Gabriela (American Girl Read online

  “What happened?” asked Red, shining the light of his phone on Teagan and me.

  I didn’t know, but I remembered what Mama always told me to do in case of an emergency in the center.

  “Parking lot,” I said.

  Using the phone flashlights as a guide, we filed down the stage stairs and out of the side door of the auditorium. The parking lot was already full of dancers and some of the people from Mr. Harmon’s art class. They were milling around, looking just as confused as the rest of us. I spotted Mama immediately. She still wore her tap shoes—a big no-no outside—and her face was a mask of worry. I ran over to her, pulling Teagan along with me.

  “Mama, w-what’s going on?” I asked, but just then Mr. Harmon, Teagan’s grandfather, came out of the building with the rest of his art class trailing behind him. He went right over to Mama.

  “Could be a thrown fuse in the circuit box,” he said, raking his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Let me grab the flashlight from my trunk.”

  And just like that, Mama was off, hurrying behind Mr. Harmon, her tap shoes scraping along the concrete as she went.

  There was a row of stores across the street from Liberty—a souvenir shop called Philly’s Finest, a place that sold candles and stationery, and the takeout restaurant Red called Empanada Pal, because the last three letters of “Palace” had faded from the awning. Even though it was already past six o’clock, the late-June air was still hot and sticky. Empanada Pal’s door was flung wide open. Philly’s Finest was, too. The lights in both stores were on.

  I let go of Teagan’s hand, said “Be right back,” and made my way to the sidewalk. From there I could see the row houses lined up next door to Liberty. Some of them were worn with age, one of them abandoned. The lights in the row houses were on. I went back to Liberty, to see if its lights had come back on, too.

  The building was still dark. Mama and Mr. Harmon were back outside now. He was talking, but Mama didn’t seem to be listening. She was looking wildly around, I knew, for me. I hurried over.

  “Gabby, you know better than to go off without telling an adult,” Mama said.

  “I … I was just … just checking to see if anyone in the houses, um, anyone else had elec—light. If anyone else had lights.”

  Mama’s face and voice softened. “And?” she asked, sounding hopeful.

  I nodded my head, already feeling my heart sinking a little. I wasn’t sure why, but it seemed bad—really bad—that everyone else had light and Liberty didn’t.

  “So what does that mean?” Red asked.

  “It means we’ve got a problem on our hands,” Mama replied. “And it might be a big one.”

  My heart sank into my shoes.

  That next morning, Saturday, we were back at Liberty to meet Mr. Harmon and Julia Santos. Ms. Santos worked with Mama when Mama needed to get in touch with the city about anything regarding the Liberty building or the grant the city gave us.

  When we arrived, Teagan and her grandpa were already there. Mr. Harmon was probably one of the most friendly, upbeat people I knew. He loved sayings, and one of his favorite ones was, You need clouds to help you appreciate sunshine. But today he, like Mama, was grim-faced and tight-lipped.

  Mama glanced down at her watch. “Ms. Santos and the building inspector should be here any minute. Let’s go inside and wait.”

  We filed into Liberty to wait for the representatives in the lobby. From there, you could see down almost all of Liberty’s hallways, lit up now only by what little sun poured through the windows. Everything looked gray. You could hardly see that the words Just Dance, painted on the wall across from the row of dance studios, were not composed of just any old letters. They were composed of tiny pictures of ballet slippers, tap shoes, and music notes, courtesy of Mr. Harmon. You couldn’t even really tell that the walls were painted a shade of apple green that had taken Mama three weeks to pick out.

  Red walked behind the front desk and tried a light switch. When nothing happened, he came back over to where Teagan and I stood and shrugged weakly. “Just thought something might happen.”

  For the next few minutes, Mama and Mr. Harmon walked the hallways of Liberty, their chins in their hands, trying light switches just as Red had in hopes, I guessed, that something might happen.

  “Do you think the city can fix this in time for the—”

  My voice trailed off. Teagan and Red looked away. Neither of them wanted to think about the center not being up and running again in time for Rhythm and Views.

  “Anyone here?” a voice called from behind us. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Ms. Santos was making her way quickly over to the three of us. She was short, red-faced, and wore a full suit even though it was Saturday. A man walked in behind her, carrying a toolbox.

  “Hi there,” Ms. Santos said. “Are your parents—oh, there they are!”

  Mama and Mr. Harmon returned to the lobby. Mama said, “Good to see you again, Julia,” to which Ms. Santos replied, “I only wish it was for a different reason. I’m sorry about all this.” She asked for a rundown of what had happened the night before.

  “Hmmm” was all she said when Mama had finished. “Sounds like it was a dramatic evening. Well, this is Jaime, one of the city’s building inspectors. Will you show us the main circuit breaker?”

  “Of course.”

  Mama led the way down the hallway to our right, past the dark, empty dance studios. We came to a stop in front of a door at the end of the hall. Mama took out her master key and unlocked it. The minute the door swung open, I moved in closer for a better look. Red and Teagan did the same. I didn’t know what I was hoping to see—maybe one switch turned the opposite direction of all the others. Something easy to fix.

  “Gabby?” Mama said.

  “Hmmm?” I replied, my focus 100 percent on the circuit breaker.

  “Why don’t you, Teagan, and Red go wait for us in the lobby?”

  “But—”

  Mama cocked her head to one side and looked at me. I knew that look. It meant, “Gabriela McBride, do as you’re told.”

  I started back down the hallway, Red and Teagan on my heels. We’d waited in the lobby for what felt like six lifetimes, when the adults’ voices became suddenly louder and clearer as they made their way back in our direction. They stopped just short of the lobby. I heard Mama say, “Thank you for coming over here today. We really appreciate it.”

  The echoes in the hallway and the tap-tap-tapping of Ms. Santos’s heels made it so I could only hear some of what she said back to Mama. What I did hear I didn’t like one bit: “Building not up to code … Unusable … Fault.”

  “Fault?” I said to Teagan and Red, as Ms. Santos and the building inspector breezed by. “Whose fault?”

  I thought back to the night before, to what had happened right before the lights had gone out. Or, I realized with a sickening lurch of my stomach, what had happened at the exact moment everything went pitch-black.

  “I-I-It’s,” I started. “It’s … our f-f-f-fault.”

  “You think?” Red asked, his voice shaking.

  I nodded miserably. “Th-There wwwwwas—”

  Teagan placed her hand on my arm. “What Gabby is trying to say is there was already so much going on at the center. Every room was being used, lights and music on all over the place. And then maybe we …” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe Gabby and me were the ones to overload everything when we tried to show our project.”

  I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I just nodded instead. Red looked like he was about to say something, but at that moment, Mama and Mr. Harmon returned to the lobby.

  “So what did Ms. Santos say?” I asked. Maybe I’d heard her wrong. “When will the electricity be back on?”

  Mama looked at Mr. Harmon. He looked back at her.

  “The power is out indefinitely,” Mama said.

  “All rehearsals and classes are canceled from today on,” Mr. Harmon declared. “We can’t reenter the building until fu
rther notice.”

  I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. Like the time I’d fallen during hip-hop rehearsal. One minute I was in the air, doing the same backflip I’d been practicing for months. And the next minute, the floor was rushing up to meet me and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Mr. Harmon turned to Mama and said, “We’ll have to call all the families,” and shoved his always-paint-stained hands deep into the pockets of his equally stained khakis.

  “I’ll take care of that,” said Mama. She heaved a huge sigh and turned around, taking Liberty in one last time. “So long, Liberty.”

  “So long,” Mr. Harmon echoed.

  As Mama, Red, and I pulled out of the parking lot, I caught a glimpse of the mural Mr. Harmon had been working on a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be these big hearts that told anyone who passed by that Liberty was a building with a lot of love. But Mr. Harmon had only painted the outline of one side of one heart before a freak rainstorm hit that day, leaving just a giant, crooked “C” on the wall. Now who knew how long it would be before the mural was complete?

  I took one last look back at Liberty’s dark windows and empty parking lot. So long, Liberty, I thought. For now.

  Mama waited for Daddy to come home from work before filling us all in on exactly what Ms. Santos and the inspector had said. Rewiring Liberty would be hugely expensive, and the annual grant we got from the city was not nearly enough to cover the cost.

  “We have just enough money to cover salaries as it is,” Mama said, resting both hands on either side of her plate.

  “But if the city owns the building, why can’t they pay for the rewiring?” Red asked.

  “Good point,” Daddy said. “It seems like this should come out of their budget somewhere.” Daddy was a network engineer and, like Teagan, knows all about solving problems.

  “Well, Ms. Santos said she will present our case to the city council, but …” Mama piled her spoon with chili, brought it to her mouth, and then set the spoon back down. “It’s a huge amount of money that we need. She suggested we have the center pay for materials, and the city cover labor expenses.”

  Rewiring. Hugely expensive. Could Liberty afford to pay for something like that? Mama always said the center wasn’t supposed to make her rich. It was supposed to make the community rich—with creativity.

  “Did you agree to those conditions?” Daddy prompted Mama gently.

  “We agreed to it; Liberty will pay for the materials. But even with that deal in place, Julia said all of this could take time.”

  “How much time?” Red asked.

  Mama’s frown deepened. “Not sure.”

  She ran her hand over her face. This is all my fault, I thought. If only Teagan and I hadn’t been so obsessed with showing off our surprise. If only we hadn’t pressed that big silver button, Liberty would be fine.

  “Mama, I … I … I have something, um, I have something I need to ssssay.” I kept my eyes on my chili.

  “What is it, Gabby?”

  “Thi-Thi-This whole thing … thing is … it’s—” The words were right there, and yet they got stuck, skipping like an old record player. “Never mind.” I chanced a question of my own instead. “Are the repairs going to take more than five weeks, four days, and approximately twenty-three and a half hours?”

  Daddy laughed, and a smile broke through the mask of worry Mama had been wearing since yesterday.

  “It’s possible,” Mama said. Then added, “Maybe.” Her smile began to fade.

  Liberty not having Rhythm and Views would be like a Philly cheesesteak without the Whiz. I had to fix what Teagan and I messed up. And maybe if I fixed things fast enough, I wouldn’t even need to tell Mama and Daddy that the outage was our fault. “We need to raise money,” I said, my mind racing. “We could have a bake sale. Ooh, and sell friendship bracelets. Bria taught me how to make these really pretty ones. And-and—”

  Mama smiled again. “Those are great ideas, Gabby, but we’re going to need a lot more money than any of those ventures can possibly raise. Listen,” she said as my face fell. “A lot has happened today, and I’ve probably already told you and Red more than I should’ve. Let’s take a break from talking about this for a while, clear our heads?”

  But I couldn’t clear my head. Not just then. All the worry about the center was making my feet tap like crazy under the table. I headed upstairs to my room as soon as the dinner dishes were cleared. My head was spinning with so many ideas about how to fix Liberty that I practically ran into Red coming out of the bathroom at the top of the stairs.

  “Hey, cuz. Look. I’m gonna have a mustache by eighth grade.”

  Red pointed at one small, thin hair above his lip that had joined the two he’d shown me two weeks ago.

  “Congrats,” I said flatly, and started stepping around him to get to my room.

  Red squinted at me. He had eyes the color of pennies. He was the only one in the family with eyes like that. “You look … How can I say this nicely? Like a bottle of soda about to pop.”

  Was it that obvious? “I’m feeling guilty about … You know. Hey—you’re not going to tell my mom about how Teagan and I caused the blackout, are you?” I asked.

  “Of course not, Gabby!” Red said. “And I mean …” He stopped and stared at the floor. “If it’s your fault, it’s my fault, too. I mean, I turned on all the stage lights for practice, including the spotlight. We probably didn’t even need all that stuff, but I wanted it to feel like the real thing, you know?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

  Red shook his head. “We’ve got to fix this.”

  “But how?” I said.

  “Red!” Mama called up the stairs. “Your mother’s on the phone!”

  Red gave me a nod and then raced down the stairs. I’d run, too, if I only got to talk to my mama a couple times a week.

  In my room, I found my cat, Maya, curled up in a little gray-and-white ball in my furry chair, which she’d claimed on the first day we brought her home. I scooped her up and climbed the ladder to my loft bed. We had read Maya Angelou’s poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” in school last year, right around the time I got Maya. That poem stuck with me—sometimes when I wanted to stop speaking because I was scared someone would laugh at my stutter, I thought about the person in the poem who wasn’t afraid of anything.

  I sat down beside Maya and said, “What are we going to do about the center?” Maya raised her head and blinked her sleepy, amber eyes.

  “Liberty is like another home to me. Do you know I’ve been going there my whole life? That’s ten years, Maya!” I held up all my fingers. “Ten! How am I going to fix this?”

  In response, Maya stood, stretched, and rubbed her face against my hand.

  “You’re no help,” I said, laughing a little and scratching her behind the ears. She purred and snuggled up next to me, pressing her warm body against mine. For the first time that day, a sense of calm washed over me, the same feeling I got every time I walked into Liberty.

  I closed my eyes, picturing the building now. There was an old wind chime hanging above the front door that made everyone’s arrival a musical event. When I was little, I used to run in and out, just to hear the chimes tinkle. Liberty is where Teagan and I became best friends, too, and where she and I raced through the hallways, playing tag and hide-and-seek until Stan called out, “Do you two need me to find you something to do? Because Lord knows the moldings need painting and the floors need polishing, too.” That was Stan’s favorite joke, because Liberty’s moldings, though beautiful with curlicues and flower details, were covered in chipping paint and most of its floors were scuffed and scratched beyond repair. Still, for me, being at Liberty was like slipping on my favorite pair of broken-in tap shoes. The center wasn’t perfect, but it fit me better than anything.

  I knew Stan felt like that, too—he always said the folks at Liberty were the only family he had. Other people like Mrs. Blake planned their whole weeks around the
ir Liberty classes. Mrs. Blake’s husband drove her and waited in his car every Wednesday, reading Shakespeare, while Mrs. Blake learned how to paint.

  What would she do without Liberty? What about Amelia? Red? And all the people who depended on the center as a place where they felt at home? To them—and to me—Liberty was something more. It was—I groped around in my mind, searching for the words, but I couldn’t pin them down.

  I was careful not to disturb Maya as I climbed down to my desk. I took my journal out and turned to a clean page. It took me a few drafts, but I finally had a poem that put my feelings into words.

  Liberty is more than just a center

  It’s us, it’s me, it’s the heart of all who enter

  It’s Mr. Harmon, Teagan, Red, Stan, and Mama

  It’s dance, it’s theater, it’s art, it’s drama

  Liberty is where my words can be free

  It’s us, it’s you, it’s everyone, it’s me

  I read the poem aloud a few times, like we did in the poetry group, working on the rhythm. Red said that spoken word poetry goes all the way back to African traditions and can be found throughout many cultures in history. People fighting for civil rights used it to express their anger and stand up for what they believed in. My poem wasn’t angry, really, but I sure believed those words. I felt them from the tips of my toes all the way up to my ponytail.

  I was reading through once more when Daddy poked his head in my room.

  “Gabby?” he said. “It’s late. Time to power down.”

  Daddy seemed to see the world as though it were one big computer. A nap was a chance to reboot; negative thoughts were corrupt files; and family and friends were your network. He told me once how computers shared information by using a data link. I hadn’t really understood what he was saying, but he’d kept repeating the word “connected” over and over again.

  Connected, like how Liberty connects all of us.

  “Daddy!” I said quickly, before he closed the door. “We’re a network!”

  “Who is, kiddo?” He opened the door and leaned against the doorframe, as Mama and Red came up behind him.