The Goodbye Time by Celeste Conway

Chapter One
    Kendra was talking about the dress again. The one she had gotten for fifth-grade graduation which came from France, according to her, and was made of something called white “pee-kay.” We’d heard about it at least fifty times. But I guess she needed to tell us again. Then Nancy Palmer started in on
her
dress. The dress she was
going to
get, that is, at some showroom that her mother knew where designers sold their latest stuff.
    “Your mom knows designers?” Kendra said, flipping back her smooth black hair.
    Nancy nodded. “Lots of them.”
    “Wow, you’re lucky. I bet you can get your dress half price.”
    That was when my best friend, Katy, gave me a signal with her eyes and I knew we were going to leave them all—all our friends walking down the hall at school on a Friday afternoon in May. We were right at the place where the kindergarten artwork hung—potato prints and fingerpaints—and I looked at Katy and nodded. And just like that, we weren’t there. Oh, our bodies were there, still a little sweaty from gym class, but
we
were gone, because now we were being someone else.
    We did it almost all the time. We sort of couldn’t stop ourselves, though sometimes I think we wanted to. We knew it was weird. Worse than weird—abnormal. And we’d both have just
died
if anyone had known. No one did. People would have worried. Even our families probably would have thought it was unhealthy.
    The three o’clock schoolyard bustled with activity as we stepped outside. Nannies and moms were picking up kids, and our friends were going on and on about graduation dresses, but Katy and I were far away. We were in our own world, the one we went into by ourselves, pretending to be our characters. It was our favorite thing to do.
    It had only been a few months ago, when I turned eleven, that my parents started letting me walk home from school alone. Up until then this high school girl, Miranda, who lives in my building, would get ten dollars for walking me two blocks from Seventy-eighth Street to Eightieth Street and another three blocks over to Riverside Drive, which is where I live in Manhattan, New York City. And actually, I’m still not allowed to walk home alone; I have to be with Katy.
    Katy used to come home with me a lot: She lives uptown, and her apartment wasn’t that great back then. I mean, it wasn’t terrible, but she has a little brother, Sam, who has something wrong with him called profound intellectual and developmental disability, and he would make a mess, throwing things and sometimes doing certain stuff I wouldn’t want to mention here. Also, she had to share a room with her older sister, who she called Bug Eye and who was very mean and was always telling us not to touch anything in her big fairy collection. Like anyone would
want
to fool around with her creepy fairy dolls. Bug Eye only cared about two things in life: fairies and soccer.
    When we reached the corner of Broadway, everyone started splitting up. Kendra and Nancy headed south, while Tyesha went north and Yolanda east. Then, at last, Katy and I were by ourselves. As we walked toward my building near Riverside Park, we started to play for real—that’s what we called it, playing, talking the way we did in our English accents.

Chapter Two
    The one person on this whole planet who would’ve understood our game and not thought we were crazy was my brother, Tom. Tom was fifteen and was going away to college at the end of the summer. My mom was both happy and sad about this. That was what she said: “I’m so happy and so sad,” like a confused person. Tom is gifted in the brain department, but although he’s a genius who has skipped a few grades, he’s not snobby about how smart he is. Actually, he says it’s a burden being brainy, like having a big rock tied to his head.
    The reason I say Tom understood the thing Katy and I did is because when he was younger, he had this thing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the