Imagine Our Future 2023

Finding Home

Stephen Howard

"Anjelica, I need to talk to you. Can you meet me at the rock?" I looked at the message that had tapped me on the wrist. This was not the sort of message I was used to getting from Sam. She wasn't the sort of friend who wanted to just talk. Scheme? Brainstorm? Sure. But "talk?"

My fingertips drummed out a reply on the tabletop for my watch to relay back to Sam. "Be there soon."

I put down the tablet my mother had handed me earlier, and got up to go. I gathered my mass of curls under a purple bandana and got as far as slipping one boot on when my father walked by.

"What are you up to, mija?"

"Going to go meet Sam for a bit."

"I thought you were working on your application for the job trial at the hospital where your mother works?"

"Looking at, Papá. Looking at the job trial. I haven't picked yet."

My father raised his hands in acquiescence. "Don't you think you should spend some more time on this, Anjelica? There aren't many openings and even if your mamá médica can put in a good word, the earlier you apply the better."

I stomped my second boot on and reached for my backpack. "I know, Papá. I promise I'll get back to it. And you know it's not the only thing I want to look at."

"I know, mija. But your birthday is next month, and the next term starts just after that and..."

I shouldered my pack. "Sam says she needs to talk. Something must be up. She needs me."

Papá's expression changed. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Her mother is out of town again right now, isn't she?" I nodded. "Go help your friend. Tell Sam we're all here for her."

"I will. Thanks, Papá."

Outside, I left our porch into a warm March morning. It might rain later, but for now I enjoyed the sun on my skin. Our small street was quiet, with only a handful of people walking or biking to wherever they were headed. Most of the neighborhood car-share vehicles were sitting quietly in their charging stations. The shared garden that ran down the middle of the street stopped at the end of the block, where the city trolley passed by.

I turned the other direction and walked along the garden fence. The chickens, recently banished from the area around the spring planting beds, wandered among the bushes and fruit trees. Sunlight glimmered on the solar cells lining the roofs of homes and businesses up and down the lane.

~

I moved here three years ago with my mother, father, and little brother after we lost everything to a wildfire in California. I was twelve. Sam's mother helped us find our feet. It turned out she and my mother went to college together in New York. They ran into each other for the first time in almost fifteen years when she was providing training on some medical equipment where my mother worked. They stayed in touch after that, and when Sam's mom heard what happened she and Sam put us up for those first few months. They lived on their own. Neighbors supplied some extra furnishings, helped us find our way around, and checked in on all of us.

Sam and I didn't click at first. She was quiet, and often busy writing something in a notebook or using an old laptop the local repair cafe had salvaged from university surplus. She'd regularly disappear for most of the day on weekends, returning at dusk sweaty and dirty. I was still recovering from the sudden move and not sleeping well. The one sketchbook I had managed to save stayed closed — I didn't want to draw the things occupying my imagination. But we were sharing a room; we were the same age (same birthday, in fact), and I needed company other than my brother in this new place.

Things started to change about a month after we arrived. I startled awake in the middle of the night to a hand on my shoulder.

"Anjelica."

I opened my eyes to find Sam's silhouette hanging over the side of her bed, trying to wake me where I lay on a mattress on her floor.

Disoriented, I said "Qué es? Ah, what is it?"

"I don't know," she replied, scooting back up fully onto her bed. She set her head on the edge, where I could see her eyes glint in the dim light. "You were talking in your sleep. I couldn't understand you, but it sounded like you were having a nightmare."

Bits of my dream came back to me, and I blew out a deep breath. "Yeah, I think I was. Thanks."

After a moment of silence, she said quietly, "This isn't the first time I've heard you at night." And then, "Was it about the fires?"

I rolled onto my side and pulled my legs in. "No," I said. I nestled my head into the pillow and tried to shake off the dream.

"Here," Sam said, and I felt something soft brush my arm. Feeling with my hands, I found the patchwork stuffed lizard I saw her curl up with each night. "That's Slinks," she said. "Maybe he can help."

I was still for a moment, then tried pulling the lizard close. I squeezed my eyes shut. I hadn't had a stuffed animal in years, but it felt right.

I heard Sam shift and then lie still. As the minutes ticked by, I didn't feel ready to try sleeping again.

"It was the hurricane," I said into the stillness. Sam rolled back to face me.

"Before we lived in California, I grew up in Puerto Rico." I was seven when it hit. My mother told me about storms that had happened when I was younger, but for me this was The Storm. I told Sam about the roof collapsing on our house, and the flooding. About my mom's work at the hospital in the weeks that followed. About losing my abuelo.

"My parents wanted to take us somewhere safer. Mamá found a hospital in Monterey that needed doctors. They must have really liked her on the video call, because she got the job just a couple days later. So we packed up what we had left, and went."

"And now you're here," Sam said after a moment.

"Yeah," I sighed.

Sam rolled away again. "So now you're safe," she said.

"Yeah," I repeated. I nudged the backpack next to my mattress with an elbow, just to make sure it was still there. I gave Slinks a squeeze, and then said "Thanks, chica."

"Sure," she replied.

~

In her awkward way she attempted to make good on that midnight promise of safety. When school started, she made sure I knew my way around middle school, including how to avoid the kids who saw cruelty as the route to popularity. When our class took a field trip to her uncle's brewery cooperative, she made sure to snag the two of us a pair of ginger beers from behind the counter when nobody was looking. She'd make abrupt introductions for me to other kids and even teachers, saying "This is Anjelica. She just moved here." Then she'd wait for us to figure out the rest of the introduction on our own. We'd exchange apologetic smiles, as if we both understood that Sam was just doing her best.

I was usually pretty good at getting to know people, but my heart wasn't always in it. Even though I had been living here for weeks, the permanency of it all still felt uncertain. Later Sam would ask me what I thought of the people she introduced me to.

"They're nice," was about all I could manage. And it was true. They were nice. She'd tell me what she knew about them. This one was into art. That one ran cross country. Eventually it grew into a group of people I could join for lunches, at least. Sometimes Sam would join us. Sometimes she'd pick a quiet corner of her own.

I learned pretty quickly that Sam didn't really have any other friends. When I asked she mentioned a few she had when she was younger, but they had all moved away or drifted apart. Sam's Mom often for traveled for work. While she was gone Sam would stay with her uncle, who lived in an apartment above the brewery. Other than her mother and uncle, she had no other family in town. She never mentioned her father.

~

When my family moved into our own place, Sam and I kept walking to school together. We found a townhouse a few blocks away. My mother appreciated the short walk to the trolley stop. My father fell in love with the neighborhood garden. He'd often be out there in the late summer afternoons with a few neighbors, still smelling of sawdust from his work designing and crafting furniture in the converted garage behind our house.

Sam and I were sitting out in that garden on a couple of chairs my dad had built, talking about our upcoming thirteenth birthday, when I found out where she was disappearing to on weekends.

While we talked a trio of songbirds came dashing through. I lost my train of thought and stared at them as they whirled and bickered. "Juncos," Sam said dismissively.

I turned to her. "You recognize them?"

"Sure. They're really common."

I paged back through the sketchbook I had on my lap, then handed it to her. "What about this one? I saw it outside my window recently."

She inspected my drawing. "Looks like a white-crowned sparrow." She sat staring at it for a while longer, then looked at me. "This is really good."

I smiled. "He sat really still. It was windy and I don't think he wanted to leave."

Sam seemed to come to some decision. "Come on," she said. "I want to show you something."

I let my dad know we were leaving, slipped my sketchbook back into my backpack, and followed her out of the garden.

Sam looked at me with my pack. "You should probably drop that off at your house," she said.

I shrugged. "It's fine," I replied, settling it snugly on my shoulders.

We headed off under the dappled shade of the street trees. She took a right on a cross-street towards a park. We crossed right through the park to a wild thicket of thimbleberry and dogwood. Here she got on her hands and knees to squirm through a small gap. "This way," she said.

I got down to follow her. "Where are we going?"

"We're almost there. You'll see."

My hands and knees got a bit scraped up, and my pack caught on brambles a couple of times, but then I was through. I stood up among a stand of small and medium trees. I could hear water off somewhere to my left. And Sam was nowhere to be seen.

"Sam?"

"Up here," she replied. I looked up, and saw her part way up one of the larger trees. "Come on." She turned to climb higher.

I wrapped my hands around the lowest branch and discovered it was not as easy as she made it look. Where she looked like she could have been climbing a ladder, I had to stop and wrestle with the foreign geometries of each new intersection.

I arrived at her chosen perch. She sat on a branch and leaned casually against the trunk, looking out. I kept my arms firmly wrapped around my own branch and looked around. We were in a lightly forested corridor that stretched off to our left and right. The park lay behind us and ahead was another neighborhood.

"What is this place?" I asked.

"It's a wildlife corridor," Sam told me. "There are four of them in the city that all connect. I've explored all of them." She looked up in the sky. "It's early, but if we're patient we might see some deer or rabbits. I even saw a fox once." She turned to face me. "But I can't draw them. I want to. Can you teach me?"

"Sure," I said.

We perched quietly and let time drift by, listening to the breeze and looking for signs of wildlife below us.

"You always seem to have it with you," Sam said.

"What?" I asked.

"Your backpack. I don't think I've ever been with you when it hasn't been there. What do you have in there?"

Settling gingerly on what I hoped was a sturdy branch, I opened my pack and showed her what was inside. It was filled with emergency supplies (some granola bars, a full water flask, a flashlight, an emergency blanket, a change of clothes), but also with things I wouldn't want to lose if disaster struck again: my sketchbook and journal, a gold and yellow beaded Osun bracelet from my abuelo, and a little photo album of our life in Puerto Rico.

"Why do you have all of this stuff? " She asked.

I shrugged uncomfortably. "I guess I just want to be ready if something bad happens again."

Sam watched as I zipped up the pack and got it back on my shoulders. "Would you leave?" she finally asked.

I hesitated. "I don't know. It's what's happened all the other times."

Sam returned her attention to the landscape around us. "I couldn't imagine leaving."

We didn't see any foxes that day. A few squirrels, plenty of songbirds, and a few large birds gliding far overhead, none of which seemed to excite Sam. I had spent so much of my life surrounded by and focused on people. I wasn't feeling confident enough on my branch to try drawing, but I was engrossed with just quietly watching these little neighbors of ours.

~

That day became the first of many spent out in the city's wilder places. As promised, I helped Sam pick out a sketchbook of her own and coached her through teaching her hands to do something they'd never done before. She told me about everything we saw out there, from animals to trees to shrubs.

It was a good place to get away from my brother and his pack of friends. We would even take to working on our homework out there.

Sam started making plans on how to watch for animals at night. We found some plans online for camera traps and took them to the community maker space. We huddled in front of Sam's laptop, printed parts and repurposed electronics a semi-organized mess on the table, muttering words that would have gotten us in trouble if our parents were around to hear.

Aki, one of the adults who helped keep the place running smoothly, rolled by in their chair. "Sounds like that's going well," they said amiably.

I slumped back. "We've followed all the directions and it still won't work!"

"Oh, that old problem," Aki smiled. "Mind if I take a look?"

We shifted aside to make room. Aki briefly checked our code and the connection to the camera, then pulled out a multimeter and started prodding our circuits with it.

"Ah, here's at least part of your problem. This resistor is fried." They looked at us. "Either of you build something like this before?" We shook our heads. "Well, you've gotten pretty far for newbies."

Aki handed me the multimeter. "Let me show you a few things."

From that point Aki would regularly join us when we arrived to work on our project. Sam got help on the software end of things at the laptop, and I learned more than I ever expected to about circuits and soldering.

The day we got the camera to trigger on command we got cheers and high fives from everyone at the maker space. Many took turns pretending to be animals for the motion sensor, making faces and goofing off. Soon Sam was itching to get it out in the field. I was feeling drained from the final stretch on the project, so I helped her pack it up and let her go without me.

Aki rolled with me to the door. "You two did really well. "Keep this up and you'll be helping other people with their projects before you know it."

"Thanks," I replied.

~

A few months before our fifteenth birthday, the talk at school and at home turned to job trials. At fifteen our school would let you you use part of your school day to get experience doing something useful in the real world. They encouraged it, in fact. As long as the job you applied for met the school's criteria for valuable experience and wasn't just looking for cheap labor, that is. We'd be old enough to be youth participants in citizen assemblies too, but that was a random draw and they didn't happen every year.

Sam and I were sitting on a rock overlooking one of the streams that meandered through town. We were reading through our homework to get ready for a class discussion tomorrow, but my mind kept wandering.

"Are you going to do a job trial?" I asked.

"With the city ecologist," Sam nodded immediately. "I've already met her."

"That makes sense," I said. I ran my hand over some moss next to me. "I wish I knew what I wanted to do."

"Maybe you could work at the maker space. You already spend time there anyways."

It was true. After the camera project I had been hooked, and would often stop by after school.

"Maybe," I said. "Check this out." I pulled my latest creation out of my backpack and handed it to her. It was a little printed box with a repurposed skate wheel embedded on one end, a few different ports on the side, and a removable hand crank.

She turned it over, curious. "What is it?"

"A battery charger," I said proudly. "You can use the crank, or you can mount it against the back tire of a bike and use pedal power! I even wound the generator coils myself."

Sam sighed quietly, and handed it back to me.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

She didn't answer right away, and when she did, she did't look at me. She spoke like she was trying hard to find the right words. "It's just, even when you create something, you still seem to expect the world to fall apart."

I felt my stomach sink. "It can't hurt to be prepared," I objected.

Sam started packing up her homework. "Well maybe you could prepare by making this place better."

"What?"

She stood. "You're good at this Anj, ok? The time it takes you to go from idea to done blows my mind. What could you create if you weren't always expecting a crisis?"

I didn't know how to handle this jumble of praise and criticism. "So what should I do? Just count on things working out? Nothing to worry about?"

"No, you make things work better." She spread her arms towards the stream. "You make sure the wetlands are healthy. That way the things that live there are happy, and they absorb the flood waters if they come. You plant trees for shade and shelter that can also handle a drought. You design a city so it's safe and works ok even if the power goes out." She turned to look at me. "And you help put things back together if something does happen. What happened to everyone else when you left Monterey? When you left Loíza?"

"That wasn't my decision! You don't know what it was like!" I was shouting now.

Sam hugged her homework to her chest, tears forming in her eyes. "I know. I'm sorry." She turned to go. As she left, I heard her say to herself "I just wonder if I'm waiting until you leave too."

~

Things were awkward for a long time after that. We'd still walk to school together but didn't talk much. Sam joined our lunch group less.

I spent even more time at the maker space, more just for a place to be than to feed a creative urge. Aki seemed to sense this, and started giving me things to help with around the place. I became an informal part of the team there.

"I won't be here next week," Aki told me as I was leaving one afternoon.

"How come?" I asked.

"Going to pitch in at the repair cafe. They're short staffed while Peter takes time to be with his new baby, so a few of us are taking turns. I don't have his sewing skills, but I do ok in a pinch."

"We'll miss you here."

"Oh, you'll all be fine. Besides, it feels good to do my little part to keep the world from falling apart."

"Huh. I guess I never thought about it that way," I said.

They smiled. "I'll count on you to keep the space humming along while I'm gone."

"I'll do my best. See you soon, Aki."

"Good night Anjelica."

I spent that night distracted, Aki's words joining Sam's accusations in a tangle of worries and possibilities running through my mind. They continued to haunt the edges of my attention through the night and into the next morning when I got the message from Sam.

~

After a couple of blocks, the street mounted a long, gentle slope over the greenery and among the trees of the wildlife corridor that passed between this neighborhood and the next. Sam had beat me there, and was waiting at the base of the bridge, leaning on her bike and staring out over the railing. Almost a head shorter than I was, the undercut in her short brown hair was dyed green today.

"Hey, chica," I waved.

She turned her head. "Hey."

We detoured onto a worn, informal footpath into the brush. Easing our way around tangles of blackberry canes and under buckthorns and maples, we navigated closer to the sound of water.

"Good timing on your message," I said casually. "My parents are really pushing me to apply to the hospital job trial."

We emerged from the brush onto a projection of rock on the bank of the spring-swollen creek. We sat down together. Sam pulled out a pair of ginger-beers from the pack she was carrying, handing me one. An apology of sorts.

Sam wrapped her arms around her knees. "So are you going to?" she asked.

"Actually, I thought I'd try working at the repair cafe."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I heard somewhere that I'm pretty good with electronics." I gave her a sly smile. "I thought I'd try my hand at fixing things for a change."

Sam gave me an oddly sad smile. "I'm glad."

"So, have you applied for the trial with the city ecologist yet?" I asked her.

Sam rested her chin on her knees and stared at the stream. Then she shook her head. "My uncle is going to move," she said.

"What?"

"He has friends up in Portland that are experimenting with microbial fuel cells, and they need someone who knows fermentation. He's decided to move up there to help them."

"Does your Mom know?"

"I don't know. I think that when she does find out she'll move us there too. Or maybe we'll move to be close to my grandmother in Minnesota."

"That's so far."

"She's been bothering my mom about living closer, and it wouldn't affect my mom's job if she did."

I sat in stunned silence. Sam being here felt as permanent as the trees that surrounded us. I could feel my world shifting out from under me again. It didn't seem fair.

"You could stay with us." I blurted out. She looked at me, surprised. Then I saw the the idea take hold. A hesitant smile appeared on her face.

"Do you think your parents would go for it?" she asked.

"Of course," I replied. "You and your mom looked out for us. Why wouldn't we do the same for you?" I nudged her shoulder with mine. "Do you still have Slinks?"

Sam laughed. "Yeah, he's still on my bed."

"He can come too, then," I joked. "It'll be a reunion."

I saw Sam's shoulders relax. "I'd like that."

I pulled my backpack around and opened it. I got out a couple of granola bars and handed one to Sam. The pack was much emptier now. I still had my sketchbook and a few odds and ends, but I left the emergency supplies at home. I wasn't going anywhere soon.

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