You Are Here by Liz Fichera Read Free Book Online Page B

heard myself laughing with them, grateful for new friends. Grateful knowing that not everything has to change when your life nose-dives.

Chapter 13
    Twenty-Four Days and Six Hours Before
    “H ow was your first day?” Mom asked. She was surrounded by job applications in every color, some completed in her perfect cursive, some not. They littered our small new kitchen table like a pile of leaves.
    “Fine,” I said, looking across at her, forcing myself to sound more confident than I felt. “I think it’ll work out fine. Kids are cool. Teachers are nice. Same old homework. No biggie.” I didn’t tell her that my heart had pounded like a freight train at the start of every class when I waited for the teacher to ask me to “tell us a little about yourself.” Or how I almost hadn’t eaten lunch in the school cafeteria until Angela and Marisela showed me how to use the Free Lunch swipe card. I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of the lunch ladies at the cash registers. And I certainly didn’t want to tell Mom about Finn’s orange flyers and the new one I’d spotted duct-taped to a stoplight two blocks from our apartment when Marisela and I walked home from school.
    Even though Mom asked me some of the usual school questions, her mind was obviously elsewhere. Her wallet was spread open with her driver’s license, her Social Security card and a Visa credit card lined up against it. She kept pressing her forehead with her fingertips. I wanted to remind her about Honey. But I didn’t have the heart to go there. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week, if she’d found a job by then.
    Mom’s black pen was flying over one of the job applications. Our care manager from A New Start was trying to help her get an entry position at a bank or a law firm, something where she would prepare real-estate paperwork. Said Mom would be perfect for it. That made Mom sit up straighter, compared to two days ago when Mom slumped with the realization that she was competing for jobs with people half her age with better computer skills and wondered aloud how she’d get offered anything. I really didn’t understand. I was just glad that today she was excited about a job. That would mean we were another step closer to getting our own place again, our own home where we could move back all of the stuff in storage and sit around our own kitchen table.
    “What about you, Jack?” Mom half turned in her seat to make eye contact with my little brother.
    “Great!” Jack said with more exuberance than I’d seen in him in a long time. He sat on the floor, organizing the contents of his backpack. You’d think he’d just been to Disneyland all day rather than a brand-new middle school. Clearly my little brother was the most resilient one in the family. Or the strangest one.
    At that, Mom stopped what she was doing, pulled off her reading glasses and beamed at him. “That makes my day, Jackie Boy. What did you love about it?”
    “Ramon. He’s cool. He makes school fun and he has lots of friends.”
    She leaned her chin in her hands, still smiling at him. “Do you have some of the same classes with him?”
    “No. But we have lunch and gym together. Those are the most important.”
    Mom chuckled. “Naturally.”
    “We’re gonna skateboard after dinner.”
    “As long as you get your homework done.”
    “I finished all my homework in study period. Piece of cake.”
    Mom flashed another smile, the nonverbal equivalent of ruffling his mop of blond hair. I smiled inside, watching them. Mom adjusted her reading glasses on the bridge of her nose and returned to her job applications.
    Then Jack looked at me and curled a finger. He nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his other finger. His gaze swept between me and Mom before he pulled out the top of a piece of paper from inside his backpack. It was fluorescent-orange. And blinding as a strobe light. My eyeballs flew open.
    I stood up, fast, knocking my chair backward against the