Free Chloe in India by Kate Darnton

Body
    Loose and Breath
    Be in a Easy Condition
    And Tune With Nature
    I guess that’s what Lakshmi and I were doing: tuning with nature. Sometimes when the aunties were sitting on their metal benches, sweating and chanting mantras while their maids fanned them with newspapers, we’d toss champa flowers down at them—not a lot, just enough to make them look around, confused.
    When we got too hot, we’d go inside and sneak Cokes to my room. It was Lakshmi who got the ice cubes out of the freezer now.
    —
    There’s something I’m really good at that I haven’t mentioned yet but I’m actually pretty proud of: origami.
    It all started back in Boston last spring. It was toward the end of the school year, right after Mom and Dad told Anna and me about moving to India and I was pretty upset. Then the school librarian, Mrs. Rodriguez, gave me a copy of this book
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,
which is about a twelve-year-old girl in Japan. At first, Sadako is fine and healthy and winning relay races at her school, but then she gets really sick from the atomic bomb. They put her in the hospital and she’s dying and then she starts making origami cranes to pass the time. She wants to make a thousand cranes—because that’s what Japanese people do when they have a really important wish—but she only gets to 644.
    I guess this book got under my skin because right then and there, I decided that I was going to make Sadako’s 356 remaining paper cranes (1,000 minus 644 is 356; if you don’t believe me, you can do the math). The problem was that I didn’t want to start making the cranes and then have to move them all to India—they’d get smashed in the suitcase—so I found the instructions online and just practiced at first. I didn’t tell anybody about it, not even Katie.
    By the time we were ready to leave Boston, I could make a crane in eight minutes flat. I didn’t rush. I wanted them to look really nice.
    The day after we moved to Delhi, I started making my 356 cranes. Every day, I would sneak a couple of pieces of paper from Mom’s printer—just a couple of pieces a day so that she wouldn’t notice them missing—measure them, and cut them into perfect squares. Then I’d make the cranes.
    The hardest part was figuring out where to put them. I wanted this to be my secret until I completed all 356. So at first I filled up a couple of shoe boxes, which I hid under my bed. Then I started putting the cranes in a big heap, way up on the top shelf of my closet, behind my winter clothes. But one day I came home from school and Dechen was standing in front of my closet, twirling a crane between her fingers.
    “What this?” she said, looking at me. There was a small pile of white printer-paper cranes on my bed.
    For some reason, I started to cry. I guess I didn’t want to have to stop making my cranes.
    The next day, when I got home from school, there was a neat stack of brand-new colored paper on my bed. Not rough construction paper, but glossy paper in jewel colors: ruby and turquoise and emerald green. I didn’t even have to cut the paper—it was already in squares.
    Dechen never said another word about my cranes, but sometimes—I guess when she had to get something from the top of my closet—I noticed that she had moved the piles around a bit.
    —
    One day, during recess, Anvi and Prisha were working on one of their dance routines. I was sitting on the bench, taking notes for them. (I had become the official choreography note taker. Yep, it’s about as fun as it sounds.) They sat down for a water break.
    “Hey,” I said. “Have you guys ever done origami?”
    Anvi crinkled her nose. “You mean that stuff that Japanese people do?”
    Prisha pushed her eyes up at the corners. “I am Japanese!” she singsonged. Then she grabbed my notepaper and crumpled it into a ball. “Look, an origami rock!” She tossed the balled-up paper to Anvi.
    “Hey!” I said. “Those were my notes!”
    But Anvi was