Free Dorothea Dreams (Heirloom Books) by Suzy McKee Charnas

her?
    I will always be a kid, she thought, staring at her knobby knees in the mirror. But people forget about kids when important things are going on. People pay no attention to kids.
    She shivered with excitement over what she intended to do. Actually, she was pretty scared, but you couldn’t just lay around being sickly, not when everybody was gearing up for this big effort and even dumb, punky Beto was in on it.
    She put on one of Roberto’s old t-shirts, a pair of bleached out jeans, and sneakers on her bare feet. The sneakers dated back nearly two years now. She had not outgrown them yet, although her toenails had worn a hole in the rubber rim of the left one. The thing was to look like some anonymous boy from a neighboring street. Otherwise some well-meaning pain in the neck would spot her and take her home to keep an eye on her until Mom got back.
    Her thick hair she stuffed into a baseball cap that Roberto had worn one summer. The cap still smelled of his hair-stuff, ugh.
    She put her medication in her jeans pocket, the one without a hole. Where she would find water if she needed to take pills she was not sure, but she’d taken them dry before, throwing her head back hard and working her throat, so that didn’t worry her.
    A soft cotton flannel shirt, long-sleeved and faded, completed her outfit. It was a hand-me-down from Roberto that her mother wouldn’t let her wear out of the house because it was too boyish-looking. That was why Blanca loved it. She wore it whenever she could. With her lucky shirt she put on an identity so far from her own that she felt her asthma could not follow.
    Dust still hung in the air of Pinto Street from somebody’s car or truck passing through. The houses looked so quiet in the morning. School was out, but most of the kids had gone to the church-sponsored teen outing today. Blanca could see two little kids playing by the sagging fence around the trailer park. Betsy Armijo was feeding the ducks in her yard, all dappled with the shade of the thorny Russian olives her parents had planted before Blanca was even born. Betsy liked to play invalid when she had her period, as if her cramps were the end of the world. Too bad she didn’t know what being really sick was like.
    Blanca heard water running and dishes chinking in the Romeros’ kitchen as she walked by. Vallejo’s dog came scuffling out of his dusty yard and grinned at her, trotting along beside her for a little until Mrs. Ruiz’s big mutt began barking from inside her fence, and Vallejo’s dog veered off to go yell back.
    Estelle Ruiz, the widow, was out watering her flowers in front of her place, a converted trailer with trumpet vines all over that were now beginning to blossom. She was old and ugly, but nice. Blanca walked fast. Mrs. Ruiz had sharp eyes.
    Then that place the Ortegas kept working on while they lived in it, slowly patching it together over the seasons out of adobes, cinder-block, and faded black panels of rigid insulation board nailed over two-by-fours. They had a great big woodpile made from the dozen Chinese elms they had cut down when they started building. Slimy-wet and iron-tough under the bark at first, the wood had finally dried out so it would burn long and hot, and last winter the Ortegas had sold some off to their neighbors. Beto used to pretend he had black widow spiders from that woodpile to turn loose in Blanca’s bed.
    The sawhorses were still out in Mr. Lopez’s yard where he’d been working yesterday, building a new coop for his chickens. He said Vallejo’s dog had run off with another hen, and next time he saw that dog he would kill it. Nobody ever saw Vallejo’s dog kill anything, but Mr. Vallejo never fed it and it was very fat, so it was assumed that whatever ran loose and disappeared on the street, Vallejo’s dog must have gotten it.
    Blanca thought it was a pissy little dog, always digging its way out from under Vallejo’s chain-link fence around his bare dirt yard. She wouldn’t