Free Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

lot.
    When they sat down on the bleachers, I went over and sat down, too. I mean, we came together, and they were just sitting there.
    She turned and looked at me and it might have been pity or it might have had an apology in it, but it was definitely Get Lost. Don’t be a child.
    I sat there for a few seconds more, looking into the dark room full of people dancing while she and her guy gazed into each others eyes and palpated each other’s hands. Then I said, “Well, see you later.” I went to the girls room and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I still looked okay. I came back into the gym through a door toward the back where it was really dark, and climbed up to the top row of the bleachers. I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn’t know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot.
    Later, while we waited for our ride, she acted like nothing had happened. But it had.
    That sleepover in sixth grade. The dance when she That quick.

     
    The sparkling water, purple concrete elephant: Seldem Pool & Patio.
     
    Other faces had other stories.
    Out of the cocoon, something new: is this one still a caterpillar?
    With the sleep-over, the dance in her head, Debbie looked at her own picture and saw a caterpillar.
    When Patty looked at it, she only saw her friend. Her gaze bounced over to Lenny’s picture, and she smiled as she remembered how just that day in science class, Mrs. Lewandowski had asked her to find a place to plug in the overhead projector. All the visible outlets were full, so she had crawled under a table on her hands and knees. When she came out, Lenny was standing there.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Looking for an outlet,” she said.
    Lenny said, “Have you tried tennis?”
    She looked up from the yearbook to tell Debbie about it, but Debbie spoke first.

     
    “Look, there goes Hector.”
    “I wonder why he’s running.”
            “His bag is breaking.”
    The bag was a grocery bag, but the items escaping from it—crumpled tissues, bent cans—looked like used groceries, also known as garbage. Why was Hector running down the street in this part of town with a bag of garbage?
    His shirttails flew out behind him. He was too far away to call out to, over the traffic noise. It was interesting, Debbie thought, how you could recognize a person, even from a distance, and even when you couldn’t see the person’s face. Even when the person was scuttling along the sidewalk like a crustacean. What was it, exactly, that you recognized?
    In Hector’s case, it was probably his hair. But there was something else, too, she thought. Something so Hector-y about his whole self. She watched him for a moment, wondering what it was that gave him away. She wondered if she had something like that.

CHAPTER 15

Guitar Progress
     
    I t wasn’t that hard to make one beautiful sound on the guitar. The easiest thing in the world was to hold down the two strings for the ? minor chord and draw your thumb across all six strings, down below. A really beautiful sound. Melancholy, but satisfying.
    Hector was developing callouses on his fingertips, which was good. He could play some songs and sing them at the same time. “This Land Is Your Land,” “Greensleeves,” a few others.
    Sometimes he felt fine about where he was. And sometimes it seemed that there was no road that led from the church basement guitar class to where he wanted to go. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember where that was, or why he had wanted to go there.
    But he had gotten into the habit of going into his room and picking up the guitar. And once he picked it up, he did all the things he knew how to do, then messed around a little bit. A lot, sometimes.

CHAPTER 16

Home Work
     
    L enny dropped his books on the bed and picked up a magazine. The creak of floorboards in his parents’ bedroom told him that his father was awake. Leon was on third shift, sleeping all day