I wanted to tell her everything, but I was afraid she’d freak out. Afraid she’d be mad. Afraid everything would be…different. So what finally came squeakin’ out of me was, “You think he’ll be back?”
She was quiet plenty long enough to make me squirm. Then she sighed and said, “There’s got to be someplace better for him than a dirty sidewalk. Let’s hope he lands there instead.”
She stretched out her arms, and when she wrapped them around me, it was like she was holding on for dear life.
I just stood there with my mouth locked down tight.
Trapped.
The next morning, Ma sprang my cage. “Lincoln!” she called from the bathroom. “Why are there bits of Snickers wrappers swimmin’ around the toilet?”
I was in the middle of a dream, trapped inside the corner market by a decrepit old man who was trying to tase me for sneaking Snickers to homeless folks. His Taser was slick and could shoot from a distance, but his aim was all shaky and he was shufflin’ along like a zombie in short red socks, wearing a hospital gown that was gaping wide open in back. “Don’t you know it’ll kill ’em?” he was shouting as I dodged him. “Send ’em straight into a diabetic coma!”
“Lincoln!” Ma hollered again. “What’s a Snickers wrapper doing in the toilet?”
I was glad to shake off the zombie in red socks, but now my mind was dodging around for another escape route. How could there be wrapper left in the toilet? I’d seen it go down! And I’d used the toilet since! Had some pieces stuck to the sides? Had they made their way back upstream? How could this be?
“You sure it’s not somethin’ else brown?” I called back.
“Lincoln Jones, I know the difference between somethin’ else brown and a candy wrapper.” Her head popped out of the bathroom. “And I’m guessin’ no ‘No’ means you got some explainin’ to do?”
It was early, the clock said we were running late, and she was dropping g’s left and right, which all spelled trouble. “Let me see,” I said, buying time.
“Mm-hmm.” She stepped aside with hips fisted and a look that said hot water was coming to a boil and she was fixin’ to dunk me.
“Maybe it’s like the alligators in Florida,” I said, sweating over two scraps of Snickers wrapper floating in the bowl. “You know the ones that fight their way upstream ’til they pop up someone’s toilet?”
“And maybe you best quit the bobbin’ and weavin’ and answer me.”
In class, Ms. Miller taught us about the Great Divide. It’s the crest of the Rocky Mountains, where rain either rolls down west to the Pacific or east to the Atlantic. An inch one way or the other and a raindrop ends up in a completely different ocean.
During the lesson Ms. Miller was already moving on to something else when I raised my hand and asked, “What if you were a raindrop and you landed smack-dab in the middle?”
I could see her mind doing a slow step back. “Well…eventually you would roll one way or the other.”
“But what if you balanced right there on the Divide? Then what?”
“Then other raindrops would join you and pull you one way or the other.”
“Well…what if they didn’t?” The rest of the class was starting to whisper, but something about being a single raindrop on the very center of the crest of the Great Divide was messing with my head.
Ms. Miller nodded and said, “Then the sun would evaporate you, and you’d condense and join a cloud, and the cloud would drop you again. Eventually you would have to go one way or the other.”
So maybe what I said next to Ma was on account of knowing I couldn’t stay on the Great Divide forever. Or maybe it was wanting to take down the Zombie in Red Socks, who was still staggering around in the corners of my mind. But probably it was because I couldn’t take another second of feeling like I was the bad guy who needed lockin’ up.
“Do you think Levi’s dead?” I asked, cringing.
“What?”
“I think I might’ve killed him,” I confessed, gazing into the tattletale toilet.
“Child, what are you talking about?”
“I’m not a child, Ma. I’m a murderer.” I turned to face her. “I gave him a candy bar. A big one.”
I could see Ma’s brain shifting gears, pressing the gas, then lettin’ up, trying to figure out what to say. “A candy bar can’t kill a man,” she finally said.
“What if he’s diabetic? Ms. Miller told us that—”
“Lincoln!” She was full throttle now, like the city bus gunning it into traffic, dark exhaust puffing out all around. “What were you doing with a candy bar in the first place? And more important, why were you down on the street?”
Before I could stop it, a confession came spurting out of me. It felt like I was heaving up my guts, spraying all over Ma. And just when it seemed like I was done, more would come blurting out until finally my gut was empty. Empty, and glad to be rid of the secret.
Ma just stood there, pie-eyed, like anyone would if they’d just been hurled on. And when she was sure I was done spraying the ugly truth all over her, she gave one good, hard blink and took a mighty breath.
I hunkered down, expecting the worst, but I guess what I’d spewed was too big a mess to clean up right then, ’cause she swallowed that mighty breath, squared her shoulders, and said, “I appreciate you tellin’ me the truth, Lincoln. We’ll sort through this tonight. Right now we best get movin’ or we’ll miss our buses.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grateful to be escaping for now.
“Eat something,” she hollered over her shoulder as she scurried to get ready for work.
“Yes, ma’am!” I hollered back, ’cause all of a sudden I was starving.
Seems like when a day starts off bad, it only gets worse. Could be that you’re so distracted by one bad move that you wind up making others. Or maybe some days are mixed into your life to prove you can survive them. Maybe it’s like leveling up.
I got to the bus stop in the nick of time and shuffled on last. Everyone else found seats quick, but I was shut out cold, with kids expanding their territory when they saw me coming down the aisle, making like there was no room on their bench in case I was thinking of squeezing in.
Nothing new there.
And then I heard my name. “Lincoln! Lincoln! Back here!”
I recognized her voice right off, and a sly-eye proved that, sure enough, it was Kandi.
My day was racing along the fast track from bad to worse. Why was she even on my bus? I checked around quick for a place to sit, pretending I hadn’t heard her.
“Lincoln!” she hollered again. “Back here!”
Now everyone was staring at me, and the back of the bus started treating me like I’d been drinkin’ stupid water. “Dude, what’s wrong with you?” “Wake up, man!” “Hellllloooo, moron…”
No grapes or tuna were flingin’ around yet, but I was imagining spoons getting unholstered and Troy commanding the troops.
Ready….
I could feel it—spoons were being loaded.
Aim….
They were cocked back and quivering!
Fire!
No food came zinging through the air, but Kandi’s voice sure did. “Lincoln!”
I finally looked at her square-on. She had a hand slapped down on a seat beside her. Holding it for me. There wasn’t a spoon in sight.
“Lincoln!” the bus driver hollered into her big bus mirror. “Sit down!”
“Why were you ignoring me?” Kandi hissed when I took the seat she’d saved.
“What are you doing on this bus?” I asked back.
She full-on frowned at me. “Why’d I even bother to save you a seat?”
About then is when it sank in: I was in the fling zone and no one was hurling food or insults. “Where’s Troy?” I asked, sly-eyeing around to be sure I wasn’t about to be ambushed.
Hilly Howard was sitting across the aisle from Kandi and me, messin’ with her bracelets. “I see what you mean about him not a
nswering questions,” she said over me like I wasn’t even there. “It is annoying.”
Kandi gave me the stink-eye and called, “And I’m definitely annoyed!”
So yeah. Girls are confusing. First they save you a seat, then they act mad when you’re sitting in it.
Kandi crossed her arms. Her little turkey-tail nails were chipped here and there, like they were tired of looking so festive. “Aren’t you going to apologize?” she asked with a huff. “Or at least thank me?”
“For what?”
“Another question,” Hilly said, causing trouble. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was pulling at her bracelets, moving them around and around her wrist, and it made me notice that her fingernails were painted just like Kandi’s, only the turkeys looked brand-new.
“See?” Kandi cried.
“Which is another question from you,” I pointed out. “You’re the one who never answers questions!”
Hilly quit messing with her bracelets and squared off with me. “You could start by thanking her for saving you a seat.”
I nearly broke it to her that I’d rather pick tuna out of my hair, but she leaned across the aisle and whispered, “Or how about for getting Troy kicked off the bus?” She gave me laser-beam eyes. “Not that the world needs to know that, but you should.”
My head whipped back to Kandi. “How’d you do that?”
She got busy chipping at a turkey tail. “I told Ms. Miller.”
“But…why’d you do that?”
“Because Hilly told me how bad it was. And someone needed to do something. And I’m not afraid of Troy Pilkers.”
“But…he’s gonna think it was me.”
It came out sounding like no one I wanted to be. I didn’t sound like Lamar or Lucas or any of the heroes in my stories. I sounded like a scaredy-cat.
A coward.
Hilly leaned over the aisle again. “I’m not seein’ a famous journalist in him, Kandi.”
“Me?” I asked, pointing to myself like the word alone wouldn’t do.
Kandi smiled at her. “You’ll see.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, whippin’ my head from side to side.
Hilly gave me a look that said I was way smaller than my britches. “Kandi was up all night predicting your future.”
“What?” I was gettin’ whiplash from looking back and forth.
“Hilly!” Kandi cried.
“Well, you were,” Hilly grumbled. Then she frowned at me and said, “You need to thank her, stupid.” She went back to her bracelets again, her little turkey tails reeling them around her wrist. “Nobody liked what Troy was doing. Even if you are a dork.”
“He’s not a dork,” Kandi said.
I don’t know if I was sticking up for myself or Kandi, but something made me look right at Hilly and say, “That’s right. I’m not.”
The bus was pulling into the drop-off zone, and Hilly stood up while it was still moving. “You are until you thank her. After that, we’ll see.”
They both focused double-barreled stares on me, Hilly from above, Kandi from the side.
So I broke down. “Thank you.”
Kandi’s nose tilted back and a little air came puffing out of it. “No problem,” she said, but the look she gave me said she was lyin’.
A t my old school, recess was indoors as much as it was outdoors. What kept us in was sometimes rain, but mostly heat or it being too humid to do much but sweat. Chasing or bouncing or dodging a ball on a swelterin’ day was not my idea of fun.
Besides, I wasn’t any good at sports. Ma didn’t like them, and Cliff—when he came into the picture—might have been good with a bat, but he wasn’t interested in swinging it at baseballs.
So sports and I never really got acquainted, and that was okay. Nobody made a fuss over it ’cause lots of other kids were spending recess indoors, too. And as long as you didn’t mess with stuff or start trouble, nobody cared what you were doing in a corner by yourself, which, for me, was usually reading comics.
I love comics. The superhero kind. Which aren’t funny, but for some reason they’re still called comics. Ma bought them for me once in a while, but my old school’s media center had a secret stash of them in a back room, and Mr. Willard, the librarian, slipped them to kids who asked. “Here you go, Mr. Jones,” he’d say with a wink, and I’d be glued to the thing any chance I got.
On the back cover of every comic Mr. Willard had taped a list of vocabulary words. Words that were used in the comic. That was good for when you were reading and didn’t know what a word meant, but the payback was you had to know all the words when you checked the comic back in.
“Ready, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Willard would say in a voice all hushed and secretive. Then he’d run through the list, sweepin’ the room with a sly-eye as he went down it, like any minute the two of us might be hauled off to the principal’s office.
“Why’re there such hard words in comics?” I asked him once, ’cause after a while my brain was loaded up with vo-cab-u-lar-y.
“Because they’re really for adults,” he whispered. “Ready for another?”
At Thornhill there are no comics. On the second day of school I asked Ms. Raven, hoping she might have a secret stash like Mr. Willard had, but the answer was no. And when I asked Ms. Miller where indoor recess was held, she gave me a strange look and said, “We do recess outside.”
I walked away feeling funny inside. Like I was alone in the middle of a school full of kids, with no place to go.
So I found a secret spot off to the side of the blacktop between a building and a fence, and that’s where I’d go to work on my stories at recess. No one bothered me or even knew I holed up there.
That is, until Kandi went and messed things up.
“Why are you always hiding back here?” she asked during morning recess on the day she’d invaded the bus. She was holding on to a four-square ball and had Macy Mills and Lexi Simmons with her. They were havin’ a polka-dot day. Just lookin’ at them made me dizzy.
I’d jerked when Kandi had asked, ’cause I was already jumpy, worried that Troy might pop up out of nowhere and let me have it. But her asking like she did also shocked me. How long had she known about my spot?
“You want to play four square with us?” she asked.
“No thanks,” I said, shaking my head.
She frowned. “If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up like Isaac Monroe.”
“Who?”
But they were already running off.
I grumbled, “Great. Now I’m gonna have to find a new spot.” But I couldn’t figure that out right then, so I got back to my story. The Ninja Cat Woman was moving through the shadows of the city’s night streets, tailing a sneak thief who had stolen Old Yeller—a yellow diamond worth over a million dollars. I was putting in double agents and heart-pounding twists, so it didn’t take long to forget about Kandi and four square and where Troy Pilkers might be lurking.
When recess was over and we were lined up outside the classroom, I noticed a lot of whispering behind me, but I didn’t know it was about me until we were sitting in our seats and Colby clued me in.
“You shouldn’t be writing about us,” she hissed across territories. “It’s not nice!”
“What?” I said, ’cause it was like a snake had struck out of nowhere.
“You heard me,” she hissed.
Rayne was next to me, fiddlin’ with a hair ribbon, and Wynne was across from me, wringin’ the life out of a Kleenex, looking every which way but at me.
“I’m not writing about you!” I said. “Not any of you!”
“Prove it!” Colby said. She had whipped out her feather pencil and was now leaning across territories, shaking it at me like she was about to cast some deadly feather spell.
“Colby!” Ms. Miller called from the front of the class. “Put that away this instant!”
Colby put it away with a huff, but her attitude didn’t go away with it. She was shootin’ eye darts at me the
whole rest of the morning. Then at lunch she and Rayne and Wynne surrounded me at my table. “Prove it,” Colby demanded.
Rayne and Wynne still weren’t looking at me, but they were there, which meant they were in the same camp as Colby. And looking around, I saw they had backup, including Macy and Lexi and their zillion polka dots. Lots of other kids were staring at me, too. It was like a mob out there, armed with plastic pitchforks, itchin’ to do me in.
I couldn’t believe it. Was this what I got for minding my own business?
Was this what I got for writing in a notebook?
The whole school hated me?
It felt like I was in an oven, roasting. And since I could see only one way to bust the door open and escape, I pushed my notebook forward. “Here,” I said.
Colby snatched it like she had every right to have it, and for a split second I panicked, remembering my story about Queen Colby and the spaceship. But that one had just been in my head—I hadn’t actually written it down.
They huddled over my notebook like a three-headed monster, gobbling up pages while I sat there feeling mad and embarrassed.
“Who’s Agent Leroy?” Rayne asked.
“What’s a Ninja Cat Woman?” Wynne whispered.
They flipped through the notebook fast, until Colby finally said, “These are just…stories.”
I yanked my notebook back. “See? Nothing in there about anybody!”
They stared at me, sorry written all over their faces.
And then, like someone had waved a magic wand, poof, Kandi appeared, rosy-cheeked and out of breath. “Guess what?” she said, sitting beside me.
Colby got right in her face. “You can’t sit here! That’s what!”
“Why?” Kandi said, looking all hurt.
“Leave!” Colby said, and now Rayne and Wynne were leaning in, too, like a flock of crows swooping down on roadkill.
Kandi gave me a look that was crying out for help, but I wanted nothing to do with her or the trouble she’d caused. And since I could tell I was on the verge of saying something either stupid or mean, I grabbed my stuff, gave the whole bunch of them a scorching look, and took off.