3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows Read Online Free PDF Page B

actually barfed on purpose. Maybe she should have just eaten her spaghetti at dinnertime.
    Polly wanted so much to talk about her grandmother. She wanted her mom to come home so she could ask if her mom had ever met her grandmother, if she knew anything about her or maybe even had a picture she could show Polly. Some nights Polly didn’t mind so much -when her mom came home late and just went right upstairs and fell into bed, but other nights, like this one, she hated it. She had so many questions lined up, she’d actually -written some of them down.
    Polly checked the time. Nine o’clock -wasn’t too late. She -wanted to call Jo, but she had called Jo two nights ago and Jo hadn’t called back yet. She dialed Jo’s number anyway. First the cell, and -when Jo didn’t answer, the phone at the beach house. She couldn’t help it.
    “Hello?” Jo’s mom answered.
    “Hi, Judy, it’s Polly. Again. Is Jo there?”
    “Hi, hon. No, she’s out-with some friends. I’ll tell her you called.”
    Judy sounded sad to her. Polly hoped she -wasn’t sad that Polly -was calling too much.
    “Did she get a job?” Polly asked. It seemed sort of pathetic to be getting information about Jo through Jo’s mother.
    “Yes, at the Surfside. As a bus girl. She’s starting tomorrow.”
    “That’s great,” Polly said. For half a second she -was tempted to tell Judy about her grandmother, but she stopped herself. She -wasn’t that pathetic.
    Ama stood at the gate in Jackson, Wyoming, in bewilderment. It had been a long and strange day—the third time she’d been on an airplane in her life and the first time alone. It was strange to be going all this way from home only to meet strangers.
    She wondered -whom she would first see from her group. She wondered what they would look like and whether they would recognize her. She wondered, did they have her picture? Did they know she was black? If so, she would not be tricky to spot in this place. She was the only nonwhite person in the whole airport, from -what she could tell. Did they even have black people in Wyoming?
    Her sister had gone so many places on her own that Ama felt she had no right to make a big deal of it, even to herself. Esi had flown to China for the International Mathematical Olympiad when she was thirteen. She’d been to math competitions in Berlin and Kazakhstan by the time she was fifteen, and when she was sixteen she’d moved from home into her dorm room at Princeton.
    Ama spent her -worry on -wondering -what to do about the things in her bag. She knew the trip leaders -would do an equipment check right away, and she didn’t -want to bring suspicion upon herself.
    “Ama? Are you Ama Botsio?”
    It -was a nice-looking twenty-something-year-old guy -wearing a T-shirt that said GO WILD! He had sporty sunglasses dangling from a cord around his neck.
    “Yes,” she said, swallowing the -word as she said it.
    He stuck out his hand and shook hers. She felt the bones in her hand being crushed. She couldn’t even get through a firm handshake. How was she going to climb up rocks?
    “Nice to meet you,” he said. “I’m Jared. I’m one of your group leaders.”
    “You too,” she mumbled. She gingerly moved her fingers around, trying to reconstruct them.
    “You’re the last flight to arrive,” he said, leading her down the corridor. “The rest of the group is out in the parking lot.”
    She expected him to notice that she was staggering under the weight of her gear and offer to help, but he didn’t. He sailed along at a rapid pace, holding nothing but a clipboard.
    I will be defeated by the walk through the airport, she thought miserably, watching him get farther and farther ahead.
    Out in the mostly empty parking lot there were a bunch of kids milling around a long collapsible table set up in front of a bus. It wasn’t a fancy air-conditioned bus with tinted windows and plush seats where they played movies. It was an old yellow school bus.
    Ama was sweating