Arya had eleven spelling words
and one hill.
The words were taped to her handlebars.
The hill waited at the end of the street.
“Necessary,” she said.
“One C. Two S’s.”
“That’s too many,” said Jiya.
She sat on the curb in a dinosaur helmet.
She did not own a bike.
She liked to be ready.
Friday was coming.
So was the spelling test.
At home, a little town stood
inside Arya’s snow globe.
When she worried, she shook it
until she couldn’t see the houses.
She had shaken it twice that morning.
“Watch,” she told Jiya.
At the top of the hill,
she held the brakes.
The crack near the bottom
looked thin as a pencil mark.
Then her fingers loosened.
The spelling card shivered.
The mailbox rushed past.
Wind whistled in her ears.
There was no room for spelling.
The front wheel found the fault.
The bike went one way.
Arya went another.
Grass.
Grit.
A scraped elbow.
One shoe still on.
One shoe somewhere else.
For a moment, she lay still.
Above her, an airplane pulled
a white thread through the blue.
She had been outside all morning.
She had not seen the sky.
“Are you broken?”
Jiya stood over her,
her helmet slipping across one eye.
Arya moved her fingers.
Then her toes.
“Mostly not.”
Jiya found Arya’s shoe.
She put it beside her.
Then she lay down too.
Dad came running.
He checked her head, her arms, her knees.
“What happened?”
“The crack,” Arya said.
Dad looked at the bicycle.
Then he looked at her.
“We’ll walk it home.”
“In a minute?”
He sat beside them in the grass.
The airplane’s white line
softened in the sky.
Arya’s test was still on Friday.
But Friday wasn’t here.
Here was Jiya,
picking something green from her hair.
Here was Dad,
holding her missing shoe.
Here was the sky,
with nothing written on it.
They found the spelling card
caught in the roses.
“Necessary,” Arya read.
“Still too many S’s,” said Jiya.
“Only two.”
She let Jiya carry the card.
That night she picked up the snow globe.
Three trees.
A church.
A road that went behind a house.
She turned it slowly in her hands.
She had never noticed the road.
On Friday,
Arya put both feet on the floor.
The teacher said the first word.
She took a breath.
Then she wrote.