Free Liberty Street by Dianne Warren

day you’ll never see with your twenty-twenty vision. After I’m gone, you can do as you like. If I go first, you’re more than welcome to move into Vince’s toy house.”
    â€œWe’ll see.”
    â€œApparently I won’t.”
    Frances wants to know what they’re talking about.
    â€œYour mother thinks I’m going blind,” her father says, and then he puts on his cap and goes outside.
    What? Really ?
    â€œYou said he wasn’t,” Frances says.
    â€œI never said for sure. Anyway, don’t mind him. He’s upset about Uncle Vince.”
    Worrying about her father going blind is one thing, but now the phrase “after I’m gone” keeps repeating itself in Frances’s head. What did her father mean by that? She worries that he’s planning to leave the way her mother did that time, the way Doreen did when she went back to England.
    Then she understands that he means “leave” in the way Uncle Vince had left.
    Which is much, much worse.
    I N S EPTEMBER , SCHOOL begins. Not kindergarten, which Frances hadn’t attended because her birthday is late in the year, but real all-day first grade, which her mother had made a case for because Frances knows her colours, and what elsedo they learn in kindergarten? The bus stops at the approach every day to pick up Frances and take her to the Elliot elementary school, an old two-storey brick building. The bus drops the younger students off first and then drives around the block to the high school, which is a newer building across the schoolyard. She’s the only grade one on the bus. She sits at the front and the bigger kids sit at the back, unless the bus driver hauls one of them up closer for being rowdy. Frances looks down most of the time she’s on the bus. If someone talks to her, she pretends she doesn’t hear. She does the same thing at school, except with the teacher. Her mother tells her she has to pay attention to the teacher.
    Six weeks into school now and Frances has begun tapping her fingers as if she’s playing the piano, although her parents have no piano and she doesn’t know the first thing about white and black keys or holding your hands as though they have oranges under them. One, two, three . . . she counts in her head as she taps one finger at a time. When she runs out of fingers, she makes up patterns—one, three, five, two, four—or she counts backwards or practises tapping finger four by itself because it won’t behave like the others do. She wonders why this is.
    She tap, tap, taps for a reason, although she’s afraid to explain it to anyone in case it stops working. The teacher at school is always telling them to count to ten before they decide whether they have to cry (girls) or hit someone (boys). Frances rarely wants to cry or hit anyone, but sometimes a storm brews up inside of her and makes her think of Dorothy and Toto being tossed around in the cyclone, and when she tries counting—one two, three . . . tap, tap, tap—bingo, it works, and the storm settles back to stillness. Tapping becomes a habit that feelsgood, like laying your cheek on the coolness of the kitchen countertop or running your fingers along the satin edge of a blanket.
    At home, it annoys her mother. She says, “I don’t know why you do that. It’s not normal.”
    One day at school, Jimmy Gulka sees her tapping on her knees under her desk and says, “Look what Loony-Moony is doing.” He gets in trouble for calling her a name, but after that, Frances tries so hard to keep her fingers from tapping that she forgets to listen to the teacher.
    Frances is just in the door after school one day when the phone rings. She can see her mother turning away from her, the phone cord wrapped around her shoulder, for what she calls a private conversation, which is still not very private.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake,” Frances hears her mother say. “I