Leaving Fishers Read Free

She’d always have a friend around.
    The driver of the blue car ducked down out of sight. Dorry’s arm froze, mid-wave. Then, embarrassed, she let it fall back to her side. She watched the car. That had been Angela, hadn’t it?Maybe she was getting something out of her glove compartment. Maybe she’d dropped a contact. Dorry waited, uncertain, but no blond head reappeared. She took two steps back toward the car, ready to ask Angela if she needed any help. Then she stopped. What if it wasn’t Angela? What if it was someone coming to Northview to buy drugs? She’d overheard people talking on the bus. There were drug dealers around.
    Dorry turned around, shivering as though she had just barely saved herself from being killed in a drug-war shootout. She hurried on to her family’s apartment.
    “Dorry? That you?” Her mother called from the bedroom.
    Dorry was still blinking at the door, trying once again to adjust to the sight of her family’s familiar furniture crammed into the still-unfamiliar apartment. The overstuffed couch, with its pattern of brown and red autumn leaves, just didn’t look right without the matching love seat, the scarred end tables on either side, or the pine paneling behind it. But the couch, the coffee table, the recliner, and the TV completely filled the living room. Getting from the front door to the kitchen was like running an obstacle course.
    Dorry’s mother came out from her bedroom.Her gray pin curls were uncharacteristically mussed, and the left side of her face had strange indentations, like the chenille pattern of her bedspread.
    “Mom? Were you sleeping?” Dorry dropped her books on the floor and sank onto the couch.
    “No, I just lay down for a few minutes. Don’t know why 1 can’t get my get-up-and-go back from this move. Guess it got up and went.” Dorry’s mother shoved her thick fingers behind her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She sat down in the recliner. “How was school?”
    “Okay.” Dorry tried to forget about the blue car. She thought about lunch. Afterward, she’d felt as victorious as the Revolutionary War soldiers her boring American History teacher had lectured about sixth period. Angela and the others liked me, she told herself over and over. Of course they liked me. They asked me to eat with them tomorrow.
    “I met some new friends,” she told her mother. But because of the blue car her voice came out sounding uncertain.
    Her mother let her glasses slip back into place on her nose. She peered at Dorry. “I knew you’d make friends soon,” she said. “I almost forgot—I got good news today, too. I got a job!”
    “Oh, good!” Dorry said. Back in Bryden hermother had worked as a nurse at the county health department. But she’d had trouble finding a job here. “At that nursing home?”
    “Yes. I’ll have a crazy schedule for a while—lots of evenings, lots of weekends. But I’m hoping that won’t last long.”
    “Good,” Dorry said again. If her mother was going to pretend to be happy, she would, too. She’d heard her parents talking about how awful the nursing-home job was. But Dorry knew they needed the money. They hadn’t been able to rent out their house back in Bryden because, with the factory closed, there was no one to rent to. And her parents hadn’t exactly told her, but she’d figured out that her dad wasn’t making as much as he used to. They wouldn’t live at Northview Apartments if they didn’t have to.
    “Between your dad’s work schedule and mine, you’ll have to be on your own a lot more,” Dorry’s mother continued. “But we know we can trust you. And you have friends now, so you won’t be lonely.”
    “Uh-huh.” Dorry didn’t remind her mother they were very, very new friends, not lifelong buddies like Marissa and her other friends back home. Once, years ago, Dorry had overheard her mother telling a neighbor, “You know, I thought I was much too old to deal with another childwhen Dorry was born. But she