The Summer of Broken Things Read online

  “They’re cheaper than plane tickets to London or Paris,” Mr. Armisted says grimly.

  “Daddy!” Avery protests. Her elbow swings out and digs into my side. “Now you’re just being mean! That’s how you’re going to punish me?”

  “London, Paris . . . What are you even talking about?” I ask. Did I fall asleep between words and miss some explanation?

  Avery whirls toward me.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” she says. “Dad said if he can get things at work under control, maybe we can take some three-day weekend trips this summer to other countries nearby, like France or England or Portugal.” She jerks her head back toward her dad and glares. “You can’t take that away from me! From us, I mean—what if it’s Kayla’s only chance to see the Eiffel Tower or London Bridge?”

  “I’m not taking anything away,” Mr. Armisted says in an even tone. “This is just a natural consequence of you not having a passport for a while. And I never promised. Those other trips were just possibilities.” He goes back to patting her shoulder. “They’re still possible. I’ll try to get the American Embassy to expedite the process.”

  We’ve barely even left the airport here in Madrid, and already Spain isn’t enough for Avery and Mr. Armisted? They want to start planning trips to other foreign countries too?

  I am suddenly really, really tired.

  Meanwhile, Avery’s gotten a new burst of energy. She’s tugging Mr. Armisted’s phone from his hand and muttering, “I’ll look up how fast they can replace a passport.”

  “The holdup’s going to be getting a copy of your birth certificate,” Mr. Armisted says, gently pulling the phone back.

  “So we tell Mom to send it by overnight mail,” Avery says.

  Mr. Armisted gazes out the window. There’s nothing to see but highway and billboards in Spanish.

  “Let’s not bother her with this,” he says. “We can just order it directly from the state.”

  “So you’re not going to narc on me to Mom?” Avery says. “Thanks, Dad.”

  She sounds sincerely grateful.

  Are they both afraid of Mrs. Armisted? I wonder.

  It’s too much to figure out when my brain’s half-asleep.

  “Count yourself lucky,” Mr. Armisted tells Avery. “The great state of California is going to save us both from a lecture.”

  California? I think drowsily. Does he mean Avery’s birth certificate would come from California?

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to say, Were you born in California too, Avery? How come I never knew that? That’s where I was born! Because my dad was stationed there. So it’s not like I’ve never been anywhere before now. I just don’t remember. . . .

  It’s too hard to make my mouth form words. I let my eyes slide shut instead, and I’m asleep before we even get off the highway.

  Avery, Actually Alert

  The sound of running water wakes me, and my first instinct is to call, Mom? Dad? Who’s using my shower?

  Then I open my eyes, and I’m not in my spacious, Mom-decorated room at home, but in a tiny bare cubicle, my arms and legs hanging off a narrow single bed, my backpack spilling open between me and the door.

  Oh right, Spain, I think. I’m in the apartment in Spain and . . . I’m starving.

  I pick up my phone—my real phone, the American one—and squint at it: one forty-five. Is that Ohio time or Spain time? Vaguely I remember setting my phone to the apartment Wi-Fi when Dad, Kayla, and I arrived. That was about the only thing I bothered doing before falling into bed. All that effort, and nobody had even texted me.

  Anyhow. It’s afternoon, and I haven’t eaten anything since . . . since awful plane food at the beginning of the flight last night. No wonder I’m starving.

  I stumble to my feet and hop over my backpack. Out in the hallway, I find that Kayla’s left the bathroom door open. Ugh. Is that what this whole summer is going to be like? I glance again, and see she’s not actually using the bathroom or the shower. Instead, she’s bent over the tiny sink.

  She turns around.

  “Oh, um, hi!” she says awkwardly. She pulls her hand out of sudsy water. “I’m washing my clothes from yesterday. I can do yours, too, if you want.”

  “No need. There’s a washer,” I say flatly.

  Kayla’s face flushes. Suds drip from her hands.

  “Yeah, but I looked at it and everything was in Spanish, so I didn’t know how to run it,” she says. “And then I started hitting things at random, and nothing happened, and . . . maybe it’s broken?”

  She looks guilty, like I’m going to accuse her of breaking it.

  It’s a washer. Who cares?

  I glance toward the shower, because I feel sweaty and gross, and maybe that’s worse than being hungry. Or a higher priority, anyway.

  Kayla follows my gaze.

  “Also,” she mumbles, as if she’s ashamed, “I’m not sure the water heater works. All I can get is cold water. I looked at it, too—it’s in a closet in the living room—but it doesn’t make sense to me either. Do you want to look and see if . . . ?”

  I try to think if I even know what a water heater looks like.

  “Dad can figure it out when he gets back,” I say. I am not taking a cold shower. It’s good to have my priorities clarified. “I just want food.”

  Kayla’s face lights up.

  “Oh, me too!” she says. “There’s, like, a ton of stuff in the kitchen—fruit and yogurt and eggs and bread . . . but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to eat it, or if it was, you know, for some special purpose or . . .”

  Seriously?

  “There’s food, you’re hungry, you eat,” I say.

  She looks at me like she’s just found out she isn’t Cinderella facing a summer with her evil stepfamily. Something twists inside me, and I don’t think it’s just because I’m hungry.

  I head toward the kitchen and Kayla trails after me.

  Mom would critique the kitchen as being too IKEA—she really hates cheap Scandinavian décor—but I’m more interested in what’s in the refrigerator than what’s around it.

  “We could do fried or scrambled eggs, and maybe pancakes or French toast, too,” Kayla says. “I think we could figure out the stovetop. Oh, and there’s potatoes, so we could fry up some of them, too. . . .”

  Ugh. Fried food.

  “I’m too hungry to cook,” I tell Kayla, even as I grab a handful of grapes. I hold the bag out to Kayla, too. “Dad left money, didn’t he?”

  “Um, over there.” Kayla takes a few grapes and points toward the tiny living room. I see a flash of blue and red at the top of a bookshelf by the front door.

  Oh right, euros are lots of different colors. Not just green, like dollar bills. . . .

  I walk over to the bookshelf and pocket sixty euros.

  “Come on,” I say. “We’re going out!”

  Five minutes later—I mean, I do pause to comb my hair and wipe smeared mascara off my face—I’m sprinting down the spiral staircase at the center of our apartment building.

  “Wait . . . wait . . . ,” Kayla calls behind me.

  My feet start to shoot out from beneath me and I grab the iron railing. These stairs are slick. They’re made of slippery polished wood, and they’re worn down in the middle where probably thousands of people have walked on them over the past decades. I’m wearing TOMS without much tread on the bottom, and the combination is dangerous. I could break my leg on these stairs. I could slip and fall all the way to the bottom and be killed.

  This would never be allowed in the United States. People would sue.

  “I’m waiting,” I call back to Kayla. “Be careful. I don’t know why Dad didn’t pick a building with an elevator.”

  “He said he wanted a place with three bedrooms, so we’d all have our privacy,” Kayla mumbles, catching up. “Maybe that was hard to find.”

  She sounds like everything is her fault all over again. And . . . she’s panting again. After only two flights of stairs.


  We make it down the next two flights without either of us falling—a major miracle. I’ve got half a mind to tell Dad we have to switch apartments. It’s bad enough I have to miss most of soccer camp—I really can’t afford a broken leg right now. Not if I’m going to make the varsity team my freshman year like I want to.

  Then I think about maybe having to share a bedroom with Kayla. Maybe I can treat these stairs like conditioning. They’ll make me more graceful and agile.

  The apartment lobby is dark and a little dingy, so it’s a jolt when I push the door open and we’re out on the street. Sunshine!

  Our apartment building faces an alleyway, and if I weren’t so hungry maybe I would think the cobblestones and the wrought-iron balconies and the overflowing flower boxes were adorable. Mom would. I turn toward the nearest major street. There’s a restaurant on the corner with tables out on the sidewalk, and people are eating pizza and pasta and maybe paella, too—that’s that special Spanish rice dish, right?

  But I don’t know if you go into the restaurant to ask to be seated on the sidewalk, or if you just sit down, or what. And whenever we go to Mexico, Dad always translates the Spanish for me. What if I can’t even read the menu here?

  And . . . okay, I probably shouldn’t have left the apartment wearing the T-shirt and running shorts I slept in. I remember Dad saying Spanish people don’t consider shorts and a T-shirt proper attire for a grown man, but I thought it’d be okay for someone my age.

  Kayla and I are the only people in sight wearing such short shorts.

  Well, whatever, I think. I’ve got good legs.

  Kayla comes up behind me.

  “You think that looks too expensive?” she asks, pointing toward the restaurant.

  “No, but the food doesn’t look very good,” I say.

  We keep walking. My stomach growls. Kayla grabs my arm.

  “Look—that sign’s in English!” she squeals. “Sort of. ‘Dunkin’ Coffee’—is that just a coffee shop, or—”

  “Oh, Dad told me about that,” I say. “It’s what they call Dunkin’ Donuts here. It’s the kind of thing Dad thinks is really funny. I don’t know why.”

  “Donuts,” Kayla echoes wistfully.

  Could we just buy a bunch of donuts and eat them? Would that be enough?

  I think about soccer conditioning and want to puke.

  We keep walking, past restaurant after restaurant. And I am so hungry, but you know Kayla isn’t going to be able to handle a Spanish menu if I don’t help her. And I really don’t want to do or say anything embarrassing, not when I’m already wearing these stupid shorts. . . .

  “Oh, look,” Kayla says, pointing again. “That place has pictures on the wall, like at McDonald’s. We could just point. Or say, ‘Numero uno,’ when we order, instead of, I don’t know, ‘sandwich con pollo . . .’ ”

  She says “sandwich” the same way you do in English, and I swear, she actually pronounces the double ls in “pollo” like an l, not a y. As in “polo pony.” Somehow she even manages to make “con” sound wrong, too. Like it’s part of the term “con man,” or “pros and cons.” Like it’s an English word, not Spanish.

  And the restaurant she’s pointing to—Pans & Company—is like a McDonald’s. They even use the same nauseatedly bright yellow décor.

  “It’s fast food,” I say, wrinkling my nose.

  “So?” she says. “Don’t we want it fast?”

  She has a point.

  “Okay, if that’s where you want to go,” I say, as though I’m being generous.

  We walk in, and within minutes we both have trays full of sandwiches and fries and Coca-Cola Light. My middle school soccer coach would faint to see me eating this garbage—Coach Landon was all about healthy choices. But I’m ravenous. And the only salad on the menu looked disgusting.

  We gobble down the food so quickly we don’t even talk. I can practically feel the calories and caffeine hitting my system.

  “I think I actually feel human again,” I mutter when there’s nothing left on our trays but crumpled wrappers and empty paper cups.

  Kayla giggles as if I’ve said something funny.

  “I feel . . . international,” she says. “We just ate Spanish food!”

  “I’m pretty sure papas fritas are just French fries with a different name,” I tell her. But I smile anyway. I’m too full and content not to.

  “Can we walk over there next?” Kayla asks, gesturing toward the front window.

  She’s pointing at a huge open plaza with a fountain and a statue and crowds of people. I actually recognize it from the guidebook Dad made me read, and from maps he showed me.

  “Oh—that’s Puerta del Sol,” I say. “It’s a big tourist attraction. Sure. Why not?”

  We throw away our trash and walk out. We’re instantly engulfed into a crowd in the street, and I remember to make sure my purse strap crosses my body, instead of dangling from my shoulder, where someone could easily grab it. Dad told me Puerta del Sol has a lot of pickpockets. But all I have in my purse is money and the apartment key, which would be easier to replace than a passport.

  Funny how I can feel so relaxed about that now—now that I’ve had sleep and food. Dad will fix everything. Why was I so worried?

  The people around us smile and laugh and point and take selfies. We move out into the plaza, and it’s like a festival or a carnival. Or Disneyland or Times Square. Kayla and I stop and watch an Asian couple with two little kids in a stroller pose beside people dressed up as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Kids in maroon shirts that say People to People walk past in pairs. Four guys with man buns and backpacks—and cute Australian accents—joke about climbing up to pose beside the man-on-a-horse statue in the center of the plaza. At least, I think they’re just joking. I decide it might be fun to sit down and see if they actually do it.

  “What’s Tio Pepe?” Kayla asks as we find a place in the shade, at the edge of a fountain.

  “Tio—? Oh, you mean the sign?” I ask, following her gaze. At the other end of the plaza, there’s a huge neon sign that lights up at night. “It’s a name. It means Uncle Pepe. I don’t know, I think it’s a brand of beer or something.”

  “Oh,” Kayla says. She stares around like she’s never before seen life-size Disney characters, neon signs, fountains, statues, or cute college guys with man buns. Maybe she hasn’t.

  “Is the whole summer going to be like this?” she marvels. “Eating out, hanging out in fun places together . . .”

  Just the way she says “together” sours my mood.

  “You’re forgetting Dad wants us both to go home with perfect Spanish,” I say and groan. “You do know he signed us up for immersion classes starting Monday, right? Because he doesn’t want us just hanging out and having fun?”

  Even that doesn’t wipe the look of wonder off Kayla’s face.

  “Classes like that are expensive,” she says. “I can see why he’d want you to have that, but—why would he pay for that for me?”

  For a minute I can almost see things through Kayla’s eyes. Was she thinking I would go to class while she stayed in the apartment like some scullery maid? Doing my laundry for me? Not even allowed to eat the food in the fridge without permission?

  “Dad’s just generous like that,” I mutter.

  But I almost want to ask Kayla her opinion. Maybe she knows something I don’t. Why did Dad insist on bringing her instead of some friend whose parents could have paid for the Spanish classes themselves? His excuse about her being older and more mature is crazy. If age mattered that much, he could have hired some junior or senior from Deskins High School. Someone like that might have been really helpful. We could have really been friends. A girl like that would have known how to take me to a sit-down restaurant. And once school started, she could have watched out for me in the school hallways; she could have given me tips about parties and boys and classes. It could have been Lauren’s older sister, or maybe Shannon’s neighbor, Catrice Simone, whose parents gave her
a BMW when she turned sixteen.

  Seriously, how does Dad think Kayla is going to be useful this summer, when she doesn’t even know how to pronounce “pollo,” and she thinks fast food is a huge treat, and she doesn’t know anything except, I guess, how to wash clothes in a sink?

  Something hits me for the first time.

  Oh no, oh no—what if that is what Dad wants Kayla to teach me? I wonder. Not the part about mispronouncing Spanish, but the part about being excited about stupid little things like greasy food, and the part about washing out underwear in a sink.

  I think about Dad wanting me to do my own laundry; I think about him arguing when Mom calls him a slack-jawed yokel.

  What if Dad made me bring Kayla along on this trip because . . . because he wants me to be like her?

  Kayla: Monday Morning

  I wake up to sunshine. I always wake up to sunshine in Spain.

  And I almost giggle at that thought, that there’s an “always” about me being in Spain—that there’s anything that’s normal or typical or usual about me being here. I am getting used to waking up every morning in my cute little Spanish room, to having breakfast on our apartment’s cute little balcony, to looking out over tile roofs.

  But today we stop “just relaxing” and start that Spanish class Mr. Armisted wants us to take.

  My stomach has a first-day-of-school feeling—Nervous? Check. Worried? Check. Certain that I’m going to humiliate myself? Check.

  But this is not a first day of school at Crawfordsville Elementary, Middle or High School. This is a class in Spain, taught entirely in Spanish, where probably everyone else is a rich kid like Avery whose parents, duh, can pay for them to go to Spain. I won’t even know anybody except Avery.

  And Avery . . .

  Is this going to be a day she likes me or a day she hates me? A day she acts like we’re friends or a day she ignores me?

  I cannot figure Avery out. Every night we go to a park so Avery can run—she calls it “soccer conditioning”—and the first night while she ran, Mr. Armisted had a long talk with me about Avery’s moods.