Girl at War by Sara Novic Page B

and only got half a canister. Two girls I knew from school were at the pump and they waved me to the front.
    “Don’t cut the line, Jurić!” an old lady yelled at me, but I called back an excuse about Rahela being ill and went ahead to meet the girls. When I got there a stream of water hit me in the chest, the wetness spreading down my torso; Vjera—the perpetually pigtailed girl—had pressed her hand over the spigot, and the water shot out through her fingers like pent-up rays of sunlight.
    “It’s
cold
!” I yelled, but already I was laughing. She aimed the water at my face now, and I caught it in my mouth, spraying it upward like the angel fountain in Zrinjevac. I grabbed at the pipe and twisted it in her direction, pegging her in the backs of the legs. We were hysterical now, laughing so hard it didn’t even make a sound. The old lady’s toleranceran out and she came at us full-hobble, swinging her empty gas cans until one hit me upside the head.
    “Get out of here before I call your mother,” the woman said. “All your mothers!” Ashamed, I quickly filled one of my canisters and darted home.
    Inside my mother pressed a hand to her hip and pulled at the strands of wet hair plastered to my face.
    “Ana, were you wasting the water?”
    “It wasn’t my fault. Some girls from school sprayed me,” I said. Silence hung between us and I mumbled a sorry to break it.
    “Let’s hope everybody has enough to drink now,” she said. Then after a while, she smiled a little and swiped again at my hair. “At least I don’t have to boil any for you. You’ve already had quite a shower.”
    I smiled then, too, and watched as she heated the water on the stove and bathed with a washcloth in the middle of the kitchen. My mother’s hair was the color of burnt chestnuts, and when she moved, it shone.
    —
    That night I arrived home from school to find my mother and father standing face-to-face, staring hard at one another. Something was wrong. My father was home too early; his fists were clenched. When the door swung in and hit the wall, they jumped. My mother turned to wipe her eyes. My father began plunking dishes and spoons down on the tablewith too much force. My mother busied herself, too, was throwing tiny clothes that had once been mine and were now Rahela’s into a suitcase on the floor.
    “Rahela,” I said. My parents seemed to slow slightly at the mention of her name. “Where is she?”
    “She’s sleeping,” my mother said. They’d moved the cradle into the threshold between the kitchen and their bedroom, and I peered in. Too much blood on the blankets, down the front of her shirt. Her breathing shallow.
    “What’s going on?”
    “The medicine’s not working. She has to go.”
    “To the hospital?”
    “There’s nothing they can do for her here. There’s a program transporting out of Sarajevo. We’re going to take her tomorrow.”
    “Transporting where?” I said.
    “To America.”
    I looked around. There were no other cases, no adult clothes in the bag. “By
herself
?”
    “It’s a medical program. They’ll take good care of her,” said my father. “Once they fix her up she’ll come right back home.”
    “I want to go to Sarajevo with you,” I said.
    “No,” said my mother.
    “We’ll see,” said my father.
    The power was on for an hour or two, and my father made a series of calls, his hand cupped over the receiver toguide his voice through the shoddy connection. At first I assumed he was trying to reach MediMission, but I noticed him later scribbling out what looked like a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket.
    After dinner, when an especially violent air raid rattled the windows of our flat, my mother sprang up and held me and I knew I could win her over.
    “Did you finish your homework?” she asked when we returned from the basement.
    “I don’t have to since I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I tried.
    My mother sighed.
    “I want to say goodbye to her,