Free Unbroken by Paula Morris

boy at St. Simeon’s and tell them to shut their big mouths.
    “Rebecca! Ling!” Her father was calling them, and Rebecca practically sprinted to the kitchen.
    “I don’t know why we never make this,” he was telling Aunt Claudia when Rebecca walked in, Ling trailing behind. He held plates aloft while Aunt Claudia ladled out a brownish stew of beans and spicy sausage onto steaming mounds of rice. “Those red beans smell so good.”
    “Red beans and rice, every Monday night,” Aunt Claudia told Ling. “This is what people all over the city are eating right now. Nothing changes in New Orleans.”
    Nothing changes . Rebecca sat down at the kitchen table, her aunt’s words echoing in her head. A year was a short time in a city as old as this. Nothing had changed. Rebecca had been deluding herself if she’d thought anything else.
     
    Aunt Claudia insisted on driving them home, and Aurelia insisted on coming along for the ride, so Rebecca was pressed up against a window, her nose almost touching the glass.
    It was dark now, and the squat palm trees planted down the narrow median strip — which New Orleanians called the “neutral ground” — looked dense and mysterious. The only othercars driving along Rampart Street seemed to be taxis, but the lack of traffic didn’t deter Aunt Claudia from her favorite habits: driving the most circuitous route, driving as slowly as possible, and missing the turn.
    “I think that was where we have to turn, back there,” said her father, in the front seat. “But we can turn — oh!”
    Rather than just take the next right into the Quarter, and wend through the one-way grid of streets, Aunt Claudia pulled one of Miss Viola’s maneuvers and performed an abrupt U-turn on Rampart. Aurelia, who was squashed in the middle, lurched into Rebecca, and Rebecca banged her forehead on the window.
    “Ouch,” she said, staring ruefully over at the other side of Rampart Street, where they should have been driving. There was their corner, with the four grand town houses in a row. Well, three grand town houses and one unloved, derelict one at the end, screaming out for paint and tenants and new window shutters.
    Except tonight the top-floor gallery was illuminated by an eerie, silvery glow, stronger than candlelight but not bright enough to be electricity. Rebecca looked closer. It was almost like a mist, or maybe like smoke — but neither of those things made sense, because Rebecca associated mist and smoke with darkness, and this was a soft, wispy light.
    She craned her neck, trying to see where it was coming from. Had someone found their way inside? She’d heard aboutvagrants and squatters colonizing empty houses, but it seemed strange they would head for the very top floor.
    Then a girl appeared — practically wafted to the gallery’s railings — and leaned out. Rebecca gasped.
    “What is it?” Aurelia wanted to know.
    “Up there — look.” Rebecca pointed to the town house. The girl was dark-haired and wore a white dress of some kind, maybe a nightgown. She gripped the railings, looking up and down the street.
    “That old house.” Aurelia seemed disappointed. “Is it falling down?”
    Aunt Claudia made another one of her wide U-turns, and Rebecca couldn’t see anything anymore.
    “Aunt Claudia!” she called. “Would it be OK if you let us out on the corner of Orleans?”
    “That’s a good idea,” her father said, probably worried they’d spend all evening driving up and down Rampart.
    When all the good-byes were said, and they were standing on Rampart waving as Aunt Claudia’s car made its dramatic swing into yet another U-turn, Rebecca inched her way to the curb. From here, looking upward, she could still see the silvery light, but to see the girl on the gallery she’d need to walk into the road.
    “What is it?” Ling walked over.
    “I think there’s someone up there. You know, in the empty house. I saw lights up on the gallery.”
     
    “You can see