If We Could Fly

Prologue

Julia, seven years old

Boys are stupid. They’re mean, and I hate them.

My skin feels warm but not as hot as the fresh streaks of tears that cut through the dirt on my cheeks. I hate crying in front of people. Someone always makes fun of me, and it’s embarrassing. This is not how I wanted second grade to go.

“Come on Julia, it was an accident,” Robbie calls out.

“Yeah,” one of his friends adds. “You weren’t supposed to walk into it.”

“And you weren’t supposed to be throwing dirt in the first place,” I remind them all in an angry shout.

“We were just playing a game. One that you ruined,” Robbie says, and I can hear the annoyance in his voice.

Who plays a game that involves throwing dirt, I want to ask. I don’t because it doesn’t matter. The damage is done. There’s dirt everywhere. In my mouth, in my hair, splattered across my clothes. I’m filthy, and they’re laughing at me.

I draw my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs. “Just go away!”

Robbie’s stupid face pokes through the branches of my hiding spot, and I turn away so he can’t see that I’m crying. I just know he’d call me a crybaby. “You’re not going to tattle, are you?”

“If she doesn’t, I will.” A girl appears, one whose voice I don’t recognize. It’s firm and demanding in a quiet sort of way. “Didn’t you hear her? She said go away.”

Robbie’s face disappears, and I peek out from the small hole that separates the thick bushes to see two pairs of feet pointed toward each other. They’re so close that the tips of Robbie’s Skechers almost touch the girl’s busted-up teal Converse.

“Mind your business.”

The teal shoes inch closer. “You’ll mind my fist if you don’t beat it.”

“Like you can fight.”

“Because I’m a girl?” she challenges. “I got kicked out of my last school for fighting. You don’t think I’ll do it again?”

Robbie’s Skechers back up.

“Come on, Robbie. They ain’t telling.” I lean a little closer to see his two friends tug at his shirt, urging him to leave.

The girl clenches her fist, and they all back up. Thinking she might actually swing, I sit back down, nervous that I might be the reason for a fight during recess and worried my teacher will call my parents.

Then another face appears, and I jolt back in surprise. The girl studies me, and I stare back, taking in the strands of brown hair falling out of her loose ponytail. “You okay in there?”

I nod, though I’m not entirely sure that I am. “Are they gone?”

“Yeah. They’re gone.” She crouches low and squeezes into the tight space with me.

I want to protest, but I’m so surprised by her boldness that I shift, trying to make room for her.

She pushes her hair from her face and mimics my position, drawing her knees to her chest. “Sometimes, when I’m sad, I think, if I could fly anywhere in the world, where would I go?

Right now, I’m thinking about Tasmania.”

“Why Tasmania?”

One shoulder lifts in kind of a half shrug. “I want to meet a Tasmanian devil.” Her dark eyes meet mine. “What about you? If you could fly, where would you go?”

It’s an odd question but one that I give serious thought.

She chews on the side of her finger and waits for me to answer.

She has a top front tooth missing, and her red baseball T-shirt is way too big for her scrawny frame.

She looks completely disheveled, and I find myself deeply interested in this wild thing of a girl.

“I don’t know,” I finally say. “Probably the beach. Or someplace where Robbie isn’t.

” I nudge a large piece of mulch with my toe.

“I miss my teacher from last year.” I rest my head on the top of my arms and stare at the girl still chewing on her finger.

“Did you really get kicked out of your old school for fighting?”

She shakes her head and wipes her hand on the side of her denim shorts. “No. We moved here from Ohio because my brother needed a better doctor.”

“Is he sick?”

Her eyes grow wide. “Very. Mostly, he’s just sick in the head. But he also had to get a whole new heart when he was six, and something in his immune system isn’t right.”

I frown, thinking about a kid needing a new heart and wondering how someone can live being so sick.

None of this seems to bother her because she sighs and falls backward into the bushes like it doesn’t matter. Maybe she’s used to it. Something else I don’t understand. “I’ve always wanted a dog, but Mason is allergic, and we don’t want it triggering anything.”

“What about cats?”

She groans. “No cats, either. My mom doesn’t want to deal with a litter box.”

I watch her close her eyes and wonder if she’s thinking about her sick brother or the pets she’ll never have. “I have a cat. She’s a gray tabby. Her name is Celine Dion.”

She looks at me curiously. “You named your cat Celine Dion?”

“She meows all night at the top of her lungs. You can come over and hang out with her whenever you want.”

This makes her eyes light up. “Really?”

A group runs by, laughing, and I watch their feet pass, hoping they’re oblivious to our hiding space.

I’m relieved when they leave as quickly as they came.

“You sure scared Robbie.” She shrugs again like it wasn’t a big deal.

Except to me, it was. I sit up as straight as I can, considering where we are, and stick out my hand. “I’m Julia. Julia Marrow.”

She eyes my hand curiously and gives it a shake with a firm grip. “Alex Pestano.”

Alex. I repeat her name over and over in my head, never having met a girl with the name Alex before.

“Do you want to go swing?”

Her question catches me off guard, and my stomach flips. “I don’t want anyone to know I was crying.”

She kneels in front of me, her head smooshing inside the bush above her, and uses the bottom of her shirt to wipe at my cheeks. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

“Robbie probably already has,” I grumble, heat crawling up my cheeks, embarrassed that the one boy I despise the most made me cry.

“That’s okay. I’ll just tell everyone he wet his pants when I threatened to punch him.”

As exciting as that rumor would be, our school has a strict no bullying policy. It’s bad enough that she already threatened to deck him. “You’d get in trouble for sure.”

Her grin only widens, as if she doesn’t mind a little bit of discipline. That’s when I notice she’s looking at my shirt. “You like Bruce Springsteen?”

“I love him,” I tell her seriously, but I’m also surprised because no one has ever mentioned knowing who he is before.

“Me too,” she says, her smile wide and her eyes sparkling. “I really like his stuff from the eighties. I love the eighties, but right now, I’m obsessed with ‘Born to Run,’ and that’s not the eighties,” she tells me, as if she’s an expert.

“I love the eighties, too,” I tell her excitedly. When she laughs, it makes my stomach swoop like I’m on a roller coaster. “My parents listen to them a lot.”

“So does my mom.” Another group runs past, and she glances at the opening and crawls out.

“Come on. There’s no one on the swings. I bet if we go high enough, it’ll feel like we’re flying.

We can pretend we’re on our way to the beach and sing Bruce at the top of our lungs.

” She waits for me to take her hand like she knows there’s no way I’m not going to.

“Or we can pretend we’re flying to Tasmania,” I offer while she helps me out of the bushes and onto my feet.

“A beach in Tasmania. Sounds perfect.” She gives my hand a squeeze, and I allow her to lead me to the two empty swings, “Born to Run” ripping from our mouths, off-key and perfect.