Sparrow's Story - A Girl Defiant

Chapter 27

Sparrow’s still in bed when Dad yells up the stairs, “Nate, Evan, Will. You guys need to be in the car. The first game starts in twenty!”

She throws her quilt over her head in case Dad looks in, but her brothers pound past her bedroom and down the stairs. The door slams twice and then it’s quiet. 

She slips out of bed and tiptoes to the front room. Dad’s car pulls out and speeds off to a full morning of soccer, and she goes back to her room to dress. 

When she comes out, the house sounds empty, but she can’t be sure. She slips through the rooms, checking to see if Damon’s still around. He was supposed to head out for Tempe hours ago. It’s not until she peeks into the garage and sees both cars are gone, that she relaxes. 

The metal extension ladder hangs on two hooks so she has to stretch to reach it. Thank God, she spent so much time lifting weights. Sparrow hauls the ladder out to the backyard and props it up against the house. Stucco flakes off on the grass, but she doubts anyone will notice.

The security light unscrews without a hitch, and it only takes a second to snip the wires in the back and screw it back into place. 

Back in the garage, Sparrow lifts the ladder to hook it on the wall, but her grip’s wrong and it teeters in her hands before slamming her in the face. She curses like a rugby fan and wrestles the ladder back in place. Blood spots her finger when she touches her aching lip. 

She grabs an ice cube from the freezer and holds it on the cut. She doesn’t have much time until the boys get back, so she goes to the laundry room. 

The clean laundry’s still stacked on the dryers where Felix, the domestic assistant left it. Sparrow flips through Nate’s pile and pulls out a pair of jeans. When she pulls them on over her shorts, she realizes she needs a belt. 

Will and Evan are string beans compared to Nate, so she ransacks their dressers and finds a ratty old Cub Scout belt in the back of Evan’s sock drawer. The webbing on the belt adjusts so it almost fits. 

It’s only ten, so she’s got an hour before Dad returns. Sparrow digs through the downstairs closet, because she remembers one of Nate’s friends leaving a sweatshirt here about a year ago. Guys never return for their crap, so just as she suspected, it’s buried under old cleats and shinguards. She slaps the dust off the hood, thinking that John Muir HS has thousands of students, so being a Mustang around here is as good as anonymous.

She stashes the clothes in one of Mom’s old suitcases that Damon brought down from the attic. It’s not what Dad expects she’ll pack which makes it all the sweeter.

She checks the wad of money she hid in her tampon box. It’s nine thousand dollars and she weighs whether to divide it up and scatter it around the house. Will hasn’t lifted any money from her lately, but that’s probably because he never considered looking in Dad’s car.

She shoves the money back in the box, deciding not to bother. I’m here all weekend. Will won’t have time to go through my stuff. 

It feels too easy that the plans for tomorrow night seem to be snapping together like Legos. But Magda’s plan is brilliant and as long as the speculator gets his price, she will be celebrating her freedom with Imran twenty-four hours from now.

 Father Gabriel always tells the Exodus girls to pick out a few things from home to take with them. Nothing that won’t fit in one pocket.

When she looks around her room, there’s nothing she wants to take other than her microscope. Two years ago, she opened a PO box in Vancouver and mailed a bunch of stuff there like her own personal Time Capsule. She figured someday she’d pick it up. 

And here it is. Someday.

Sparrow wanders downstairs. Pictures of her family line the hall, but they haven’t changed since Mom died. Nate comes up to Mom’s chest, and Will and Evan are bow-tied kindergartners. 

The house has been more like a parking place than a home for a really long time. Well, maybe Larissa will change that. 

  A nasty taste fills Sparrow’s mouth the instant she thinks about Dad selling her so he can buy Larissa.  Sparrow flops on the couch.

Stupid of her not to guess what he was up to. The evidence was staring her in the face when he took her to the partner dinner last month.

The partners rented the rooftop of a Hollywood hotel. Tables circled a lap pool and LA was a yellow gold carpet of a million lights. 

Dad steered her through the crowd, and junior associates flocked to him like he had  fifties pinned to his suit, but Dad couldn’t stop looking past them at a cluster of senior partners who each had a young girl hanging on one arm.

 Sparrow didn’t have to calculate the statistical probability of those guys all having daughters her age to know it was laughably low. Those pretty, glittery girls were trophies. Bought and paid for with annual bonuses in the six or seven figures.

So the now obvious truth about Sparrow’s auction is that Dad wants to peacock around firm dinners with Larissa on his arm, just like the senior partners he’s so desperate to become. 

The garage door whines open, and Sparrow races upstairs and barricades herself  in her room. She can’t trust herself not to show how angry she really is.