Hush by Jacqueline Woodson Read Free Book Online Page A

second when I believe that everything is back the way it once was. We both say Here! and Toswiah’s friends look at me and laugh. I am Evie. I am Evie. I am. The other Toswiah doesn’t look anything like me—she is shorter and round-faced with dimples and cornrows. I want to snatch her name away and press it all over myself. I want to hear people calling it—calling out to me. I would like for her or anyone to be the one that’s disappeared.
    At lunch today, Toswiah and her friends circled me in the school yard. It was cold out, gray. The ground was still wet from yesterday’s rain. I was dressed in Denver clothes—a light green ski jacket and dark green pants. Toswiah and her friends dress like this place—dark colors with designer names showing everywhere.
    “Where are you from again?” Toswiah asked. Her eyes narrowed, but her voice was soft. I stared at her, surprised.
    “Bay Area.” Around us, kids were chasing each other and laughing. There were a few couples leaning against the handball court making out. “San Francisco. You know—the Rice-A-Roni song thing.”
    Toswiah rolled her eyes at me. “Is everyone in the Bay Area named Toswiah, or do you just like answering to my name?”
    “It’s my cousin’s name,” I said, looking down at my hands. “I just haven’t heard it on anybody else before. It makes me miss her.”
    Toswiah and her friends looked at me a long time. Toswiah’s nails are long, painted dark blue with a bright yellow sun on each one.
    Mama’s religion says We are in the world but not of the world. Maybe that’s true. It’s a religion of lots of rules that I don’t believe in, but once in a while it makes sense. This place isn’t my world. My soul isn’t here. I bit my lip. Mama didn’t want us to make friends. It’s too dangerous, she said. I know how you girls tell your friends every single thing. There’ll be time for friends, she said. Let’s just get ourselves good and settled in who we are first. If you’re truly hungry for friends, make friends with the Witnesses.
    Ugh! Anna said. And what? Party with the Bible on a Saturday night? I don’t think so.
    “I was in San Francisco once,” one of Toswiah’s friends said. “It’s a stupid place. Cold in the summertime.”
    “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Toswiah sang, like it was a rap song she’d just made up.
    I smiled. “Mark Twain said that.”
    The other girls looked at me, but Toswiah’s lips turned up a little. She shrugged.
    “Maybe. Maybe not.”
    “It’s pretty there, in San Francisco,” I said.
    “No, it’s not,” the girl said.
    Toswiah rolled her eyes again. “Don’t even go there, Tamara. You know she’s a Joho, and Johos can’t fight anybody. It’s against their religion.”
    “My mother is,” I said. “I’m not.”
    “Then why don’t you pledge to the flag?”
    “Because my mother doesn’t allow us to.”
    “Mama’s girl,” Tamara said.
    “Joho head,” another girl said.
    “So why’d you move here, then,” Tamara asked, “if San Francisco’s so pretty?”
    We had been taught to say we moved here because we wanted a change. But standing there, that reason sounded stupider than anything. What kind of change? A gray, cold place where people thought we were weird?
    “Just because,” I said. “Why did your family move here?”
    “I was born here,” Tamara said. “And my mother and her mother and my father and his father.” She circle-snapped her finger in front of my face, making the others laugh.
    “My father read somewhere that this was a better place to live,” I said. Across the yard, I could see Anna talking to a boy and laughing.
    “It’s the only place to live,” Toswiah said.
    “Oh,” Tamara teased. “Like you’ve been everyplace else.”
    “I don’t have to be everyplace else to know what’s good.”
    If you’d ever been to Denver, I wanted to say, you’d know there were better places. But I stood there