Where We Used to Roam Jenn Bishop (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

Besides Ms. Patel—sorry, Nisha—no one else had really gotten started on anything yet. The other students were clustered around the brownies. Two eighth graders I knew from when we had to take the bus back in elementary school, Aisha Simmons and Danica St. Clair, and two girls I didn’t recognize. One of them was Asian, with long super straight black hair and wearing a hat with a fox head. The other was tall and white, with shoulder-length blond hair that had a chunk dyed hot pink.

“Hey,” Fox Hat said as I reached in for a brownie. “You new?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Emma. I’m in sixth grade.”

“Us too!” she said. “I’m Lucy and this is Kennedy.”

“We just transferred this year from Comey Valley Charter,” Kennedy said. She had a gap between her front teeth, just wide enough that you could slip a quarter between them. “Do you want to sit with us?”

“Sure,” I said, following them over to a table by the window. “Have you been coming since the beginning of the school year?”

Kennedy nodded. “Our parents said we had to do something after school to meet people, but there aren’t a whole lot of sixth graders in art club.”

“Except Henry.” Lucy pointed to a boy I hadn’t noticed, in the corner. He was dressed in all black and wearing headphones while making something out of clay.

“Right. Yeah. And no.” Kennedy laughed. “Now we can tell them we met you! See, we are meeting people. And we’re so good at it, right? Not at all creepy.” She opened her eyes extra wide and reached over, grabbing Lucy’s shoulders.

“You see what I have to deal with,” Lucy deadpanned.

Kennedy seemed like a lot, that was for sure, but not in a bad way. She reminded me a little of my cousin Baxter when he had too much caffeine. While Lucy excused herself to go grab her project, Kennedy pulled out a notebook from her backpack. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

I reached into my backpack, suddenly hesitant. I’d never shown my notebook to anyone, not even Becca.

“Oh, come on, it can’t be weirder than this kid Kyle back at Comey. Kyle drew nutso pictures of murdering people. And then he mysteriously stopped coming to school one day. Now that I think about it, what did happen to him?” She tapped her chin and raised one eyebrow.

When Lucy returned, I noticed her slip-on sneakers had sloths on them. She set down a collage made from the teeny-tiniest magazine clippings. It wasn’t completed enough for me to see where she was going with it, but I was intrigued. “Yeah, Kyle was super shady,” Lucy said.

“Okay, fine.” I traded notebooks with Kennedy. “But it won’t make sense if I don’t—”

“One, two, three—oh, whoa!”

I chewed on my lip as Kennedy flipped through the pages. The first quarter of the notebook was an inventory of the shoeboxes under my bed. The pages after were sketches, ideas of what I could bring to life with all those pieces.

“Do you make these boxes from scratch?” Lucy asked, peering over Kennedy’s shoulder.

“My dad has a lot of leftover wood in the garage. And sometimes I find old ones at the Take It or Leave It.”

I felt like a jerk all of a sudden, looking over my own stuff when I should have been looking at Kennedy’s art. I flipped open her notebook. Inked inside were manga sketches. Some of them were characters I recognized, but others were completely original. Their eyes, wide and detailed, their mouths so animated and expressive. A girl with big black boots, one of them raised like she was about to kick someone’s butt. “These are incredible.”

“They’re all right,” Kennedy said. If I knew her better, I’d say she was being modest, but I still didn’t know her that well. “Your boxes… are any of them done?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of the growing gallery on my bedroom wall. Seven, not counting the one I’d just started for my mom.

My best was probably the one that came in first in mixed media at the town art show this summer. Not exactly a major accomplishment given that I’m too young for the teen category, but still. It had a shattered window with a baseball and a broken teacup resting at the bottom. Dad asked if it could be “on loan” for the year, so like a real collector, I was lending it to him. It was up on the wall in his office at NBC Boston.

“I hope we can see one sometime,” Kennedy said.

“Yeah,” Lucy chimed in. “Those are way cool. I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

“Thanks,” I said. For a second I imagined Austin watching us. What did I tell you? Your big brother knows everything.

Kennedy handed my notebook back carefully, like she got that it was a treasured object. Hers probably was too. I passed it back, and for the next hour and a half, until the late buses lined up outside, we drew.

Well, Kennedy drew. I’d packed some magazines to look through for my mom’s shadow box. My hope was to find something delicate and beautiful to adhere to the inside of the glass, but I still wasn’t sure what. Sometimes the best parts were the images I stumbled upon by chance. Lucy cut and glued, humming along with the music. When Kennedy got stuck or frustrated, she would color on her nails with markers.

“So, why did you transfer?” I asked.

Lucy and Kennedy looked at each other like they were trying to decide who should answer, and then Kennedy started talking. I had the feeling this was how it always was with the two of them.

“One of my moms changed jobs,” Kennedy said. “And her new commute made it tricky to do drop-off and pickup at the charter school.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

“And then Lucy”—Kennedy uncapped a brown marker—“couldn’t imagine life without me, so she decided to transfer, too.” She quickly drew a little squirrel on Lucy’s biceps.

“You like animals, huh?” I said, thinking about