Read an Excerpt
Broken Soup SNY
Chapter One
It wasn't mine.
I didn't drop it but the boy in the line said I did.
It was a negative of a photograph, one on its own, all scratched and beaten up. I couldn't even see what it was a negative of because his finger and thumb were blotting out most of it. He was holding it out to me like nothing else was going to happen until I took it, like he had nothing else to do but wait.
I didn't want to take it. I said that. I said I didn't own a camera even, but the boy just stood there with this "I know I'm right" look on his face.
He had a good face. Friendly eyes, wide mouth, all that. One of his top teeth was chipped; there was a bit missing. Still, a good face doesn't equal a good person. If you catch yourself thinking that, you need to stop.
All my friends were cracking up behind me. The girl at the counter was trying to give me my change and everybody in the line was just staring. I couldn't think why he was doing this to me. I wondered if embarrassing strangers was one of the ways he got through his day. Maybe he walked around with a pile of random stuff in his pockets—not just negatives but thimbles and condoms and glasses and handcuffs. I might be getting off lightly.
I didn't know what else to do, so I said thank you, who knows for what, and I went red like always, and I made a face at my friends like I was in on the joke. Then I shoved the negative in my bag with the oranges, milk, and eggs, and he smiled.
All the way home I got "What is it, Rowan?" and "Let's see" and "Nice smile"—a flock of seagulls in school uniform, shrieking and pointingand jumping around me. And I did my usual thing of taking something that's just happened apart in my head until it's in little pieces all over the place and I can't fit it back together again. I wanted to know why he'd picked me out of everyone in the shop, and whether I should be glad about that or not. I thought about what he said ("You dropped this... no really... I'm sure") and what I did (act like a rabbit in headlights, argue, give in). I was laughing about it on the outside, feeling like an idiot on the quiet. I had no idea something important might have happened.
My name is Rowan Clark and I'm not the same person as I was in that shop, not anymore. The rowan is a tree that's meant to protect you from bad things. People made crosses out of it to keep away witches in the days before they knew any better. Maybe my mum and dad named me it on purpose, maybe not, but it didn't do much good. Bad things and my family acted like magnets back then, coming together whatever was in the way.
When I got home with the shopping, I forgot about the negative because there was too much to do. Mum was asleep on the sofa while Stroma watched The Fairly OddParents with the sound off. Stroma's my little sister. She was named after an island off Scotland where nobody lives anymore. There used to be people there until 1961 and one of them was someone way back in my dad's family. Then there was just one man in a lighthouse until they made the lighthouse work without the man and he left too. That's what Stroma and her namesake have in common, getting gradually abandoned.
I made scrambled eggs on toast with cut-up oranges and glasses of milk. While we were eating, I asked Stroma how her day was, and she said it was great because she got Star of the Week for writing five sentences with periods and everything. Being Star of the Week means you get a badge made from cardboard and a cushion to sit on at story time, which is a big deal, apparently, when you're nearly six.
I asked her what her five sentences were, and she said they were about what she did on the weekend. I said, "What did we do?" and she reeled them off, counting them on her fingers.
"I went to the zoo. With my mum and dad. We saw tigers. I had popcorn. It was fun."
Five lies, but I let it slide, and after a minute she met my eye and started talking about something else I couldn't quite make out because her mouth was full of orange. Stroma and I had whole conversations with our mouths full. It was one of the benefits of parentless meals. That and eating with your fingers and having your dessert first if you felt like it.
After supper she did a drawing of a torture chamber while I washed up. "It's us going swimming," she said, pointing at the rivers of blood and the people hanging from walls.
I said, "We can go on Saturday if you want," which she did and I already knew it.
She asked me to draw a unicorn, and even though it looked more like a rhinoceros and should have gone in the garbage, she colored it pink out of loyalty and called it Sparkle.
When she was all clean and in her pajamas, we'd read a book, and when she was feeling sleepy, Stroma asked for Mum. Just like a kid from Victorian times who gets to see a parent in order to bid them good night, but the rest of the time has to make do with the staff. I said Mum would take ten minutes because I'd have to wake her up first. I put this lullaby tape on that Stroma listened to every night since forever and I knew she'd probably be asleep before anyone made it up there.
Broken Soup SNY. Copyright © by Jenny Valentine. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
