
JORDY’S HOMETOWN
    The first place we go look at is a disaster. A basement apartment.
    It didn’t say that in the ad. Also no lawn, no bushes, no trees.
    The second one is a dream, though an unattainable one. I mean, for God’s sake. I don’t even have a job. And I never managed to hold one before. Not with Chloe to look after. So what we’re doing here, I don’t know. But we’re here. Because I promised.
    And I already know Chloe is never going to want to leave.
    It’s a small apartment built into the back of this old guy’s house. Two back bedrooms converted into a small unit. Hot plate only, but with a bath and shower. Furnished. And it’s cheap. Really cheap. I forgot how cheap you can live in this town. When he tells me the price, I actually have that in my sock. So we could actually stay a month. Potentially, we could.
    Before it all falls down. The house is on a big lot with a lawn all the way around. Of course, the grass is getting brown now, with winter coming on. But Chloe doesn’t seem to care. She seems to trust it to go green again. It’s fenced all around, with bare rosebushes against the fence every few feet. In the spring I’m sure it will be incredible, but I can’t imagine we’ll get to still be here by then.
    There isn’t a tree exactly, but in another way there is. The trunk is in the neighboring yard, but branches spill over the old man’s driveway, dropping red-and-orange leaves and whirlybirds.
    That’s what we used to call them when I was a kid. Whirlybirds.
    Those seedpods with tails. If you throw them up in the air, they spin like little helicopter rotors all the way down.
    The old guy is showing me the apartment, and I look out the back window and there’s Chloe in the driveway, picking up handful after handful of whirlybirds and throwing them into the air over her head. Laughing as they copter down all around her.
    How did she know that? I wonder. Maybe she grew up someplace with whirlybirds. The early part of growing up. I don’t know how Chloe grew up. We never ask each other questions about the past. That’s one of the reasons why this works.
    The old man wanders over to see what I’m staring at. He walks like he has steel rods from his waist down, holding everything in line. He’s really old. “She’s an exuberant girl,” he says.
    But he doesn’t say it like an insult, so I decide he’s okay.
    “I think she likes it here,” I say.
    There’s a dog run in the corner of the yard, with a red doghouse at one end. I don’t notice it until a massively overweight,