No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis Page B

came out of the heart. Was it made there? Where did it go?
    I stared hard at the poster, trying to figure it out.
    “Get away from there!”
    The bookstore security guard tried to shoo me away.
    “Get away!” he said. “This has nothing to do with you!”
    “I look like that inside,” I told him. “So do you.”
    “Do you have money? You have no money. This is not for you.”
    “I have plenty of money,” I said, patting my pocket where the folded-up pizza was. “And I’d like to buy …” I reached into my memory for the right words. “I’d like to buy a biology book.”
    I walked past the guard into the store.
    I didn’t get far.
    “Get out,” the manager said. “Take your filthy hands off the books and get out. There is nothing here for you.” To the guard he said, “If you let this happen again, you’re fired.”
    The guard tried to grab me, but I left on my own.
    I was mad. How did they know I didn’t have any money? Could they see into my pocket? Maybe I had as much money as those fancy ladies who didn’t want their purses searched.
    And then I saw my reflection in one of the windows.
    I had been looking at the inside of the windows, so I hadn’t noticed it before.
    Now I saw it.
    I was filthy. I had stayed away from the river because I was afraid I might run into Dr. Indra there. My kurta was torn and covered in grime. My hair was knotted and matted. I scratched my head a lot because ants crawled around in it at night and that made it all bunch up. Wind and living did the rest.
    They were right, I thought. Books were not for me. I probably didn’t even look like everybody else inside. Under my skin, there was probably just more dirt.
    I left the mall.
    I walked out past the guards at the gate, who yelled, “How did you get in here? Get out!” I tried to sit on the steps, but they chased me away.
    I sat on the curb across the street. They couldn’t stop me from doing that.
    But it didn’t make me feel any better.

11
    Feet
    AND THEN I FORCED myself to do what I had avoided doing since I’d left the hospital.
    I looked at my feet.
    Even caked with dirt, I could see they were a mess.
    There were large nasty-looking sores on the sides and the bottoms. There were blisters from the burns that were green and puffy. There were cuts from glass and bruises and scrapes from all the falls I’d had just that morning, hitching rides on the backs of trucks.
    And they smelled bad.
    Not just ordinary street-dirt bad. Worse. Like walking-by-a-dog-that-had-been-dead-for-three-days bad.
    I looked at the feet of the people passing by. I was close to the ground, in a good position to look at feet. I saw feet in high heels, feet in army boots, feet that were bare and feet in canvas runners. I saw the dancing feet of children who were eager to get into the mall and the tired feet of tradespeople pushing their barrows.
    What was the worst that could happen? My feet wouldn’t fall off. So what if they had sores? So what if they smelled bad? Nobody ever died from having bad-smelling feet.
    Or did they? I didn’t know.
    “I don’t know anything,” I said out loud.
    Maybe I should try to make my way back to Jharia. I could pick up coal, live with the woman who was not my aunt and it wouldn’t matter that I didn’t know how the body made blood or what it took to make someone die. I knew how to find bits of coal on the ground, pick them up and put them in a bag. A lot of people lived their whole lives that way.
    “Get along. Keep moving.”
    I thought the guard was snarling at me. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to argue with him, even though he was a mall guard and had no power over who sat on the curb. Of course, that wouldn’t stop him from hitting me anyway if he wanted to.
    “Spare a rupee for my baby?”
    The voice was weak, but there was a lull in the traffic and I heard her.
    I looked up.
    A thin woman in a torn and dirty sari was slowly climbing the stairs to the gate where the guards stood. Her