Grounded, p.4
Grounded, page 4
“Hanna Chen.” Hanna walks up, putting out her hand to shake my mom’s. “Feek is helping me find Snickerdoodle Mildred Hoffman, a lost cat in the airport.”
Mom scrunches up her eyebrows, and I instantly know it’s not happening.
“You lost your cat, sweetie? You shouldn’t be looking through this big airport by yourself. It’s getting late. Where are your parents?”
“My dad is fine. It’s not my cat, but Feek, Ruqi, and I are—”
“You, Ruqi, and Feek what?” Mom turns to me accusingly. “Feek, are you playing with strays?”
My ears are burning. “Mom! It’s not like that. Snickerdoodle has a family. They’re . . . heartbroken!”
“And you’re chasing strange cats with your sister and this child too?”
“Hanna’s a pro. She finds . . . um . . .” I falter. I can’t tell Mom she finds lost sisters.
“Lost loved ones,” Hanna says. “I find lost loved ones.”
Mom looks back and forth at us with a deep V in her eyebrows.
She finally lands a gentler gaze on Hanna and says, “Sweetie, what you’re trying to do is . . . nice, but leave that snicker cat to the experts. Go to your dad. I’m sure he’s worried.”
“But—” Hanna says.
“Feek and Ruqi are going to sleep now. Good night, child.” Mom turns her back. Once again, Hanna looks like she’s just been kicked.
I mouth “sorry” to her as her shoulders droop. Then I turn my back like Mom did. I’m not trying to be mean, but I don’t want her to see the stupid look on my face. Did Mom have to talk to me like a little kid? In front of go-anywhere-and-do-whatever-she-wants Hanna?
When Hanna is a good number of steps away, I turn and see she’s still marching, determined. What’s it like to go out and search an airport at night?
Mom carefully places a knocked-out Hamza in his car seat, then sticks out her hand and eyes me meaningfully.
“Here too?” I ask. “We’re in an airport. What if I need it?”
“At bedtime, your phone goes away.” She repeats the rule I’ve heard a thousand times.
I groan but take it out. I missed a text from Dad.
Salaams Feekness. Sorry I didn’t have time to hear your poem. Send it my way when you get a sec.
Mom clears her throat and snaps. I struggle to hand her my phone without too much attitude. I’m hot right now.
“I hope I can get sleep in this,” she mutters as she lies down on one of the cots. She pulls Ruqi beside her and covers them both in a large coat she brought even though it’s early September. I try my cot. No way anyone is getting any sleep on one of these.
But within minutes, I hear Mom breathing, deeply asleep. Well, maybe one person can get sleep on these cots.
For me, though, it’s time to get back to my rhyme book. I reread the poem I was going to show Dad this morning, but what I thought sounded good last night feels messy and weak to me now. Maybe it was a blessing I didn’t get to share it?
No, I am good at this. I flip to the lines I wrote before Ruqi disappeared earlier: I’m the words to the song/ The hammer to the gong/ The beats to this rhythm . . .
What rhymes with “rhythm”? Think! But I still got nothing. It’s like Ruqi has blocked me. How does Dad rhyme even when he’s constantly going and constantly tired? I write what I wish I could ask him:
Dear Dad,
Do lines drop down incomplete for you too?
Do your rhymes forget the beat, ’cause mine do?
Do you read your stuff and pray for better?
Do you go back to cross out every letter?
Do you go back and erase every letter?
Ugh! My poem about not flowing doesn’t flow. I draw a big X over the lines. The answer is “no” to my questions, anyway. Dad can do poetry half asleep. I’ll have to figure out how to do that too.
“Shiny house!” Ruqi peeks her head out from Mom’s coat and points to that big ridiculous machine.
“Ruqi,” I groan. “Now is not the time.”
“Cookie Cat!”
“You still thinking about Snickerdoodle?”
“Snickerdoodle! Snickerdoodle!” she sings.
“Shhh!” I look at Mom and Hamza, still soundly asleep. “You heard Mom—we can’t look for Snickerdoodle. Want to see some cat videos?”
Thankfully, she comes to my cot.
I sigh when I reach into my empty pocket. I forgot I don’t have my phone.
“Shiny house!” Ruqi jumps up.
I pull her back down. “Ruqi, I know it’s cool that the balls are moving and all, but we have to stay here.” How does Mom usually make her sleepy? “Lay down. I’ll . . . tell you a bedtime story.”
Ruqi looks skeptical. “We don’t have no books here.”
“It’s in here.” I point to my head.
She squints at me. “What’s it about?”
“A superhero named Feek.”
“No,” she says.
“Fine, a unicorn.”
She claps. “And Snickerdoodle. And my fwiend Nora!”
“Okay, sure. Once there were three friends, Ruqayyah the unicorn, Snickerdoodle the cat, and Nora the evil, foul-smelling witch—”
“Nora, the pwetty pwincess,” Ruqi corrects.
“Fine! Once there were three friends: Ruqayyah the unicorn, Snickerdoodle the Cat, and Nora the okay-looking princess with probably no foul smells,” I begin again and finally, thank God almighty, she lies down to listen.
But do you know I’m only five minutes into my story—a rousing, powerful bedtime story—and Ruqi starts looking around? From her pocket, she digs out that paper she ripped from Hanna’s flier and looks at that instead. My story is more boring than a flier?
I snatch the paper. “I thought you wanted a story.”
“Cookie Cat!” Ruqi reaches for the paper.
Groan. This again. I’m about to just give her the stupid flier when something catches my eye. I see the cat—or half of it, since the paper’s ripped—with its back paws on a floor with golden geometric designs. I’ve only seen a floor like that at Doc Hoffa’s house. Is that floor common? It looked unique to me.
“Gimme Cookie Cat back!”
Cookie Cat. Suddenly, I’m back at Doc Hoffa’s house. At a party with almost a hundred guests from the poetry industry and their families, celebrating the premiere of Storm the Stage.
Mom had whisper-shouted at Ruqi, “Leave that cat alone. That’s Cookie’s cat.”
Cookie.
I thought it was funny that Lala Hoffa, wife of Doc Hoffa and former supermodel, was going by that name. Doc Hoffa kept calling her “Cookie” and she kept calling him “Hoffa Choc-a Chip.” She almost purred it. Yeah, ridiculous. It gets better. When she would call her kids—and I couldn’t keep track of them all in that crowd—she would call them some silly cookie name.
She’d say, “Shortbread, hunny, don’t pick your nose” or “Biscotti, baby, tie your shoes” or “Where’s Fortune? Anyone seen Fortune?” or “Come give Mommy a kissy kiss, Gingersnap.” I think I even heard a “Mealy Raisin.”
But did I hear a Snickerdoodle? I don’t know. I was taking it all in: the guests, the golden floor, the gigantic crystal chandelier, famous poets casually strolling through rooms, and a six-foot-tall supermodel running after kids but never toppling in six-inch heels. At least one floofy-looking cat was walking around, but who except Ruqi cares about a cat in Doc Hoffa’s mansion? Could Snickerdoodle be their cat?
I look back at the flier again. CONTACT COOKIE HOFFMAN, it says. I think I’ve read somewhere that Doc Hoffa’s real last name is Hoffman. Cookie probably doesn’t want to use her celebrity name. I get that. Even though my dad is a small celebrity, it’s sometimes more convenient not to tell people who he is. Dad told us before attending their party that he signed an agreement that we wouldn’t take pictures or share details, because people always make up horrible stories about the Hoffas for gossip sites. I’m thinking about the online search I’ll do when I get my phone back in the morning when I look up to see Ruqi already a few steps away.
I jump up and grab her.
“Not so fast!” And then I almost beg, “Listen to the rest of the story, Ruqi.”
“Okay,” Ruqi says, before lying back down on my cot. But I don’t trust her “okay.”
Please let her go to sleep!
If Dad—sitting across from me at our gate, where I’ve been banished to by Feek’s mom—wasn’t shooting me guilty glances in between reading something on his iPad, I’d ask him a deep question. Usually he’s good with such questions, the type that take a lot of talking to get to the right answer.
But now the look on his face tells me he’s thinking about his secret matrimonial quest from the weekend.
If he was his normal self, I’d ask him, Do the ends ever justify the means if the ends end up saving a life?
Like if you’re about to do an illegal thing but it’s for something good, isn’t that okay?
Like, can I pretend to be thirteen and make a Facebook account in order to check in with the Hoffmans?
I desperately need to connect with them. And I can’t use Dad’s account anymore because he changed his password, and I couldn’t crack it even after trying all his other passwords.
When I checked the Animal Allies forum on my phone, I learned that the Hoffmans had updated their Facebook page just an hour ago about two new potential sightings of Snickerdoodle at Hurston today.
More.
Snickerdoodle.
Sightings. Today.
Now I’m convinced that flights getting canceled is heaven-sent. Isn’t Allah giving me another message? Here are some extra hours to find Snickerdoodle?
I don’t want to waste a second of it.
So during all this time sitting here, I’ve tried my hardest to reach RainingCatsNDogs, the person who posted about the new Snickerdoodle sightings on the Animal Allies forum, but so far, they haven’t replied to any of my messages. They didn’t post any information on the locations where Snickerdoodle may have been last seen! (I’m pretty sure they assumed everyone could just go check the Facebook links themselves. Not remembering that some Animal Allies members are under the age of thirteen. Sob.)
Which means I need to go right to the source! I desperately need to talk to the Hoffmans themselves so they can tell me where I should focus my investigations.
I bring up the MAKE AN ACCOUNT Facebook window on my phone browser that I’d already filled in with my name and other extremely truthful details, except for the entry for year in the date-of-birth field. (It says I was born two years earlier than I was. Because sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.)
Before clicking submit, I look up at Dad to see if he’s watching.
Oh great. We end up exchanging guilty glances.
I close the browser window.
He puts down his iPad. “Was the food court busy? What did you get to eat?”
I go back to the Animal Allies forum on my phone to see if RainingCatsNDogs has responded to my twelve messages and posts.
“Nothing,” I murmur to myself.
“A whole food court and you didn’t find anything?” Dad says, putting his iPad away in his laptop bag. He stands up and puts the bag on his shoulder. “Want to come with me now and get something? Before the restaurants close?”
“No, I’m okay.”
Instead of making his way to the food court, he comes over and crouches in front of me. “Hanna, are you okay?”
Uh-oh. He says that with so much sadness that my throat gets plugged and hot tears attack the back of my eyes and I want to yell, “NO! I’M NOT OKAY. I’M IN AGONY. IN ANGUISH. YOU WENT TO FIND A NEW MOM FOR ME AT THE CONFERENCE WITHOUT TELLING ME. SO HOW IN THIS UNJUST WORLD CAN I BE OKAY?!?”
But I hold it in and don’t answer. He will get nothing from me. And then nothing will happen.
Like Dad getting married.
To make the lump in my throat disappear, I stare at the logo for Animal Allies—a dog, cat, and bird flying a plane together, waving—and try to think about that precious future moment when I finally find Snickerdoodle (insha’Allah) and give her a handful of Meow Mix treats from my hands.
“I want to talk to you about something, actually,” Dad says, taking his laptop bag off his shoulder and setting it down on the floor by his legs.
He’s getting comfy.
I look up. I need to escape.
“I was going to wait until we got to Auntie Lisa’s, but we have time now.” He’s lifting an arm like he’s getting ready to . . . hug me?
Comfort me?
When he tells me the awful truth—that I’m getting a new mom?
Even though I’ve never gotten a chance to know my real mom and I’m still learning about her. Even though I still love her so much.
It feels like alarm bells and huge sirens are going off in my brain: GO! LEAVE! WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
RUN!!!
I get up.
“What are you doing? What’s wrong, Hanna?” He’s reaching out. His hand brushes my elbow. “The whole weekend you’ve been ignoring me. I thought it was because you were busy with your friends, but now what’s happening?”
Sami.
I can make out his sky-blue shirt out of the corner of my eye. He’s at a set of seats at the gate across.
It’s like it’s waving at me, his shirt. Even though his face is actually super-frowny above his shirt as he stares hard at the tablet he’s clutching, it’s still a nice, friendly sign.
He never got a chance to answer if he’s on board to help me find Snickerdoodle. Feek said he was in, but then his mom didn’t understand the mission.
Sigh. Feek would have been super helpful—the way he just knows what he’s talking about. And the way he trusts me.
Sami, I’m not so sure about. His forehead scrunches a lot like he’s calculating a ton of things in his head.
But I guess Sami will have to do. Beggars can’t be choosers.
“I wish you’d talk to me.” Dad rests a hand on my shoulder gently.
Oh noooo. A big part of me wants to sink into that hand and let Dad hug me tight, like when I used to cry about not knowing who to make Mother’s Day cards for at school.
Back then, I was really crying because everyone in my class knew two things: one, that I didn’t have a mother to make a card for, and two, all the teachers brought up “you can even make a card for your grandma or an aunt or a neighbor” just because I, Hanna Chen, was in the class.
Dad said it was okay if I made Mother’s Day into a little joke for myself. That I could make up imaginary people to make funny cards for, like “thank you for knitting me socks from dryer lint” or “you make the bitterest radish cake in the entire world” or “you’re the best great-great-great-great-grandma!”
Then we’d make a real card for Mom at home, with my big brother, Adam, helping sometimes too. It was full of prayers for her in heaven and current pictures of me because she’d never seen me older than a baby.
And Dad makes sure to hug me tight all the days leading up to every Mother’s Day, and all the days after, until I put away Mom’s card from that year with the other cards in a box.
I know I’ll never be able to give them to her, but I also know I don’t ever want to make cards for any other mother either.
Even if Dad found someone else.
I stand and move away from his hand.
Sami! He just looked up at me!
“Wait, where are you going?” Now Dad stands, his voice bewildered.
“One of my friends is waving me over. He needs help,” I say over my shoulder, holding up my phone. “You can text me if you need me, Dad.”
I make sure I don’t turn around. I don’t want him to see my face, and I for sure don’t want to see his. I know both of our faces are sad, and seeing Dad’s will make the tears filling my eyes just spill.
I can’t cry when I have things to do.
I’m so glad Snickerdoodle needs me to find her.
And that Sami will help me.
This isn’t happening.
This can’t be happening.
I need to get to the bus stop in NINE hours!
“Sami, take a deep breath,” says my mother as the sound of thunder crackles so loudly the windows tremble.
“Seriously, kiddo.” My father pats my back and looks at me worriedly. “In and out—like we’ve talked about.”
“But it’s storming so bad outside!”
He looks out the large glass windows. “It is pretty rough out there, but don’t worry, we’re safe here.”
My mother nods. “As scary as it is, the airport is built to withstand a storm like this.”
Scary? They think I’m scared the lightning storm is going to personally zap me? I look at them. They think I’m a scaredy-cat too, don’t they?
“No, th-that’s not what I meant,” I manage to say. “D-do you think there’s at least a chance the plane might take off? I know it won’t be on time now, but the storm could pass quickly. And if they board us in the next few hours, we’d still have a chance—”
My words are interrupted by a crackle of thunder like a popcorn machine going berserk, followed by an emphatic BOOM. The lights in the airport flicker again.
I guess I have my answer . . . but . . .
“Other airports!” I exclaim. “Let’s look up an airport out of the storm path? We could take a different flight.”
“Sami—” my mother begins.
“There won’t be any flights until morning,” Dad tells me.
“But if the flight is in the morning, I’ll miss the bus. It leaves at six o’clock sharp, and Sensei told us he wasn’t going to wait for anyone.”
“Yeahhh.” My dad makes a sympathetic face. “If I’m going to guess, according to the hourly forecast on my weather app, our flight won’t take off until five or six in the morning, when the storm clouds clear.”
Five. Or six. In the morning. My brain feels like it’s glitching. Because five or six in the morning means we won’t get back to Orlando by late morning. Which means I am missing not only the epic bus ride up to Gainesville with my teammates but the karate competition too.
