Until I Find Julian

Until I Find Julian Read Online Free PDF

Book: Until I Find Julian Read Online Free PDF
Author: Patricia Reilly Giff
today, sunny and hot, too nice for school. I sneaked out of the house with my fishing pole over my shoulder, slid down along the mud next to the creek, and sat against a tree, heart pounding.
    What would Mami think about my skipping school? What would Abuelita say?
    I didn’t worry for long, though.
    Fishing in the creek would be better than the math review we were having that day. And maybe with forty kids in the class, my teacher might not notice I was missing.
    I could see a fish, but it saw me too in the reflection of the water: my every-which-way hair that I hadn’t combed, my ears that stuck out a little from my head, my skinny arm holding the pole. With a flick of its silver tail, the fish was gone, over to the other side of the creek to rest in the shade of an overhanging tree.
    I didn’t care.
    But then I heard Julian singing, his voice loud as he came along the side of the creek. It was something about a frog that waited to snap up a fly, one of Lucas’s songs. He was on his way home to sleep after a night working for Miguel at the factory.
    I hadn’t thought of Julian. What would he say when he saw me fishing in my school pants, which I saw now were muddy?
    Before I could dart away like the silver fish, there was Julian’s reflection in the still water. He stopped in the middle of the song and I hunched my shoulders.
    But he didn’t say what I thought he might.
    “Saw a frog,” he began to sing again. And I sang too.
    We finished the song and he kept going.
    I stayed there, the song in my head, fishing, until I was sure school was over and I could go home again.
    Ah, Julian. He never told on me.
    But a week later, a painting hung over my bed. It was me, fishing, my head back, eyes closed. My pants were rolled up and muddy. But only Julian and I knew they were my school pants. We both grinned when we looked at it together.

It’s more than hours. It’s forever. The next day, until late afternoon. We eat the sandwiches Felipe has put together. Sometimes we hear him slow down and stop; then he talks to people, but we huddle between boxes. We sleep. We wake. Then, at last, he lets us off near Julian’s house. “Straight along that road,” he says. “I’d take you the rest of the way, but I’m late.”
    We stumble out of the truck; the sun is sinking on the far edge of the horizon.
    Felipe gets out too. We hug and thank him; we promise to stop and see him on the way home.
    “Don’t forget,” he calls as he slides back into his seat. We wave goodbye as he pulls away.
    “I’ll tell my mother—” he calls back, but the rest of his words are lost with the roar of the truck.
    We march along the road, faster now, almost there! At the top of the street we stop to stare at a big house with shiny glass windows. It’s painted white with a line of cactus plants throwing their crooked arms up to the sky. The house is even larger than the one that belongs to Miguel, the factory foreman who fired me at home.
    “Whew,” Angel says. “A rich guy.”
    Julian? No. As I count the numbers on the door, I see that it’s not Julian’s place. Of course not. “I wrote about him while we were in the truck,” I tell her. “You can read it later.”
    She twitches one shoulder. “What is he doing here, anyway? Making money?”
    “He’s not here anymore. At least, I don’t think so. This is just where he was.”
    I walk up the street, searching. “If I had enough money,” he said once, “I’d put up a little house in
el norte,
or maybe even a tent. I’d farm a bit, and draw foxes at night, and the birds and geese during the day.”
    And there’s his house, in the middle of a row of houses; most of them seem empty. They’re attached and lined up the way Lucas lines his toy blocks along the floor. The roofs are flat. You could run on top of those houses from one end of the street to the other.
    Julian’s house doesn’t look friendly the way ours does at home. Charcoal paint has chipped off in spots,
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