Seeing Orange Read online

  Seeing Orange

  Sara Cassidy

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  Amy Meissner

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2012 Sara Cassidy

  Illustrations copyright © 2012 Amy Meissner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cassidy, Sara

  Seeing orange [electronic resource] / Sara Cassidy ; illustrated

  by Amy Meissner.

  (Orca echoes)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-996-4 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0318-3 (EPUB)

  I. Meissner, Amy II. Title. III. Series: Orca echoes (Online)

  PS8555.A7812S43 2012 jC813’.54 C2012-902834-7

  First published in the United States, 2012

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938344

  Summary: When a neighbor encourages Leland’s artistic talents, he finds the confidence to express his feelings to his grade two teacher.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover artwork and interior illustrations by Amy Meissner

  Author photo by Amaya Tarasoff

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4 ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

  For Alden —SC

  For Leland, thanks for letting me in —AM

  Author’s Note

  An artist named Justin Beckett said, “I could paint these mountains the way they look, but that isn’t how I see them. Artists don’t paint what things look like. They paint what they see.”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter One

  Pumpkin is stretched out asleep in my pajama drawer. Now my pajamas will have her golden-orange hairs all over them.

  Mom is reading on the front steps, a mug of smelly tea by her knee. She calls it herbal tea. But I call it horrible tea.

  My sister Liza is singing in the bathtub. It’s some song about setting fire to the rain. Liza only takes baths so she can sing in the bathroom. She likes the echoes. She calls them acoustics.

  Silas is building LEGO spaceships on the floor of our frog-green bedroom. Later, he’ll head outside to throw a tennis ball against the wall. Once, his ball went through the open bathroom window while Liza was in there singing. Splash! Did Liza ever scream!

  And me? I’m under the piano bench. I’ve draped a blanket over it to make a secret cave. It’s getting pretty hot in here. Maybe I’ll go lie on the floor in the narrow space between Mom’s bed and the wall.

  I could pretend I’m a luger speeding down an ice track. That’ll cool me down.

  I like the laundry room best. It’s a scrubbed place.

  The air smells like soap. I like the white walls and the soft towers of clean, folded laundry. The only problem is the dirty laundry piled on the cement floor. It’s like a stinky sleeping beast. If I look too long, it starts to breathe.

  This morning, I drew a picture of Mom’s sweater on the clothesline. The crayon that matched it was called persimmon. Apricot was too light. It was hard to draw the sweater’s wrinkles. But I did a good job with the right sleeve that hung down as if it was reaching for something.

  The kitchen is the busy room in our house. It’s where we talk and play Scrabble. Silas doesn’t usually sit for long. He wheels around and around the house on his Rollerblades. He only changes direction if he gets dizzy. “He’ll damage the floors,” visitors warn.

  Mom just shakes her head. “Having fun is more important than smooth floors,” she says.

  Some places in our house scare me. Like under the back porch. I only go there if we are playing hide-and-seek. I squat on top of the broken plant pots, hoping the pill bugs don’t crawl over me. Old flower bouquets with brown petals and moldy stems rot in the dirt. Mom dumps vases out there when she can’t get to the compost pile.

  On school mornings, we jam up in our tiny front hallway. We cram our lunches into our schoolbags.

  Mom searches frantically for the car keys. Silas gulps down the last of his bowl of cereal. Liza pulls everything off the coat hooks to look for her favorite hoodie.

  Move out of the way!

  Where’s my other shoe?

  That’s MY lunch.

  Mom calls it the Hurry Flurry. These days, I don’t like the Hurry Flurry. Because I don’t want to go to school. My grade two teacher is Mr. Carling. No matter what I do, he’s always mad at me.

  Chapter Two

  As soon as I enter the schoolyard, my heart starts to bang. It bangs like the big drum in the Victoria Day parade. My stomach feels like it’s full of gravel. I can hardly walk. It’s like I’m wading through high water. “Hurry up, Leland!” Liza hisses as she breezes past. But I don’t hurry up. I freeze.

  Delilah rescues me. Her shaggy belly presses against my thigh. I grab the square handle of her leather collar and let her lead me through the big front doors. She leads me down the shiny hallway into Mr. Carling’s classroom. I hang up my jacket and change into my indoor shoes. Delilah snuggles into my cubby. She has to shrink a little to fit in there.

  I once saw a dog like Delilah leading a woman down the street. The woman had long hair, freckles on her nose and strange white eyes that blinked a lot.

  Mom told me the woman didn’t see well and the dog helped her get around. Delilah doesn’t really help me see. She helps me move. Liza says Delilah is imaginary. She says I make her up. So what? She still helps me.

  The carpet at the front of the classroom is the color of a rotting Christmas orange. But up close, it’s amazing. It is made of a million, zillion tiny thread loops. Each loop is a single color: rust, copper, gold, bright orange. I like to stick the point of my pencil into a loop and pull until one end comes out. Sometimes the nib of my pencil breaks.

  Mr. Carling shoves a piece of chalk into his chalk holder. He writes: October 25. The backs of his fingers are hairy. His hands are hairy too, and his arms. I wonder if his wrist is hairy under his watch strap. Maybe the strap hides a seam where he’s stitched together, like a monster. I wonder if any of the other kids wear watches to hide their seams. Sam has one. He could be a—

  “Leland? ”

  Mr. Carling looks at me hard. I look back at him, but it feels like there are miles between us. “Get your listening ears on,” he says. “Where are the salmon spawning?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Goldstream River. We’re going to see them on Thursday. There will be a permission form for your parents to sign…”

  My grade one class went to Goldstream last year. I watched a giant maple leaf whistled down from a tree onto the back of a dead salmon that seagulls had been pecking at. The red leaf landed right on top of the salmon’s red wound.

  Everyo
ne is standing and moving quickly to their desks. I hurry to mine. “What are we supposed to do?” I whisper to Angela.

  “Write a story about the ocean,” she says. “Duh!”

  Angela’s fire-orange hair is in a thick braid down her back. I asked her once if she was a Viking, but she didn’t answer. Now, her hand scuttles across her page like a crab. I imagine streams of fire running through her, down her arm and out her hand. Her pencil marks are the ash.

  “Let’s see what you’ve done so far, Leland.”

  Mr. Carling is at my desk. I look at my page. It’s blank. White as a bandage over someone’s mouth.

  “Nothing,” Mr. Carling grunts. He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

  My stomach hurts. I stare at the bare page. It starts to blur and fall away. It falls down to the bottom of an ocean. Mr. Carling squats beside my desk. I smell the lemon drop that clicks against his teeth.

  “You will have to stay in for recess,” he says.

  Delilah growls from the cubby. The bell rings. Everyone leaves except me and Mr. Carling.

  I wipe tears from my eyes. The page floats up again. I write a title: Raft. I begin: A Viking was alone on a raft. His salty tears landed in the salty ocean. I trace over the o in ocean. I make the o bigger and bigger. I draw little waves inside it, and a raft. I work hard on drawing the ropes and swirling knots that hold the raft together.

  Then I look out the window. Kids crawl all over the playground. Their footprints in the sand look like little waves.

  Mr. Carling gets up from his desk and looks at my paper. “Well, at least you wrote something. You can go outside.”

  I race to the jungle gym. But as soon as I make it to the top, the bell rings to go back inside. I get one big jump for the whole recess. I dig my heels in deep, all the way down to where the sand is dark brown.

  Chapter Three

  On Tuesdays and Wednesdays after school, I pull the Red Flyer wagon, heavy with newspapers, down our street. Silas runs door to door delivering them. Our cat Pumpkin sometimes follows for a block, then turns back. Today, though, she stays longer. Silas waves his arms at her. “Shoo. Go home.”

  There’s a house on our paper route that Silas and I call Gloomy Rooms. The front steps sag. Moss bubbles up between the roof shingles. The grass is high, and the bushes are dark tangles. Silas rolls up the newspaper and throws it onto the crooked front porch from as far away as he can. For a while afterward, everything seems a little scary. Then Yellow House cheers me up.

  The yard of Yellow House is filled with bird baths. The woman who lives there always calls out, “Thanks!” Today, she’s in the yard, watering a small tree. She’s wearing a big gray sweater, and her jeans are tucked into rubber boots. When she sees us, her face crinkles into a smile. She waves.

  My mind goes click. She has one hand on the hose and her other hand is waving. It’s as if she’s pumping the air for the water that is running through the hose.

  After supper, I ask Liza to pour paints from the big plastic jugs into the muffin tin. Then I paint a picture of the woman with her arms out, one waving, one watering. I like my painting. I look at it over and over.

  At breakfast, Mom looks worried. “Pumpkin didn’t come home last night,” she says.

  “Maybe she got lost,” Silas says. “Or hurt.”

  “I hope she’s just on a walkabout,” Mom says.

  “Yeah, cats do that,” Liza says. “They wander off for a few days.”

  “Not Pumpkin,” I say.

  I’m so worried about Pumpkin, I forget about Mr. Carling and walk right into the school without Delilah’s help.

  Chapter Four

  “Boys!” Our neighbor Mikel waves a shiny can at me and Silas. “Engine oil,” he pants. “Your wheels squeak. Puts my teeth on edge.”

  He gets down on a knee and squeezes oil into the wagon’s wheels. “There.” He stands. “Might as well take my paper now.” He reaches for a newspaper.

  “Not that one!” I cry.

  Silas laughs. “Why not that one, Leland?”

  I put on a baby voice. “That one’s special,” I say, and pout.

  It works. Silas rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Here, Mikel, take this one.”

  Outside Gloomy Rooms, while Silas delivers the newspaper, I feel like I’m sinking. The sky is the color of tin foil, and the clouds are like steel wool. The wind blows. Leaves scatter. They scratch along the sidewalk and street.

  Hurry, Silas.

  Finally, Silas is back. “I heard the old man,” he says. “Whistling in there. It sounded happy and lonely at the same time.”

  Moments later, we’re at Yellow House. “I want to deliver the paper today,” I say.

  Silas raises his eyebrows. “That isn’t our deal.”

  “Just this house,” I say.

  “I’m not paying you any more than usual,”

  Silas says.

  “I don’t want more money!” I tell him.

  I grab the newspaper that Mikel nearly took, unlatch the maroon gate and hurry up the walk. Birds chatter in the bushes. A water fountain gurgles and chimes. I smell sap, wet dirt and flowers. It feels like I’m in another world, where the air is thicker.

  Hidden inside the newspaper is my drawing of the woman watering her tree and waving. I slide it out and tuck it into the woman’s colorful mailbox. I leave the newspaper on her doormat, which says Welcome!

  I walk back through the chattering yard and step onto the gray sidewalk. The world goes plain again: houses, grass, brown telephone poles.

  Chapter Five

  After supper on Thursday, Mom calls a family meeting.

  “Pumpkin hasn’t been home in three days,” she says. “I called the SPCA. They haven’t seen an orange tabby.”

  “We need a poster,” Silas says. “You know: Lost Cat. Reward.”

  “Good idea,” Mom says. “We need a good photo. One that shows her swirly markings, and the bald patch by her back hip, and her nibbled ear.”

  “And her different colored eyes,” Silas says. “One green, the other blue.”

  “And her cracked red collar,” Liza says. “With the little tarnished bell.”

  “No photo will show all that stuff,” Silas says.

  “I could draw a picture,” I say.

  “Yes!” Mom says. “Excellent idea. I’ll scan it into the computer and print copies.”

  “And the reward can be my old iPod cover,”

  Liza says.

  Mom sets me up at the kitchen table with paper, paints and photos of Pumpkin. It’s fun getting the colors of her fur. I mix yellow and red to make orange, and add white and black for different shades. I draw black stripes on her face and the little patch of white on her chin. I use a tomato-soup red for the collar, and mix gold and orange for her bell.

  It kind of feels like I’m writing a letter to her. Every stroke of my paintbrush whispers, Come home. I paint her sunning in a square of light on the kitchen floor.

  “Marvelous!” Mom says, staring at the painting. “You captured her. That is Pumpkin!”

  “I wish it really was,” I say.

  “She’ll come home, Leland.”

  “When?” I ask.

  But Mom doesn’t answer. She starts putting the paints away.

  “Time for bed, Sweets,” she says after a while.

  My heart drops. For once, Mom doesn’t know what is going to happen.

  Chapter Six

  I take Pumpkin’s food dish outside and make a line of kibbles from the front door, down the front stairs, along the sidewalk to the end of the block. Maybe Pumpkin will smell them and nibble them one by one right to the front door.

  On the way to school, we put up posters. Have you seen Pumpkin? Reward! Our phone number is on them. It’s raining a little. I hope Pumpkin isn’t wet and shivering, wherever she is.

  I want to hide under the piano bench until I hear Pumpkin pad into the house to drink from the fish tank. That’s what she does! The goldfish get out of her way.

>   Pumpkin doesn’t really do a lot. She sleeps most of the time. But she makes our house feel warm. Like a fire in a fireplace. Lions make the jungle a jungle. Pumpkin makes our house a home.

  We’re going to Goldstream Park today. First, though, we have to write a story about salmon.

  I write my title: Sammen. I look out the window. Some of the fall leaves are salmon-colored, orangey pink. Salmon get their colors from eating krill, which are pink, and shrimp, which are orange. People can turn orange too, if they eat too many carrots.

  Suddenly, I see orange everywhere: the playground slide, the rust on the flagpole, a seagull’s webbed feet. I look around the classroom and spy orange letters, orange clothing and orange book covers.

  Just thinking about orange made my eyes find it.

  “Sammen?” Mr. Carling takes a deep breath. “I spelled salmon for you on the blackboard. S-a-l-m-o-n.”

  My face goes numb. I hope I’m turning invisible.

  “You had better get some work done, Leland, or you won’t be going to Goldstream,” Mr. Carling says. My throat tightens. Delilah walks over and lies at my feet. She thumps her tail against the floor. Shhh.

  “Focus, Leland! Your classmates are almost finished.”

  I try hard. I write: A bald eagle fishes a sammen salmon from a lagoon. She carries it in her beak and flies over a schoolyard. The bell rings. Recess!

  “Leland, you need to stay and finish your story.”

  I sit back down. I stare at the classroom walls. There are no pictures on them, just the letters of the alphabet and a math chart. The classroom air is like metal—hard and thin. It’s the opposite of Yellow House. There, the air is like feathers.

  If I could write better, I’d write: The salmon wriggles to get free. The eagle can’t hold it. The salmon falls from the sky and crash-lands in the schoolyard below. Kids crowd around as it flips and flops. Delilah the dog noses through the crowd and gently takes the salmon in her teeth. She runs all the way to the ocean with the salmon in her mouth. She drops the fish into the salty water and barks goodbye as the fish swims away.