Shoot / Don't Shoot

Начало книги

Lying hot and sleepless in the narrow upper bunk, nine-year-old Ceci Grijalva knew her mother was leaving long before she left, long before the outside door opened and closed. When it did, Ceci pulled back a corner of the sheet that served as a curtain and peered out at the weed-infested yard that separated their dingy duplex f mm the one next door. Moments later, Serena Grijalva’s pilfered grocery cart, stacked high with dirty laundry, rattled past the window toward the pot-holed gravel track that passed for a street inside the dreary complex known as Esperanza Village.

Hope Village. Even a little kid could tell that the name was a bad joke. Hopeless was more like it.

Ceci dropped back on her thin mattress and lay there hot and miserable. Back home in Bisbee where they used to live or down in Douglas with Grandma Grijalva, the weather would be cooler now. But not here in Phoenix. Peoria, really. The way her mother had talked about it, Phoenix was one huge, magical city—a wonderful place. Ceci had discovered that it was actually a bunch of places—Phoenix, Glendale, Peoria, Sun City. She could never tell where one stopped and another be­gan, although the kids who had always lived there seemed to know—and they made fun of Ceci when she didn’t.

Читать дальше →