The Secret Side of Empty Read Online Free PDF

don’t speak out of turn, please. You wait to be called on. Okay?”
    I shivered a little, wondering if the teacher was going to keep trying to get my name right. But she moved on. And I decided I hated kindergarten.
    Later that afternoon, Mrs. Yarrow made us color. I usually got the box of eight and colored with them carefully. But for kindergarten my mother had gone all out and bought the impossibly big box, with colors like chartreuse and cadet blue. And silver. My favorite. In the week before kindergarten started, I had worn down the silver crayon the most, always being careful to color around all its sides so as to not ruin its point. I had drawn a fish and a microscope and a magical little planet floating in space in a sea of deep blue, which really brought the silver out.
    That day, while we colored, Quinn had zeroed in on my silver crayon and had snatched it out of my box without asking. My English was still spotty then. I’d learned most of it from commercials and TV shows. I wasn’t sure I knew enough to ask Quinn to give it back. I tried to think of the words.
    Suddenly, I heard the silver crayon snap in two. Quinn gave a little shrug and dropped it back on my desk.
    I wanted to tell her she was a jerk. I wanted to tell her my mother had had to save up for those and I didn’t know how long it would take until I would get another box. I wanted to tell her that crayon was good for making rocket ships and crowns on princesses and magic moon flowers and that she had ruined everything. But I couldn’t.
    So instead I burst into tears.
    “What is it?” said Mrs. Yarrow.
    I pointed to the broken crayon.
    “Mousy Rat’s stupid crayon just snapped. It was already broken. I don’t know why she’s making a big deal of it. It’s just a crayon,” said Quinn.
    “Now, Quinn, let’s be respectful of other people’s things and also their feelings. Say sorry.”
    “Sorry,” she said, narrowing her eyes and scrunching up her old-looking mouth. Looking about as unsorry as you can look while saying “Sorry.”
    Mrs. Yarrow turned to me, “And sweetheart, you’re a big girl now, so stop crying. Use a different color. Look how many you have!”
    I looked at the empty spot where the silver one should be and cried some more. I had spent an hour taking each crayon out and putting them back in rainbow order. Now there would always be a hole where the silver one should be. I cried harder.
    Chelsea looked at me with her big Chelsea eyes. She waited for Mrs. Yarrow to walk away. Without saying anything, she took her silver crayon out of her box—her box was even bigger than mine—and slipped it in exactly the right empty spot in mine. Her thin fingers were graceful. She had chipped Granny Smith−green nail polish. I stopped crying and looked at her, then at the crayon. Her silver crayon was pristine, untouched. She smiled and looked down at her paper, going on with her work. I sucked my boogers back into my nose and went back to coloring mine, too.
    It was then I knew I wanted to stick by this girl for life.
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
    M y room is narrow, with Jose’s little twin bed on one side and my folded-up futon on the other. It doesn’t feel mine much, maybe because it’s the fourth bedroom I’ve had in as many years. I bump my head into the model airplane hanging from a clear wire. I’m pretty sure that big chunk of dust has been on it since about three apartments ago.
    We are what people would call poor. People around here, anyway. The trouble with having parents with no papers: they can’t get very good jobs. You need a Social Security number for everything from garbage man to clerk at Walmart. So being an office dude with health insurance and paid vacation time is definitely out. There are some jobs that pay cash that look the other way if you don’t have a Social Security number. I’m not sure how information about those jobs spreads, but somehow my dad hears about them.
    In Argentina, my dad dreamed of