Finding Miracles Read Free

countryside: gray sky above and gray snow below, blah on blah. My breath was misting up the window. Had Em been with me, she would have drawn a smiley face to make me smile.
    But I was glad to be alone. My sister, Kate, hardly rode the after-school bus anymore. She always had some extracurricular activity, chorus, yearbook, debate club. Kate’s my same age, but a grade ahead of me. (Her birthday’s the 9th of April, mine’s the 15th of August, or so it was decided. We’re both turning sixteen this year.)
    Sometimes a new acquaintance will do the math and start asking questions. How could Kate and I be sisters and be the same age but not be twins? One time, I questioned Mom and Dad about how much everyone we knew knew. They exchanged a glance.
    “We’ve just told a few friends,” Mom said, then hesitated. “Honey, I hope you know there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Children come to families in different ways.”
    That inspirational stuff always sounds great, but it doesn’t take the feelings away. I wanted to be just another Kaufman. Was that so hard to understand?
    “It’s private, that’s all,” I tried explaining.
    The funny thing is that Kate looks more Latin than I do. She’s got our grandmother Happy’s chocolate brown eyes and brown-black hair (Grandma’s is from a bottle now) and olive skin that was common, Grandma says, on her mother’s side, before they all got wiped out in the Holocaust. Grandma Happy actually has a lot to be sad about. But that’s a whole other story.
    Kate is also smart. I should know. We shared a room for years, before I begged for my own attic cubbyhole, where I didn’t have to watch Kate put together a report the night before and come home a week later with an A. Meanwhile, I was lucky if I could hang on to a B minus with some assignment I’d struggled over for weeks.
    For a long time, I actually thought I was stupid. All through grade school and middle school, I had to have special lessons. I just couldn’t seem to put letters together into written words and sentences. And I used to get such headaches! I was totally convinced that I had a brain tumor. Once, I overheard Mom talking to one of my tutors. He was saying how he’d read some article about children adopted from the Third World having learning disabilities. “When you think about the traumas many of these kids have been through, it’s a miracle they even survived.”
    Was he referring to me? Was I a
survivor
?
    How could I claim credit for something I couldn’t even remember?
    The bus had stopped.
    “Earth to Mil, Earth to Mil,” Alfie, the driver, called out. Alfie’s an ex-hippie, a favorite of Em and Jake and me. His conversation is sprinkled with misquotes from old sixties songs. Em’s theory is that back in his Woodstock days, Alfie fried his brain with drugs, and his memory cells got all jumbled up. “You gotta get out of this bus if it’s the last thing you ever do,” Alfie sang.
    Very funny, I thought as I filed by, not giving Alfie my usual smile on my way out. He knew something was wrong and started improvising on “Hey Jude” in that soft, throaty voice of his: “Hey, Mil, don’t be a grouch, take a bad day and make it happy . . .” On and on as I went down the stairs. You couldn’t give Alfie a dirty look. He was just too nice a guy with his bandanna and ponytail and pretend-gruff face. So I did the only thing I could think of. I turned around and gave him the peace sign.
    He flashed me one back. His came with a smile.
    Mom was home, talking to Kate on the phone, coordinating picking her up later from chorus. I searched the house. No Nate.
    I rushed into the kitchen just as Mom was hanging up. “Where’s Nate?”
    I must have looked panicked, because Mom’s hand was at her heart. “What do you mean, ‘Where’s Nate?’ ”
    “Nothing.” I tried to calm my voice. “I was just looking for him, that’s all.”
    “Honestly, Milly. You scared me to death.” Mom was