The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. (6 page)

“Have you told Coach you’re getting caught up?” We’re at a red light, so Dad turns to face me. “You know, she may have to send someone else to sectionals unless—”

“She’s
not
sending someone else. I’ll have it done,
okay
?” I pretend I’m still arranging my binders. We’ve had this conversation about homework and grades and projects about a million times.

I do all the readings and I do all the homework. It’s just that somehow, when Mrs. Loring gives us those multiple-choice questions with the little bubbles to fill in, more than one answer seems like a good idea to me. I’m not a one-bubble kind of girl.

“Okay.” Dad stretches and puts his hand on my shoulder as we pull to a stop in the circle in front of the school’s main office. “Happy Monday.”

“Thanks.” I lean over, kiss him on the cheek, sling my backpack over my shoulder, and grab the leaf book that fell out onto the seat. I hop out of the car before he can say anything else about leaves. Almost.

“Hey, wait!” he calls.

“Yeah?”

“You never told me about that tree game.”

“What about it?”

“Did you decide about me?”

“Umm . . .” The bell is about to ring, and I haven’t used the leaf guide enough to decide what a Dad-tree would be. I flip through the book until I find a short tree that’s kind of chubby and droopy. “How about a dwarf mulberry?” I blow him a kiss.

“Hmph.” Dad puts the car in gear as I slam the door. Clearly, he was hoping to be a redwood.

I just make it to homeroom, catch my breath during the announcements, wait for the bell, and make another mad dash down the hall for first-period English. I sink into a chair and pull out my assignment notebook to make sure I have my homework for the day.

Reading letter for English class. Check. It’s right here in the assignment book.

Math problems 2 through 14 (evens) on page 152. Check. That’s in my math binder.

Review parts of body for French quiz. Check.

Science Leaf Project—Collect first ten leaves by October 7th. Check. The bag’s right here in my backpack. I move the binders aside and plunge my hand to the bottom. Aside from some leftover orange stickiness, there’s nothing. I take out the binders, one by one, until the backpack is empty.

Crud. My leaves are in the back of the hearse. And I can’t call Dad. He’s picking up Rudy Disilvio’s body.

I hope Mr. Disilvio likes nature.

After I turn in my reading letter—the homework that I didn’t lose—I pull a new pencil from my backpack and reach for my sketchbook.

The pencil rolls off my desk and over toward Ruby Kinsella. She slouches down in her seat so she can reach it with her foot and kicks it back to me.

“Thanks,” I whisper. Ruby peeks out from under a thin curtain of wispy blond hair and smiles. She’s a weeping willow, quiet and breezy and nice.

I settle in to draw while Mrs. Clancy passes out papers. I sketch a beech-tree leaf, like the ones Zig and I saw on Sunday.

I pencil in its rough, ragged edges. A gust of wind rattles the window, and I look out. Leaves are whooshing all over the place, flying past horizontally as if they have engines of their own.

I watch them fly for a minute and sigh. They’re all going to be rotting in a drainage ditch before I can collect the rest of my twenty-five. If I could choose a magical power, I’d want the power to freeze time so I could keep those leaves right where they are, finish my project, and take my time about it.

I draw the deep lines that go from the center of the beech leaf to its edges and remember how strong it looked, holding on in the wind. A Nonna leaf.

If I could, I’d freeze time for Nonna, too. I’d go back in time a year—even six months would do it. Back to the days when she knew her way around the market and remembered where she left her purse. It used to feel like Nonna would be with us forever. She never felt old to me until now.

Saturday freaked me out. It’s happening more and more; she just sort of drifts away for a while. She comes back, but there are times when I don’t even think she hears me when I’m talking. I guess I shouldn’t blame her for that. I get yelled at for daydreaming in class at least three times a day. I always come back too.

“Gianna, can you tell us who wrote this poem?” I look up from my drawing to Mrs. Clancy’s whiteboard and see the title “Birches.”

“Birches”? Zig talked about this poem!

“Robert Frost.” I recover from my daydream in time to answer.

“Very good.” She shows us a picture of an old man with white hair, more wrinkles than I can count, and eyes droopier than a basset hound’s. Then she starts reading.

“When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.”

She keeps reading, but I stop there to check out the picture. This guy looks about ninety years old and grumpy too. What could he possibly know about climbing trees? I have to skip a few lines to catch up with Mrs. Clancy’s reading. The narrator talks about how ice storms are probably the real reason the birches are bent over. That I understand. Two years ago, an ice storm knocked out our power for three days, and when it was all over, we had to take down two birch trees that never stood back up. I like this poem, so I catch up again.

“But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.”

This part reminds me of Zig, so I doodle his name in the margin of my notebook. He’ll spend hours out in his yard just puttering around, making slingshots and wiring up alarms for his fort. The kid in the poem spends his time climbing birch trees, really carefully, way up to the top, so he can launch out and swing down to the ground, and start all over again. It sounds like fun and makes me want to try it.

Mrs. Clancy pauses in her reading, and I look up to make sure I’m not getting the stop-that-doodling look, but she just stares out the window for a second, like she’s daydreaming too. Then she starts reading a new part of the poem, and the speaker finally sounds like the old guy in the picture.

“So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.”

He talks about how hard life is, and then, there’s a line that really gets my attention.

“I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.”

I think about those lines again. “I’d like to get away from earth awhile . . .” I wonder where Nonna goes when she slips away from us in her mind.

Is she off swinging birches?

Or out catching leaves?

It seems like she stays away a little longer every time.

Does she like it better there than here?

The bell rings, and I pile up my papers to put them away.

Maybe that’s what we need—a bell to bring Nonna back when she’s gone off somewhere in her mind. I’d be ringing it all the time.

After lunch, I ace my sixth-period French quiz because Madame Wilder lets us write
or draw
parts of the body as she reads the vocabulary words out loud. I may not be much of a leaf collector, but I can draw everything from my
tête
to my
pieds,
no problem.

But ninth-period science class hangs over me like a big old storm cloud.

I spend the rest of the school day hoping for a homework miracle. Okay, maybe not a miracle. Just a stroke of luck would be nice. Aren’t there leaves
anywhere
around this school?

I look on the floor in the hall, just in case someone tracked one in on a shoe. I check the garbage bins, in case some overachiever like Zig threw out a few extras. I hang out by open windows, hoping a leaf will blow in. I even offer to help the dairy delivery guys carry in the flats of little milk cartons at lunch so I can get outside. The cafeteria monitor says no, and when it’s time for ninth-period science, I’m still leafless when I plop down in my seat.

I look around. No one’s in class yet except Mary Beth Rotwiller and Bianca Rinaldi, and they’re huddled in a corner gossiping about Ruby Kinsella, whose pants ripped when she bent over to pick up the quarter Penny Smith dropped in the lunch line. Apparently, Ruby had on purple day-of-the-week underwear with the day written all around the edges on the elastic. There it was for the world to see: “TUESDAY ** TUESDAY ** TUESDAY.” The fact that it’s Monday made it about a million times worse for her. Ruby missed French because she went home to change her pants, and Mary Beth and Bianca are making sure that everyone knows. They are poison sumac trees in the forest of Ethan Allen Middle School.

But at least Bianca’s attention is off me.

A breeze ruffles my hair, and I turn to the window. The sunshine must have tricked Mrs. Loring into opening it, even though the air is starting to feel winter-cold.

Lucky for me, there’s a garden right outside the window with a crab apple tree dropping bitter little apples all over and an overgrown lilac still holding on to half its leaves. I pick up my pencil and wander over to the sharpener next to the window. I put the pencil in and start grinding its already pointy end to a sharper tip, looking at Mary Beth and Bianca, still huddled and whispering, probably waiting for Ruby to show up so they can laugh in her face.

I leave my pencil in the sharpener and reach out the open window. I wish I had longer arms. The crab apple tree is still about six inches out of my reach. I push the window up a little higher and lean out a little more. Mary Beth and Bianca are now repeating the Ruby story to anyone who will listen.

There’s no sign of Mrs. Loring, so I hop up onto the counter next to the pencil sharpener, lean back out the window, and wrap my legs under the counter to hold on. Jackpot! I feel cool leaves in my hand. I grab a few and casually lean into the room to deposit them next to the binder on my desk.

A few more kids have shown up for class, but most of them have joined the Mary Beth and Bianca news hour, so I decide to go for it.

I go back to sharpening my pencil for a minute to make sure the coast is clear. It’s reduced to a pointy little nubbin. I hop onto the counter and lean out in the other direction. Unfortunately, the lilac bush isn’t quite as close to the building as the crab apple. I have to lean out a little farther, and I can almost touch the closest branch when I hear, “Gianna Zales! What on earth are you doing?”

Mrs. Loring’s shrill voice scares me so much I forget to hold on with my legs, and I tip over backward right out the window. I land on my back staring up at the bright October sun, shining through the leaves left on the lilac bush. A breeze stirs the branches, and one drifts down, fluttering off my nose onto the ground. Mrs. Loring leans out, looking first alarmed, then furious.

“Sorry. Just getting some fresh air.” I offer a weak smile and sit up to brush myself off. I know I’m in trouble, but strangely, I’m not upset. I’m thankful. Number one—I wasn’t wearing a skirt. If I’d gone tumbling out that window with a skirt on, it would have knocked Ruby Kinsella out of the limelight pretty quick. And number two—the custodians must have just mulched the garden for the winter. I landed in such a nice deep pile of wood chips that it didn’t even hurt. I grab the lilac leaf that fell, climb in the window, and take my seat, just as Zig walks in and the bell rings. Mrs. Loring just stares.

“See me after class.” She turns on the LCD projector that’s attached to her computer. “Okay, everyone. Take out your ten leaves so I can come around to check.”

Ruby usually sits in front of me. She’s always scribbling in her marble notebook, so sometimes I can sort of hide behind her when I don’t have my homework. She must have decided she couldn’t face Bianca and Mary Beth again because her seat is still empty.

I raise my hand. Sometimes it’s better to get these things over with quickly, like pulling off a Band-Aid.

“Yes, Gianna?”

“I left my leaves in my dad’s car.”

Bianca lets out a snort of laughter.

“All of them?”

I nod. “Oh . . . except these.” I hold up my lilac and crab apple leaves from the window.

Mrs. Loring sighs. “You can work on identifying those. Take out your leaf key and a pencil.”

I reach into my pencil bag. It’s empty. While Mrs. Loring walks down the row of desks on her leaf-checking tour, I zip back to the pencil sharpener, retrieve my nubbin, and settle down to work.

CHAPTER 6

I
escape Mrs. Loring’s room after school with a promise to be prepared for the next class and a ten-minute safety lecture. Can’t really blame her for that. It’s hard to argue after you fall out a window, no matter how low it is to the ground.

Zig’s waiting for me outside the school, fiddling with a bunch of wires hooked up to one of those little Christmas-tree lightbulbs.

“Wanna go for another hike?” He clips two wires together and frowns when nothing happens. “Or did you get the rest of your leaves when you fell out the window?”