Sparrow, Always, page 1
For all the Sparrows
—G. D.
To all the animals in my life!
—E. C.
1
Sparrow was walking her kitten and searching for a bird, her face tilted up to the blue sky, which was why she wasn’t paying attention to what was on the ground. Which was how she tripped on a tree root and landed splat on the sidewalk in front of a dog.
“Toby, sit,” said the lady on the other end of the dog’s leash. “Smart pup!” she added when he promptly sat. Then she asked Sparrow, “Are you okay?”
Sparrow scrambled from the ground. She had skinned her knee and scraped the palms of her hands. But who cared? The dog was gazing at her with shining brown eyes. It had short fur the color of honey and wore a blue guide-dog coat.
“I’m okay!” she said. “I’m totally okay.”
“You took quite a tumble,” said the lady.
Her voice was calm. Not calm and cold, like when a grown-up was trying not to scold. It was calm and warm, like the April afternoon. Her face had a calm look too. Even her long, straight black hair looked as if it never got tangled. Sparrow’s hair got super tangled, and she hated having it brushed, which was why she always wore it in two braids.
“Your dog is so adorable. What kind is he?”
“This is Toby. He’s a yellow Lab. One year old, so his body is full-grown, but he’s still a puppy at heart.”
At the end of her red leash, Sparrow’s kitten, Gracie, was staring at the dog. Sparrow knew what the kitten was feeling: curious. Gracie wanted to check out this Toby, just like Sparrow did. But Sparrow knew you weren’t supposed to pet a guide dog. You weren’t even supposed to ask. Gracie didn’t know that, though. The black-and-white kitten was padding slowly toward the golden-furred dog. When she got closer, she looked up, and the dog looked down, and their noses touched.
“He’s so good!” cried Sparrow.
“He needs to be,” said the lady. “If he’s going to be a guide dog, he needs to be able to handle situations like this.”
Now Sparrow saw that Toby’s blue coat said FUTURE GUIDE DOG. “So he’s not one yet?”
“Not yet,” said the lady. “Like I said, Toby’s still a puppy, really, and I’m what they call a puppy raiser. I’m training him to be a well-behaved dog. In a couple of months he’ll take a test to see if he can move up for his real guide dog training. Someone else will do that—if he passes the big test.”
“I hate big tests,” said Sparrow.
“Me too,” admitted the lady. “School would be a lot more fun if there were no tests.”
“A lot,” agreed Sparrow. She used to love school. Sharing at Circle Time. Listening to books at Story Time. But fourth grade was starting to have a lot less sharing and stories and a lot more homework. And tests. And worst of all, group projects.
Toby was still sitting, like the lady had told him to, but Sparrow was sure he wanted her to pet him. He was gazing at her with his big brown eyes, which seemed to say, Me three! I hate tests too! Pet me! and his tail was kind of wagging. Since he was sitting down, it didn’t wag very well, so it was more like thumping. Wag-thumping. Or thump-wagging.
Sparrow felt an answering thump in her heart. She couldn’t pet the dog, though, no matter how much either of them wanted.
“What if he doesn’t pass?”
“First the guide dog organization would see if he can do another kind of job. But if that doesn’t work out, he could be adopted. The puppy raiser usually has first dibs, but I’d say no, so they’d find somebody else.”
As Sparrow’s mind soared straight to “somebody else” being her, she could almost hear her parents telling her not to get carried away. Not to get her hopes up, which was one of her least favorite things grown-ups said. What was so wrong about being hopeful? Except maybe she finally got the reason now. What was the point of hoping for something that could almost probably definitely never happen, and then being so sad when it didn’t? For one thing, Toby might pass the test. And for another, she already had a kitten that she loved.
There was no way she could ever be the one to give Toby his forever home.
2
“Sorry for almost crashing into you,” said Sparrow.
“It’s really all right,” said the lady. Toby was still sitting at her feet, like he was supposed to. The kitten had begun walking back and forth under the dog’s chin, the white tip of her tail brushing his gold fur each time she slipped past. “I used to walk like that when I was a girl, not looking where I was going. My parents used to tell me to get my head out of the clouds.”
“Mine say that to me!” said Sparrow.
Actually, Sparrow’s mom and dad hardly said that anymore. They used to say she got too carried away. Or that she was being a drama queen. With her head in the clouds. They wanted her to rein it in. Dial it back. Come down to earth.
Then they took a class on parenting and started reading books, and began saying things that were basically the same idea but didn’t sound quite so mean. And then they had another baby and didn’t have so much time to work on fixing her. But Sparrow figured that sometime soon—when Asher stopped crying in the middle of the night—her parents would get back to trying to make her a little less Sparrow-the-way-she-was and a little more Sparrow-the-way-they-wanted-her.
“It seemed like you were looking for something,” said the lady. “In the sky.”
“My bird!” said Sparrow. “Well, not my bird. But a bird I know. She’s a pigeon, and we named her Snowberry. She hit our window, and we took her to a place that fixed her wing, and when she was better, they brought her back here to let her go.”
Together they looked up at the sky. A line of pigeons perched on the wires that swung from pole to pole along Hartley Street, too far away for Sparrow to tell if one of them was Snowberry.
It was late April in Maine, and spring was still arriving. The trees weren’t bare winter brown anymore, but they weren’t summer green yet either. They were in between. Some had bright lemon-lime-colored leaves, and others had caramel-colored leaves. But they were all just-getting-started leaves, like Asher’s tiny baby hands curled into fists.
“Is that why you’re walking your kitten on a leash? So it can’t hurt birds?”
“Yes!” said Sparrow. “I don’t think Gracie could catch one yet. But just in case.”
“That’s so responsible!” the lady said, and added, “And she’s adorable.”
That was true, in Sparrow’s opinion. Gracie was black and white, like Sparrow’s favorite cookie from the bakery on Bridge Street. Except Gracie’s markings weren’t divided evenly, like on the cookies. They were all jumbled up.
Sparrow launched into the story of how she’d gotten Gracie. Her family had moved here last summer, and Mrs. LaRose—she was the old lady who used to live in the other half of their house—had seven cats. Then Mrs. LaRose had to move out, and she could keep only one of her cats! Sparrow found new homes for the other six. And when the cat Mrs. LaRose was keeping turned out to be having kittens, Sparrow found homes for them, too. And got to keep one herself.
“Amazing Grace LaRose for long,” she said, realizing as she wrapped up the story that it was probably way too much information. “Gracie for short.”
But all the lady said was, “Wow, sounds like you really love animals.”
“I do!” said Sparrow. “I love all animals. I love cats, especially Gracie cuz she’s so soft and cuddly, but she’s playful, too. And I love the way birds can fly. And we never had a dog, but I would love one so much. If it got along with Gracie, that is.”
“Well, it looks like these two certainly get along,” said the lady.
The kitten was still slinking back and forth under Toby’s chin. He turned his face up toward Sparrow, his head tilted to one side with a quizzical look: Is your kitten white with black splotches, or black with white splotches? Which was what she could never decide!
“Do you think he’s going to pass his test?”
“I hope so! I have a special feeling about Toby. I think he’d be great at guiding and that he’d love it. He’s so eager—so enthusiastic. He wants to go.”
Sparrow knew how that felt. “Eager” and “enthusiastic” were words for excited, which was how she got. She instantly changed her mind. She wasn’t going to secretly wish she could give Toby his forever home, because that might jinx him. If Toby would love to be a guide dog, then that’s what she wanted too.
“Me too!” she said. “I mean, I hope he passes too.”
Now Toby’s brown eyes seemed to say, Me three! I hope I pass too!
“It’s been fun chatting,” said the lady with a smile, “but I have to be somewhere, so I better get going.” She pulled out her phone and glanced at it. “Actually, I think I’m already here. Eighty-seven Hartley.”
“Eighty-seven Hartley?” asked Sparrow as she and the lady both looked at the house with the number 87 on the porch post. It was a white house with two front doors, both painted green.
“That’s where I live!”
3
“This is not your decision to make, Sparrow,” said her mom as she dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster.
Monday morning was not off to a good start. First, it was raining, which meant there would be indoor recess at school. Second, Sparrow was trying to talk to her parents. But they weren’t listening. Maybe if she were as tall as them, they would pay more attention. She hopped up onto a kitchen chair. “But why can’t we at least talk about it? Like, why wouldn’t you rent the unit to th
Her parents both pointed to the floor.
“Floor!” said her mom.
“Floor!” said her dad.
Sparrow held out her arms and flew down off the chair.
“Sparrow, what have we said about climbing on the furniture?” asked her mom.
“That it was cute when I was little, but I’m too big for that now,” recited Sparrow.
“That’s right,” said her mom.
“Now listen, Sparrow,” said her dad. “To answer your question, we might rent the unit to the woman with the dog, and we might not. Someone else might be a better tenant.”
“Better how?”
“Without a dog, for instance.”
“What’s wrong with having a dog? Toby is such a good dog! He’s not going to do anything bad!”
“I have an idea,” said Sparrow’s mom. “How about we all take a breather?” She drew a deep breath to model “taking a calming breath,” and Sparrow’s dad did the same. The bread popped up from the toaster.
Sparrow sucked in some air and huffed it out as quickly as she could, pretending to breathe. She had to regular-breathe of course, but she wasn’t special-breathing. She didn’t want to calm down. She wanted to talk about Toby. “Well, when are you going to decide?”
“Here we go,” said her mom, setting two pieces of toast on the table.
That was a nice thing about Asher, the baby. Her mom used to leave the house early for her job at a dentist’s office, cleaning people’s teeth, but now she was staying home for a while. Which meant that in the afternoons, Sparrow could come straight home from school. And in the mornings, cinnamon toast. Smeared with butter, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, and cut into four triangles.
“Yum,” said Sparrow, biting into the first triangle.
“You’re welcome,” said her mom with a smile, before she bit into her own piece.
They were both cinnamon toast fans, which was kind of funny because they both had cinnamon-colored freckles sprinkled on their cheeks, along with light brown hair and brown eyes. Sparrow’s dad had brown hair too, but his was darker. Plus, he had a mustache.
He sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. “Let’s get things straight,” he said. “How this is going to go.”
Sparrow’s dad was a big believer in getting things straight. He worked nights at a newspaper, fixing the stories other people wrote during the day. Making sure the grammar was right and that all the facts were correct. Between her dad being someone who made sure stories had no mistakes and her mom being someone who made sure teeth had no cavities, Sparrow sometimes felt like she didn’t have a chance. They were fixers.
“Fact,” said her dad. “Quite a few people answered the ad to rent the other half of our house. We’re showing the unit to a few more people today. Then we’ll make a decision.”
“And we hear that you hope we’ll decide to rent to the woman with the dog,” added her mom, “whose name is Eileen Kim, by the way.”
“And Toby,” Sparrow reminded her. “So how will you decide?”
From the baby monitor on the kitchen counter came a faint squeaking sound. Asher was waking up.
“Mostly it will be whether we think they can pay the rent every month,” said her dad. “We’ll check their credit score. We’ll check their references. It’s grown-up stuff, Sparrow.”
He didn’t say you wouldn’t understand, but he might as well have. Which made Sparrow mad. She would understand. They were the ones who didn’t understand her. “All I want to know is, if she can pay the rent as good as anyone else—”
“As well,” said her dad, interrupting her. “As well as anyone else.”
Sparrow didn’t get why kids interrupting grown-ups wasn’t allowed, but grown-ups interrupting kids was. “Okay, but if she can pay the rent as well as anyone else, why wouldn’t you let her have it? She’s doing something really important! Toby’s going to be a guide dog! You could be, like, helping someone get a guide dog!”
Asher’s squeaks were getting louder.
“Time for somebody’s second breakfast,” said Sparrow’s mom. “And, oh my gosh—it’s way past time for you to go, Sparrow!”
“Want a ride?” asked her dad.
“No!” Maybe Sparrow wouldn’t have minded a ride from her mom, but she knew her mom had to feed Asher. And she did not want a ride from her interrupting, grammar-correcting, you-wouldn’t-understand dad. “I want to walk!”
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want to walk in the rain and be late to school?”
“Yep,” said Sparrow as she tugged on her rain boots. Then she slung on her backpack and headed out into the wet, gray day.
4
Walking to school in the rain, Sparrow decided that if April were a color, it would be yellow. The sky was gray, but everywhere something yellow was blooming. Yellow dandelions. Yellow daffodils. And big, shaggy bushes of yellow forsythia.
By the time she hurried through the doors of Eastbrook Elementary and speed-walked down the hallway, morning announcements were already on. “Hot lunch is fish tacos; happy birthday to Samantha Ahmed; and there will be inside recess today.”
Sparrow stashed her raincoat in her locker. Inside her boots, her socks were wet from puddle-stomping on the way. And they had slipped down, so they were all wrinkled up under her feet. She hated that feeling. She didn’t stop to fix it, though, because if she got to Mrs. Foxworthy’s room before announcements finished, she wouldn’t have to get a late pass from the office.
“And now,” said Principal Weiss, “from all of us to all of you, welcome to school today!”
Then came the recording of kids saying welcome in different languages: “Bienvenidos. Ahlan wa sahlan.” Mrs. Foxworthy had said that every year they made a new recording, and kids who knew another language could volunteer. Sparrow knew only English, but her best friend, Paloma, was going to volunteer for Spanish.
“Bienvenue,” came the last voice, right as Sparrow burst into Mrs. Foxworthy’s fourth-grade classroom. She had made it!
Wait—what?
The blue pod—four desks pushed together, where she sat with Paloma and Anton and Caleb—was gone. All the pods were gone. All the desks were by themselves, in rows. Sparrow spotted the only empty one: right in the front row by the whiteboard. She made her way there, sat down, and twisted around in her seat to find Paloma’s desk—miles away on the other side of the room. Paloma gave a little wave.
“Welcome, Sparrow!” said Mrs. Foxworthy. “I’m glad you’re in time to hear me explain why the desks have been rearranged. To be honest, there’s been a little too much chatting lately. And we have work to do! I want everyone to be ready for fifth grade. Fifth grade is important, because that’s when you will really be getting ready for middle school.”
Sparrow liked Mrs. Foxworthy. She wore red-framed eyeglasses that usually perched on her head in her short, spiky hair like a red bird in a nest. She wasn’t too strict. And last fall she had even adopted one of Mrs. LaRose’s cats that needed a home—the orange tabby named Marmalade.
But Sparrow did not like Mrs. Foxworthy’s desk-moving idea. She couldn’t believe her teacher was moving her desk now because of something that was years away. She tuned back in to hear “… and we’ll be going to the library so you can begin researching your topic.”
New research topics didn’t sound horrible. Mrs. Foxworthy almost always let them pick their own because they were supposed to be self-directed learners. Sparrow knew exactly what she was going to pick. Guide dogs!
“And these,” said Mrs. Foxworthy, holding up a stack of papers, “are your assignments.”
Assigned topics? This day was not starting out so great. First, rearranged desks. Now assigned topics. Plus, wet socks.
Mrs. Foxworthy was walking up and down the rows of desks, handing out slips of paper. Dogs, wished Sparrow. Please make it be dogs.
Mrs. Foxworthy was getting closer. She dropped a slip of paper on Sparrow’s desk.
Not dogs.
5
Sparrow had good reasons for not doing what she was supposed to do.
The class was supposed to be looking for books on their assigned topics in the library. But first she had to stop at her locker and take off her wet, wrinkled-under-her-feet socks. And then—because she hadn’t been able to talk to Paloma all morning, since Mrs. Foxworthy had moved all the desks from pods into rows—she headed straight for their favorite spot in the school library, the beanbag nook. Paloma was already there, curled up on the pink beanbag with a pile of books beside her. Anton was there too, trying to build a tower with his stack of books.
