The New Girl

Nothing ever happened on my street, and I had stopped expecting it to. That sounds sad when I write it down. It didn't feel sad. It just felt true, the way it feels true that the sun comes up. I lived on Alder Street in a town called Pruitt, and Pruitt was the kind of town that people drove through on the way to better towns. We had a gas station, a diner, a school, and a lot of dust. The dust was the main thing. In summer it got into everything. My abuela said the dust was Pruitt reminding you it was still there. I was sixteen and I had lived in the same house my whole life. I knew every crack in the sidewalk. I could have walked to school with my eyes closed. I had a best friend, Danny, who I'd known since we were five, and we mostly hung out behind the diner because it was shady there and nobody bothered us. That was my life. I'm not complaining about it. I just want you to understand how flat it was, how I had basically agreed with the town that nothing was ever going to be different, so you understand what it meant when the moving truck showed up. It showed up on a Saturday in June. I was on my porch drawing in my sketchbook, which is the thing I do, I draw, mostly I draw the same stuff over and over because the same stuff is all there is. And this truck pulled up across the street at the old Watters house, which had been empty for like a year, and a family started carrying boxes in. I watched the way you watch anything new in a town where nothing is new. Like it was TV. And then she came out of the truck. She was about my age. She had short hair, dark, kind of sticking up like she'd cut it herself, and she was carrying a box that said FRAGILE on it but she was carrying it like it wasn't, like she didn't believe in fragile. And halfway across the yard she stopped. She just stopped, in the middle of all the carrying, and she looked around at Alder Street — at the dust, at the gas station sign down the block, at all of it, the whole flat nothing of it. I figured she'd make the face. Everyone makes the face when they really see Pruitt for the first time. It's a face that says oh. Oh no. She didn't make that face. She looked at our dusty dead-end street, and she smiled. This big slow smile, like she'd been handed something. Like the street was a present and she couldn't wait to open it. I was so confused by that smile that I forgot I was holding a pencil and I just sat there. And then she saw me. She caught me staring, which was embarrassing, and I should have looked down at my sketchbook and pretended I'd been drawing the whole time. That's what I would normally do. I'm not a person who gets caught staring and then does something about it. But she didn't let me look away. She lifted up the FRAGILE box like it was a greeting, like a wave but with a box, and she called across the street, "Is it always this quiet here?" And I don't know why I said what I said. I think it was the smile. I think the smile made me brave for one second. "Always," I called back. "Nothing ever happens here." And the new girl grinned even wider, and she said, "Perfect," and then she carried her not-fragile box inside, and I sat on my porch with my pencil, and for the first time in a long time I felt like something on Alder Street was about to be different. I didn't know her name yet. I'd learn it the next day. It was Sunny, which I thought was too perfect to be real, but it was real. I want to be honest, since this is my story and there's no point telling it if I'm not. Something started that Saturday. Sitting on my porch watching a girl smile at my ugly street like it was beautiful. I didn't have a word for the something yet. I wouldn't have a word for it for a while. But I stopped agreeing with the town that nothing would ever change. That was the first thing Sunny changed, and she did it before I even knew her name.