Jakarta Missing Read Online Free PDF Page A

up stories together all the time, and then one day, when I told her a story for the first time, she said ‘You are great!’ It made me feel … all huge inside.”
    â€œI like to dream that I’m having secret adventures,” Melanie said. “I wish I could have one in real life.”
    â€œMom says Jakarta read to me for four hours straight when we moved to Ethiopia, but I don’t remember because I was too young. I do remember Maji, though. That’s in Ethiopia. We moved there because of a cholera epidemic Dad wanted to study, and we stayed for a long time.”
    Melanie was a good listener. Maybe the quest was to make a true friend, Dakar thought. That was something hard and a bit scary. Having a true friend might keep the ice from getting to her heart. But to have a true friend, didn’t you have to be willing to tell some secrets? Okay. She would tell Melanie three real things about Maji. Maybe how on rainy days she and Jakarta would climb into the attic and make up stories for the paper families they cut from Sears catalogs? The families lived in spider webs—American dads and moms and well-dressed little kids all in their charming catalog poses. Sitting by the wood stove, she and Jakarta would turn the pages of the catalog, picking the people they wanted and cutting them out. Then they would carry the people up the ladder into the attic. She and Jakarta had to be careful not to step off the rafters up there because their feet could go through the mud ceiling.
    No, she’d rather tell about outside, about how the first thing they always did was check the passion fruit vines to see if any of the fruit was ripe. “If it was,” she told Melanie, “we’d suck the sweetness and seeds out. The second thing was to check the false banana trees for little frogs that hid down where the rainwater collected. Once Jakarta had the idea that we should toilet-train the frogs so they could be better pets.”
    Melanie giggled. Dakar thought about the frogs, their cool skin against her palms. She and Jakarta usually had to hide the frogs. Any Ethiopians who saw the frogs would slap at the children’s hands until they let the frogs go, would scold them in Amharic, and pull back in fear or disgust as the frogs scrambled away.
    â€œThe best thing about Maji,” Dakar said, “was the water babies.” They played water babies whenever they followed Dad down to the waterfall. The game started where the bushes by the path were thick and you had to be careful not to let stinging nettle touch your legs. The water babies grew curled up at the tops of ferns. She and Jakarta would pick them carefully and hold them, resting in their palms, until they got down to the river. While Dad talked to people at the mill, they’d make boats out of sticks. Dakar could still see the water whirling the boats away, she and Jakarta running after them, down the river, past the mill where people’s grain got ground into flour. She could remember the fine, thin smell of the flour.
    If the boats got stuck, they had to wade in and get them free. The cold water shocked the skin of her bare feet, hurting all the way to the tip of her tongue, but Jakarta said they had to save the water babies. She sighed.
    â€œDon’t stop,” Melanie said.
    So Dakar explained the game. “We would follow the water babies as far as we could. But finally we’d get to a place where the bushes were too thick and we couldn’t follow. ‘Say good-bye now,’ Jakarta would say, and we would call, ‘Good-bye. Good-bye.’ I always asked her where they went, but she would say, ‘It’s a secret. I’ll tell you someday.’”
    Suddenly Dakar realized she was about to cry. She put the tip of her thumb in her mouth and bit it hard. That usually worked.
    â€œAre you sending Jakarta your good thoughts?” Melanie whispered. “One of my aunts says, ‘Trust the