Free Calli Be Gold by Michele Weber Hurwitz

window. A few minutes later, Mom turns into the rink. “The parking lot is jammed. It’s a madhouse, like usual.”
    Before Becca’s skating team begins its competition season, the girls put on a show for their families and friends. All the other skating teams from the rink are in the show too. It’s a big deal. Everyone comes.
    Mom veers into the last space in the far parking lot, then gets out, whips open an umbrella, and puts her arm around me. We run through the rain toward the door of the rink. Alex ambles behind like it’s not even raining. “Find us when you get inside,” Mom calls back.
    At the rink, Mom stops just inside the door, shakes out the umbrella, then closes it. Another Synchronettes mom spots her. “Karen,” the other mom yells. “We’ve got hairpiece trouble! Three of them fell out during warm-ups! If that happens in a competition, we’re dead!”
    The two of them start talking about what they can do to make the skaters’ hairpieces stay in place. Mom is suggesting clips and bobby pins and barrettes, but the other mom keeps insisting they need to use a special type of glue. The doors to the rink open, and Alex walks in, his hair dripping water.
    This is the weirdest thing of the day. Just before the rink doors close, somehow, through the downpour, I catch sight of a very small tree in the parking lot with one single leaf clinging to a skinny branch. The leaf is hanging there, sort of fragile, not another leaf in sight anywhere on the whole tree.
    That leaf makes me think of all those paper bags stuffed with leaves, and then, for some reason, of Noah,and how he dove under his desk and grabbed my ankle when Mrs. Bezner came by. The leaf is holding on to the tree in the same way that Noah was holding on to my ankle.
    He was holding on to
me.
    “C’mon, Calli,” Mom says. “They’re saving seats for us.”
    As Mom tugs on my arm, I glance at the lone leaf and realize I was able to make Noah laugh. I remember the sound—jingly and light and clear, but also unsure, like he was out of practice. When he was laughing, he didn’t look so different. He covered his mouth with his hand and threw his head back. His eyes crinkled up into two lines behind his glasses. He looked like a normal kid.
    I decide right then and there that I’m not saying anything to Mrs. Lamont or Mrs. Bezner. I picked Noah, and I’m sticking it out.

randma Gold and Dad are holding part of a row in the stands with Grandma’s purse and Dad’s shoes used as seat-savers. “People are getting vicious,” Dad reports. “Fifty times, someone tried to take these seats.”
    Grandma gives me one of her lung-crushing hugs. “How are you, Calli-beans?” she says, but doesn’t listen for my reply. “I’m freezing. Can’t they turn the heat on with all these people here?”
    “There are warmers, Mother.” Dad points to the ceiling.
    “They’re not doing very much good,” she snaps. “I should have brought a blanket. Or a comforter!”
    “Becca’s team is on first,” Mom says, consulting the program. Then she scans the rink. “Where’s Alex?”
    “I see him,” I say, and Mom asks, “Where?”
    I point to Alex, who’s leaning against a wall by the skaters’ dressing rooms, with his headphones still on.
    “Oh, fine,” she says. “We don’t really have room for him anyway.”
    I am squeezed between Mom and Grandma Gold. My jeans are still wet and now plastered to my legs, but I don’t say anything. Neither of my parents would hear me anyway, because Becca is about to skate.
    The skaters on Becca’s team are wearing their costumes from last year. They are supposed to look like bikinis, with a piece of skin-colored fabric between the top and bottom. It looks fake. So does their hair, because every skater has the same curly ponytail attached to their real hair. Their makeup is exactly the same too. They look like identical dolls in a row on a store shelf.
    Dad stares straight ahead, focusing only on Becca. As