Free Full Ride by Margaret Peterson Haddix Page B

have to be ashamed of.
    I look her full in the face again.
    â€œRosa,” I say, “you’re a good friend.”
    What else can I tell her?

Now
    The school day ends, and I walk across the street to home. I am, as usual, the only person walking. Even the other kids who live in my apartment complex drive, or get friends with cars to drive them. Or, if they have neither cars nor car-owning friends, probably they are loitering at school so no one will see them leave.
    I did that freshman year. I actually joined the cross-country team just so I didn’t have to walk past all the other kids roaring out of the school parking lot in their Mustangs or Jeeps or even the practical Civics and Corollas and hand-me-down minivans from their moms. No heavy-duty symbolism there: I ran away every day that fall. At the end of the season the coach, who still hadn’t learned my name, said, “Kid, you’ve got stamina. You and that Muslim girl—the two of you came in last or second to last every single race. But you’ve got staying power; I’ll give you that much.”
    Jala ran with me. I would have quit without her. But it was always the two of us bringing up the rear of the pack; it felt like I owed it to her to keep showing up. It would have been too lonely for either of us to be the only one losing. And then it wasnatural, in November when the cross-country season ended, to follow her into math club and Spanish club and service club and other activities that, it turned out, I was actually good at.
    It is mostly thanks to Jala that I have any extracurriculars to put on my college apps.
    Does Jala think of me as poor, like Rosa does? Do Oscar and Clarice and Lakshmi and Stuart and . . .
    I stop myself before I end up listing everybody in my class, every single person I’ve met in Deskins.
    I know, because my sociology teacher made a big deal about it last year, that Deskins High School is very “economically diverse.” Some people (like Stuart Collins) live in mansions; some people (like me) live in the apartments. People in Deskins call our complex just “the apartments,” not “Whispering Pines Apartments” because, as it turns out, these are the only apartments in town. But, thanks to the bad economy, lots of people who live in actual houses are poor too. Mr. Stoddard, the sociology teacher, said the factor everyone looks at is how many kids get free or reduced lunches courtesy of the government. At DHS, it’s 20 percent of the student body.
    I am not in that 20 percent, even though I am pretty sure that I qualify. This is one of Mom’s quirks, that every single year she refuses to fill out the paperwork. I think this is her way of doing penance: It’s like she thinks that if Daddy is eating free government food in prison, we don’t deserve to sign up for me to get free government food at school.
    Not that she’s actually said that.
    I am clinical and detached as I think about this all the way across the street. I make my strides long and carefree. I am just pondering government statistics and sociology class and paperwork—nothing that actually matters . Then I reach the front door of our apartment. Open it, shut it behind me, lean againstit like I leaned against the concrete block wall in the bathroom during lunch. I drop my backpack and let myself remember the expression on Rosa’s face in lit class, the tone in her voice. I let myself identify the emotion behind that expression, that tone:
    Pity.
    No, no, I tell myself. You can’t call it pity when she says she’s poor too. That makes it empathy, compassion. She thinks she knows how you feel. She thinks you’re both alike.
    She thinks.
    It’s not the same. We’re not poor for the same reasons.
    And if she did know the truth about me? Would the pity/empathy/compassion turn into disgust? Revulsion? Hatred?
    It doesn’t matter, because Rosa is never going to know.