WE LEAVE EVERYTHING as it is in R's hot front yard because we'll be right back. There are things we need at the big stores. We walk the half mile down the long hill to the bus stop where the one bus sometimes runs through our town, sometimes not. It runs that day, and between the three of us, we get on it with nearly ten dollars, five of which is a five-dollar bill paid to Z for yard chores he did for a nice house up the road. We ride that sweaty bus way out of town, along the water, towards the next town where there is a K-Mart and a Goodwill. 

 

We ride until R, who lives next door to Z and I and knows the world, says it is our stop and so we yank the yellow line, feeling like vandals, and ragtag off the bus, probably having seen a face we know or that knows us along the way, it being high summer in our little hometown on the big river. 

 

They once sent logs down that river to make masts for wooden boats. Once, they cut ice out of the river and sent that too, in hay. We don't yet know about any of the world that happened before the pilgrims, because school teaches a history that loves more than anything to tell the stories of the money that has been cut up out of the ground of this country called America. Which is to say we don't know all that we do not yet know.

 

In the K-Mart, the ceilings are as high as the barn roof. We enter and we probably stand there like motherless fawns, skinny, backwoods-playing kids, stricken by the sudden blue light of commerce. Then we turn right because we've been here before, and march down to the back of the store where they keep such necessities as tennis rackets and water pistols and chalk. We are here for chalk. 

 

Z is my big brother and R is his big friend who lives next door. They are several centuries older than me and they know things, being eleven and twelve, that I, being juvenile, cannot yet know. They know, for instance, the appropriate way to walk through a store like K-Mart like big people who have wallets full of identification cards. Juvenile is the word Z and R said had to do with the jail the bus went by, the cement walls behind the fence yellow with heat and pollen. 

 

Then we walk along the way back of K-Mart and get to the aisle that smells like R's black and white guinea pig named Leaf Petal, and pick up guinea pig food too. I see, like I'm watching it happen from way far away, that Z and R know something that I don't. They are looking at the money in Z's hands and they are looking at the price stickers on the chalk and Leaf Petal's food. They are looking so hard and serious that I get nervous. I get the feeling that I get when I'm with our mother when the food stamp card doesn't work, like I want to pretend that I don't know these poor kids, Z and R. But they are not her, and I am always proud to be with them, the big boys who are so close to being men, their heads way up there at a different altitude. So it's a confusing moment, and I don't like it, how I feel, how I can see that they're nervous. 

 

Maybe they're not nervous, but they're not talking. They're still looking at the price tags and the coins even though they know exactly how much money we have because we counted it enough times to be absolutely sure of all the worth of the piles of nickels and dimes and quarters. "We left the pennies because", said R, "they are dead weight", which is something Z once told me that I am, though he took it back straightaway. 

 

I'm a little sister and always have been, and I don't know yet that I always will be. And I don't know yet what it means really, to be a little sister growing up in the shadow of big boys who seem like men, and I don't know yet what it means to grow up with very little sense that the world is stable under your feet, by which I mean I can't know yet all the things that growing up poor will mean for the rest of my life. 

 

Z and R start talking about the five percent tax. So I see what's going on. What it is is that they're not nervous about not having enough money but nervous about the other boy figuring out that tax first and adding it all together and all of this happens in just a couple moments but it seems like more and more lately Z and R aren't loving each other like they used to, but loving the way that it feels to win and make the other lose. So I take two steps back and watch them. Then I watch a grown-up mother and daughter walk by holding hands and looking in love. I promise myself I won't ever need anybody like that. 

 

On the bus home, we fondle the chalk. We are going to make a four-square court, so we can be the recess champions when the school year gets rolling. The pavement sizzles under our sandals, heats the soles of our feet. When we get to R's driveway, I see how still Leaf Petal is sleeping there in the yard, like a little black dropped sock, flat in the grass at the edge of her pen. R, who knows things about the world, crosses the yard with the food bag held in his two fists and as he's going, he calls back to Z and I where we wait on the tar, "She's alright, you know." As though we believed any different. It's a hot, hot day out there on the lawn. 

 

But then of course, she's not alright, and on that day I see a big boy cry. 

 

This was all way before Goodwill got found by people with money to buy other things and before the K-Mart emptied. This was before the homes got too expensive for anybody I know to own one. This was before K-Mart got knocked down and replaced by a building with twenty-one middle-class condos and a restaurant with a chef people know about. This was before, but not too long before, Z and R quit speaking and nobody but them ever knew quite why. 

 

We bury her beneath the crab apple tree where the old boat rots. Maybe we even have a little fun. Anyone can get over a guinea pig. We are decently tough kids, as it goes. 

 

So what with the bus, the money and the death, we grow up a little more than average that day. Which is how it goes. Bones grow and a soul ages in fits and spurts. I don't know yet how proud I will one day be to be a poor girl who grew up. I don't know yet who I will be.