Same Sun Here: List 2

Mrs. Lau says this has never happened before, storage has always been free, this is just another way to scare rent-controlled tenants.

We roll up the peacock bedspread and lay down a Chinese brocade sheet.

And I heard a man on the news say that the only people who do well in hard times are undertakers.

Some people were serious and some people seemed giddy.

Mum put on her favorite salwar kameez. It’s yellow with green flowers stitched all over, and whenever I look at it, I smell spring in Garhwal.

I don’t have to take the test because I am under the age of eighteen. So once Mummy-Daddy are citizens, I can be one, too. It’s called “derivative citizenship” (there are a lot of big words that go along with becoming an American).

There is something on the paper Mai gave us about “no perjury,” which Kiku says means lying.

But I am still fretting, because Mom has been in the hospital ever since. And I heard Mamaw on the phone, telling Dad that it could have been an aneurysm.

Even though it was cold today, there were lots of cardinals calling to each other in the trees. Their song is “Birdie, birdie, birdie!” which I think is real interesting, for a bird to say that.

He got detention for defacing school property, but he said, “I refuse to honor my detention unless the other individual who wrote on my locker confesses to his crime like a real man.”

I am still painting the backdrops, and I am learning how to do the light cues. I like that everyone in Drama Club has at least two jobs.

When I told Kiku, he said he would “do a mad engineer rendition of a bootie.”

She curses and she talks a lot about being a girl. I bet she is someone who would write a song about shaving her legs. Kiku calls her “sassy.”

I, Meena Joshi, do solemnly swear that I will never again write to my friend River Dean Justice about
1. anything to do with hair
2. making out of any kind

If I were a lawyer, I would sue you for “defamation of character.”

However, the jolt of the boulders caused ceiling trusses to fall into the gymnasium and onto five of the boys.

In this practice, the entire contour of the mountain is changed forever and waste—or overburden—is stored in nearby “valley fills,” impoundments containing rocks, dirt, and felled trees.

The school’s principal, Harold Wright, who refused an interview for this story, would only say that the buildings are beyond repair and will have to be razed and rebuilt.

Local grassroots activists have been fighting the mining practice for years and have been galvanized by the recent opening of the mine so close to the school.

Local grassroots activists have been fighting the mining practice for years and have been galvanized by the recent opening of the mine so close to the school.

She said that the stereotype is that Indians are smart, though, and either REAL poor or REAL rich. Mamaw says that the bad part is that people “reduce” us—hillbillies AND Indians—down to some kind of little “generalization.”

I could see it, in slow motion, as the crack ran on up the ceiling and caused some of the humongous lights and rafters to fall.

Being scared messes with people in different ways, I reckon.

Mamaw and this bunch of people she works with called Kentuckians for the Commonwealth are planning a big march on the state capital.

One time he ran in the house because he was scared of a thunderstorm that was coming (he heard it before we did), but then he got even more scared to be walking on the linoleum, so he ran back out and ran under the porch and wouldn’t stop shivering for the rest of the night.