Finding Miracles Read Free Page B

came, trying to figure out what look to put on my face when I entered the kitchen. I felt I owed Mom an apology, but then, if I said anything, Mom being Mom, we would have to have a talk about it.
    “Milly, you should have seen this goal I made!” The minute I came in the room, Nate launched into the story of his triumphs at practice. He raced around the kitchen, bat-ting an imaginary puck. Kate rolled her eyes at me.
    Nate swung and almost knocked Mom over as she was taking a cookie sheet out of the oven. Mom almost swore, but in the end all she said was “foul!” Kate and I laughed. There was no way Mom would ever say the f-word. She was raised Mormon, and even though she’d been quite the rebel, leaving Provo to go to college in the East, joining the Peace Corps when she graduated, marrying a Jewish boy, there was still a prim part of Mom who thought Chap Stick was enough “makeup” and said excuse me every time she sneezed.
    Mom brought the cookies to the table, sailing the plate in the air with a flourish, like a fancy waiter. Nate lunged but missed. “Come on, Mom!” he wailed impatiently.
    Mom set the plate down in front of me. “Milly gets first pick.”
    “Why?” Nate asked, instantly adding “no fair!” before Mom could even reply.
    “Because . . . I risked Milly’s life making these cookies!”
    Even I looked startled.
    “I left the oven on,” Mom explained, pulling up a chair beside me. “What if I’d burned the house down? What if something had happened to my baby?” She squeezed my hand, which actually made the itching feel better.
    Nate was grinning. He loved it when someone else got to be the baby in the family.
    “I saw Em after school,” Kate said between nibbles of her cookie. She was turning the lazy Susan at the center of the table round and round. Any minute Mom was going to tell her to quit, that this was the third lazy Susan in the last year. It was Kate’s nervous tic, an inconvenient one, I often thought, as you couldn’t exactly carry a lazy Susan around with you. Mine was much more portable: skin rashes. “She was headed over to Jake’s.”
    “Yeah?” I asked nonchalantly.
    “There was some hot-looking guy with her. She said he was someone new in your class.”
    Hot-looking? What about his hair? What about his clothes? I could feel Mom extra quiet beside me.
    “Em said he’s older but was put back until he catches up.”
    “Where’s he from?” Nate asked.
    Kate shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”
    I didn’t volunteer. Neither did Mom.
    After dinner, I took the cordless up to my attic room. Em and I usually talked at least once every night, sometimes more if the line was free. We are all heavy users at our house. Except Dad, though sometimes he has a bunch of phone calls to make about private jobs he takes on when the local contractor goes into his seasonal slump.
    Em reported that she had had a great time at Jake’s. Dylan and Will had come over.
And
Meredith! I felt a pang of jealousy. Meredith had been Em’s best friend before Em and I became best friends. It wasn’t that Em dumped Meredith to be close to me, but just that they saw very little of each other now that Meredith was at Champlain Academy, the private school one town over. “I wished you’d been there,” Em was saying, as if she could sense that I felt left out. “Everyone missed you so-o-o much.”
    I felt better knowing I’d been missed, even if Em was exaggerating. “So how was Pablo?” I ventured.
    “What do you mean how was he?”
    What I meant was, had he said anything about the awful classmate who pretended not to understand him. “I mean, did he talk any?”
    “Mil, he hardly speaks English, how could he talk to us? Well, actually, take that back. Meredith tried talking to him in Spanish.” Meredith’s family had lived in different Latin American countries when she was growing up. Her dad used to be some reporter specializing in Latin America, until he took a job teaching journalism