Listening for Lucca Read Free

“She had to go to the doctor.”
    “Her ears again?”
    “I guess so.” The girl crouched down to pat her hands gently over the smooth sand. Then she stood up. “But this is her bathing suit. It’s mine now. Hand-me-down soMama wouldn’t have to buy me a new one. Why did you call her
awful
?”
    “She just … she’s strange.”
    The girl shrugged. “What should we play?”
    “Big slimy sea monster.”
    “How do you play that?”
    “Like this!” The boy jumped into the water and stood up with seaweed stuck to his hair and arms. Then he took a big scoop of mud, slathered it across his chest, and howled in a monster voice,
“Arrgh! I’m gonna get youuuu!”
    The girl shrieked and ran, but the boy caught up with her and dragged her back to the water. She kept shrieking, but she was laughing, too. Her brother swung her through the waves and she screamed with happiness, until it seemed like she could no longer breathe. The boy set her down and they started chasing each other through the shallow water, splashing as they went. They ran along the beach until I couldn’t see them anymore.
    They hadn’t noticed me at all. Maybe I would have gotten along with them. Maybe I could say hi next time. Maybe.
    I sighed, got up, and found my sneakers.

3
    They don’t tend to like me, other kids. There’s something about me they think is very strange. I have to admit: they’re right.
    It’s why I’d wanted to ignore the man on the bench in the park last night.
    I’ve always seen people in odd clothes, which isn’t unusual in New York, so I never thought anything of it. But about a year ago Mom had been invited to a playdate for Lucca with her friend’s kids at the playground in Washington Square Park, and I went along. When we were getting ready to go home, I was standing in the archway at the end of Fifth Avenue, looking up the street, when it
changed
. The taxis and cars were gone, the modern buildings.… There were horses and buggies, and people dressed in gray and black and brown suits and dresses.
    I’d swayed and closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them, everything would be back to normal.
    “Are you all right?” Mom was asking.
    I looked at Lucca in his stroller; he was swinging his feet as if nothing odd had happened at all. Mom wouldn’t have believed or listened to my answer, so I didn’t say anything, and she decided I was faint with hunger and pulled us into a little shop for open-faced sandwiches.
    I tried to forget the whole thing, but then it happened again. Only it was worse. Because I was with kids from school.
    We’d gone on a field trip to the Natural History Museum on the Upper West Side. We went on a school bus and rode in the big semicircle loop where they have school-group drop-off. After we got off the bus, we stood around for a few minutes before they let us inside. We got a glimpse of the pretty park surrounding the museum and of the elevated train that ran up and down the next avenue.
    The trouble was, when we were inside the museum and our guide was talking about the beautiful mosaics they’d put in the many levels of underground subway platforms for the museum stop, I raised my hand. “But the subway is aboveground here.”
    The kids laughed at me. “The subway is
definitely
underground here,” someone said.
    “But we
saw
it,” I insisted. “We saw it before we came inside.”
    Everybody laughed harder. The tour guide exchanged a brief glance with my teacher. “It’s possible, honey,” she said to me, “that you once saw an old photograph. TheNinth Avenue line used to run here along Columbus, on the other side of the museum, but it hasn’t been there for, oh … more than half a century.”
    My cheeks burned. The tour guide changed the topic to science. Or, as the museum called it,
natural
history. Things that happened
naturally
. It wasn’t natural to have the present fall away and suddenly
see
history, was it?
    After eating unnatural chicken tenders shaped