The Colossus of Roads
Page 10
“No,” he answered. This might have been the girl who’d been so loud about her fish taco holding a bouquet of California poppies. He tried to answer quietly in the hopes that it might encourage her to do the same. “Not a Girl Scout. Just a friend to one of them.”
“Okay, good to know!” she sang out. “Don’t you love going there to paint? Hey, do you know Q.E.? She’s doing it too! We call her Q.E. for Queen Elizabeth.” She called to a girl at the next table. “Q.E., have you met Rick? He’s new! He’s been coming to the Girl Scout art project!”
Rick sensed that this girl made friends and assigned nicknames very easily. But she seemed genuinely nice, which would have been great if she hadn’t been yelling the words Girl Scout and gesturing at him. He thought maybe he should bail on this conversation before the entire cafeteria noticed the words hovering over his head and decided to nickname him Girl Scout Guy. He said, “Yeah, guess I’ll see you there this week. Gotta go to the bathroom now, so, er, see you.” He took his untouched food and stood up.
“Sure, lunch is the best time to use the bathroom, since you don’t need a special pass. I’ll look for you tomorrow at the next art meeting!” she said sunnily. “Forgot to introduce myself. I’m Liz. I could be Q.E. Two, for Queen Elizabeth the Second, but I prefer Liz. I’m in Girl Scout troop six-four-five-five-six. Which troop is your friend in? Sorry, tell me later. I don’t want to hold you up from heading to the bathroom.”
Now Rick could see the word bathroom hovering around his head. He wished he hadn’t said it, and wished Liz hadn’t repeated it. Which was worse, Girl Scout Guy or Bathroom Boy? He noticed Tennis across the room, giving him a concerned stare. He elected not to say anything else, bobbed his head in a friendly way, and left the cafeteria.
His stomach prodded him to find a spot to eat his lunch, so he slumped against the wall outside the auditorium and ate in the shadow of some famous people exhorting him to reach higher, believe harder, and never give up on anything. He wondered if any of them remembered what it was like to be eleven years old.
After school, Mrs. Herrera’s welcome hug was extra squeezy. She said, “Your father told me you’re graduating from after-school care. We are going to miss you so much! You know you can come over here anytime just to say hi, or if you need any kind of help.”
“Thanks,” Rick said. He knew she meant it. He joined Mila at the kitchen table while Mrs. Herrera left to put Daniela down for a nap.
“It won’t be as much fun around here without you,” Mila said. “Will you still be able to come to Ms. Diamond’s house with me?”
“Yeah. My parents said that was okay.” Rick took out his math homework and tried to care about it. Mila also had her math book open on the table, but instead of numbers, the lined paper in front of her was full of strange bicycles. It looked like she was trying to draw a unicorn on a bike on the bottom of the page.
She saw him glance at it and said, “My science teacher challenged us to sketch a bicycle from memory, and then we compared it to a real bike to see how close we got. Most of us were so wrong. Then he showed us this website where an engineer presented how mis-drawn bicycles would look in real life. They were cool and wrong at the same time. Do you want to see what I drew?”
“No thanks,” Rick said curtly, his pencil scratching a hole into his assignment on dividing fractions. What was the point in solving things? You solved stuff, but there was no guarantee it’d stay solved. “I don’t want to think about bikes, or about people doing things wrong.” He scrawled a few more answers and shut his binder.
Mila put down her own pencil and watched him brood. She asked, “Do you want to go watch TV?”
Rick exhaled heavily. “Fine. Cartoon Network, okay?”
But when they walked into the living room, they found Abuelita there with four folks who looked close to her age. They were having a discussion in low voices. Abuelita’s big ham radio with the hockey-puck knobs had been moved from the doily-covered end table to the coffee table. Abuelita waved Mila and Rick back toward the kitchen. “No televisión right now,” she said to Mila. “My ham radio group is meeting. We’ll be done in a little while.”
One of the gentlemen in the group, dressed in sharply creased slacks and a black Hawaiian shirt with a pattern of pink hibiscus flowers, spoke up. “That’s right, honey, the TCD has some business to discuss. We’re planning our next big membership drive. You can never have too many grandmas like Abuelita here out on the streets.”
“It’s best we don’t talk about this in front of them,” Abuelita chided him.
“What’re they gonna do, tell their Scout leaders about us and make sure we don’t get any merit badges?” he responded.
A woman wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words My Favorite People Call Me Nana countered, “Well, they might tell somebody, and the TCD agreed to be a secret society for a reason. You know what a pain it is to argue with nonmembers about our work. Wastes a lot of time better spent watching and driving.”
“C’mon, we do what we do for Mila and Daniela and this boy here—for their whole generation.” He turned to Rick and motioned him closer. “Kid, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. You’re talking to some proud members of the Traffic Calming Division. Pleased to meet ya.” He stuck out his hand. Rick shook it mechanically. “We keep the streets safe for our grandkids. We all have ham radios in our houses and in our cars. TCD members around the city watch out for children from their homes, and if they see someone speeding on their street, they use the radio to put out the call, and the closest TCD member out driving gets there lickety-split and slows the speeder right down.” He slapped his knee. “Fifteen miles an hour is plenty fast enough to get where you wanna go, so that’s what we get ’em down to. This lady, she’s a master at the brake-and-weave.” He jabbed a gnarled finger at Abuelita. “She teaches super-slow driving classes at the local track.”
She’s teaching other people to drive slowly? How many Abuelitas are there? Rick’s stomach asked.
Mila was looking at Abuelita like her grandmother had turned into a hippogriff. “This is what your ham radio group does? I thought you spent time talking about the good old days and your families.”
“We do that, too,” said Abuelita. “But once some of us realized how much driving talent our group had, we decided to put it to use.”
“Talk about talent! She’s not one to brag,” one of her friends chimed in, “but she’s driven in the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix.”
“Formula One?” Rick said, trying to process this discussion. He couldn’t possibly have heard that right. Formula One race cars were probably the fastest cars in the world.
Abuelita said, “I had a lot of adventures before Mila’s mami was born.”
“Yessir, we’ve got lots of TCD members who are Formula-One certified,” the man in the Hawaiian shirt said. “And we’ve got a former NASCAR champ who drives an ice cream truck for us. Gotta learn to drive really fast if you want to understand how to drive really slow. And slow’s the answer, my boy. Why, if only everyone who got behind the wheel of a car could never drive faster than fifteen miles an hour, the world would be a better place. A safer place. A place where our grandchildren can play stickball and bike to school and live happily ever after.”
“To our grandchildren!” Another man raised his glass of seltzer in a toast.
“To our grandchildren!” the others cheered.
Rick put his hand to his forehead to keep his brains from crawling out from between his eyebrows. “So you’re trying to fix traffic in Los Angeles by making everyone drive really slowly?” He hoped this was some peculiar joke that Abuelita’s friends thought would be good to play on him and Mila. Sometimes older folks thought he’d like things he didn’t, like hard butterscotch candies.
“You betcha. Butterscotch?” The snazzily dressed gentleman pulled a hard candy from his shirt pocket.
“No thanks,” Rick said. “Mila, I need to go sit down.” He turned to leave the room and Mi
la began to follow him.
Abuelita said, “Mila, Ricardo, respect the privacy of me and my friends. Not a word to your parents or anyone else. When you get to be a certain age, everyone wants to tell you what you can and cannot do. If we stay secret, we can focus on what we’re good at, not on explaining and defending it all the time. You hear me?”
“Yes, Abuelita,” said Mila.
Rick nodded, then retreated to the kitchen and collapsed into a chair. “How is this happening?” he groaned at the ceiling.
Mila sat back down in front of her unicorn drawing. “What my grandma’s friends are doing?” she said. “It makes a strange kind of sense, don’t you think? I mean, the way Abuelita normally drives, compared to the way she can drive when you’re in the car…” She frowned. “Why do you look so upset?”
“Don’t they get that they’re making LA traffic worse?” Rick said, raking his fingers through his hair. His mind’s eye was being assaulted with visions of his parents’ delivery van trapped behind barely advancing Traffic Calming Division cars. Then he imagined those TCD grandparents leaning out their car windows to wave at bicyclists who had spray-paint cans sticking out of their jersey pockets. “Does Abuelita know about your mom and dad and SPLAT?”
As he asked the question, the gentleman with the Hawaiian shirt came into the kitchen with his empty glass. “Oh, them. Of course we know them. The bicycle loonies,” he said.
Abuelita called after him, “I don’t like that word, loonies!”
“Sorry, I know your daughter’s one of them, but I call ’em as I see ’em,” he responded over his shoulder. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of seltzer. In a slightly quieter voice, he confided to Mila, “Don’t know how someone who drives as well as your grandma ended up with a daughter who thinks bicycles are the answer to everything. No offense, but that’s plain bananas.”
Rick said, “Sure it’s bananas, but how is slowing everything down any better?”
“Eh? Speak up, there. I don’t hear as well as I used to,” the gentleman said.
Rick said more loudly, “How is slowing things down any better? I mean, fifteen miles an hour?”
“Yes indeed, sonny, slowing everything down is better.” He nodded as though Rick had agreed with him. “Fifteen miles an hour and the whole world is a happier place. Los Angeles doesn’t know how lucky it is to have one of us living on almost every block. We have eyes and wheels everywhere. When we pull out in front of speeders, you can see they think, Bad luck for me, there are so many old people in LA who don’t know how to drive—ha ha! I tell you”—he clapped Rick on the back—“it doesn’t feel like work when you love what you do.” He filled his glass with seltzer and went back into the living room.
Mila started to add a hoof to her drawing.
Rick stared at her. “Doesn’t any of this bother you? I mean, forcing people to ignore the rules of the road and drive fifteen miles an hour, that’s not the way to make life better for everyone! And forcing people to ride bicycles isn’t, either!” A horrible thought occurred to him. “How many organizations like this are there?” he asked.
Mila frowned at him again. “I love my abuelita, no matter how slow or fast she is, and it looks like she and her group are happy doing what they’re doing. And the things my parents and I do with the bicycle group are usually a lot of fun. We’re going to ignore that Mr. Platt guy who wants to vandalize signs. Mami already started organizing a subgroup called BLAM: Bike-Loving Amazing Mamas,” she said.
“The cyclists’ way and the TCD’s way make life impossible for drivers who need to get somewhere on time!” Rick said feverishly. How could he get Mila to understand and agree with him? He grabbed his notebook and rapidly sketched a street grid. Then he drew a couple of unicorns. “See how these unicorns are running along and they’re getting where they’re going?” he asked. They didn’t look great, more like dogs with horns growing out of their noses, but he figured it was close enough to get his point across.
She scrunched her face a little at him but nodded.
“So now…” He added in a unicorn facing the wrong direction between them. “Here. Put in a unicorn that’s not obeying the rules and it makes it harder for the other unicorns to move along properly.” He drew question marks above the first unicorns’ heads. “In fact, it makes the other unicorns mad, so some of them stop obeying the rules, too.” He drew furious bushy eyebrows on the unicorns’ faces. “Do you get it?”
Mila looked at his sketch. “The horns grow from their foreheads, not their noses.”
Rick gave an agonized groan and started to erase one of the horns. She put her hand over the paper to stop him. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I sort of get what you mean. But not everyone has to agree. Having lots of different ideas can be a good thing. You know that Muhammad Ali poster in the cafeteria that says “Different strokes for different folks”? Maybe you can relax about it a little.”
“I can’t relax about it. You don’t understand. Traffic is a puzzle with one correct solution. And I’ve got to find it!”
He almost started to cry. To head the tears off, he kept talking, and was soon spilling out the story of Smotch’s problems, what he’d done at Yum Num Donuts, and how he’d secretly changed the work orders at Ms. Diamond’s house. Mila listened all the way through, her mouth dropping open more and more and more as he went on. She didn’t say anything until he finished talking and put his head on the table. He felt less like crying and more washed-out inside after telling the whole story to someone.
“You? You’re the Colossus of Roads?” Mila whispered.
“Me. I’m the Colossus,” he said to the tabletop. “Me.”
“Oh. Okay. Wow. I mean, I always knew you liked talking about traffic, and drawing those street things,” she said. “But…you’re going to get in trouble.”
“I just want to help my family,” Rick said. “This is what I can do.”
“Ms. Diamond would probably make you stop if she knew. And Mami and Papi said last night they hope the Colossus—you—gets tired of what he’s doing and gives up so Mr. Platt will stop insisting their group buy bulk boxes of spray paint.”
Rick raised his head and said, “Don’t adults want us to change the world? And persist? I mean, ‘The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.’ Even Eleanor Roosevelt thinks I shouldn’t give up.”
Mila shook her head. “I don’t think Mrs. Roosevelt was talking about traffic, though.” She squeezed both hands around her pencil. “We should tell my folks who you are, and how you’re trying to help your mom and dad.”
“No!” Rick said. “My parents don’t want your family to know about their money troubles. Plus, what if your folks told that Mr. Platt guy about me? It needs to be a secret. Please don’t tell your parents, or my parents, or Ms. Diamond, or anyone before I get the chance to prove myself.”
Well, finally, it sounds like you’re not actually giving up, his stomach said. You wouldn’t care about adults stopping you if you weren’t going to keep trying.
Rick continued, “I have this one huge solution I want to try out. My parents have an important meeting on Friday, and if they can’t make it there on time with decent food to serve, I think that’s going to be the end of everything.” He laid his head on his notebook again.
He heard Mila say under her breath, “Lots of secrets in this house today.” She twisted her pencil back and forth and said, “I get that you want to help your family. I won’t tell anyone, but I think this should be your last one.”
“Yeah,” said Rick. “My last shot.”
LYING DOWN IS NOT COLOSSAL
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, RICK sat motionless on the cool tile floor at Ms. Diamond’s. In front of him lay the stack of signs he’d gathered and retouched last time. Mila had dragged the signs she’d been working on next to him before going to get a palette full of colors.
“Are those signs for your huge solution?” Mila asked, sitting down next to him.
It’ll work, his stomach said. Keep Colossusing this thing. Go on.
His mom and dad were scheduled to meet with the movie studio people in three days, so it was either do this or do nothing.
Mila examined a SPEED LIMIT 65 in his pile. “That one could use a smidge more white, I think. You can use my paint palette, if you want.”
Rick touched a brush but didn’t pick it up. A heavy weight had taken up residence on top of his shoulders. He sank down on his back and folded his arms over his chest.
No, no, his stomach said. Lying down is not Colossal.
Mila dabbed her brush in the red paint and kept talking. “So, I realized there’s no need for centaur cement. If I spread a thick layer of paint on the big sign and press another sign on top of it before it dries, they end up stuck together. See?”
He turned his head toward her painting. She’d indeed stuck three individual dragon paintings around the edges of the big sign she’d begun decorating last time, leaving the word FREEWAY visible. Dragons in all shades of red, orange, and yellow seethed around it as if in combat. “I can make my own mythically mythtastic sign, like you said.”
Rick gave her a thumbs-up.
“Want to try another masterpiece paint-off?” Mila asked. “I’ve got a feeling there’s someplace in LA that really needs a DANGER FALLING GRYPHONS sign.”
Rick tipped his head back to look up at the ceiling. “No thanks,” he said. “I need to come up with a way to make my solution better somehow. Stronger. Able to convince any adults who might want to take it down, ruin it, or ignore it, that it’s a great idea.”