Bigger than a Bread Box by Laurel Snyder Page A

hadn’t spent the last two days treating me like garbage. I walked over, even though the tone of her voice made me feel uneasy.
    “Look at you!” Maya said. “How did you manage
that
?”
    “Hannah lent it to you?” asked Megan. “Maybe because she felt bad about … the other day?” She looked at me hopefully.
    “No,” I said, setting down my backpack and taking adeep breath. “Nope. Actually, this is mine.
My
jacket. I just got it.” I brushed an imaginary fleck of dirt off the lapel.
    “Really?” Cat asked. I couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. It was like … like she knew a secret. “Where’d you get it?”
    “Oh, you know …,” I said, thinking fast and deciding to lie vaguely. “Online.”
    “Where online?” asked a girl I’d never really talked to, an eighth grader named Maddie.
    “Um. I don’t remember.”
    “That’s funny,” added Maddie. “Because I’m pretty sure Hannah said that hers was one of a kind, handmade, but maybe it isn’t!” She snickered. I couldn’t decide if the snicker was aimed at me or at Hannah.
    “She … she did?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” said Maya. “She said it was a designer thing her dad had gotten made for her. She made a big deal about it being from, like, Paris or somewhere. I forget. London?”
    “Italy,” said Cat. She turned back to me. “Her dad went to Milan. Remember?”
    “No, I—I don’t remember,” I stammered. If only I had—
    “That’s funny,” said Maya. “She talks about it enough, but anyway, maybe yours is just a knockoff or something?”
    “Um, yeah, maybe—that must be it,” I said. I nodded in what I hoped was a casual way. I was sweating underthe jacket. I felt chilly and hot all at once. I wished I could run home and climb back into bed, start the day over. It was way too late for that now. “It probably is—what you said—a rip-off.”
    “
Knock
off,” said Maddie, “not
rip
-off.” She laughed.
    “
Knock
off, knockoff …,” I repeated, looking down at my feet. The toes of my ballet flats were newly scuffed, and they looked too red to me now. Like maraschino cherries. They looked like toy shoes. “It’s just a knockoff.”
    I breathed deeply and prayed for this to be true. A knockoff didn’t sound like a good thing to have, but it sounded way better than the alternative. What would Hannah do when I showed up with a coat
exactly
like her one-of-a-kind jacket? How would I explain that there were two one-of-a-kind coats in the same school? Could the bread box even do that? Could it have created an exact replica of something? Could the box
clone
something? I wondered what would happen if I wished for the
Mona Lisa
.
    Then, for the very first time, I wondered just where, exactly, the things I wished for came from. How they managed to appear in the box the very moment I wanted them. But I didn’t have long to think about it—
    “Come on!” said Cat, picking up her bag and starting up the steps. “We’ll be late, and now I can’t wait to see Hannah.” She gave me a mean smile.
    I felt sick. I felt
so
sick.
    “Come on, Becky,” said Megan gently, hanging back for me. “It’ll be okay. Who cares if your coat isn’t a real Italian one like hers? Who cares about coats?”
    Evidently a lot of people
, I thought. Out loud I said, “Thanks.”
    I shuffled up the stairs behind the red pouf of Megan’s hair and into school. I trudged through the sea of kids whose names I mostly still didn’t know to what now felt like my doom.
    When we got inside, there was Hannah, standing at her locker with her back to us. We walked up the hall toward her. I felt like I might puke. The jacket was weighing on my shoulders, pulling me down.
    “Hey, Hannah!” Cat called out eagerly.
“Hannah!”
    Hannah whipped around, her hair fanning out, her eyes wide open. She began to say, “Guess what! Someone stole my—” Then she took everything in—she saw
me
.
    She stopped speaking.
    She closed her