“Sit down. Talk.”
“I don’t mind,” I said honestly. “I like being useful.”
“Dee, you don’t have to be useful to be liked. Not here, anyway.”
I blinked at her. “I can talk and load the dishwasher at the same time.”
Tim stood and carried his plate through to the kitchen. “Actually, multitasking has been shown to decrease productivity.”
“Only in men,” Reeti said. “Women do it all the time.”
Which is how the three of us ended up in the kitchen, doing dishes and chatting about not much of anything at all. That warm feeling around my heart was back. It took me a minute to recognize it.
Happiness.
Nine
I had three classes a week. Leaving me with plenty of time, as Glenda said, to look after the girls and explore the city.
I’d never been to Orlando, but Dublin was what I’d pictured Wizarding World to be, quaint shops and strange things to eat and drink. Flowers everywhere, spilling from stalls and planters, crowding tiny gardens, springing from chimney pots and cracks in the cobblestones. And tourists, and music floating out of unexpected places, and the old library, like Hogwarts, dreaming at the center of it all.
At night, on my evenings off, I went out with Reeti to pubs or hung out in her flat, watching cooking shows on television. Sometimes we crossed the bridge, dropping in on Sam for tea and a chat. During the day, while Lily and Sophie were in school, I poked along the market stalls, buying vintage sweaters to ward off the chill, searching the bookstores for authors Sam had recommended. Dublin was everything I’d hoped for or imagined.
And then there were the seven hours a week I spent in class.
With sixteen students—total—in the writing program, there was no place to hide. Even in this diverse group of writers, Ididn’t fit in. It was my accent. Or my boots. Or the fact that I was sleeping with one of the professors.
I winced. Not that I was sleeping with Glenda, except literally. I was rooming in her house, taking care of her children. But working as her nanny definitely put me in an awkward position, somewhere both above and below my classmates on the social scale.
They were all so smart. I listened to them volunteer their opinions in class, these cool girls and earnest boys, so confident of their talent, their causes, and their clothes, and felt like a total impostor.
I spent hours in the library, reading the assigned texts and catching up on the hundred or so years of Irish literature that had not been part of my education until now. I read alone in my room at night and in the common room before class, hoping, fearing someone would talk to me. Constantly expecting someone to say,Dee Gale? Any relation to Destiny Gayle?and then laugh, and it wouldn’t be a joke.
“Adjusting to a new school is always hard,” I told Toni at the end of September. I was leaving the writing center through the seldom-used front door, bag on one shoulder, phone in my other hand. “You remember.”
Or maybe not. She was only four, an active, happy kid, when we went to live with Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for good.
“Hard for you, maybe,” Toni said. “I would love to go to a different school.”
When our mother went away, it became my job to watch over Toni, to comb her hair and zip her coat and hold her hand crossing the street. After Mom died, I carried on the way I thought she would want me to, teaching my little sister to tie her shoes, putting a dollar under her pillow when she lost a tooth. But now I had exactly fourteen minutes to meet Lily and Sophiebe fore school let out. I hurried to the corner. “It’s natural to be homesick.”
“I’m not homesick. I hate it here.”
“Give it time,” I said. “Once you get involved—”
“It’s beensix weeks.” She made it sound like an eternity.
“How are things going with your roommate? Madison?”
“Fine. We don’t really hang out together. Her boyfriend is here, so she’s either at his place or I’m sleeping in the lounge.”
I hummed sympathetically. “But you have other friends.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I could hear her eye roll through the phone. “Half my graduating class is here. It’s like I never left high school.”
“You’ll meet new people, too,” I said. “Maybe if you signed up for some clubs...”
“Dodo, you’re not listening to me.”
