Free Seeing Orange by Sara Cassidy

Chapter One
    Pumpkin is stretched out asleep in my pajama drawer. Now my pajamas will have her golden-orange hairs all over them.
    Mom is reading on the front steps, a mug of smelly tea by her knee. She calls it herbal tea. But I call it horrible tea.
    My sister Liza is singing in the bathtub. It’s some song about setting fire to the rain. Liza only takes baths so she can sing in the bathroom. She likes the echoes. She calls them acoustics .
    Silas is building LEGO spaceships on the floor of our frog-green bedroom. Later, he’ll head outside to throw a tennis ball against the wall. Once, his ball went through the open bathroom window while Liza was in there singing. Splash! Did Liza ever scream!
    And me? I’m under the piano bench. I’ve draped a blanket over it to make a secret cave. It’s getting pretty hot in here. Maybe I’ll go lie on the floor in the narrow space between Mom’s bed and the wall.
    I could pretend I’m a luger speeding down an ice track. That’ll cool me down.
    I like the laundry room best. It’s a scrubbed place.
    The air smells like soap. I like the white walls and the soft towers of clean, folded laundry. The only problem is the dirty laundry piled on the cement floor. It’s like a stinky sleeping beast. If I look too long, it starts to breathe.
    This morning, I drew a picture of Mom’s sweater on the clothesline. The crayon that matched it was called persimmon. Apricot was too light. It was hard to draw the sweater’s wrinkles. But I did a good job with the right sleeve that hung down as if it was reaching for something.

    The kitchen is the busy room in our house. It’s where we talk and play Scrabble. Silas doesn’t usually sit for long. He wheels around and around the house on his Rollerblades. He only changes direction if he gets dizzy. “He’ll damage the floors,” visitors warn.
    Mom just shakes her head. “Having fun is more important than smooth floors,” she says.
    Some places in our house scare me. Like under the back porch. I only go there if we are playing hide-and-seek. I squat on top of the broken plant pots, hoping the pill bugs don’t crawl over me. Old flower bouquets with brown petals and moldy stems rot in the dirt. Mom dumps vases out there when she can’t get to the compost pile.
    On school mornings, we jam up in our tiny front hallway. We cram our lunches into our schoolbags.
    Mom searches frantically for the car keys. Silas gulps down the last of his bowl of cereal. Liza pulls everything off the coat hooks to look for her favorite hoodie.
    Move out of the way!
    Where’s my other shoe?
    That’s MY lunch.
    Mom calls it the Hurry Flurry. These days, I don’t like the Hurry Flurry. Because I don’t want to go to school. My grade two teacher is Mr. Carling. No matter what I do, he’s always mad at me.

Chapter Two
    As soon as I enter the schoolyard, my heart starts to bang. It bangs like the big drum in the Victoria Day parade. My stomach feels like it’s full of gravel. I can hardly walk. It’s like I’m wading through high water. “Hurry up, Leland!” Liza hisses as she breezes past. But I don’t hurry up. I freeze.
    Delilah rescues me. Her shaggy belly presses against my thigh. I grab the square handle of her leather collar and let her lead me through the big front doors. She leads me down the shiny hallway into Mr. Carling’s classroom. I hang up my jacket and change into my indoor shoes. Delilah snuggles into my cubby. She has to shrink a little to fit in there.

    I once saw a dog like Delilah leading a woman down the street. The woman had long hair, freckles on her nose and strange white eyes that blinked a lot.
    Mom told me the woman didn’t see well and the dog helped her get around. Delilah doesn’t really help me see . She helps me move . Liza says Delilah is imaginary. She says I make her up. So what? She still helps me.
    The