Broken Soup Read Free Page B

that’s been there forever. They sell cones out of a window on the street or you can go in and have sundaes in tall glasses and scoops in a silver cup. Stroma sat on Bee’s lap, even though there were about thirty-nine free chairs. She was chatting away about some boy in her class called Carl Dean who’d cut a hole in his shirt on purpose, with scissors, because he needed that exact color for his collage. She was making us laugh without even trying.
    I’d been remembering the birthday party we had there, me and Jack, when he was nine and I was seven. I wondered about all the kids who’d come and where they were now, and if any of them remembered Jack or knew he was dead or even minded. I was wondering which chair he had sat on then, and if it was theone I was sitting on now.
    It was cool and quiet and empty in the shop. I saw a crowd from my class go past the window, yelling, dancing, drawing attention to themselves. Another day that would’ve been me, but right then I was glad to be hidden away at a marble table with a girl who said things I hadn’t heard ten times before. We finished off Stroma’s mint chocolate chip when she’d had enough. Bee tried to make an origami swan out of her napkin and failed. We looked at the pictures on the wall—signed photos of celebrities nobody’d ever heard of. When the waitress took Stroma off to get more free cookies, Bee asked me if I’d thought any more about the negative.
    I hadn’t, not at all. It took me a second just to work out what she was talking about. She seemed interested, so I said I was going to get it printed, just out of curiosity, to see what it was. I wanted to say the right thing so I could spend more time around her. I knew it would still be in Jack’s bin because I was the only one who did the garbage, Tuesday nights. And that was the only thing in his bin, anyway—we never used it. Still, I was thinking I’d just get another negative if that one had somehow disappeared. It’s not like she would ever know.
    After a bit she said, “If you want to print it I can help you. I know how to do that stuff.”
    It was nice the way she said it, not pushy, and she said I could bring Stroma. So I said OK.
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    We went to her house later in the week. Bee lived with her dad and her little brother in a top-floor apartment on the Ferdinand Estate, with a playground out the front and a view across London. The walkway outside her front door was lined with geraniums and daisies. Bee’s dad was called Carl and he had overgrown pale hair and sunken cheeks. You just knew by looking at him that he played the guitar. Her brother was about two. He was wandering around with a Snoopy T-shirt and no pants, which cracked Stroma up straightaway. He had hair the same color as Carl’s, but all matted and curly.
    â€œI didn’t know you had a brother,” I said.
    â€œYou don’t know much about me at all,” she said, smiling. “We just met.”
    We watched the chubby little back of him padding down the hall, Stroma close behind, fussing over him like a sheepdog.
    â€œWhat’s his name?”
    â€œSonny.”
    Carl took Stroma and Sonny off to the kitchen to make jam tarts. Stroma couldn’t stop giggling. I thought her knees might buckle with the joy of it.
    Bee was taking things out of cupboards in the bathroom. She said it would be much quicker to scan the negative into Photoshop and get an image straight up on screen, but she didn’t have a scanner and anyway she printed photos in the bathtub because it was how Carl had taught her with all his equipment. She said the old-fashioned way was better because she liked the not knowing, the time things took to happen. The faucets were on and she had her head under the sink. She was talking to me about this thing called the Slow Movement, which seemed to mean baking your own bread instead of running out for it to the nearest shop, and