The Question of Miracles

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 2015 by Elana K. Arnold

 

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhco.com

 

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Arnold, Elana K.

The question of miracles / by Elana K. Arnold.

pages cm

Summary: Unhappy about moving from sunny California to rainy Corvallis, Oregon, and grieving over the death of her best friend, sixth-grader Iris looks for a miracle and may find one in new friend Boris.

ISBN 978-0-544-33464-9 (hardback)

[1. Miracles—Fiction. 2. Grief—Fiction. 3. Moving, Household—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Corvallis (Or.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.A73517Qu 2015

[Fic]—dc23

2014000738

 

eISBN 978-0-544-33255-3
v1.0215

 

 

 

 

F
OR
A
LEX
K
UCZYNSKI
,
MY DAD, WHO MAKES ME FEEL LIKE A MIRACLE

Iris stood inside the great big double-wide doorway of the gymnasium-slash-auditorium-slash-lunchroom. It was crazy in there—track marks from wet, muddy shoes crisscrossed the lacquered wooden floor. A miserable teacher sopped up spilled milk right in the middle of everything. Three more teachers wandered the perimeter, keeping an eye on the whole scene, shushing kids when they got too loud, telling a pair of boys to “Cut out the horseplay!” when they started tossing some girl's orange back and forth over her head.

The acoustics were terrible; the voices from the crowd of kids inside made Iris feel like her brain was an apple on a tray, tipping over and knocking against the side of her head.

Back home in California, no one ever ate lunch indoors—lunchtime was a strictly outdoor activity. On the two or three rainy days each year, they'd eat in their classroom while the teacher played a movie, but other than that, they ate outside at concrete picnic tables, just to the right of a big open field. It was humane. There was room to breathe.

But that was back home. Here in Oregon, where it had rained literally
every day
since they'd parked the moving van in the long gravel driveway of the farmhouse Iris's dad had bought sight unseen (except for the video tour on the real estate agent's website), school lunch had to be consumed indoors.

It was another reason to hate it here. As if Iris didn't have a long enough list already. Along with the ridiculous noise of the reverberating voices, there was also the smell—the musty, mildewy, earthy stench of too much rain, socks that never did dry out completely, and wet hair.

But she couldn't just stand there all day. The other kids were starting to turn and stare at her.

There was a table at the far side of the gymnasium, just under a basketball hoop, that wasn't completely crowded. Iris headed there, ignoring the questioning glances on the other kids' faces. Ignoring the occasional smile, too. Ignoring everything.

And when she slid into an empty spot near the end of a bench, she ignored the kid sitting next to her—a mouth breather she remembered seeing in her Social Studies class before lunch. She
felt
him there, though—the aura of his curly hair, the wet-wool scent of his red and blue striped pullover, the weight of him taking up space.

This was Iris's first day of school, even though September was almost over. Her dad had wanted her to be homeschooled, which had sounded like a good idea to Iris—she wasn't in a big hurry to be around a lot of people—but after two weeks of trying to do schoolwork at their kitchen table, with her dad sipping coffee and looking over her shoulder, Iris had insisted that her parents enroll her at Linus Pauling Middle School. At home in California, sixth grade meant being the oldest kids at the elementary school. Here, it meant being among the youngest, lumped into the gym at lunchtime with teenagers whose bodies smelled like grownups and who looked at each other in a way that Iris didn't have all the words for but knew she didn't like.

Iris pulled out her lunch. The boy from Social Studies class was eating a microwaved burrito. It smelled worse than the packed bodies, worse than the rain. Iris could hear him chewing.

To block out the sound, she took a big bite of her apple and listened to it crunch between her teeth. Iris put all of her attention into eating that apple—bite, chew-chew-chew-chew, swallow. Bite.

“You really like apples,” said Burrito Boy.

Iris ignored him.

“You like the red ones, too, or just the green kind?”

“The red ones are mealy,” Iris answered begrudgingly. It was one thing to ignore a tablemate; another thing entirely to ignore a direct question. She didn't feel like being
that
rude.

“Yeah, I think so too,” said the boy. “You ever try a Pink Lady?”

Iris shook her head.

“You should,” he said, enthusiastic now. “They're the best. They're crisp like a green apple, but sweeter, like a red. Kind of tangy, too.” Then he added, “My name's Boris.”

Finally, Iris turned to look at the boy next to her. She wondered if he was teasing her, making fun of her in some way she wasn't quite catching on to.

But his expression was wide open, earnest. His dark brown curls rioted around his face, there was a flush in his round cheeks, his eyes—as dark as his hair—weren't laughing at her, but waited eagerly for her response.

Everything about him was doglike—the way he sort of sat forward in his chair, the way he waited for her to answer, the way his eyes stayed on her face.

Unfortunately for him, Iris was a
cat
person.

She turned away. “Thanks for the recommendation,” she said. “I'll ask my dad to pick some up.”

She unwrapped the sandwich her dad had packed for her that morning—egg salad. At least there was that.

“Your dad does the shopping at your house, huh?” In typical doglike fashion, Boris didn't take the hint that Iris was done talking. Not seeming to care that she didn't answer, Boris continued. “My mom's the grocery shopper for our family. But I make her take me along whenever I'm around, because she buys all the wrong stuff. Like plain Cheerios instead of the honey kind. Low-fat milk instead of whole.”

Iris didn't tell Boris that her dad did the shopping because her mother was busy working at the university, doing important research, or that her dad was actually a really good grocery shopper, and a good cook, and even a good gardener. That was the thing her dad had been the most excited about, when they moved—the gardening. “Can't grow anything in that sandy beach soil. When we get settled in, I'm going to grow all the produce we can eat. Self-sufficient, that's what we'll be,” he'd told them both—Iris and her mom—on the sixteen-hour drive up the coast of California, through half the length of Oregon, and plop into the heart of the Willamette Valley. That's what Corvallis
meant,
even—Heart of the Valley. And the town was surrounded by farmland. Cows and great big rolls of green alfalfa.

But it had rained every day since they'd moved, and her dad still hadn't braved the weather to dig his garden.

Iris tried not to feel smug.

Around her, the other kids were finishing their lunches. And they all seemed to know the routine; when a table emptied, they signaled one of the teachers, who came over to fold the table. Then the kids would help push it to the far side of the gymnasium.

A tall, skinny girl with long, skinny braids rolled out a cart full of balls. Dodge balls and basketballs.

A boy with feet as big as Iris's father's came over and stared at her and Boris. “You almost finished?” he asked. “We wanna play.”

Iris looked up. Above her was the basketball net, strung onto a red metal hoop. The net was made of thin off-white rope, knotted and tied in a series of loops. Each of the topmost loops attached to one of the hooks that rimmed the hoop—fifteen of them, Iris counted. From there the net narrowed in a series of diamonds down to a limp, not-quite-circular mouth that yawned at her.

Iris shoved the crusts of her sandwich and her apple core into her lunch bag. She hadn't even opened her orange juice. She stood and watched as the teacher collapsed the table, as it contorted in on itself.

There was a loud bang behind her, and Iris gasped, jumped a little. She felt her heart pound, her stomach sicken.

“It's just a stack of trays that fell over,” Boris said. “Over there.” He pointed across the gym, where a dozen pea-green lunch trays were scattered across the floor. In the midst of them, two boys played around, one trying to knock a baseball cap off the other's head. “You okay?” asked Boris. He looked concerned, earnest. Doglike.

Iris nodded as she grabbed her backpack and turned away, hurrying out of the gym.

It was a terrible school, Iris told herself. And she hated basketball.

Iris's house was the last stop of the school bus route. They had added the stop just for her.

When she first climbed on board, Iris took a moment to look around. It was just as she'd always expected a school bus to be, just as they always looked in movies—double rows of black bench seats, an arched metal ceiling, those metal-rimmed windows that could open up or down or both, with one pane of glass disappearing behind the other.

Like the gymnasium—and the classroom, and the hallway—the bus smelled damp. And as more kids shoved in behind her, forcing Iris down the aisle to the back of the bus, the closed windows started to fog over with the students' combined warm, moist breath.

Iris slumped onto a bench two rows up from the last and parked her backpack next to her to discourage any potential seatmates.

It worked, which Iris found both grimly satisfying and somehow disappointing. She'd never ridden the bus back home, but she'd always had a seatmate; she and her best friend, Sarah, had been across-the-street neighbors, and Iris's dad and Sarah's mom had taken turns driving them to school and home again. Sarah would have thought the bus was wonderful, with its lack of seat belts and double-hung windows and springy vinyl-covered benches.

The bus lurched forward with a screech of wet tires and a crescendo of laughter and chatter all around. Iris looked toward the window, but the tears in her eyes and her breath condensing on the glass obscured the never-ending scape of green, which was just fine with her.

It was beautiful, this stupid place. It was all the rain. It made everything lush and green, but it also made it impossible to explore anything. Because the rain never stopped.

She hated it, even if it was beautiful. So what to its stupid beauty? Seal Beach had been beautiful too, in a different way. A usable way. The long, smooth sand beach, the straight wooden pier with the burger joint way out at the end of it. The smell of fish, the whisker-thin fishing lines up and down the pier. Iris had loved Seal Beach. She loved its name, the image it conjured—sleek seals sunning on the beach, rolling over onto their backs and stretching in the warm sand.

The bus pulled to the side of the road for its first stop, and the doors cranked open. Half a dozen kids spilled down the stairs and into the rain, all of them pulling up the hoods of their slickers but not one of them opening an umbrella.

“They'll know you're not from around here if you carry an umbrella,” Iris's dad had said that morning, before he'd driven her to school. He had to take her that first day so that he could fill out all the forms, sign things.

“I
want
them to know I'm not from here,” Iris said. Her voice sounded mean to her own ears. “
Here
is stupid.”

The doors swung closed, and the bus was on its way. A row up and across the aisle, two girls whispered closely. For one moment Iris wondered if they were talking about her
.
But then the girl next to the window scrawled two sets of initials surrounded by a poorly drawn heart onto the steamed-up glass, and the other girl shrieked and reached over to erase it with her palm. Then they both turned to see if the boy across from them was watching, and they collapsed into laughter.

It was obnoxious.