Free Verse by Sarah Dooley Page A

even though it isn’t even nine a.m.
    â€œWe should do something.” I feel guilty wasting gallons of orange sunshine.
    â€œWhat do you want to do?” Mikey asks.
    I shrug half a shoulder. Stella murmurs her disapproval. “I’m supposed to help your dad clean out the storage shed.”
    He snorts. I take this as a no.
    â€œWe could go to the pawnshop,” I suggest.
    â€œWhy? What’s at the pawnshop?”
    â€œSomething I want.”
    He twists his head to look over at me. “Something top secret, or you going to tell me?”
    â€œSomething top secret.”
    â€œYou going to tell me when we get there?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThen forget it.”
    We stay draped on the porch. The sun keeps moving.
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    â€œSasha?”
    Mikey’s voice catches me off guard. I pull my face off my algebra book, and Stella murmurs another warning.
    â€œI was sleeping,” I say.
    â€œSorry.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI said I’m sorry,” he repeats.
    â€œNo, I mean, you said ‘Sasha.’ So I’m saying ‘what.’”
    â€œOh. Let’s clean the storage shed.”
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    There’s a lot of junk in the storage shed. Some of it is boring stuff: extra extension cords and broken roof shingles and boxes of Christmas lights. Some of it is more interesting. There are stacks of papers arranged loosely on the tops of boxes, like somebody brought them in quicklyand stuck them in the first available space, like that person didn’t really want to deal with them. They need to be gathered and put into some of the empty boxes along the back.
    At first, Mikey stacks things quickly, but after a while, he notices me scanning the papers and separating them into piles to box. Mikey starts scanning, too, like he didn’t realize he could do that before.
    The top layer of papers is boring. Water bills. Electric bills. Internet bills. Underneath, where the postmarks start getting older, things get more interesting.
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    After we find the box, Mikey freaks out and breaks a window. I yank him back by the shoulders before he can step on the glass in his flip-flops and get cut. I can’t let Mikey step in the glass. He’s not even ten. I’m supposed to watch out for him.
    Mikey pulls himself from my grip and darts out of the shed. He runs across his yard, across the road, and between two houses on the other side. He disappears from view.
    The cousin in me thinks I ought to run after him. But the employee in me thinks I ought to clean up the glass before Hubert sees it, or I might never get Phyllis a GUI-tar.
    Actually, the
cousin
in me sort of thinks I ought to clean up the glass before Hubert sees it, too. I can tell Shirley and Mikey barely get along. I want to keep him out of trouble as much as possible.
    I’m not exactly sure how to clean up glass. It’s scattered all over the rough wood floor of the shed. I know not to pick it up with my hands, but it’s going to be tough to clean it up without touching it.
    I think I know where Phyllis keeps the broom. It takes some sneaking to get the broom and the dustpan and make it back without anybody asking questions about what I’m doing. Then it takes some figuring to work out how to get the dustpan to hold still while I sweep into it. Nobody ever taught me anything. I feel ashamed and mad all at once. I sweep up the glass, and it makes the softest
crunch-crunch-crunch
as it slides into the dustpan.
    Now I’ve got a dustpan full of broken window and a hand full of broom and a shed that is still not clean and a cousin on the run. The day itself is still pretty, but the stuff inside it isn’t.
    I hide the broom behind some boxes. I put the dustpan and glass on a shelf. I put the thing away in its box. I close the box. I put it neatly on the shelf in front of the