Jakarta Missing (19 page)

“Right,” Jakarta said. “Next time.” But Dakar saw her grin at Emily as she turned away.

“Aren't you scared of Coach Svedborg?” Dakar asked when they were eating supper with Pharo.

“No. What's he going to do to me?”

“That's right,” Pharo said. “Jakarta is his star girl. What's he going to do to his star girl, hey?”

“That's not it,” Jakarta snapped. Pharo laughed. “I'm just trying to build a tight team,” Jakarta said. “Everyone needs a team.”

“He sure sounded mad today,” Dakar said.

Pharo shrugged. “You can't be the hero if you can't be the goat.”

“That's right,” Jakarta said. “Coach Svedborg doesn't scare me. The only thing that scares me is not getting my English paper done. Not with an away game Friday.”

“She'll let you turn it in late,” Pharo said.

“I don't think so,” Jakarta said. “She's already made one exception for my pathetic self.”

“So. Skip our shoot-around tonight?” Pharo asked.

“Never.” Jakarta whirled on him, and he laughed and held up his arms as if he needed to save himself from attack.

“Who was that girl I saw you practicing with today?” Dakar asked.

Jakarta hesitated. “Sharyn. I'm not even sure why she made the team.”

“Yes, you know, hey?” Pharo said. “Someone felt sorry for her. That's why they let that girl on to the team. She's a hard worker, but she was born with something wrong with her foot. She's never going to play in a game. Never, never, never.”

“She's got that one excellent shot, though,” Jakarta said. “Too bad she can't just park under the basket and shoot it. Don't you ever feel bad about the girls Coach calls the blue-collar players, who show up with their lunch boxes even though they don't get any glory time? Why shouldn't I work with her?”

“Keep it friendly, baby,” Pharo said. “I didn't say anything.”

“I'm going out to see if there's anything more to rake,” Dakar said, even though she knew there wasn't.

Pharo shook his head. “You're crazy, too,” he said. “Snow is going to be here and cover those leaves up. Maybe even tonight. I feel it.”

“Snow?” Dakar shook her head in disbelief.

“Right after we shoot around,” Pharo said, “I'm looking at the furnace. Then I'm taking the two of you to a store. Gotta get scarves, gloves, Russell pants. Act like a babe in the woods when it comes to winter, and you could lose a finger.” He waggled his fingers meaningfully at Jakarta.

“Okay, okay,” Jakarta said. “Don't get in a twist. It's only October.”

“Yeah,” Dakar said. “Quit trying to scare us. It's nowhere near winter yet.”

“P
lease. Not snow.” Dakar peered out the window of her room later that evening with her new winter clothes all lying on the bed. Pharo had said the furnace was fine, but what did he actually know about furnaces? What if it coughed a bunch of carbon monoxide into the air and they went to sleep and never woke up? Or what if so much snow came down that they couldn't get out? What if the snow was up to their second-floor windows and they slowly starved to death? Before she went into Jakarta's room to sleep, she lit a candle and whispered into the flame, “Come home. Come home. Come home. Come home.” Oops. Too close. That last
h
blew the candle out.

The next day felt like walking through glue. But every time Dakar glanced out the windows, she didn't see anything that looked like snow. Ha, she thought when they'd made it safely and snowlessly through the morning and most of the afternoon. She picked up a couple of the yellowish leaves and put them on top of the pile. Pharo wasn't right. She knew it. But the sky was a strange, soft gray, and the dark arms of the trees looked bleak and bare against it. Could winter possibly come this soon?

She tried to imagine what it would be like to see snowflakes floating down. What did snow actually and truly feel like when you touched it? Besides cold? She was pretty sure it was Egypt where Mom first read that snow poem out loud, because Dakar had a blurred memory of looking out the window at a yellow-and-beige world, imagining palm trees reaching up to catch handfuls of snow. She and Jakarta had pestered Mom with question after question. Did snow really clump on branches and pile so high that you had to dig a path to get through it? What was it like to float down a hill on a sled, your fingers tingling in your mittens?

In Maji they'd begged Mom to read the poem every night for a while. Finally, when the workers were cutting the grass on the hill behind the house, squatting to slide their hand scythes through handful after handful, leaving the grass lying in clumps to dry, she and Jakarta had come up with a snow poem plan. It wasn't easy finding the cardboard, but somehow Jakarta had managed. For hours, they polished the pieces with handfuls of dried grass. Then they built grass paths down the hill. They spent one glorious day climbing the hill and sliding down on their cardboard sleds, over and over, until Jakarta decided to try a piece of tin, instead of the cardboard, and gashed her arm open. That put an end to the snow game, but for that one day, every time Dakar swooshed down the hill, she wondered if this was anything like snow. Now she was going to find out.

Could you run in snow? Toss it like confetti? Giddy with questions, Dakar leaped into the pile of leaves, laughing and throwing the leaves. Suddenly she stopped. No. Wait. If snow came down like confetti, it would cover up the lawn. Had she done all that work for nothing?

“Waaaaait,” she hollered up at the sky, feeling foolish.

But the sky didn't wait. When Dakar woke up and looked out the window the next morning, she knew that Pharo had been right. Winter was dancing its way into town like a juggler pulling silk scarves from the sky, and the leaves would be covered with snow before Mom ever had a chance to see how tidy and safe she had made everything look.

She walked glumly downstairs and poured milk onto cereal, watching it splash over the cereal the way the snow would cover her leaves while she was in school. What was Mom doing right this minute? What about Dad? Was Dad missing them? Was he missing Mom? Probably he was working, too, and saving too many lives to think about missing anything at all. He was Donbirra's father in reverse. He loved his daughters, but he loved his work even more.

“Doesn't it bother you that Dad gets caught up in trying to save the world and forgets about us?” she asked Jakarta. Out the window she could see that the snow was now thick as a Maji fog. Good thing Pharo had made them get all that winter stuff.

“Not really. I think my real dad was the same way.”

Dakar was shocked. Jakarta had never said those words before. Real. Dad. “Did Mom ever tell you more about
him
?” she asked cautiously. She wondered if Jakarta ever thought about the letter waiting for her when she turned eighteen.

“Not much. She said my real dad and Dad saw an accident when they were going out to look at some temple ruins. They turned around and were going back to help when another car hit them. My real dad was on the side of the car that got hit, and he died instantly.”

Dakar stirred her cereal bleakly. Mushy. What if Dad had gotten killed, too? One thing she did
not
miss in Kenya was the driving: people slamming around, darting or blundering their way in and out, and saying
enshallah
, meaning that if God wanted them to die, they would die, and if God wanted them to live, they would live, so why bother to look before pulling out into a busy street? Addis Ababa was bad, too, but cars went faster in Nairobi, and there were more terrible accidents.

Probably Guatemala was another country of bad traffic, and maybe that was just the least of Dad's dangers. What if an unstable building toppled over and squashed him? What if deadly cholera started sweeping through the camps? Or some other loathsome disease from too many people and too little clean water and food?

She just
had
to think of something else to try. Jama was just a runt whose two older brothers called him things like son of a hyena, but he had saved Donbirra from the crocodile. She couldn't quit trying to get the family back together, no matter how many hoodies or how much snow tried to stop her.

All the way to school Dakar felt cold and wet. Snow kept creeping down the back of her neck, and she couldn't figure out how to use the scarf to keep it out. The wind had painted a skunk stripe of white on all the trees, and now it blew refrigerator air against her cheeks. When they got near Melanie's house, she stared at Melanie's windows. Three lights were on, and the house looked cozy and charmed. She looked closely for any movement, a shadow. Nothing.

With every step, her leg brushed against the cold denim of her jeans and made her shiver. Homesickness for East Africa trickled through her like a slow, sweet ache. “Don't forget the Nairobi eye fly,” she told herself firmly. If you brushed at it and accidentally squashed it on your skin, it left ulcers. “Don't forget ugly Nairobi frogs.” Last year, after the huge October rains, Yusef told them to be sure to block up the kitchen door against frogs. Sure enough, within a half hour, three big ones were squeezing their slimy swamp bodies under the door, and these weren't sweet Maji frogs, either, but sewer frogs. Mom got five out of the pantry. Jakarta counted fifty in the back entryway. All fifty of those frogs would have been in the house if she and Jakarta and Mom hadn't been home to stuff plastic bags in the crack under the door. Yes, every place had its bad-weather agonies.

That morning one of the announcements over the intercom was about how the Lady Wildcats were about to qualify for regionals. Dakar pretended to hunt for something in her desk. “Look for the schedule on the board inside the high school door,” the high school assistant principal said. “It's time to get out and support those roaring Lady Wildcats.”

“Tell your sister good luck,” Ms. Olson said.

Dakar blushed. Kids were looking. But for once their eyes didn't say
ferenji, mzungu, khawaaga.
She gave the class a shy smile back, holding the moment in her mind, sweet and bitter as pomegranate seeds.

When the end-of-class bell rang, she rushed out, still feeling flustered, and almost ran smack into Melanie, who wasn't looking where she was going because she was talking to two girls. One was Ms. Purple Hair. How long would it take for Melanie to have purple streaks in her own silvery white hair? Melaniethefollower. Off to follow someone else.

“Whoa—kid-hey,” Purple Hair said. “You're Jakarta's sister, right?”

Dakar's eyes flickered to Melanie. But Melanie didn't say a word.

“Yeah,” Dakar said. “That's right.”

She felt ready to fight. Or ready to run. But all the girl said was, “We were just talking about how she's going to take the girls' basketball team to state. I don't think they'll win state, but wouldn't it be cool if they could? We've never had a girls' basketball team that even got to regionals.”

“My cousin says they're definitely going to state,” Melanie said.

Dakar looked at Melanie with a sudden longing. Maybe Melanie would say something about having gotten to meet Jakarta.

“
I
can't wait to see them play Bear Lake,” the third girl said. “Bear Lake beats us in everything.”