For her second day at this new school, Rose had put together the perfect ensemble. The first day she hadn’t done anything too wild. Just an old shirt of her mom’s and leggings. A few months before, she had made a belt to wear with the shirt from all the lanyards she had woven in summer camp. One sixth grader had even admired it. The outfit was low-key. Her outfit today, however, was hardly outrageous. Bow ties and boys’ collared shirts were so in right now. Or so she had thought. She had felt confident.
But today they had reshuffled the homeroom assignments, and she was put in with the three meanest girls in the entire school. Every school has its mean girls, but usually Rose managed to dodge them. These three seemed particularly vicious. Like mythical creatures, harpies perhaps, with human heads and bodies but the wings and talons of predatory birds. She was their prey. Fresh blood.
Yes, it all fits, Rose thought.
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Rose—Rose Ashley. And over three weeks ago, she became an instant orphan when her mom was killed in a car crash. Now she’s surrounded by three of the most horrible girls—pardon, harpies—in a new school, in a new city, living with a grandmother she barely knows.
Their game was about to begin again. Rose hardly had time to pick up her backpack and flee when there was a screech from one of the girls. Rose looked up just as a boy in an electric wheelchair came crashing into the middle of the circle.
“Sorry, coming through. Didn’t mean to crash into you, Brianna.”
“Just buzz off, Creepo Palsy,” Brianna sneered. Rose was shocked. It was a terrible thing to say. Her new homeroom teacher, Mr. Ross, had already told her that she would be sitting behind the boy in the wheelchair, Myles, who had cerebral palsy.
“Learn how to drive!” Carrie shouted. She gave Rose a sharp look and then the girls scattered, like flies shooed off food at a picnic.
“Uh . . . thanks,” Rose said to the boy. “You’re Myles, aren’t you?” He wore very cool, squarish glasses. The lenses were thick and seemed to magnify his dark brown eyes. Shaggy black bangs fell across his forehead. He was cute—“a handsome lad,” her mom might have said. Or if he had been a girl, “comely.” Her mom had a penchant for old-fashioned phrases.
“Yes,” Myles said. “The student in the wheelchair. My reputation precedes me.” His head wobbled a bit as he shifted slightly. His left hand was bent inward and appeared immobile. His right hand hovered over the chair’s controls, the fingers open and relaxed. “And you’re Rose Ashley. The new student.” His speech was thick, like cake batter, as if his tongue had to scrape and push the sentences out of his mouth.
“Uh . . . yeah, I’m Rose, and thanks for c-crashing into them.” The very word was hard for her to say since her mom’s accident. She hadn’t been allowed to watch the news that night or in the days that followed the accident. Caroline, her mom’s friend from work, stayed with her until they could figure out where Rose was to live. She had unplugged and hidden the cable box, so Rose wouldn’t hear about the crash on television. But Rose still heard snippets of the phone calls whenever Caroline thought she was sleeping: “Engulfed in flames . . . died instantly . . . no remains.”
I’m sort of a remain, Rose thought. In her mom’s will, it said that Rose was to go to her grandmother’s house if something ever happened to her and that proceeds from the sale of the house were to go to Rose.
“Yeah, Myles. You showed up at the right time.”
“My pleasure,” Myles said.
Rose looked off toward the girls, who had retreated to another corner of the schoolyard.
“The girl with the ponytail—she’s Brianna, right?”
“Yeah, but the real ringleader is Carrie. The short one with the streak in her hair. Kind of the Cruella de Vil look, except the streak is blue and not white. She thinks it’s cool and ‘creative.’ NOT. And that’s Lisa. Uh . . . not much to say about her except she likes sequins, glitter. Sparkle on the outside. Dim on the inside.” Myles tapped his head. “But she is a good horseback rider. Watch out for her spurs.” He laughed. The chuckles sounded a bit like bubbles breaking through water.
Just then, the bell rang. He gave a jaunty salute with his right hand, then buzzed off in his wheelchair.
Rose was standing alone now. So alone. If her mom were alive, she would have gone home and told her about these obnoxious girls. And her mom would’ve said something like “Oh there’s always kids like that. . . .” And maybe told her about some bully from her own school days. And Rose would’ve whined and said, “You don’t get it, Mom.” But now there was no mom to try to understand her. There was no mom for her to whine to. “Puleeze, Mom, gimme a break. Things have changed since your day.”
There simply was no mom.
The Philadelphia house had sold quickly, and the very next day Rose was bundled up like some sort of package and put on a flight to Indianapolis to live with her grandmother, Rosalinda. Caroline came with her to help “settle her in.” But there was no settling in to speak of. Rose felt entirely adrift.
That first night she had been too tired, too shocked, too sad, too everything to even eat. So Rosalinda’s live-in cook sent dinner upstairs to her bedroom. But she just pushed the food around on her plate.
The next night she came downstairs when called and was surprised to find that she was to eat alone. Caroline had already left.
“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked Betty, Rosalinda’s caretaker.
“She likes her supper in the greenhouse,” Betty answered. For the next twelve days before school started, this was how it went: Rose ate alone, her grandmother treated her with general indifference, and no one mentioned her mom. If Rosalinda was bothered by the death of her daughter, she didn’t show it. The one time any mention of Rose’s mother did come up was when Rose came out of the bathroom one evening and ran straight into Betty and Rosalinda.
“Betty,” Rosalinda said, turning to the caretaker, “am I upstairs or downstairs, and who’s this young girl? She looks so much like my daughter.”
“She’s Rosemary’s daughter—your granddaughter, Rose,” Betty answered, giving Rose an apologetic look. She pointed to a picture in a frame on a table. It was the one taken on a beach in Florida. Rose was just five or six at the most. In the photograph, Rose was wearing a bathing suit with mermaids on it and leaning up against her mother. Her mom wore a bathing suit that she called a mom-kini, as it was fairly modest. “She’s almost all grown up now, Mrs. A, but just a little girl in that picture.”
“Oh yes,” Rosalinda answered. Rose looked up hopefully, but only for a moment. “I remember I had a daughter or a granddaughter once. I think I misplaced them.” She giggled as if she were describing a missing remote from a television—oh dear, where did that remote go?
“Misplaced” was the perfect word, Rose thought. It seemed to Rose as if her father must have been misplaced as well. She had learned quickly as a child not to ask about him. Whenever she did, a strange mist that was not quite tears came to her mother’s eyes, and a sadness seemed to cling to the air. Her mother appeared to nearly dissolve into some distant place beyond anything Rose knew.