Things Seen from Above

by Shelley Pearsall

  “Welcome to the top of the world,” Mr. Ulysses said once we reached the rooftop.

  The turquoise-blue September sky stretched overhead, dotted with the same cheery cloud puffs I’d seen earlier that morning. Although Marshallville Elementary was only a single-story building, except for the gym, it seemed much higher from our lofty viewpoint.

  “Wow, this is so great.” I walked around the rooftop a little, trying to take in everything—the sky, the drifting clouds, the views. I’m not crazy about heights, but the roof didn’t seem to bother me.

  Shading her eyes, Veena looked awed by it all. In one direction you could see the white globe of our city water tower, the stadium, and our high school. In another direction—the hazy shapes of the Kellogg’s buildings and factories. They were actually in Battle Creek, but you could see them from Marshallville.

  “Be careful where you step,” Mr. Ulysses warned. Smiling, he pointed to a large splat of glistening white as we moved to the side of the roof that overlooked the playground. “Birds really like it up here.”

  I couldn’t believe we were on the roof during school. It felt like winning an award for something—only I didn’t have to feel guilty or embarrassed for winning because nobody knew about it.

  “Okay, see what you notice on the playground now.” The janitor rested one boot on the short ledge that surrounded the roof and gestured at the scene below us. All the recesses were over, so the Buddy Bench was empty. The playground was deserted. A forgotten soccer ball lay near the swings.

  From this vantage point, you could clearly see the two circles Joey had made in the dirt about twenty or thirty feet apart from one another. Below each one, there were bunches of short lines. A faint wavy line scalloped around the edges of the playground. I could see two small triangles on the far side of the wavy circle. Other random lines curved below us. There definitely seemed to be a pattern to what Joey had drawn….

  And then the picture suddenly became clear.

  “Oh!” Veena and I gasped, seeing it at the exact same time.

  The face of a Marshallville Tiger was staring up at us.

  Joey had worked on the design in his head all week. It was the biggest tracing he’d done yet. When drawing a giant tiger face (or anything else), the order of the lines was the most important part. One line had to lead to the next.

  You couldn’t walk all the way from the ears to the mouth, for instance, unless you wanted to waste a lot of time and make a lot of extra footprints that went nowhere and meant nothing.

  Joey didn’t like wasting time or footprints.

  Inside his head, he’d given a number to each part of the tiger. The wavy fur around the outside of the tiger’s face was number 1. The triangle ears were numbers 2 and 3. A stripe below them was 4. And so on.

  On Friday, all he had to do was keep track of the time and follow the order of the numbers in his head—kind of like the paint-by-numbers horse he got from his grandparents one Christmas. Only he wasn’t making a horse. Or using paint.

  Number 21 was his last number.

  It was the nose.

  When he got to that part, he had only three minutes left. Trying to be as fast as he could, Joey zipped up his red coat and lay down in the middle of his tracing. He ignored the blazing sun on his face and all the scratchy bits of bark digging into his back.

  Angling his arms like the sides of a triangle, he let out a deep sighing breath. A sensation like floating or soaring flowed through him. This was his favorite part: The moment when the wind and the sky wrapped around him. The moment when he felt like he could fly.

  In his mind, he could see everything below him—the huge tiger’s face with its rippling orange-and-black fur, its glowing eyes, its fierce mouth, and its warm red nose.

  It was so perfect, so real—if he listened closely, he could almost hear the tiger roar.

  Veena and I shook our heads at the sight.

  “Wow. I just can’t believe that,” I said.

  Smiling softly, Mr. Ulysses took his foot off the ledge and turned to squint at me. “So what do you think about our friend Joey now?”

  “I don’t know,” I had to admit.

  Part of me felt kind of stunned. How had Joey been able to create something this large, this perfect—something he couldn’t even see—using only his feet? And while wearing Crocs, for goodness’ sake?

  The other part of me was mad.

  I wanted to drag every person who had ever called Joey a traitor or a moron—or anything else—up to the roof to see the fantastic tiger he’d done for our Spirit Day. Maybe they’d think twice before mocking kids like him again. Maybe they’d learn not to jump to conclusions about people. Maybe a few kids would actually (gasp!) be interested in being friends with him now—since he’d proven he was a loyal Tigers fan. Not that it should matter….

  Mr. Ulysses chuckled. “Sometimes one question leads to another, doesn’t it?”

  “How did he do it?” asked Veena, studying the design intently.

  Mr. Ulysses shrugged. “Beats the heck out of me. That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I watched him make it, and I still have no idea how he managed it.”

  It occurred to me that maybe we weren’t the only people the janitor had allowed on the roof. “Has Joey ever been up here?” I asked.

  Mr. Ulysses shook his head. “Nope. But I wondered the same thing when I first saw what he was doing. I thought to myself—was it possible the little kid was sneaking up here somehow and mapping all this out? But I keep the boiler room locked when I’m not there, and I’m the only one who’s got the keys.” He pulled a very official-looking ring of keys out of his pocket and jangled them. “Here they are. Haven’t left my sight in years.”

  Around us, the roof shimmered with questions and heat. I could feel a slow trickle of moisture running down the middle of my back. Although there was a slight breeze, the black-tar roof was getting hotter by the minute. A shine of sweat glistened on Veena’s forehead.

  I definitely wanted to stay longer, but I didn’t want to look like a pool of sweat when I got back to class. Plus, I was concerned about how much class time we were missing.

  Mr. Ulysses seemed to read my mind. “Well, I think we’d better wrap up today’s field trip and get you both back to class, right?”

  “Yes.” Veena nodded. I could tell she was getting as anxious as me.

  I have to admit that it was pretty fun to descend from the roof into the boiler room. I felt like a star in an action thriller as we climbed through the trapdoor opening, one by one. Skipping the last two rungs of the ladder, I jumped to the concrete floor and landed (sort of) gracefully on my feet.

  Tanner Torchman would have been impressed.

  After Veena reached the bottom of the ladder, Mr. Ulysses followed more slowly. With a grunt, he yanked the trapdoor closed and made his way carefully down the rungs. When he got to the floor, he took a deep breath and wiped his arm across his red face. “Whew, it was pretty warm up there today”—and then he smacked his forehead. “Doggone it. I knew there was something I forgot to do while we were up there.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I wanted to get a better picture of the tiger for my collection.”

  I looked at Mr. Ulysses incredulously. “You have pictures?”

  Mr. Ulysses grinned. “Of course.”

  Turns out Mr. Ulysses had an entire drawerful of Joey’s work.

  He pulled open the center drawer of his old wooden desk, and it was stuffed with dozens of square cards made of white plastic.

  “Are those photographs?” Veena asked, leaning closer.

  “Yep.” Mr. Ulysses nodded. “They’re Polaroids. The pictures print right out of the camera. A couple of years ago, I got one of those old cameras from a teacher who was retiring. Ron Blanchard. Good guy. They don’t make teachers like that
anymore.” He nodded toward an odd-looking object sitting on a shelf near his desk, as if it was Mr. Blanchard himself. “That’s the one that belonged to him.”

  It looked more like a toy than a real camera. I made a mental note to research more about Polaroids when I had the chance.

  “It’s practically an antique, but it works great. See for yourself.” Mr. Ulysses reached into his desk and pulled out a handful of the white cards. He handed one to Veena and one to me. Although it felt like plastic, I was surprised to see that mine actually had a color picture on it. A very blurry image of Joey’s tiger.

  “See, that’s the one I wanted to retake.” Mr. Ulysses pointed at mine. “My hand moved.”

  He tapped the photo in Veena’s hands, which showed a big spiral around the 2003 Tree. “Now that one is a lot more common. Today was the first time I’ve ever seen him make a tiger, but he does a lot of circles and spirals like the ones you’re holding. Not sure why.”

  “It reminds me of some of our art in India,” Veena commented, holding the photo closer to study it.

  Mr. Ulysses shuffled through more photos in his hands. “Actually, I’ve got a ton of Joey’s spiral photos. Big ones. Small ones. In fact, I think a couple of these might have been from last spring by the look of the tree.”

  I glanced up in surprise. “Joey was doing them last spring?”

  Mr. Ulysses nodded.

  “Has he been making designs longer than that?” Veena asked.

  Mr. Ulysses shook his head. “Don’t think so. He moved here at the start of third grade, I believe.” He squinted upward. “His family came from Illinois or Indiana, I think.”

  He continued. “In fact, I only noticed what he was doing because I was up on the roof one afternoon, fixing a problem with the roof drain over the art room. He’d made a giant face that day. Frowning.” Mr. Ulysses chuckled. “When I first saw it, I thought my eyes were playing tricks, let me tell you. Looking down and seeing the playground frowning at me—that definitely got my attention.”

  Veena spoke up. “Did you ask him about it?”

  “Yep.” The janitor nodded. “But I didn’t get very far. When I asked him if he was unhappy about something, he got this scared look and took off. After that, he avoided me like the plague. I didn’t bother him again, but that’s when I started taking pictures of whatever he drew. I thought somebody ought to be saving it.” He paused. “I know I probably should have shown the pictures to Mr. Mac or one of his teachers, but I guess I kept hoping that maybe they’d notice things on their own.”

  He passed another Polaroid snapshot to us. The lines on the playground resembled an unraveling ball of yarn.

  “See, sometimes he does a bunch of scrambled lines and I can’t figure out what the heck he’s making. Maybe he just wanders around like that when he can’t think of anything to do,” the janitor said.

  “But here are some of my all-time favorites.” He handed us three more photos. One had a splotch of dried mustard on it, as if Mr. Ulysses had kept it on his desk at some point. It showed a person’s face looking up from the playground. The person appeared to be bald with a round, yelling mouth that filled half of his face.

  I squinted more closely at it. “Is that supposed to be Mr. Dunner?”

  Mr. Ulysses coughed and seemed to hide a grin. “Don’t know. Maybe.”

  The gym teacher was well known for yelling. He liked to announce on a daily basis: “I HAVE THE LOUDEST VOICE IN THIS SCHOOL. DON’T MAKE ME USE IT.” He was my least favorite teacher at Marshallville. To be fair, a gym teacher would never be my favorite teacher, no matter what—but still, Mr. Dunner yelled a lot.

  From the photo, it was pretty obvious that Joey felt the same way I did about the guy.

  Another picture showed what appeared to be waves covering the playground.

  “Waves?” Veena asked, holding the picture closer.

  “Yep, I think so. Not sure why he did them that day.” Mr. Ulysses handed us another photo. “But can you guess this one?”

  It looked like a wagon wheel with small circles inside it. Veena and I both tried turning the photo upside down and then right side up to figure it out. “Okay, we give up,” I said finally. “What is it?”

  The janitor laughed. “Ha. That one’s tricky. It took me a while too. He made it this past Wednesday. Pizza day.” He pointed to the dots on the wagon wheel. “Pepperoni.”

  Pizza Day. The day Joey had jumped around like an obsessed rabbit and spun in circles.

  Wow.

  Veena and I burst out laughing at the same time.

  “That is so…” I searched my mind for a word that fit. The only thing I could think of was “amazing”—which is such an overused word that it doesn’t work to describe things that actually are amazing—but it was the best one I could come up with.

  “Amazing,” I said.

  As I studied the photos in my hands, I felt a shiver of excitement. I loved discovering things. And it felt as if we’d just made a rare discovery in the old boiler room of Marshallville Elementary: a previously unknown species of student, a mysterious fourth-grade artist, a creative genius….

  “Why hasn’t anyone else figured out what he’s doing?” I wondered out loud.

  Every recess, there were at least a hundred kids on the playground. Plus Mrs. Zeff. Sometimes a teacher came outside too. Joey had been doing his tracings since last year, according to Mr. Ulysses. Why hadn’t anyone noticed what he was doing? When the drawings were right there in front of them? It seemed impossible.

  “I wondered the same thing,” Mr. Ulysses agreed.

  “It’s so obvious once you see it.”

  “Yes.” The janitor nodded. “It is.”

  And then he added after a thoughtful pause, “However, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that people often see only what they expect to see. If they don’t expect much, they don’t see much.”

  Was he talking about himself? I wondered. About being a janitor?

  “Or they see all the things they don’t like,” Veena added. “And then they ignore everything else.”

  “Exactly.” Mr. Ulysses nodded.

  He sat down in his sagging office chair again. “So you two are much smarter people than me. What do you think we should do with what we know? Should we share it? Or stay quiet and keep it to ourselves? That’s the dilemma.”

  To speak or not to speak went through my mind.

  “I think people must find out about him,” Veena replied with absolute conviction. “He is an extremely gifted person. Everyone must see his gifts. I think he will be quite famous.”

  The janitor’s gaze shifted to me. “April…your thoughts?”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  Normally, I was the kind of person who would jump into things, especially if I thought there was a way I could help out or make something better.

  Yes, I wanted Joey Byrd to get the respect he deserved.

  And okay, maybe a small part of me wanted outcasts in general to get the respect they deserved—and maybe that included me.

  But could the idea backfire somehow? Did Joey really want everyone to know about his playground art? And what would happen when they did?

  “I don’t know,” I said after a long hesitation. “I see what Veena is saying, but I think we need to know a little more first. Like what Joey wants. And what his drawings actually mean.” I handed the photos back to Mr. Ulysses.

  Veena seemed to agree.

  “Good. Then it’s settled.” Mr. Ulysses nodded. “For now, we say nothing. I’ll write you some hall passes to get back to class.” He pushed the handful of Polaroid photos into his desk and closed the squeaky drawer. “Our lips are sealed.”

  A lot of things looked much better from above. Joey kept a list of them in his head:

  Large tiger faces

 
Pretzels

  Keyboards

  Circus tents

  Open umbrellas

  Winding rivers

  And the colorful bowls of Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal that Joey ate for breakfast every morning.

  We knew about Joey’s secret gift, and at the same time we had to pretend we didn’t know about it. It was a tough spot to be in.

  I could tell Veena desperately wanted to talk to Joey at recess. And I wanted to ask him a whole list of questions that I’d been jotting down in my notebook. Such as: How did he map out the giant drawings? Why did he make them? Where did he get his ideas from? Why did he keep his tracings a secret?

  But I felt like we had to wait for the right moment. We couldn’t act too curious—or he’d start to avoid us. We couldn’t draw too much attention to him—or other people would start to notice.

  Just by coincidence, I happened to meet Joey’s parents at Open House a couple of days after we saw the tiger. Every year, Marshallville Elementary held an Open House in the middle of September for parents to meet their kids’ teachers. They always asked sixth graders to volunteer to help—to be ambassadors for the school—so I had signed up.

  Anyway, I was working at the Open House registration table when Joey’s parents came over to get their name tags and classroom assignments. I don’t know what I expected them to look like, but they had zero resemblance to Joey. Like, if you were playing a matching game with parents and kids, you would never put them together at first.

  Joey’s mom was a large-sized woman with long hair pulled back in a braid. Although her face didn’t look that old, her hair was almost entirely gray. She wasn’t dressed up like some of the other moms were for Open House. She was wearing a hospital scrubs–type top with bears on it and pink pants and white sneakers. Maybe she was a nurse.

  Joey’s dad was tall and thin with thick-lens glasses. He had dark hair that kept falling across his forehead, and he kept nervously pushing it away every few seconds. That was the only detail that reminded me slightly of Joey and some of his habits.