It's Only Temporary Page 9

  “At the very least,” Coach said. “This sounds pretty serious, if you ask me.”

  And they didn’t know the worst of it, Skye thought, remembering when Pip had been shoved and kicked around just before Halloween. But that was their secret, she and Pip had decided.

  “It sounds very serious,” a troubled-looking Ms. O’Hare replied. “You kids should have spoken up earlier,” she added, turning to her students.

  “But it didn’t happen in class,” Skye tried to explain. “And Melissa and Taylor aren’t even here. They’ll never get in trouble, no matter what! They’re not the type.”

  “We’ll take care of them later, if this information is accurate,” Ms. O’Hare assured her students. “But you must speak up to an adult when bad things happen.”

  “Okay,” everyone mumbled with varying degrees of sincerity.

  “Aaron and Cord, apologize to these young artists,” Coach said.

  Cord’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t dare disobey. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  “Me, too,” Aaron said, looking away.

  “Say it, Aaron,” Coach told him. “And look them in the eyes like a man.”

  “I apologize,” Aaron said, almost spitting out the words.

  “I’ll take care of some of this on the playing field,” Coach said, glaring at all four of his players. “Some extra push-ups and laps will help remind the team how athletes should behave, and I’m sure the guys will be grateful to Aaron and Cord for the reminder. But the entire school should talk more about this – this bullying problem after Thanksgiving break, so I think Ms. O’Hare and I will take it to the principal, and we’ll talk about doing some school-wide sensitivity training.”

  Horrified, all the kids tried to stifle their groans.

  “I agree,” Ms. O’Hare said, nodding her head. “And for the art activities kids’ part, making things right is important, so my students are all going to chip in to reprint the inserts for the four of you this very week on the best paper money can buy,” Ms. O’Hare told the football players. “So they can sign them for all the other students, as planned, and so they’ll be able to show them to their grandchildren someday.”

  Skye almost lost it at that point, thinking of any of those boys being somebody’s grandfather, but she stared at the ground and stifled her nervous giggles.

  “So, will that do it, Coach?” Ms. O’Hare asked the football coach, who had just stolen a glance at his watch.

  “I believe so,” he said, nodding solemnly. “But do you have the original drawings handy? Because a couple of the boys wanted to keep theirs.”

  “Really?” Ms. O’Hare asked, astonished.

  “Really,” the coach confirmed. “And I’d love it if whoever did them would draw a nice one of me, too, after we get back from break. If it’s not too much trouble, that is. I’d love to frame it and give it to Mrs. Coach for Christmas.”

  Mrs. Coach! Skye was delighted, hearing him call his wife that, and when she looked up, to her astonishment, Danko was grinning, too – but he wiped the smile off his face almost instantly, and he resumed his habitual blank, sullen stare.

  The art activities kids all looked at Skye. “Sure,” she said, croaking out the word. “I’ll be happy to draw a picture of you, Mr., um, Coach. And the originals are right over there,” she added, pointing to the teetering pile of papers left over from the Homecoming newspaper project. “I’ll just go get them.”

  “And then we can all go home,” Ms. O’Hare said. “Because I, for one, am in absolute shreds.”

  Dear Scott, Well, I’ll be home in just one more day! It’s too bad Gran is staying in Sierra Madre for the holiday, but at least she will be celebrating with her (maybe invisible) boyfriend.

  I did get in trouble Monday, in fact all the art jerks did. But the hardest thing was for me to apologize privately to Ms. O’Hare, which I did because I like her, she trusted me, and I blew it. But she forgave me, because nobody’s perfect, right?

  Love, Skye

  (P.S. You are my keyboarding assignment today.…)

  24

  Family Reunion

  “Need to stop?” the Albuquerque airline representative asked, pausing by a restroom.

  “No thanks,” Skye told her, embarrassed both by the question and by having to be accompanied at all, though it was the rule until she was fifteen. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, but stick close,” the woman called out, clacking across the brown tiled floor again with leggy strides. “I don’t want to lose you in this crowd.”

  “You won’t,” Skye shouted, hurrying to keep up. The Albuquerque International Sunport was jammed today with people – edgy parents, scared or excited little kids –intent upon their holiday travels, and Skye was momentarily homesick for Gran, and Sierra Madre.

  “I hope someone’s waiting,” the woman said, sounding irritated in advance over the possibility of some glitch. “Because they’ll have to sign off on you.”

  “Someone will be there,” Skye promised, hoping it was true. The woman was making her sound like an unwanted parcel, which Skye hoped she was not.

  But the truth was, she didn’t know what to expect this Thanksgiving, because – was everything going to be okay with her mom, her dad, and Scott? Or “something like okay,” the way she had put it to Kee last Sunday morning?

  Skye actually felt nervous about her own family reunion.

  She spotted them at once, in spite of the many people pushing toward the baggage carousel like iron filings being drawn to a giant horseshoe magnet. Scott was sitting on a brown leather bench, probably trying to look as if nothing was wrong with him, though his walker – complete with yellow tennis balls on its front legs – crouched nearby. Her mom leaned against a square pillar, while a few feet away, her dad scanned bobbing heads in the crowd like a human radar device.

  Her mom looked old, Skye thought, feeling guilty about sounding so critical – or if not old, older. Her hair needed cutting, and she’d gotten thinner, and she wasn’t wearing any lipstick.

  “Skye!” her father shouted, waving his arms in the air. “There’s our girl,” he announced to his wife and Scott.

  “Darling,” her mother said, rushing over to greet Skye with a warm embrace.

  Her mom still smelled the same, Skye thought gratefully – like lemonade, or something else sweet and citrus-y. She had missed her mother’s hugs. “I’m here,” Skye announced unnecessarily.

  “Oh, you,” Mrs. McPhee said quietly, giving Skye another squeeze.

  “Hi, Mom,” Skye said, her voice muffled against her mother’s dress. “This lady says you guys are supposed to sign something saying I got here okay.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Skye’s dad said, smiling broadly at the toe-tapping airline representative as he scribbled his name. “You have a nice Thanksgiving, now,” he called out to her disappearing back.

  “We’re heading straight up to Santa Fe so we won’t waste a moment of our vacation,” her mom told Skye, sounding excited. “Oh, and here comes Scott!”

  Scott looked a bit fatter, Skye thought as her brother laboriously approached with his walker. It was as though he’d gained all the weight their mom had lost. But compared to last August, anyway, he seemed to be moving around a lot better. “Hey,” she greeted him, feeling strangely shy. She leaned over the front of Scott’s walker to give him an awkward hug.

  “Hey, Skye,” Scott said back. “Art jerk,” he whispered, grinning.

  “What does your bag look like, Skye?” her dad asked, scanning the carousel.

  “It’s that old green duffel,” Skye reminded him. “And Gran put a big orange X on the side of it with tape.”

  “Sounds familiar,” her dad said with a smile. “It should be here pretty soon.” He turned to his wife. “Why don’t you and Scotty go get the van, and then meet us at the loading zone?” he suggested. “That’ll be his physical therapy for the day.”

  For a moment, it looked as though Scott was going to argue, but
– in the spirit of their upcoming mini-vacation, a relieved Skye supposed – he just shrugged, then headed toward the wide glass door that led outside, his mother trailing after him.

  Her dad looked tired, Skye thought anxiously as she stole a peek at him. “So, how’s Scott really doing?” she asked, feeling a little disloyal to her brother – her newest friend, in a strange way – for talking about him behind his back. But she had to know.

  Her dad sighed as the same few orphaned suitcases cruised around once more. “He’s doing a lot better, honey,” he said. “The seizures have pretty much stopped, and he’s not as depressed as he was, and he’s cooperating with his rehab people more. I guess the meds are working.”

  Meds. Becoming familiar with a term like that was never a good sign, Skye thought sadly.

  “It was real sweet of you to answer all those e-mails of his,” her dad was saying, distracted now by the new bags that had started to hurtle down the chute toward the carousel. “One of his therapists was just saying how much his small motor skills have improved, at least in part because of all that keyboarding.”

  How patronizing, Skye thought, scowling. “Well, thanks,” she mumbled. “But I wasn’t being sweet, Dad – except at first, maybe. But after that, I wanted him to write me, and I liked writing him back.”

  So there, she added silently.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be chowing down on chiles rellenos and sopapillas before you know it, Skye,” her father said, glancing at the expression on her face and mistaking it for hunger. “You’re back in New Mexico. Welcome home, honey!”

  25

  This New Scott

  “So, you got busted, huh?” Scott asked quietly in the backseat of the McPhees’ new van, after removing his ear-buds and clearing his throat. He actually looked as shy as Skye had felt about forty minutes earlier, she noted, surprised.

  Skye’s parents sat without speaking in the front of the van – as if there were an invisible wall between them.

  “Busted big-time,” Skye whispered, trying to smile. “And it’s gonna get worse when I get back,” she added, thinking of the threatened sensitivity meeting.

  But at least that meeting would probably keep Aaron, Cord, and the bad ballerinas in line for the immediate future – not because of anything amazing the principal might say, but because of those kids’ fear of further incurring the wrath of the entire meeting-hating student body.

  “Tell me about it later,” Scott mouthed, jerking his head toward the front seat.

  “Okay,” Skye whispered back, and she resumed staring out of the boxy van’s windows at the gray-bottomed clouds above their car, clouds that streaked the surrounding landscape with shadow.

  The McPhees were well on their way north to Santa Fe, about an hour’s drive in all. Albuquerque’s looming Sandia Peaks – bare, brown, dusted with snow at the top, and wrapped with cloud shadows – had slipped behind them. Ahead, the distant snowy peaks behind Santa Fe and Taos – which lay even farther north than the McPhees’ destination – seemed to beckon.

  Interstate 25 shot straight through the desert, climbing gradually as it passed a small town – Bernalillo – and several pueblos that were invisible from the highway. Wild winter-gold grass sprawled for miles in every direction, Skye noted, its expanse punctuated only by the dark green bushes that looked like shaggy marbles someone had flung across the desert floor.

  Skye sighed. The truth was, she was feeling weirdly awkward around this new Scott, because – who was he, now? Obviously, her brother was not the pint-sized hero who’d towed her around the neighborhood in his Radio Flyer when they were little. And he wasn’t the moody whirlwind who’d basically dominated their lives for the past four years. And he wasn’t, thank goodness, the cursing, raving Scott of last summer.

  This new Scott, the Scott who had been e-mailing her for the past three months, seemed unfamiliar to Skye – as if, in the nine months that had passed since his accident, an entirely new person had been born.

  This Scott – in his e-mails, anyway – could be angry and self-pitying, true. So could she. But he could also be funny, brave, and even optimistic, in spite of everything.

  And he truly cared about her once more. They cared about each other.

  But where had this new Scott McPhee been for the past four years, Skye wondered? Hidden, like the artist inside Danko Marshall?

  And why had it taken a tragedy for that person to emerge?

  It didn’t seem to Skye as if their van had driven uphill at all, but it had; they were now only a few miles south of Santa Fe. There were puzzle pieces of snow by the road now, and many more bushes on the surrounding slopes.

  It occurred suddenly to a half-awake Skye that there was so much horizon in this part of New Mexico – spreading for miles in a complete circle around her family’s car – that they must be somewhere near the exact center of the universe, or at least at the heart of the world. “X marks the spot,” she whispered sleepily.

  “Huh?” Scott asked, removing his ear-buds once more.

  “Tell you later,” Skye said, echoing her brother’s earlier words.

  26

  Forever

  “No leftovers. That’s the only bad thing about Thanks-giving in a hotel,” Skye said late Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, as she and Scott sat bundled up on a bench in chilly sunlight in Santa Fe’s central plaza. Behind them, skeletal trees cast lacy shadows on the remains of the snow – dirt-sifted now – that had fallen a week earlier.

  Skye had dreamed about Christmas in Santa Fe the night before, she suddenly remembered, surprised that her imagination had picked the wrong holiday to celebrate. It had been a lavender-blue twilight in her dream, and very cold, with snow decorating the tops of the town’s adobe walls like white frosting on flat-roofed gingerbread houses, and she was all alone. But hundreds of farolitos lined every walkway and rooftop, and they warmed her with their glow.

  Farolitos were simple lanterns made with small white candles placed in sand-weighted brown paper bags, or–more recently – electric lights inside plastic “paper bags,” and they were a real New Mexico thing, especially in the winter. Skye’s dad had told her once that the word “farolitos” meant “little lighthouses,” because that’s what the finished lanterns kind of looked like. And that comparison had been perfect for her dream – because somehow, she just knew that those little lighthouses were guiding her. They were keeping her safe.

  She’d been lost in her dream, but because of the farolitos, she had not been afraid as she wandered through the deserted town.

  And in her dream, Skye could hear the floating, in-and-out sound of people chanting and singing as she walked the empty streets, and the heartbeat of distant drums, and even though she couldn’t find those people no matter which corner she turned, she knew they were nearby. She wasn’t alone.

  It had been so cool.

  “Putting green chiles in the stuffing,” Scott reminded her in the new, painstaking way of speaking he had that made it sound as if the words were crawling into and out of his head one at a time. “That’s the bad thing about Thanksgiving in a hotel.”

  “They put green chiles in everything in this town,” Skye observed as she tried to sketch the sticking-up monument in the middle of the plaza. “But other people’s stuffing always tastes wrong, in my opinion.”

  Scott sighed and looked at his watch. “How long are Mom and Dad gonna be gone?” he asked.

  “At least until three,” Skye said, shifting her bottom on the uneven wooden slats and leaning back against the ornate bench’s cold, green metal sculptural flourishes. “It’s supposed to be like a date for them, remember? The folk art museum, and then their own private romantic lunch. But we’ve got money for lunch, too – just as soon as I finish my drawing.”

  “It’s not gonna work,” Scott said gloomily.

  “Well, I don’t have a ruler,” Skye said, eyeing the tall, skinny monument with a frown.

  “I meant their date,” Scott told h
er. “They’ll still argue. They’ve always argued.”

  Skye was silent for a couple of minutes as she drew. Scott was right, their parents had always argued, even before the accident. It seemed important to Skye that she remember this. “But we’re us, not them,” she reminded her brother.

  “I gotta move around, or my legs won’t work,” Scott told Skye. “It’s freezing.”

  “Well, so move around, then,” Skye told him, because–did they have to do absolutely everything together? “Do a couple of laps around the plaza, and by then I’ll be done,” she told him, softening her tone.

  “I don’t know,” Scott said reluctantly, scanning the crowded area.

  Wherever she and Scott went, Skye had observed in the past two days, a weird sort of vacuum seemed to be created behind them as they walked, a vacuum that caused strangers’ heads to turn as they nervously wondered what calamity had happened that had placed a sixteen-year-old kid behind a walker. Once, some little kids had mimicked him behind his back, and Skye wanted to scream at them.

  That head-turning and mimicking would probably happen in California, too, Skye thought – if the McPhees really moved there.

  Scott stood up a little unsteadily and reached for his walker. “They’ll still fight in Sierra Madre,” he told Skye, big brother to little sister.

  “I know that,” she replied, not looking up from her drawing. “Moving wouldn’t fix everything. But they think it would be a fresh start for everyone.” Mostly you, Scott, she added silently. “Dad might not even be able to get a job in Southern California,” Skye reminded her brother. “Or that tenant in Gran’s rental unit might decide not to move out after all,” she added, trying not to think that far ahead, because – what was the point, when anything at all might happen to any one of them?