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Chapter One <figure>
ON A SEEMINGLY ORDINARY TUESDAY morning, Mrs. Mary Holsapple, proprietress of the Sycamore Home for Orphaned Children, announced that everyone would be going on a “walk around the neighborhood.”
Lainey Philipps had lived at the orphanage since she was three years old, nearly nine long years ago. She could count on her fingers the number of times that she—or any of the other kids, for that matter—had been allowed to venture more than ten feet beyond the institution’s thick iron gates. So Mrs. Holsapple’s announcement took her quite by surprise.
There’s got to be a reason for this, Lainey thought. The pit that was permanently lodged in her stomach grew a bit larger.
And it’s certainly not going to be a kind one, like wanting us to breathe fresh air and experience the hustle and bustle of London streets the way regular kids do. Mary Holsapple and her husband, Darnell, were cruel and crooked. Lainey figured they were the last two people on Planet Earth who should’ve been left in charge of a house full of orphans in need of extra care and love.
How had the Holsapples ended up at SHOC? (That was what everyone called the Sycamore Home for Orphaned Children for short, since the whole name was such a mouthful.) Who’d picked them to have this job? And why had they ever accepted it?
Lainey didn’t know, and she didn’t dare ask. The Holsapples had a strict no-questions rule, and she didn’t want to get a whipping. So those questions, along with all the others Lainey had had over the years, stayed buttoned up inside her.
“Hey.” Lainey heard a whisper and felt a tug at her side. It was Nora, one of the younger girls at the orphanage. Though Lainey never said it out loud, Nora was her favorite. If her parents had lived long enough to give her a little sister, Lainey imagined she would’ve been someone just like Nora. “What’s a
neighborhood?” she asked.
Nora was only four. But that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t know such a simple word. Most of the older kids didn’t know it either. Maybe they’d heard it, but they didn’t really understand what it meant. They’d never been part of a neighborhood. They’d never even walked through one.
Oh, how Lainey yearned for life outside the orphanage—a neighborhood to walk through, where you’d go to school and have teachers who actually wanted you to learn things. And, at the end of the day, most importantly, you’d go home to parents who loved you.
The SHOC kids didn’t have parents—at least not ones who were able to take care of them. They slept on narrow cots in one big room: girls on one side, boys on the other, with a series of sheets hanging down between them. In the summer, the flies buzzed by the kids’ ears and landed on their eyelids. In the fall, someone would catch a cold, and by winter it would have passed through the whole orphanage, and everyone was coughing.
There were nights when loneliness overtook her, and all the tears that Lainey had held back for so long burned to get out. That was the only good part about the coughing. It drowned out the soft sounds of her crying, so the Holsapples didn’t punish her for it. They also had a strict no-crying rule.
On usual weekday mornings, Lainey and the other kids headed downstairs to the classroom. One big classroom for all the kids, of all ages and all skills, all lumped together. There weren’t enough desks for everyone, but the Holsapples didn’t care a lick about that. The kids were given old workbooks with pages missing, or answers already filled in—often filled in wrong. Most days, the so-called teacher would stand in front of the classroom and announce that it was “silent reading time.” But how did they expect the kids to read silently if no one had ever taught them how?
The answer was that they probably
didn’t expect them to. To them, the kids were lost causes. Hopeless. The unluckiest of the unlucky. Those who didn’t get adopted by the time they were thirteen—and most of them would not—would be sent to workhouses to toil to the bone, or else turned out onto the streets, where the dark cloud of bad luck would surely follow them.
Lainey tried not to think too much about her awful fate. There was nothing she could do about it. But at least she was lucky about one thing. Back when she was barely three years old, her mum had taught her all the letter sounds.
When Lainey closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough, she could even picture it. There was her mum, lying next to her in bed, an alphabet book between them. It had drawings of animals with their bodies bent into letter shapes. An alligator dipping at the waist to make an
A. A bumblebee with wings like the curves on a
B. And on and on. Lainey would trace the animals with her fingers, and her mum would tell her the letter sounds.
Lainey held on to that memory the way you’d hold on to a precious stone—knowing you’re holding something valuable, something that requires great care. Often on those lonely nights, Lainey would squeeze her eyes shut and strain to hear her mum’s kind and steady voice inside her head: “
A says ‘aah.’
B says ‘buh.’”
Later, in the classroom at SHOC, Lainey figured out for herself that stringing those sounds together made words, and that the words made up sentences, made up paragraphs, made up books. She read all the books she could get her hands on—though in truth there weren’t that many to choose from. The books at SHOC were either really old, or they were books that other people didn’t want, so they’d dropped them off for the orphans instead of throwing them in the trash.
One person’s rubbish is another person’s riches, Lainey’s dad used to say.
It was lovely to hear his voice in her head. Lovely and hard. But Lainey would take the hard to get the lovely. When she pictured her dad in her head, he often had a book in his hands. She thought he’d be happy to know that she considered the books left at the orphanage to be her riches.
One of the books happened to be a dictionary. She’d read it from start to finish and learned the definitions of “aardvark,” “zygote,” and everything in between... including “
neighborhood.”
“Don’t ask such daft questions, Nora,” Mrs. Holsapple said now, having unfortunately overheard her.
Lainey bent close to the girl’s ear. “It’s the people who live close to you,” Lainey whispered. “That’s your neighborhood.” She smiled inside her heart as she said it. She knew better than to let a smile form on her face. The Holsapples were practically allergic to the children experiencing any happiness at all, no matter how small a moment it might be. But Lainey liked being able to teach things to the other kids. It made her feel useful, and that made her feel hopeful. Nora was her favorite kid of all to help.
“This one’s a dolt; that one’s a know-it-all,” Mrs. Holsapple said.
And just like that, Lainey’s happiness was snuffed out like a candle. Her chest filled with anger. She kept it locked inside, just like her smile. Just like every other emotion she ever felt.
“That means the people in SHOC are my neighborhood,” Nora said. “We’re going to walk around SHOC?”
“Enough chattering,” Mr. Holsapple said. “Shut up or I’ll wallop you.”
“Hurry and line up,” Mrs. Holsapple added.
The Holsapples were always making the kids line up. At bedtime. When they woke up in the morning. When it was time for chores. When chores were finished (not that they were ever finished).
Boys lined up on the left, and girls on the right. The lines were in size order, with the shorter kids in front and tall ones in the back. The boys’ line was longer, so Mr. Holsapple told Jacob and all the boys behind him to get to the back of the girls’ line, to even things out.
“I ain’t going on no girls’ line,” Jacob said. He was ten years old and tall for his age, with sandy-colored hair and a red birthmark shaped like a teensy baked bean beside his right eye. Lainey wished that he’d keep quiet around the Holsapples, like she did. But Jacob couldn’t help himself. He always said what he was thinking.
Mr. Holsapple grabbed Jacob by his earlobe and dragged him over. It felt awful to watch and not stick up for him. But Lainey knew that saying something wouldn’t help Jacob at all. The other boys followed behind him. The lines were even—or at least even
enough to satisfy the Holsapples—and out they went.
They made a left at the gate and marched down the sidewalk.
It was so bright outside! That was the first thing Lainey noticed. The courtyard at SHOC was almost always darkened by shadows from the buildings surrounding the orphanage. But the streets beyond were bathed in warm yellow light. The sky was a deep but bright blue. Of all the colors in the world, sky blue was her favorite. It was a small moment of good luck to be out on a clear, cloudless day and be able to see it.
Though Lainey knew from an old science textbook she’d found at the orphanage that the sky wasn’t
actually blue, at least not completely. The light from the sun was made up of all the colors of the rainbow. Blue light traveled in smaller, shorter waves than the other colors, so it was what you saw.
Lainey tipped her head back, squinting to look at it, and she tripped over the heel of the girl in front of her.
“Ow!” Peg cried. She was only a couple of months younger than Lainey. They’d been together at the orphanage nearly the whole time.
“Oh my, I’m sorry, Peggy,” Lainey said. “The sky distracted me. I love it, don’t you?”
“Huh. I never gave the sky much thought,” Peg said.
“Do you think the skies on other planets are the same color blue?” Lainey asked.
“I’ve definitely never thought about that,” Peg said.
“Shut your traps,” Mr. Holsapple said. “Or you’ll be emptying chamber pots for the next week.”
Chamber-pot duty was the most dreaded chore of all the bad chores at SHOC. You had to heave up the full pots and hold your nose so as not to faint from the stench as you carried them down the steps and out the door. You’d empty them into the gutters that ran alongside the street, hoping that you didn’t accidentally splash anything on your only pair of shoes and socks while you poured.
The girls stopped talking and kept walking. Lainey watched her feet so as not to step on Peg again. And not to step on anything else that might’ve been poured into the gutter.
Other people were outside, their clothes clean and bright. The SHOC kids looked like a giant dust cloud passing by, all wearing raggedy old clothes in shades of brown and gray. A couple of women lifted scented dried flowers to their noses. They inhaled and blocked out the stench of dirty kids.
That was a thing some people did when they visited the city: they brought sachets or flowers to block out the bad smells. And though it made Lainey ashamed that they were lifting their flowers to their noses in front of the orphans, she could hardly blame them. She knew that she and her fellow waifs were filthy and must smell terrible. When it was just the kids together at the orphanage, they were all so used to it, they barely noticed. But out in the world, Lainey was reminded of just how bad it all was. Even her eyelids felt heavy with dirt. Her eyeballs were the only part of her that remained clean.
A little boy stopped in front of them to wave. “Hi, kids!”
His mother yanked his arm, as if pulling him from something contagious. Which she probably was. Lainey’s head itched from something that was likely lice.
“This way, Teddy,” the boy’s mum said.
“Who are they?” Lainey heard him ask.
The mum loud-whispered “orphans” as if it were a dirty word. Lainey was so embarrassed, even if it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t any of the kids’ fault. The only difference between the SHOC kids and Teddy was that they’d had bad luck and he’d had good luck.
Teddy probably didn’t even think about his good luck. He probably didn’t know he had it—just like most lucky kids. It’s when bad luck happens that you become aware of these things. And the thing about bad luck is it can sneak up on you at any time. You could be in the middle of a great day—maybe even your best day. Then bad luck swoops in and shocks you and you have your worst day.
And yet Lainey always tried to hold out hope that her luck would change.
