ALSO BY BONNIE-SUE HITCHCOCK
The Smell of Other People’s Houses
CONTENT NOTE:
One of the many story strands in this collection is connected to sexual abuse (not graphic), which may be a sensitive issue for some readers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2021 by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
Cover art copyright © 2021 by Matt Saunders
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781984892591 (hc) — ISBN 9781984892607 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781984892614
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For the child of the hoodlum, with love
To those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.
—Bertolt Brecht
Contents
Cover
Also by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
Title Page
Content Note
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Angry Starfish
Pigeon Creek
Sea-Shaken Houses
Parking-Lot Flowers
The Right Kind of People
Basketball Town
Alaska Was Wasted on Us
The Stranger in the Woods
There’s Gas in the Tank, Louise!
Acknowledgments
ANGRY STARFISH
Gina pushed the metal snow shovel across the ice, carving a path that she and Poppy could then skate on. Well, if Poppy would quit whining and get her skates laced. Somehow Gina had gotten roped into taking her dad’s girlfriend’s kid to the pond. She’d only relented because it was minus twenty outside and Poppy had looked horrified at the idea. Her dad’s getting a new girlfriend had given Gina’s anger a whole new lease on life.
Until recently, she’d thought it had been waning, but mostly it just smoldered inside her rib cage. It was exhausting, being herself, fighting so hard all the time. She had been almost ready to just give up and let it all go. “Moving on” was what her counselor called it, and Gina wondered if she meant they should pack up and leave town, start over somewhere that did not remind Gina so much of her mother.
Instead, the girlfriend, Libby, had arrived with her cute little daughter, and poof! It was as if someone had thrown kerosene on Gina’s smoldering briquettes of anger. She could feel the flames leaping, the heat licking her sternum. On really cold days, it was almost nice.
“Sure, I’ll take Poppy over to the pond to skate,” she heard herself say. “We could even hitch Alpaca up to the sled and have him pull us over.”
Alpaca was their oldest husky—her mother’s favorite—and the trip would take twice as long with him. Gina smiled smugly to herself, thinking of her otter-fur mittens that never let the cold get anywhere near her fingers. Poppy’s, she’d noticed, were down and Gore-Tex, no comparison to animal skins.
Her dad, though, had smiled at Poppy and said, “You know, I think we have some of Gina’s mittens from when she was little that you should wear. And I’ll put the caribou hide in the sled so you stay toasty warm.” Then, to make matters worse, he’d even given her the fur hat Gina’s mother had sewed while her hands were still able to pull the needle through the stiff leather on the inside.
That was a long time ago, before the disease had attacked her mother’s joints. By the end it had kept her from even writing her name. Gina wished she could forget the image of her mom’s bent fingers gripping a stubby pencil as if her life depended on signing her name one last time. That image was all Gina had left, unless you counted a father who would move on with another woman and smile sweetly at that woman’s daughter. Maybe he thought Gina was a lost cause because she had read a book through the funeral, refusing to look at anyone or anything, especially the casket. She hadn’t known what else to do.
All she had really wanted was for someone to tell her it was okay to fall apart, but nobody did.
The disease was the reason her mom had stopped harnessing up the dogs to go to the corner store, the same one that Gina pulled into on the way to the pond while Poppy sat in the sled, talking to herself.
“What did you say?” Gina asked, stepping off the runners to tie Alpaca to the post.
“I was talking to Elizabeth.”
“Who’s Elizabeth?”
“She’s my best friend. She’s right here.” Poppy patted the empty seat beside her.
Gina blinked at Poppy and felt her lashes sticking together, moisture freezing them in tight crystals. She put her fur gloves over her eyes for a couple of seconds until the crystals melted and she could pry her lashes apart. But Poppy was still all alone, sitting in the sled.
She had overheard Libby telling her father about Poppy’s invisible friend. “We think it’s her way of coping….”
But then they’d noticed Gina standing in the hallway. Libby put on a fake smile and changed the subject.
Gina refused to ask her father anything, preferring instead to ignore Libby’s appearance in her life because ignoring things was Gina’s superpower.
She really didn’t care if Poppy had invented a friend to fix whatever she needed to “cope” with.
