Uprising Read Free

male and female boarders. No touching our food—if I find anything missing between meals, that’s it, you’re out in the streets. No bringing friends here. No using our soap. If you want your sheets clean, you use your own soap, you wash them yourselves. But not too much, because I won’t have you making my linens thread-bare, using them up. No taking our candles—buy your own if you need them. No . . .”
    Bella barely listened.
    None of this matters,
she told herself.
Pietro will take care of me.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    â€œYou should probably tell them you’re fifteen,” Pietro said the next morning as he walked Bella to her first day at her new job.
    â€œI am fifteen,” Bella said.
    â€œReally?” Pietro said, looking at her sideways in a way that made Bella notice his eyelashes, as long as a girl’s, curving up from his dark eyes.
    â€œWell, I
think
so,” Bella said. “As near as Mama can figure. Of course, it’s written down at the church, back home, but it’s not like we could have bothered the priest to look up the baptism records for someone like me. . . .”
    She was babbling. She stopped talking and clenched her teeth firmly together, because she didn’t want Pietro to think she was foolish. She concentrated on dodging a peddler who seemed intent on shoving his cart right into her path. She narrowly missed stepping out in front of a huge horse pulling a wagon full of—was that ice?
Ice
in the summertime, glistening between layers of straw?
    â€œCareful,” Pietro said, because while she was gawking at the ice, another peddler
had
rammed his cart into her leg. Pietro jerked her away at the last minute, so it was only a glancing blow. But now he was leading her through an impossibly narrow gap between a man puffing on a cigar and a lady with a towering hat.
    â€œIs it—always—this—crowded?” Bella managed to pant.
    â€œCrowded?” Pietro glanced around as if he’d just noticed the cigar man and the hat lady. “This is nothing. On Saturdays, a lot of people don’t come out until later in the day.”
    Bella didn’t even want to think about what the sidewalk would be like later in the day. Already, there were probably more people crammed in around her than lived in her entire village of Calia. Even on saints days back home, when everyone marched up to the church, nobody packed together this tightly. And those were people she knew. These were total strangers jostling against her, their elbows brushing hers, their packages jabbing against her chest.
    Bella longed to clutch Pietro’s arm as she had yesterday, to cling to him for protection. But somehow she couldn’t. Touching him would mean something different today. She’d lain awake last night trying to remember how close a cousin Pietro was—was her grandfather his grandmother’s brother? Or was the connection her father and Pietro’s mother? It hadn’t mattered, back in Italy. Pietro had grown up in another village. She remembered seeing him only once, at a funeral. But now . . . what were the rules in America about cousins getting married?
    Even in the dark, her back against the wall, two of Signora Luciano’s filthy children snoring beside her, just thinking that question had made her blush. She felt the heat rising in her cheeks now, in the daylight. She tilted her head back, hoping for a cool breeze on her face. But the air around her was hot and still and stale. In America, it seemed, even air got trapped in the crowd.
    Bella gasped.
    â€œWhat’s that?” she asked, pointing upward.
    â€œJust more tenement buildings,” Pietro said, shrugging.
    â€œNo,
there,”
she said. “Those metal things, running down the side of the building like caterpillars. There’s one there— and there and—” She narrowly missed poking a man in the eye. He scowled at her, spat,