Chloe in India

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2014 by Kate Darnton

Cover art copyright © 2016 by Anna and Elena Balbusso

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Originally published in paperback by Young Zubaan, an imprint of Zubaan, New Delhi, India, in 2014.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 9780553535044 (trade) — ISBN 9780553535051 (lib. bdg.) eBook ISBN 9780553535068

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v4.1

ep

For Sophie, Charlotte, and Elizabeth

And for Steve

I was so busy I didn't hear Mom come up behind me. I heard her voice before I saw her, and this was what that voice said:

“Chloe, Chloe! Oh no, Chloe!”

I froze in front of the bathroom mirror. In my left hand, I was holding a clump of blond hair away from my head. Well, hair that
used
to be blond. Now it was After Midnight Black.

In my right hand, I was holding an After Midnight Black permanent marker.

“
Now
what have you done?” Mom groaned.

This, I knew, was a rhetorical question—one of those questions grown-ups ask but you're not really supposed to answer.

Besides, it was pretty obvious, no? The evidence was all there: black marker, black hair.

My mom is a watchdog journalist, which does not mean that she watches dogs and then writes about them. It means she investigates stuff. You'd think she'd be able to figure this one out by herself.

“Why, oh why?” Mom wailed.

Now,
that
was a trickier question. To be honest, I hadn't given the whole thing much thought. It wasn't like I was going to color my whole head with Magic Marker. But
maybe,
if I colored one little section right at the front, then looked in the mirror with my head tilted at
just
the right angle, I could see what I'd look like with all-black hair.

“What were you thinking?” Mom moaned.

Here is what I was thinking:

Every single one of the ninety-eight other kids in Class Five at Premium Academy has black hair. Every single one. In fact, there is only one other girl in the whole school with blond hair, and I've seen that girl sitting alone in the senior school stairwell picking at her split ends. I think she's from Germany, which might be even worse than being from America.

I didn't want other kids to mix me up with the split-end-picking, stairwell-sitting blond girl, so I had decided to rectify—which means fix—the situation.

(For the record, I am eleven, but I like to use big words, mainly because I read a lot. It's one positive side effect of being new and not having any friends.)

Mom had her hands on her hips, eyes all googly. Her lips were clamped into a tight, thin line. It seemed like she was waiting for me to say something.

So I did.

“Well, you're the one who brought us here,” I said.

It wasn't me who decided to move our whole family from Boston, Massachusetts, to New Delhi, India, over the summer. My parents decided that. Well, mainly my mom. “It's where the stories are,” she had said by way of explanation. I was only ten back then, and I got this picture stuck in my head—the streets of India lined with storybooks. Literally.
Madeline
and
Eloise
and
Pierre
(you know, the boy who says, “I don't care!”) were lined up like lampposts along a busy street. Elephants wandered in and out among them. That was what India would be like—elephants and stories everywhere.

Boy, was I wrong. They don't even have a decent public library here. As for elephants, we hardly ever see them. When we do, it's one sad elephant trudging down the hot highway to some fancy kid's birthday party. A mahout sits on its neck, his bony knees tucked tight behind the elephant's ears. He beats the elephant with a stick. Cars and buses honk: Out of the way, you dumb elephant! Out of the way!

Back in Boston, we lived in a tall, narrow brick building attached to other tall, thin brick buildings on both sides. Ours had big windows with black shutters that looked like ears. Huge maple trees lined both sides of our street. The trees were so tall, their leaves met at the top to form a canopy. In the summer, it was like living under a bright green tent.

Our street in Boston was a dead end, so even though we lived smack in the middle of the city, there were hardly any cars and we kids were allowed to play by ourselves out on the stoop. Sometimes we'd sneak white pebbles from the neighbors' Japanese garden and roll them down the steps to see how far they'd make it out into the street. Our building didn't have a yard, but that was okay because there was a city park right around the corner, with a playground and a tennis court and a hill that we would sled down in the winter.

Here in Delhi, we have a park across the street too, but the playground is just a broken seesaw and a metal slide that gets so hot you could fry an egg on it. There's the skeleton of a swing set with chains where the swings should be. The chains dangle there, swaying in the wind. Sometimes street kids tie rags to their ends to make seats, but the rag swings last only a day or two before they fall apart. As for sledding, ha! The ground is flat as a pancake. And it never, ever snows.

The movers showed up at our apartment in Boston on June 13. I remember the date because it was the day after my birthday, the day after I turned eleven. Mom gave them slices of my leftover cake. I watched them through a crack in the french doors. I watched them eat up all that cake, scraping the last bits of fudge frosting from their paper plates with my purple plastic birthday spoons. Then they packed all of our stuff into brown cardboard boxes and loaded the boxes and all of our furniture into a big orange truck and drove the truck to Cape Cod, where they unloaded everything into Nana and Grandpa's basement. Mom and Dad knew we wouldn't be staying in India forever, so they thought renting furniture was a much better financial decision—their words, not mine—than paying to cart it across the ocean. Back at our house, there was nothing left but dust bunnies and seven enormous suitcases. That was part one of moving.

Then we all got on an airplane: Mom and Dad and Anna, who was fourteen, and Lucy, who was a tiny little baby, and me and the seven suitcases. After a very long time, we got off in Delhi. That was part two.

And now a different family lives in our skinny brick building in Boston. A different kid sleeps in my room, while I…sleep in India.

Besides moving to India, here are some of the other things that I did not decide:

I did not decide to be a little sister.

I definitely did not decide to
have
a little sister.

I did not decide to go to an Indian school where I would be the only kid (okay, besides the split-end-picking, stairwell-sitting German girl) who is blond. Oh, and American. I am the only kid (besides Anna) who is American.

All of these things just happened to me.

My mom looked at her wristwatch: 7:15. We were going to be late for school. Again.

She let out a loud sigh. “Let's clean you up,” she said.