CHAPTER ELEVEN
CEREMONY
One week before the ceremony, I'd say I would have been about as likely to read an original poem in front of my classmates as I would have been to stand under Astrid's window and serenade her with a mariachi band.
But a week can change everything and now I was going to read a poem.
The poem had come to me in the middle of the night. I groped for my journal. I wrote furiously, trying to get the poem down on paper. My pen scratching on the paper was the only sound in the dark, quiet store besides the distant hum of the refrigerators.
I fell back asleep, convinced I had written the most beautiful poem in the world. In my sleepy state, I was sure it would heal the world—this poem of mine.
Then I woke up in the morning to hear Batiste repeating everything Chloe said.
When I opened my journal to bask in my brilliance, it was, of course, total scribble scrabble. I could only make out a couple words. The pen drifted all over the page and the funny thing is that I had underlined, very emphatically, in several places, but there were no words above the underlines. Just lines with exclamation points after them.
So I pretty much had to start from scratch.
* * *
Hey, guess who cooked breakfast? Me and Alex. You would think everyone would have been tired of my half burnt–half raw delicacies, but they ate my cold yet crispy frozen waffles and blackened hash browns right up. At breakfast Josie told us the ceremony would be in the Bed and Bath area in one hour. She asked us not to go near there so she could finish setting it up.
"Do we get to dress up?" Caroline asked.
Max groaned and rolled his eyes.
"What? It's a ceremony, right? Like church?" she asked.
"That's a good idea, Caroline. Everyone get dressed up," Josie said.
"Can I just wear this?" Brayden asked. He had on jeans and a sweatshirt.
Josie looked pointedly to Jake. She waited.
Jake cleared his throat.
"I think we should all dress up," Jake said to Brayden. "You know, show respect."
* * *
I gave myself a good once-over with baby wipes and put on fresh clothes. I retrieved my journal from where I'd left it in my sleeping bag. I was looking over my poem, fretting about some word or comma or something, when I heard wind chimes.
"What's that sound?" came little Henry's voice.
He climbed out of the toy-box playhouse that he and his sister had made. Caroline came right behind him.
"Um, wind chimes," I said. "I think Josie is making that sound to tell us it's time to go to the ceremony."
"Our mom loves those things," Henry told me, taking my hand. "She has like five of them and they hang in the garden out back. They get all tangled up in the winter but she always goes and straightens them out. She just loves the sound of 'em."
"I know," I said. "We can hear them from our yard."
My mom called their mom a hippie because of all her wind chimes, but I wasn't about to say that.
"Our mommy says they sound like fairy music," Caroline added.
"Hey!" Henry said. "Do you think we could get some for her? Take them with us when it's time to go?"
