Free Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden

doors—and just as I was thinking there was no way Annie was going to find me except by luck, I spotted her and yelled, waving my arms. One of the guards started edging toward me, but I managed to duck out of his way and get lost in the crowd; Annie watched from the next-to-top step till I crossed the street, and then she came toward me, smiling. “Let’s get away from here,” she said, and led me around the corner to a quiet little park where there were mothers and baby carriages and dogs—a different world.
    “I tried to get in,” I said, and explained.
    “Oh, Liza, I’m sorry!” she said when I was through. “I should have warned you more—I’m sorry.”
    “Hey, it’s okay!”
    “Those security guards are jerks,” she said, still sounding upset. “They probably thought you were selling.” She gave an odd little half laugh and sat down on a bench. “We could use fewer of them here at school and more where I live.”
    “I didn’t think it was so bad,” I said, remembering her embarrassment when we took her home. “Where you live, I mean.” I sat down next to her.
    “Oh, come on!” said Annie, exploding the way she had at the Cloisters over the ear piercing. “You know what goes on in those buildings, the ones no one lives in? Kids shoot up, drunks finish off their bottles and then throw up all over the sidewalk, muggers jump out at you—sure, it’s a wonderful neighborhood!”
    “I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “I guess I don’t know much about it.”
    “That’s okay,” Annie said after a minute. But it didn’t seem okay to me, because there we were sitting moodily on a cold bench saying
    “I’m sorry,” to each other for things we couldn’t help. Instead of being happy to see Annie, which I’d been at first, now I felt rotten, as if I’d said something so dumb the whole friendship was going to be over with when it had only just started. Finis—end of script. Annie poked her foot at a bunch of dry cracked leaves near one end of the bench; we were sitting pretty far away from each other. “Somewhere out there,” she said softly, “there’s someplace right, there’s got to be.” She turned to me, smiling and less upset, as if she’d forgiven me or maybe never even been as angry as she’d seemed. “Where we lived when I was little, after we’d moved to San Francisco, you could see out over the Bay—little white specks of houses nestled in the hills like—like little white birds. Getting back there and finding out if it’s as beautiful as I remember—that’s one of my mountains.” She flapped her arms in her coat—it was thicker than her cape, but I could see that it was old, even threadbare in spots. “Sometimes then I used to pretend I was a bird, too, like the ones I pretended were across the Bay, and that I could fly over to where they were.”
    “And now,” I said carefully, “you’re going to fly across the whole country to get to them.”
    “Oh, Liza,” she said. “Yes. Yes—except …” But instead of finishing she shook her head, and when I asked her
    “What?” she jumped up and said, “I know what let’s do! Let’s walk over to the IRT and go downtown and take the ferry back and forth to Staten Island till it gets dark so we can see the lights—have you ever done that? It’s neat. You can pretend you’re on a real ship—let’s see. Where do you want to go? France? Spain? England?”
    “California,” I said, without thinking. “I’d like to help you find your white birds.” Annie put her head to one side, for a moment reminding me of the way she’d pretended to be a unicorn at the Cloisters. “Maybe there are white birds in Staten Island,” she said softly.
    “Then,” I said, “I guess we should go on a quest for white birds there. California’s very far away.”
    “That’s what I was thinking before,” Annie said—we were walking now, toward the subway. “But next year’s far away, too.” I wondered if it really was. On