far as I could, until I could hardly see.
The train the afternoon that Acid walked away was late, and when it came it was packed, only one seat in the back of the car I had chosen, near the operator’s booth. It was an hour’s ride home from school, forty-five minutes if I was lucky.
That was another way I was different: I was never lucky.
The subway rumbled and swayed. The car I was in emptied as more and more people got out. Hardly anyone got in as we traveled uptown. We were almost home when the train jerked and halted, and I was pushed into the sleeping man beside me. I moved away quickly, scooting over until my shoulder pressed against the side of the car. The man only snorted and went back to sleep.
The conductor’s voice came over the intercom, scratchy and garbled—but I knew what he was saying; I had heard it before. “This train is being held by supervision. We will be moving shortly.”
We were in between stops, and outside the window, the tunnel looked black. Inside the train, the lights flickered and went out. When they turned back on, there was something on the outside of the window.
Hand. It was a hand.
Someone was riding on the outside of the train.
I stood, my bag sliding off my lap and hitting the floor with a thud. The sleeping man grumbled. The operator came out of his booth and scanned the car.
I met his glance. “There’s someone out there.”
He didn’t look. “Kid, sit down.”
“Look!” I said.
Annoyed, he flicked his eyes in the direction I pointed, barely a glance. But the operator didn’t see. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ll be moving soon.” He opened the door to his little booth, and went back inside, muttering to himself, “Kids!”
I had heard about people riding on the outside of subway cars, trying to be funny, getting themselves killed. But when I turned to look again, to double-check, the hand was gone. I saw only the empty tunnel and the swinging work light. Why was it swinging, as if someone had knocked into it?
With a jerk, the train started moving again.
My stop was the last in Manhattan before the Bronx. My building was the last on the block before the highway, and our apartment was on the top floor, up five flights of stairs. No elevator. “It builds the muscles,” my sister had said when she was a dancer.
But she wasn’t a dancer anymore.
She was waiting for me in the hallway of the apartment when I unlocked the door, which was bad. Really bad. The Firecracker never got home before me, not since she started working her “real job,” as she called it, her “grown-up job” that kept her late, every night, sometimes until nine or ten. I checked my phone. It was six.
“The Head-of-School called,” the Firecracker said. “You’re getting a D in English.”
That hurt, but I tried not to let it. “So?” I said.
“So, they won’t let you out of the ninth grade if you don’t get at least a C.”
I followed her into the kitchen. “What does that mean, they won’t let me out?”
“That means, you’ll lose your scholarship and be kicked out of school. You can’t coast by anymore, Esmé.”
“I’m not coasting,” I said.
But I knew I was.
It was like I was tired all the time. It was like I was angry and upset—but if I talked to someone about it, if I stayed after school to meet a teacher or go to tutoring, I would have to think about it. I would have to bring it up. And I didn’t want to bring it up. I wanted it not to be happening at all.
Miss Wrong.
I did well in school when I was a kid, well enough that they made me take tests, and the tests got me into a new school, a private school. Acid and I were scholarship kids, brought in by the tests. In middle school, I had raised my hand and answered questions, and I had usually got them right. But in high school, this year, something had changed in me. I got the questions wrong sometimes, often enough that I got a new nickname.
The teachers at my new school all called us by our last names, like we were in the military or gym class. So Wong became Wrong for my classmates. Miss Wrong. It wasn’t a stretch. It wasn’t very creative.
But I still stopped raising my hand.
The Firecracker was banging pots in the kitchen. “They’ve given you multiple chances at that school,” she said.
I dropped my bag on the floor. “No, they haven’t.”
“Those were their words. Not mine. Your scholarship is a big deal, and if you don’t deserve it, if you don’t work for it, they’re going to find someone who does.”
“So?” I said. I slumped against the doorframe. My sister was kneeling, her head and shoulders in a cabinet. “Are you actually going to try and cook something?” I asked.
“I’m home early,” she said. “I thought I might as well.”
Her frame was twisted to reach into the back of the cabinet, her arm extended, almost artfully. I thought of her dancing—and then I thought of how I was never going to see that again.
She backed out of the cabinet, holding a frying pan at a distance, as if it were something distasteful. “I can’t afford that school. If you lose that scholarship, you’re out.”
I shrugged. “Public school.”
“No. You don’t understand. If you lose your scholarship, you’re out of here. You’re out of New York. I’m sending you away.”
Acid never answered his phone. When it got too late to call, I fell asleep.
I had nightmares since my parents died. Not nightmares: dreams. I dreamed about a dark space. At the end of the space was a light, a bright white light growing brighter and bigger and whiter—and in the light, my mother danced.
I knew it was my mother, not my sister, although I had never actually seen my mother perform on stage. But the face on the dancer in my dreams matched the face I saw in pictures—like the Firecracker’s only thinner, a slimmer face than mine, with the high cheekbones I would never have, and the wrinkles on the forehead I didn’t have yet. It was the smile most of all that made me certain it was my mother. In photographs, she always smiled when she performed, and I knew—I remembered from seeing her on stage—my sister never did.
My sister grimaced. She grunted and frowned and stomped across the stage, a ball of energy, a lightning bolt. She danced like she was always angry. She tore through toe shoes. Her tutus ripped. Her feet bled. “The Firecracker,” The Times called her, and the name stuck. They also wrote that she was a tribute to her mother.
My sister quit dancing, right after that.
I didn’t really remember my mother, and I remembered my father only as a voice, a deep belly laugh. They died when I was a kid, in a car crash.
But I never dreamed about that.
In English, I tried to text, and the teacher saw. “Miss Wong,” she said. “Your phone, please.”
I slid out of my seat and dragged myself to the front. No one laughed until the third row, when a girl coughed and said it: “Miss Wrong.” Then everyone laughed, an explosion that radiated through the room. The teacher glared at the class, but didn’t say anything. I was getting a D, why would she?
After school, I had to double back to the classroom to pick up my phone, and I barely made the train. It was less crowded than yesterday, but slow, and the car I had picked had bad air-conditioning, the windows steaming over in the afternoon heat. Someone had cracked one open, a slit through which I could see the black tunnel. When we stopped