Room_ A Novel - Emma Donoghue [113]
For a while we get lost, then she sees the name of the street where the Independent Living is so we weren’t really lost. My feet are tired. I think people in the world must be tired all the time.
In the Independent Living I go bare feet, I won’t ever like shoes.
The persons in Six C are a woman and two big girls, bigger than me but not all the way big. The woman wears shades all the time even in the elevator and has a crutch to hop with, the girls don’t talk I think but I waved my fingers at one and she smiled.
There’s new things every single day.
Grandma brought me a watercolor set, it’s ten colors of ovals in a box with an invisible lid. I rinse the little brush clean after each so they don’t mix and when the water goes dirty I just get more. The first time I hold my picture up to show Ma it drips, so after that we dry them flat on the table.
We go to the hammock house and I do amazing LEGO with Steppa of a castle and a zoomermobile.
Grandma can come see us just in the afternoons now because in the mornings she’s got a job in a store where people buy new hair and breasts after theirs fall off. Ma and me go peek at her through the door of the store, Grandma doesn’t seem like Grandma. Ma says everybody’s got a few different selves.
Paul comes to our Independent Living with a surprise for me that’s a soccer ball, like the one Grandma threw away in the store. I go down to the park with him, not Ma because she’s going to a coffee shop to meet one of her old friends.
“Great,” he says. “Again.”
“No, you,” I say.
Paul does a huge kick, the ball bounces off the building and away in some bushes. “Go for it,” he shouts.
When I kick, the ball goes in the pond and I cry.
Paul gets it out with a branch. He kicks it far far. “Want to show me how fast you can run?”
“We had Track around Bed,” I tell him. “I can, I did a there-and-back in sixteen steps.”
“Wow. I bet you can go even faster now.”
I shake my head. “I’ll fall over.”
“I don’t think so,” says Paul.
“I always do these days, the world is trippy-uppy.”
“Yeah, but this grass is really soft, so even if you do fall, you won’t hurt yourself.”
There’s Bronwyn and Deana coming, I spot them with my sharp eyes.
• • •
It’s a bit hotter every day, Ma says it’s unbelievable for April.
Then it rains. She says it might be fun to buy two umbrellas and go out with the rain bouncing off the umbrellas and not wetting us at all, but I don’t think so.
The next day it’s dry again so we go out, there’s puddles but I’m not scared of them, I go in my spongy shoes and my feet get splashed through the holes, that’s OK.
Me and Ma have a deal, we’re going to try everything one time so we know what we like.
I already like going to the park with my soccer ball and feeding the ducks. I really like the playground now except when that boy came down the slide right after me and kicked me in the back. I like the Natural History Museum except the dinosaurs are just dead ones with bones.
In the bathroom I hear people talking Spanish only Ma says the word for it is Chinese. There’s hundreds of different foreign ways to talk, that makes me dizzy.
We look in another museum that’s paintings, a bit like our masterpieces that came with the oatmeal but way way bigger, also we can see the stickiness of the paint. I like walking past the whole room of them, but then there’s lots of other rooms and I lie down on the bench and the man in the uniform comes over with a not-friendly face so I run away.
Steppa comes to the Independent Living with a super thing for me, a bike they were saving for Bronwyn but I get it first because I’m bigger. It’s got shiny faces in the spokes of the wheels. I have to wear a helmet and knee pads and wrist pads when I ride it in the park for if I fall off, but I don’t fall off, I’ve got balance, Steppa says I’m a natural. The third time we go, Ma lets me not wear the pads and in a couple of weeks she’s going to take off the stabilizers because I won’t need them anymore.
Ma finds a concert that’s in a park,