Free Chloe in India by Kate Darnton Page B

clenched around her half-finished paper crane, crushing it. “You want to see my house small, your house big? You want to see my house dirty, your house clean? You want to see my house sad, your house happy? You have sister, I don’t have? You have baby? That what you want to see?”
    “I—I…,” I stammered. But it was too late. Lakshmi had already run out of my room.
    I heard the front door slam. I rushed to the window. A couple of seconds later, Lakshmi came flying down the stairs and out the front gate. Her stick figure ran down the street.
    “Klow-ay? You okay, Klow-ay?” Dechen was standing in the doorway to my room, her face creased with worry. She held Lakshmi’s crushed paper crane.
    “Now look what you’ve done!” I yelled.
    I knew this wasn’t Dechen’s fault. I knew it. Still, I couldn’t stop myself.
    This was my first fight with Lakshmi. I needed someone else to blame. Besides, it was Dechen who had planted a seed of doubt in my brain. She was the one who had mentioned the lice.
    “She was my friend, Dechen!” I yelled. “My only
real
friend!”

The next couple of days, Lakshmi didn’t come to the park after school. She kept her distance from me at school, too, but like I said before, things had always been different for us there. It was like some unspoken rule—we never hung out together. I stuck with Anvi and Prisha. Lakshmi stuck with Meher, who was the only other EWS girl in Class Five. Turns out, Meher’s mom also worked at the school, and Meher had been at Premium Academy since she was little, which surprised me because her English was pretty bad. Or at least, I assumed it was. I didn’t really know, because she hardly ever said a word.
    Lakshmi finally showed up at the park about a week after our fight. It was a Tuesday afternoon and it was really hot. I was sitting under the champa tree with a book, trying to read, but it was hard because I kept glancing up every couple of minutes, hoping Lakshmi would appear.
    And then there she was.
    She had Kali with her and she held something in her hand. When Lakshmi sat down next to me, she placed it in the grass. It was a piece of origami in a shape I had never seen before. It looked like a fortune cookie.
    Lakshmi didn’t say anything at first. She just picked up a champa flower and started fiddling with it, folding its petals all the way back till she could spear them with their own stems. The flower came out like a little ivory box with a golden center.
    “Hey, it’s flower origami,” I said, and Lakshmi smiled a little.
    So we sat there, under the shade of the champa tree, both of us not talking and doing champa origami, when, out of the blue, Lakshmi said, “My mother, she also teach me folding technique.” She pointed her chin toward the strange piece of origami sitting on the grass between us. “She work in hospital. She teach me to make sister’s hat.”
    So that’s what it was: a nurse’s cap.
    Lakshmi’s fingers kept working, folding the champas’ ivory petals back, piercing them with their stems. “She teach me corners on bedsheets.”
    Lakshmi held one flower in front of her face and twirled it in her fingers. “Her uniform, it all white,” she said. “White like champa.” Then she picked up the little origami nurse’s cap. She put it on top of her head and let go, balancing it. The cap stood out against her black hair like a bright star in a moonless sky. Lakshmi grinned.
    “She wear hat like this!”
    The origami cap tumbled from her hair onto the grass.
    I didn’t say anything, just kept doing my flower origami, not looking at Lakshmi, hoping she might say more. I was curious. In the few weeks that I had known her, she had never talked about her family before. Not once.
    Lakshmi leaned over and put one hand on Kali, who was splayed out on her side in the shade, sleeping. Lakshmi’s hand went up and down with Kali’s breathing.
    “Outside the hospital, one
didi
sits there. She is—what you