Uprising Read Free Page A

and rushed on.
    â€œYou mean the fire escapes—the stairs on the outsides of the buildings?” Pietro asked. “The Lucianos’ building has some, didn’t you notice? They’re so people can climb down from the higher floors if there’s a fire.”
    Bella counted windows. One, two, three, four ... All the apartment buildings were five stories high. Back home, except for the priest and the one or two families who actually owned land, everyone lived in one-story, one-room mud houses. The women did their cooking in the doorways; most nights, no one bothered lighting a lamp or a candle before going to bed on the dirt floor. Fire wasn’t a problem.
    Bella tried to imagineliving on the fifth story of some wood-framed apartment building. She imagined flames licking up through the wooden floor. She shivered despite the heat.
    Pietro was chuckling.
    â€œI forgot how strange everything seemed when I got here last year,” he said. “The littlest things. Engraved buttons. Food in boxes. Bridges. Doorknobs. Traffic cops. Now I don’t give any of it a second thought. Don’t worry—you’ll stop noticing things after a while too.”
    Bella wasn’t sure she wanted to stop noticing. She was thinking how grateful she would be for a fire escape, if she ever needed one.
    â€œNow, remember, at work today, don’t let them see howmuch you don’t know,” Pietro said. “Just do what they tell you. And it’s payday—Saturdays are when they give out the money for the whole week. But they won’t give you anything, because this is just a practice day, a tryout. They want to see if you can do the work.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, they won’t give me anything?” Bella asked, horrified. “Pietro, I have to make money, for my family, for Mama, for . . .”
    She wondered how he could have misunderstood so completely, how he could have agreed to such a ridiculous thing on her behalf. Didn’t he know how close her family was to starving? Couldn’t he tell by looking at her, Bella, with the bones of her face jutting out in hard knobs, her skin stretched tight, her eyes sunken in? The thin stew Signora Luciano had fed them for dinner, the slice of hard bread she’d given Bella for breakfast—that would have been three days’ worth of food back home. They’d had bad harvest after bad harvest, ever since Papa died.
    Why else would Bella have come halfway around the world, to this strange place, except that her family was desperate?
    â€œThey have to pay me,” Bella said. “And if they won’t, I’ll work somewhere else.”
    â€œCalm down,” Pietro said. He looked around, as if worried that someone else in the crowd would overhear. “This is just how they do things here. Any other place in New York City, it’d be the same. I got you the best job I could find for a girl. You work hard today, next week they’ll pay you. And then I’ll send the money to your mama, right away.”
    â€œYou will?” Bella asked. “Oh, thank you!”
    She walked on, not minding how thick the crowd was shehad to plow through. As far as she was concerned, she would walk over burning coals if it meant help for her family.
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    The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was at the top of a ten-story building. Bella froze on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up and up and up. It made her dizzy to bend her head back so far. This was like staring at the mountains back home, except the mountains sloped down gradually, and the Triangle building shot up straight from the ground to the sky, its sheer, steep walls blocking out the sun.
    Something like terror gripped Bella, and her thoughts tangled:
I cant work in a big fancy place like that.. . I’ll starve and so will Mama and the little ones....Oh, how far away the ground must look from those windows up there. .. .
    She swallowed hard,