Who will be a victim of history?
Who will win Rosa’s love?
Will Rosa use her sewing skills to join the resistance, or be pulled into the Kinder Kirsch?
“Passion, death, the triumphs of the heart and the siren song of family obligations … ROSA OF KRAKOW is a fascinating historical journey about a woman just like us, born at a pivotal time in history.”
（It is SO important, ladies, to take a moment and realize how #blessed we are.） Steel yourselves, ladies! You will swoon over this Holocaust love triangle.*
The place: Priya’s House
The rest: Y’all know the drill by now: start time is 7:30, creative snacks appreciated and bring tissues to spare!!!!!
*Square?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Middle schools were supposed to be dingy, depressing places with humming fluorescent lights and peeling mustard paint. The one Annie had attended, five miles east of Sandstone K-8, had an appropriately soul-sucking institutional feel.
By contrast, the Sandstone kiddos sprinted on landscaped sports fields and swung from monkey bars on an award-winning sustainably sourced playground. They skipped to class on bamboo-wood floors, through warm beams of sunlight refracted down by pyramid skylights, past student artwork that had been professionally framed.
Today, Annie walked slowly down the main hallway: balanced atop her overfilled steel coffee mug was a red velvet cupcake that she’d snagged from a platter in the teachers’ lounge.
She’d been gluttonous to take it: Lena was coming to dinner and had hinted that she was bringing something rich for dessert, but Annie used her slow pace to appreciate the new student art, which had been switched out over the weekend.
The rotating Student Art Gallery was a Sandstone point of pride, which didn’t mean the art was any good. Annie suspected that most of it wasn’t, certainly not the giant blurry photograph above the water station, which seemed to be a close-up of a dog’s nostrils.
The quality didn’t matter; what mattered was that everyone acted like it was the creative expression of geniuses, and the dog-nostril photographer—a self-aware sixth grader who’d come to Annie last year for strategies to cope with “perfectionist tendencies”—would feel valued, which would lead to good posture, strong eye contact, boosted self-esteem, and the courage to try new things.
Or she’d graduate feeling entitled to accolades she did not deserve, petulant and thirsty for external approval.
That was the risk of a Sandstone education, Annie supposed, and the rewards far outweighed them. The first time Annie had walked inside of the building, she had felt like one of those parasitical birds—Jen Chun-Pagano would know the name of the species—who laid their eggs into other birds’ nests.
I don’t belong here, Annie would sometimes think when she spotted Laurel on the kindergarten playground, but she sure as hell will.
There seemed to be a pet theme to this month’s art gallery. Up ahead was a painting—a slightly better piece, Annie suspected—that gave the Warholian faces treatment to someone’s Siamese cat. Sierra and Haley were deep in conversation against it, their heads framed by neon pink and green.
From Sierra’s hip jut, the way her mouth moved nonstop, interrupted by only Haley’s nods of agreement, Annie could identify an impassioned rant.
She crossed to their side of the hall, hovered a few feet away from them, inched close enough to hear Haley’s voice, clear and loud, punch her in the ear.
“She’s out of control.”
One wide step and Annie was between the girls, inches from the painting, close enough to smell the not-quite-dry acrylic. “Who’s out of control?”
Haley’s eyes narrowed. Sierra blushed.
“Who?” Annie repeated. She didn’t care about the boundaries she had just bulldozed through, because she knew exactly who they were talking about.
The moodiness, the night “runs,” after which Annie would surreptitiously sniff her daughter’s jacket, check its pockets for bottle caps.
Who else could it be?
Laurel was out of control. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. And, as Lena had said over Christmas: better to intervene.
“Sierra,” Annie said in her best strict-teacher voice. “You’re coming with me.”
* * *
“Someone needs to do something,” Sierra said. She took a bite of the red velvet cupcake and held it out to Annie. “Splitsies? It’s so good.”
“All yours,” Annie said.
Annie had bribed Sierra with the cupcake from the teachers’ lounge, but it hadn’t been necessary. Sierra was an open book, happy to miss a few minutes of English to spill everything about Se?ora Bemis, the new Spanish teacher, who was apparently totally out of control.