I keep making lists in my head of all the things I should be doing on the farm—things my calendar says should already be done—and school and the rest sort of blurs together.
My steps slow by the classroom door when I catch sight of Mateo a half dozen yards down the hall. He’s leaning against Jessica’s locker, her blonde head tilted close to his as she cozies in and shows him something on her phone. Glitter sparkles on her perfectly round nails, which match her fancy shoes.
You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes. You know where they’ve been, and where they’re headed. Expensive or hand-me-downs, shoes take you places, but if they’re too pretty to step off the pavement, all they’ll ever see is a world bound up by cement. Ten bucks says Jessica never walked a dirt road in her life. If you ask me, all that shine looks way out of place next to Mateo’s worn sneakers.
Still, seeing them together makes something inside me deflate like a slow leak in a tire. I duck inside the classroom and squeeze past a knot of girls by the door. Grabbing a Chromebook off the metal cart beside Mr. Collier’s desk, I make my way to the back of the class, drop my backpack under my desk, and slump into my chair under a poster of Coretta Scott King, first lady of the civil rights movement. On either side of her, paintings and photos line the wall all the way around the room. Woven rugs, face masks, and iron tools hang below the portraits on pegs and wires. It’s sort of a mini-museum, with stuff from all over the world stuck to the walls. Mr. Collier has a picture of himself suited up in a black belt with trophies hanging behind his desk.
If someone said Mr. Collier was some kinda real-life Indiana Jones ninja, I’d believe it.
“Hey, Paige.” Mateo slides into the seat in front of me and shrugs off his jacket.
“Hi.” I curl my fingers under the edges of the Chromebook to hide my bitten nails. Even if they were long enough to bother with glitter and stuff, the paint wouldn’t last past the first day of chores.
The bell rings, and all six foot five inches of Mr. Collier steps through the doorway. He gives a couple quick claps, and his voice, deep as a diesel engine, rolls right over the chatter and shuts it down.
“Welcome, class. Find your seats.” He pulls the door shut behind him.
He takes off his sports coat, folds it, and drapes it over the back of his office chair. With a sweeping gaze, he rolls up his sleeves over his dark-brown arms. “Please pass up the review questions for chapter twenty-seven.”
Students dig through backpacks, and a flurry of papers flows toward the front of the class.
Right. Homework. I knew I was forgetting something. I open the Chromebook for a mini-barricade between me and the front of the room and keep my head down as Mr. Collier collects the piles of papers from the front of each row, taps the edges of the stack to make them all even, and slides them into his drawer as gentle as a hen tucking eggs in a nest. With that done, he adjusts his gold-rimmed glasses and scans the room.
“All here, I see. Excellent. Get ready to type or write down some notes. Whichever method you prefer.”
Most of the class open Chromebooks and power them up. Three-ring binders and spiral notebooks flop onto desks as the rest of us dig for pencils or pens and hold them at the ready. I pull out my notebook, write the date at the top, and set the pencil down. Hanging onto it while he’s talking is sort of like holding a hammer over a nail just in case you want to hit it someday. If I hear something I want to write down, I will. But there’s no point pretending I’ll write loads down. We both know I won’t.
He plucks a pen from the side of the interactive whiteboard and taps the screen.
A graph slides into view with numbers and percentages, and Mr. Collier circles a 46%. “This is the average grade from your tests last week.”
The class groans, but he raises a hand. “I get it. I do. A new teacher partway through the year is an adjustment, but that doesn’t change the fact that your grades matter.”
Arms folded across his chest, he paces across the room. “I won’t change your test grade, but I will give you an opportunity for extra credit.”
Mateo flashes a smile at me, and I scrunch my nose back at him. He gets way too excited for grades.
Mr. Collier walks back to the board and pulls up instructions with “May 4th” written at the top. “Each of you will find someone in history whose story speaks to you. Name someone—anyone you remember from history.”
Emily, the blonde beside me, raises her hand, and Mr. Collier nods at her.
“Einstein.”
“Sure. Anyone else? Throw them out. Let me hear it.”
“Lincoln!”
“Alexander Hamilton.”
Mr. Collier raises his fist. “‘I’m not throwing away my shot!’ That’s right. Who else?”
“George Washington.”
“Elvis.”
“Ben Franklin!”
“Lady Gaga!”
He holds up a hand. “All good examples. My daughter would probably add Beyoncé to that list, but those are people we hear about all the time. I’m interested in the stories you don’t hear—and I want to know how they relate to you.”
He points to a painting over his head of two Asian women holding a tiger skin with some kind of writing on it. “These are the Tru’ng sisters of Vietnam. When their people were suffering under China’s rule, the sisters killed a man-eating tiger and wrote a declaration against injustice on the hide. They recruited more than thirty-five women as generals for their rebellion and drove China out of Vietnam in AD 40. Ever heard of them?”
We shake our heads.
“I thought not.” He taps the pen against his hand and walks to another poster. “Over here, we have Sybil Ludington: a young woman who, in 1777, rode more than twenty-five miles from New York to Connecticut in the dark to warn people the British were coming—that’s longer than Paul Revere’s famous ride. Sixteen years old, folks, and she saved entire towns.” Hooking a thumb in the pocket of his pressed, gray slacks, he points to a photo of an African American girl in midair over a high jump. “Alice Coachman. In 1948, she became the first black woman to win an Olympic medal.”
Next to me, Jacie bites her lip, her fingers flying on her keyboard like this will be on a test, but Jeff in front of her plays a game on his phone under his desk.
Mr. Collier taps the wall under a black-and-white photo of a girl standing beside an enormous stack of papers almost as tall as she is. “Margaret Hamilton headed a team that wrote the navigation codes that got Apollo 11 to the moon and back.”
He stands below a photo of samurai armor and swords. “And then there’s my personal favorite, Yasuke. The first non-Japanese man ever to become a samurai . . . was an African slave. As the story goes, he was enslaved as a child and spent his life in chains. So, imagine for a moment what it must’ve been like for a man who never had choices, power, or freedom to have the chance to wield a katana—and do it with enough skill to be named samurai.”
Murmurs roll around the room, and Mr. Collier smiles. “Yes, he was fierce. Now think of how Yasuke’s story would resonate with an African American student of martial arts, like me.” Mr. Collier steps back into a fighting stance, his fitted dress shirt pulling tight over his arms.
Some kids laugh, others nod as he relaxes and walks to the back of the room, pointing to picture after picture. “Take the time to read all these names. Sojourner Truth, Fredrick Douglass, Booker T. Washington—they all made an impact on history. There are so many to choose from, why stick to the same names you already know? So now, let’s try again. Who can think of someone in history that we don’t hear about every day?”
Silence fills the room, and students glance at each other for a few heartbeats before Mateo raises his hand. “Chief Pocatello?”
“There you go. How many of you knew our town was named after a Shoshone chief?”
Mr. Collier walks up the
aisle beside us and stops beside Jeff’s desk, his hand open and waiting. Jeff sighs as he stops his game and sets the phone in Mr. Collier’s hand.
“Research,” Mr. Collier says, like he’s announcing a grand prize at the fair. “Find someone who speaks to your own personal story. You’ve got three weeks to do this report—and none of that time will be in class—so listen up to the requirements.”
For the next ten minutes, Mr. Collier lays out the rules of what he expects and then lets us search on our Chromebooks for who we might use for our reports.
When the bell rings, kids rush to return the Chromebooks and hightail it out the door.
“Paige? A word, please?”
“Yeah?” I veer toward his desk and adjust the strap on my backpack as he steeples his hands and waits for the last of the students to clear the door.
“You didn’t turn in your assignment today.”
“I forgot.” Between Milkshake, chores, and Miss Dolly, it’s a miracle I remember school at all.
“That’s another zero you can’t afford.” He turns to his computer, fingers clicking on the keyboard. “And I haven’t seen your reading log this month at all. Are you at least reading the assigned chapters?”
My silence is answer enough.
He watches me and shakes his head. “You’re a farmer, right? Imagine that your brain is a wide-open field. Your brain is growing new connections, new experiences, and you want this crop to be the very best it can be. Reading books is what makes that ground fertile.”
“Books are like fertilizer?” Wait till Scotty hears about this.
“Well, maybe I didn’t make the best metaphor, but you know what I mean.”
I stare at the pencils on his desk, because I don’t know what to say. I’m sick of people telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. Mr. Collier doesn’t know me any more than Miss Dolly does. I already know what’s important, and I’m taking care of it. The farm is running, the animals are fed, and the crops are watered. The rest is just stuff that gets in the way.
“Paige, I’m only saying this because I care. Trust me.”
My head jerks up at his words, and I hear Dolly’s voice overlapping with his—just another fancy-dressed person trying to boss me around. I lift my chin. “You know what too much fertilizer does? It stinks.”
Mom would have my hide for that sass, but I can’t take it back. I don’t want to, either.
“Enough. Like it or not, your grades matter. If you don’t pass this class, you’ll have to retake it. Fail enough classes and you’ll have to retake the entire grade. If things don’t improve real fast, I’ll have to call your parents. Would your father approve of these zeros?”
My father? My whole body rocks back as his question cuts deeper than any furrow.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Mr. Collier is on his feet, reaching for me, but his voice seems far off, and I back away, the hurt too fresh to think straight.
“How would you know what my dad wants? You never even met him.”
“Paige—”
Stupid tears blur my eyes, and I bolt from the room faster than any thoroughbred horse ever ran.
He can keep his stupid manure books, his slick sports jacket, and his fancy posters. If we had met a year ago, I’d have liked his class, maybe even loved it. But things change.
He doesn’t understand what it means to be up before dawn and to bed after dark. To be twelve and dead tired but still working because there’s no one else to get the job done.
He doesn’t know that the last words I spoke to my dad were a promise, and I’ll keep that promise or die trying.
Chapter Eight
By the time the bus gets to our street on the Sho-Ban Reservation, most of the kids have already gotten off.
“I’m telling you, it was awesome.” I sling my backpack over one shoulder as the bus stops in front of Kimana’s house. I slip past two boys, heads together, watching a phone. One of them has three braids; the other has his hair cut short.
“The owl flew right over your head? Were you nervous?” Kimana pats the shoulder of a girl in a gray hoodie—one of her brother’s friends—and glances at Mateo behind me as she exits the bus.
“No. It was sort of magical. Like the veil between here and heaven stretched thin enough to cross over if I could fly.” I grab the hand rail and hop down the steps to the road.
Mateo passes us and turns to walk backwards, his hands palm out. “Maybe you should change your mind, rejoin Lego League, and build yourself some wings so Kimana can program them for you.”
“Not you too! No ganging up on me about robotics.” I wag a finger at Kimana. “Your evil plan to guilt me into joining the league won’t work.”
“It wasn’t her,” Mateo says. “I was looking at the team list on Mr. Shelmen’s door, and he practically made me promise to talk to you. He wants you to join the team really bad. Like really, really, really bad.”
“Right.” I laugh. “Whatever.”
We all look to the bus driver and wait for her to wave us across the road.
“Maybe next time he should send gifts,” Kimana says. “Are there any bribes that would work?”
“Probably not, but it would be fun to try. He should send chocolate.”
We step across the yellow dotted line.
The bus horn blasts, and Mateo yanks us out of the other lane as a blue minivan screeches to a stop. It’s so close, I could touch it.
The bus driver lays on the horn again and gestures, furious, but I can barely hear anything over my heart pounding louder than a drum inside my skull. Each beat shakes me, as memories of past and present slip free and collide inside me.
I stare at the teenage girl inside the minivan. Her left hand grips the steering wheel, but her right hand holds a phone, screen bright, against her heaving chest.
She had been texting.
My breath hitches again and again, and I tremble as Mateo steps closer to the minivan and yells, “What’s wrong with you? Put your phone away! You could have killed us!”
Images of a mangled ten-wheeler wrapped around and over the remains of a tractor flood my mind. I blink, but I still see it all again with my eyes open or closed. Bent irrigation pipe scattered across the road. The truck driver searching for his phone instead of trying to help the man hanging from the tractor seat.
Looking for his phone, because he had been on his phone when he hit the pipe wagon and the tractor.
My dad’s tractor.
The pipe never made it to the field. And Dad never made it home.
I let Kimana pull me across the road and down her driveway, her arm around my shoulders. She knows I hate talking about it, and Mateo and she purposely talk of other things—anything other than cars and trucks, tractors and texts.
Kimana tells us about this kid she likes—Dante—who does the Fancy Feather Dance with two bustles splayed with feathers—one secured behind his hips and another between his shoulder blades—and I tilt my head up, letting her words and the sun wash over me.
Here with my besties, there’s no judgment, no expectation, and no pushing. If I don’t want to talk, I don’t. My chest eases a little, and I remember how to breathe.
They don’t give me pitying looks either—not like I get from teachers. Mr. Collier apologized all over the place—apparently he didn’t get the memo about my dad when they hired him—but he still says the extra credit is my only chance of passing, and that’s only if I do all my homework for the rest of the year.
Halfway down the lane, nanny goats bleat a happy welcome, pressing their horned heads through the fence, their ears waggling. They have perfected the art of begging for food by looking adorable.
“Don’t believe them,” Kimana advises. “My brothers fed them this morning before school.”
“Where’s your bike?” I ask, feeling calmer the cl
oser we get to my friend’s house.
“In the shed behind the arena.” Kimana leads us down her dirt driveway beside the split-rail fence that surrounds the training paddock where her brothers train their horses for Relay racing.
As we pass her ranch-style house, Kimana’s Hutsi steps out onto the porch with a watering can in hand, silver and stone rings reflecting the afternoon sun. She nods at us as she lifts the plastic mini-greenhouse off a workbench and pours water over tiny green seedlings. “What are you three troublemakers up to today?”
“Troublemakers?” Mateo looks behind us, eyes wide in mock horror. “Where?”
“Hi, Hutsi,” I wave. “What’cha growin’?”
“Basil, sage, chives, dill.” A breeze teases a wisp of gray against her soft brown cheek. “Plus tomatoes and chili peppers. A little of everything.”
I give her a double thumbs-up. “Nice.”
“You gonna have some sweet corn for me this year?” she asks.
“Of course!” I answer as if it’s not even a question. As if I know for a fact that I’ll be here to harvest sweet corn come August. I mean, I will be here. I have to believe it’s true.
“Good. I used the last of our freezer corn a couple days ago.” She covers her plants and pulls open the screen door. “You let me know when it’s ready, okay?”
“You bet.”
“Oh.” Hutsi sets down the watering can. “Kimana, did you hear Little Man is hosting a powwow for his senior project? He called to invite you to compete. Oh! And Feather’s doctor says she’s due any day.”
“But I don’t have my jingles yet. When is it?”
“Next month.”
“I guess I’ll have to up my game on beads or something. Thanks, Hutsi.” She leads us around the corner of the house. “Bike’s over here.”
“Who’s Feather?” Mateo asks.
“My cousin. I’ll babysit for a couple days when she has her baby.”
Tucked like a chick nestled under a wing, the lean-to cozies up to the side of the barn. A dirt bike rests on its kickstand in the center of the floor. Globs of dried mud speckle its fenders and wheels, but the engine shines where Kimana cleaned it all out.
The Wish and the Peacock Page 6