Running through Sprinklers Page 3

  9

  THE LAST STRETCH of summer! Things I do with the Andos: run through the sprinklers, slide down the banana slide, wear bathing suits all day, every day, chase after the ice cream truck, drink out of the garden hose, have sleepovers every single night, play hide-and-seek until the sun goes down . . . and, of course, ride bikes to the corner store. Me, James, and the Ando sisters.

  It’s only about a five-minute bike ride down the road by the forest to the corner store, but it always seems so far away. It’s in a little strip mall with a Chinese-takeout place, a laundromat, a liquor store, and a pub. Metalheads with long hair wearing Judas Priest shirts usually hang around outside the pub, but Mrs. Ando told us never to make eye contact with them. I’m not sure if it’s because she thinks they’re dangerous or if it’s because she’s not into heavy metal.

  There is everything any kid could want at the corner store: ChapStick, candy, Wite-Out. We all wander around the store separately for a bit, then meet up at the Slurpee machines, which always look like mini washing machines to me. I pull a lever and watch the neon blue slush coil down perfectly. If I have one true talent in life, it’s filling up Slurpee cups. I’m really good at it, and plus, the younger ones always make a mess when they try. I give Jen and James each a full cup. Then I pull the lever down on a different machine and cherry-red icy goodness oozes out. We go to pay at the counter. Nadine also buys a whole bag of sour keys candy and gives one to everyone.

  With our red-and-blue stained mouths open, we bike home, E.T.-style.

  10

  NADINE CALLS. James and I both answer ( James in the kitchen; me across my bed, in my room): “James, get off the phone.” (He doesn’t.)

  Nadine: “Pleeeease, Sara, I need your help buying new clothes for school. I don’t know what to wear.”

  Me: “Okay, we can go now. My dad can drive us.”

  James: “Hey, can I come?”

  Me: “Get off!!”

  Nadine: “Of course you can come, James.”

  Dad drops us off at the entrance to the department store, which is annoying because it’s on the far side of the mall where there are no cool shops so we have to basically walk through the entire mall to get where we want to go. But I think he just drops us off here because he likes to avoid as many left-hand turns as possible.

  Anyway, I lead Nadine and James through the lingerie section (awkward with James there), up the escalators, through the makeup section (stop for two squirts of my favorite perfume in my hair), and finally we are in the mall.

  We walk through the mall’s long corridor, which goes over 104th like a bridge, connecting the two parts of the mall. There are mirrors along the walls and as we walk I watch our reflection and think Nadine and I kind of look good together, like how ice-skating pairs do, except we’re both girls.

  Nadine stops and points at the chocolate store where they have my favorite hedgehog chocolates that taste like Nutella. “Can I buy you guys an ice cream? My mom gave me money.”

  Nadine gets a strawberry ice cream cone (“My favorite fruit,” she says), and I get pralines and cream (“My grandmother loved it; she died before I was born,” I say), and James gets bubble gum (“I just like gum,” he says).

  We sit on wooden bench: Nadine, me, and James. As we lick away, and as I watch people pass by with their shopping bags, and see a toddler trying to keep up, I have this weird feeling we’ve done this before together, or will again in the future, or that it will be the last time.

  “So what’s our plan?” I say. “I was thinking today we should focus on buying your clothes, mainly because I forgot to get money from my mom.”

  Nadine is silent for a minute. Then she says, “I’m really worried about the upcoming school year. I think it’s going to be hard.”

  “I don’t know if it’ll be hard, but I do know that if we don’t have anything new to wear, it’ll be a disaster. I think we should wear matching outfits, but different colors. Just for the first day of school, of course. It’ll be funny. We are ‘the twins,’ after all.”

  “Maybe,” she says quietly. “I’m actually not really looking forward to school starting. I wish summer would last forever.”

  “School will be fine. It always is. We have each other. Plus, we still have a few weeks of summer left, Nadine. So all we need to worry about right now is getting you some new stylin’ clothes.”

  James says, “Hey, wanna pitch the tent in the backyard tonight and have a sleepover?”

  That night, after Nadine and I go into our separate homes for supper (spaghetti and meatballs for James and me, dunno what the Andos had), the doorbell rings and it’s Nadine and Jen, with their camping equipment in a half circle at their feet, their black sleeping bags looking like big burnt marshmallows.

  In the backyard, Nadine sets up the massive tent she brought over. She used to be a Girl Guide, before dancing took up all of her time and she had to quit. But she got a lot of badges. She can easily make a fire without matches and navigate by looking at the stars. When she opens the tent, it reminds me of an umbrella or a parachute.

  James drags Mom’s old golf bag out from the shed while Jen pulls small unripe apples from the trees. Nadine and I run into the house and upstairs to get Cookie’s cage from my room.

  From my bedroom window:

  We watch James and Jen drive the apples into the neighbor’s pool behind our house, plop plop plop, like rocks skipping on the ocean.

  Later, in the dark:

  Snug in our sleeping bags like worms, we all look up through the thin fabric of our tent at the stars. They are that bright.

  James: “Some boys from my team want to camp in Green Timbers Forest before the end of the summer. Daniel says there is an open field somewhere in there. I bet we could see more stars there. We should do it.”

  Me: “We’ll see. Let’s talk about it another time.”

  Nadine: “Yes, time to sleep.”

  Everyone, separately, like dominoes, says, “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  And with the faint smell of James’s pee in the air (because he ate a lot of watermelon earlier) and the sound of Cookie running on his wheel, we all fall asleep together.

  11

  I HAVEN’T BEEN practicing piano as often as I should this summer.

  When I practice, I don’t really think about what I’m doing too much. It’s not that I hate piano or that I’m bad at it, because I’m actually pretty good and come in first place in competitions and stuff. I just don’t love it, you know, like the way Nadine loves dance. So when I practice, I let my fingers do the work and do my real, true favorite thing: daydream.

  I think I like daydreaming because it gives me a break from it all. I usually have a general daydream that I keep going back to, to see what happens. This general daydream lasts for months, until I get a new one. For a while I had this great one about me living in Hawaii and scuba diving every day with the turtles. And all I ever wore was yellow and orange swimsuits, and I ate pineapples and mangoes and then wrote in my diary on the beach until sunset.

  Sometimes I daydream about things that haven’t happened, but other times I dream about things that have already happened. They are more memories, I guess. Good memories.

  We are all little.

  Nadine and I are in preschool. It’s our first day. We sit next to each other on the orange carpet; it smells like farts, I think because this boy in blue sweatpants keeps farting on it whenever we sit down. We sing, “Bonjour, mes amis, bonjour! Bonjour, mes amis, bonjour! Bonjour, mes amis, bonjour, mes amis, bonjour, mes amis, bonjour! Bonjour!” And I don’t know what it means, but we sing it loudly, screaming almost, squeezing our eyes shut.

  We run from the car to Bear Creek Park, straight for the swings, our favorite. We pump and pump and swing so high that it feels like we might go over and around, like a gymnast on a bar. We slow down and jump off to see who can jump the furthest. It’s a
lways Nadine; I always get scared last moment and do a little hop. Then we go on the tire swing.

  “But there is bird poo on it,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s dried up.”

  “Really?” I say. She nods.

  I sit on it and swing. And she’s right, it’s totally fine.

  After, we go on the teeter-totter and try to make each other pop, not poop, up to the sky.

  KNOCK! KNOCK!

  My brother and I open the door: It’s the Ando sisters, all three little faces staring at us.

  “There’s a rainbow in the sky!” they say. “There’s a rainbow in the sky!”

  And we look.

  Arching over Surrey is the most BEAUTIFUL and SPARKLY and MAGICAL rainbow you ever saw. Like someone threw their crayons in the air and smudged them across the sky.

  Mr. Ando has us all line up across the front lawn under the rainbow to take a picture. I sit closest to Nadine. She’s my best friend.

  I’m practicing piano and looking out the window—you know, the usual—and see the Andos’ van pull into the carport. They all leap out of the doors in floppy straw hats and sunglasses, white-and-navy-striped beach bags over slightly burnt shoulders. Nadine’s the last one to get out because she’s lugging the big cooler. She stops for a moment as though she can hear me play and smiles before she goes inside.

  12

  ME: “You made this?”

  Nadine: “Yeah. It took me four days.”

  We are both standing at my kitchen table on our tippy-toes, looking into a big cardboard box with its top cut off.

  Inside is a super intricate multilevel hamster playground with stairs made out of Popsicle sticks and empty toilet paper rolls as slides. More empty rolls are scattered around as tunnels.

  “My aunt helped me line the bottom part with linoleum,” Nadine says. “So you can clean up his pee easier.”

  “It’s amazing,” I say.

  “You think he’ll like it?”

  “One way to find out.”

  We are alone in my room ( James is out with my dad) hovering over Cookie’s cage. Nadine carefully pulls him out and snuggles him. She gently pets him with her index finger. “He’s so cute,” she says.

  She goes nose to nose with Cookie for a second, and then looks up at me and kind of stares. Not with intensity, but with softness. “Sara, you know you’re my best friend forever, right?”

  “Of course.”

  I hear the front door open. James yells, “Whoa!! What is this thing?!” and Nadine says, “Maybe we should take Cookie downstairs.”

  She carries Cookie all the way downstairs cupped against her chest, then gently releases him into his new playground. He goes crazy exploring everything, and gets stuck in a toilet paper roll because he’s kinda chubby. But it’s all good, because we pull him out.

  Suddenly Nadine says, “Shoot. What time is it? I have to go.”

  This reminds me of when we were little and Nadine was over playing and she wanted to go home but I wouldn’t let her go. I would do everything to make her stay: cry, yell, bribe her (“You can play with my Cabbage Patch Kid if you stay”). All of this made her want to go home even more. Once I blocked the door and refused to let her by, and once I bit myself on the arm and yelled for my mom, saying she bit me even though she hadn’t, but my mom knew me, how bad I could be, and I eventually was forced to let Nadine go. Like now.

  “Okay,” I say. “But we still need to figure out what to wear the first day of school. I can come over tonight and we can discuss.”

  “Maybe. I’ll get back to you. I have a couple of things to do first,” she says, and leaves.

  13

  MOM’S BEST FRIEND, Ms. Cha, is here until school starts. “It’s too hot to be in Korea right now,” Mom says. Ms. Cha lived across the street from her when they were little.

  Mom and Ms. Cha spend the whole night lying on a quilt on the living room floor. In the morning, I come down and find them sleeping next to each other.

  I make them blueberry pancakes (Mom taught me how to lightly press the blueberries into the top of the pancake with my fingertips while it’s cooking) and coffee (Dad taught me), and Mom and Ms. Cha sit at the dining room table and eat and start talking about what so-and-so is doing and why so-and-so is no longer talking to so-and-so. I look at Mom as though I’m disapproving of them gossiping so much and Mom says to me, “Sara, there are three things in life: food, sex, and talk about other people.”

  Umm . . . okay.

  Anyway, they start talking about the Korean War.

  “We fled early,” Mom says. Her father pushed a bicycle from Seoul all the way to Busan, walking and taking the train every once in a while. She sat in the basket on the bike with her younger brother. Halmonie and Mom’s older brother and sisters walked behind, holding hands.

  Ms. Cha: “We fled late. We were so late we had to step over dead bodies that were piling up in the middle of the street.”

  Then they start making those dramatic serious faces that Mom and her friends make when they are around each other. Eyes getting small, then really big. Mouths in a straight line, then opening into a circle. Foreheads relaxing and then tightening, deep lines spreading across, then going away.

  Mom remembers being on the roof of a train and getting off just before a tunnel. Then later they heard that everyone on the roof had died going through that tunnel. “We were so lucky,” Mom says. For a long time after, she thought people rode on the top of trains instead of inside.

  Mom says that once they made it to the south, to a village just outside Busan, they stayed with family there. She and her cousins went into the hills to play with matches and lit the hill on fire. “The entire village came out with brooms to beat the fire out.” Mom and Ms. Cha’s heads tilt back and they laugh, mouths pointing to the sky.

  Mom remembers American soldiers handing out Hershey’s chocolate bars. She says that the first thing she did when she moved to Canada was buy a Hershey’s chocolate bar. “But it was disappointing,” she says. “I remember it tasting a lot better back then.”

  When they went home, years later, they found their house destroyed. Same with Ms. Cha’s house across the street. Mom’s dad had to rebuild and it took years before things were even slightly normal again.

  “Korea has such a sad history.”

  Ms. Cha nods.

  “We were invaded by everyone all the time for thousands of years. China, even Japan invaded and occupied Korea. A lot. But the Japanese don’t put it in their textbooks,” Mom says. “They deny it.”

  She says that Koreans were the best potters ever. The Japanese didn’t know how to do it. “So you know what they did?” She moves in closer. “They kidnapped Korean potters and brought them to the south of Japan to make pots.”

  I can’t imagine Nadine a kidnapper. Mom doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

  14

  NADINE AND I are on my front lawn in our bikinis. Well, she is wearing a bikini, I’m wearing a one-piece. I’m lying down and Nadine is at my feet painting my toenails with paint-and-peel pink nail polish. The sprinkler is on and when it comes around, it just misses my head, leaving a few drops on my forehead and my lower lip.

  Nadine looks at me over her mom’s tortoiseshell sunglasses and says, “I have to tell you something. I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “I’m going to high school,” she says nervously.

  “Uh . . . yeah, me too,” I say. “We all are, eventually.”

  “No, I mean I’m going to high school, like, next week. Once school starts.”

  “What?”

  “I’m skipping grade seven,” she says quietly.

  Her words punch me in the stomach. I can’t breathe. I struggle to sit up. “What? Why?”

  “I need to be . . . challenged,” she says in the same low voice.

  “Says who?”

  “Mademoiselle Jestin, my parents . . . me.”

/>   “When did you decide?!”

  “The last day of school,” she says. She looks down, embarrassed.

  My face is hot. I can’t believe this. Her. “You’ve known all this time?!”

  “I tried to tell you, but I couldn’t find the right moment.”

  She stops painting my nails and crawls up as if I’m on a swing and she’s going to spider me. Face to my face, her legs over my hips and sticking out on either side. She hugs me to calm me down and whispers, “Nothing’s going to change, Sara. I promise.”

  15

  I OPEN MY eyes. They are swollen and sore from crying. I’m on the couch in the family room. I guess I slept here last night. Wrapped in the TV blanket, empty cans of orange pop all around me.

  I feel nothing inside, but my body feels a lot heavier. It’s hard to move.

  The TV turns on. Dad sits in front of my feet, at the edge of the couch, trying not to disturb me. A British news anchor is talking and I look up: pictures of fire in the desert.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Dad: “Sorry I woke you, but a war has broken out in the Middle East and the Americans have sent troops to fight. . . . What are you doing down here?”

  “The world sucks,” I say.

  “Yes, it sometimes does. Pumpkin, are you okay?”

  Dad has this way of always knowing when something is wrong. I look at him and right when I’m about to say something, my brother runs in the room and says, “Wanna go to the pool?”

  The dark changing room smells of wet cement and pee. I step into my damp bathing suit, tiptoeing over clumps of hair on the floor until I’m outside on the pool’s deck, under the sun, blinded.