Paper Stars

Chapter 14

14

Crossed Hearts

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School dragged on without much variation for a week or so, and by Thursday evening, I was all too eager for summer again. However, on Friday morning, Fritz reported that his truck’s carburettor had blown and we would have to find our own means of transportation until he could fix it. When Marie, Augie and Bruno pined and begged, Fritz granted them permission to stay at home, but not Saul and I: as a year twelve and thirteen, we were forced to ride our bikes the eight and a half kilometres to the secondary school. This feat would take us approximately an hour and forty minutes to accomplish, and that was only if we hurried. Just to make it all even more dismal, it was raining. To be clear, this was not one of those pleasant, warm summer rains: it was bone-chilling and school-book-soaking.

Not surprisingly, we arrived at school very, very late: drenched through, mud-splattered, dejected. Thankfully I was able to avoid detection as I squelched into class as stealthily as I could manage. And thus I shuffled my way through the rest of that miserable day, taking greatest care not to slip over the puddles that accumulated round my shoes, and when school at last ended, I accepted a ride home in Edith’s new Plymouth. While it made me feel terribly selfish, I just couldn’t bring myself to wait around for Saul, as his first hour teacher had given him an after-school detention for that morning’s tardy. Thankfully, my friend was of the easygoing variety and hadn’t seemed all too perturbed by my decision when I informed him at lunch.

The moment the closing bell rang, I met Edith and her cousin at her car, set my mud-caked bike on the rack and got into the passenger seat, and we talked the ten minutes or so it took to reach my home. Edith let me off in front of my driveway, and after removing my bike from the rack and thanking her earnestly, I dashed across the lawn and into the parlour of my house. What followed was a very long shower, a change of clothes and the sigh that comes with settling down to with a cup of tea and a great deal of geography homework. I felt guilty imagining Saul biking through the rain alone, but there was nothing for it; friendship only goes so far in such ghastly weather.

The house was quiet—unusually so, seeing as Benjamin was sketching upstairs, Hanna was staying late at the primary school for play practice, Mother was working overtime at the café and Father was at his office in town. The silence was actually a pleasant change, so I sat bundled up in quilts upon my bed as I worked, sipping my tea and basking in the knowledge that I was no longer damp and cold. An hour passed and my patience with longitudinal lines and numbering axis waned, and eventually the sound of Saul’s bike spokes could be heard trundling along, followed a few minutes later by the postman’s. The car paused briefly in front of our front gate before fading off up the street. Presently, I made the decision to go out to the letterbox; after all, Mother would be cross if I let the mail get soggy.

Outside, the rain had ceased temporarily, though the fog was no better: rising and slithering round the house like a serpent and tempered slightly by a surprisingly chilly wind. The ugly weather gave me all the more reason to hurry as I ran to the letterbox, embracing myself to perhaps keep the cold air from squirming through my jumper. But as I rifled through the mail, I thought I heard the back door open and a voice calling my name. I paused and listened intently, though soon dismissed this as sounds coming from the Eberstarks’ home next door and returned to the task at hand. Given that most of the letters consisted of invoices and banking updates for Father—nothing from Aunt Jo yet—little held my interest and I soon scuttled on back inside with the mail in my arms. As I set them on the kitchen table, the sound of running water could be heard from the upstairs restroom: a sign that Benjamin must have come down. But then there was a shout from the hallway, and it was a voice that certainly did not belong to Benjamin Jastrow.