by Mary Amato
“This class should come with extra shampoo,” I say.
Mr. Ferguson laughs. “Okay. You are just a small part of the massive mycelium that is running under the soil of this great forest. And when I say massive, here’s what I mean … in one cubic inch of soil, there’s eight miles’ worth of you all tangled together. Try to imagine that. You grow quickly and you spread throughout the soil, joining strand to strand, making the soil nice and spongy so that it holds water and nutrients better and creates conditions that are perfect for growing trees and food.”
“Thank you, fungus,” Langley says.
Mr. Ferguson laughs.
I love this class. I’d love school if every class came outside and pretended to be a fungus. Smells so good out here. Feels good, too. Just lying down in the grass. Above me the sky is like a canvas that has been painted the most perfect shade of blue, and I want to reach up and write my name in the sky. Trevor Musgrove. I’d like to have a skywriting business and write people’s names in the sky. When the wind blows, each letter will billow and stretch, like the name is alive.
Mr. Ferguson continues and his voice takes on this low, calm tone, like he’s hypnotizing us. “You are the fungus. Now the remarkable thing is that you are not just connected to one another, you happen to be a mycorrhizal fungus, a fungus that has a beneficial relationship with a plant, so you are also connected to the roots of these trees. Go ahead, the people closest to the trees, connect to them.”
The girls near the boys are giggling because they have to touch one another. It’s like we’ve all made this invisible agreement to act like little kids again, in a fun way, because it just feels so good to be out of jail.
As soon as everybody is in place, Mr. Ferguson goes on. “You have a certain kind of intelligence.”
“Because we’re in the Summit program!” Langley says, and everybody laughs again.
“No. Because you’re a mycorrhizal fungus. You are listening for and reacting to signals from your partners, the trees. The parts of you closest to Ms. Taylor pick up her distress signal. Ms. Taylor, give them a distress signal.”
Like a maiden in distress, Stephanie says,
“Help! I need water!”
The class laughs.
“Go ahead and pass the message on.”
The students closest to Stephanie pass the message from one to the other. “She needs water.” We’re like a maze, so the message spreads out quickly. “She needs water. She needs water.” It becomes a hum that travels to me and then I get to pass it on. “She needs water.” Finally it travels all the way to the big trees.
“I got water, right?” Langley says.
“Yes. Because you’re closer to the river. So what are you going to do?” Mr. Ferguson says.
“Pass some back to her.” Langley starts to make like he’s going to spit and Stephanie mock-screams and covers her hair.
“Think of another way, please,” Mr. Ferguson says.
“Okay,” Langley says. “Here’s some water,” he taps the girl who is connected to him who taps the student who is connected to her and says, “Here’s some water.” The imaginary water travels back through the class, slower because it’s being tapped now from person to person, one at a time. “Here’s some water. Here’s some water.”
On my back in the soft grass, I wait to see if the message will come to me. I hope it does because I want to pass it on. I know everybody’s feeling the same way. We’re all totally into it. Maybe it’s because we’re all connected, but it’s like I can feel how thirsty Stephanie is, like it’s life or death even though we are all playing a game.
The message gets closer, and then the girl next to me gets it and giggles. “Here’s some water,” she says to me, and my arm gets ready because it’s our elbows touching, and I’m racking my brain for a good joke to make. Then, for some reason, she reaches over and taps the back of my hand with her fingertips. Tap. I can almost feel droplets of water there.
The straightest path to Stephanie goes through my feet, so I close my eyes and imagine sending the water from my hand, through my body, to my foot. As lightly as I can I tap the other girl’s shoulder with my foot. “Here’s some water.”
I keep my eyes closed, but I can hear the water being passed from person to person. There’s a hush when the water arrives to Stephanie. I imagine her like a tree, drinking in the water through her roots. I imagine how good it must feel to drink the water after being so thirsty. I imagine the water rising up in her and seeping into her leaves.
“Thanks, everybody,” she says, and some people laugh, but my throat closes up because I think about Charlie.
How come there can be a mycelium in the ground that will bring water to the roots of a thirsty tree, and there can be nothing under a baby but a bed of garbage? He must have been thirsty. He must have been waiting for someone to come, even if he couldn’t put it into words.
I open my eyes, and the sky above me is so blue it hurts.
“Mr. Musgrove?”
Everybody is looking at me.
I sit up.
“Diana was asking if a mycorrhizal fungus could be considered ‘good.’ Are there good fungi and bad fungi? Should we talk about fungi in moral terms?”
Mosquito Boy comes to my rescue. “I think the mycorrhizal fungus isn’t doing this because it feels sorry for the tree or feels obligated to help the tree, but it passes on the water kind of automatically? Because it’s all part of the biological design? The fungus gets something and gives something.”
“Well said. Of course the fungus and the tree aren’t actually talking to each other with words the way we did. But you can think of this fungus like a mother, trying to nurture her offspring and the food chain that provides nutrition for her children.”
“Are you calling my mom a fungus?” Langley asks.
Mr. Ferguson laughs.
“So there is a mycelium under us right here?” Lydia asks.
Mr. Ferguson nods.
“How do you know for sure?” I ask.
He smiles and points to the grass behind Sam with his walking stick. “What do you see?”
Sam gets out of the way. There’s a mushroom.
“Proof!” Mr. Ferguson says. “Now I want you to sit down where you are and try to draw a depiction of what we just acted out. Then write down your comments and add more from the book. Remember: I want to read your thoughts, not just the facts.”
As we’re working, Ferguson strolls around. “Now you can all put down on your work résumés that you have worked as fungi!”
Somebody asks how he knows so much about mushrooms.
“I’m a mycologist,” he explains. “I got my degree in the study of mushrooms.”
I ask how he became interested in mushrooms in the first place.
“I grew up in a very poor part of West Virginia,” he says. “Believe it or not we picked mushrooms for dinner. I became interested in identifying them because once I brought home the wrong kind and my whole family died.”
All the pencils stop moving.
He laughs. “Just kidding about the dying part. Nobody died, but once I did pick a bad one, and we all had diarrhea for days. It’s not always easy to identify which mushrooms are good for you and which are bad for you. And I have heard about fatal mushroom poisoning, which is why you all should never eat anything you pick.”
“Do you eat what you pick?”
“Yes, but I’ve been studying mushrooms for decades.”
He strolls on, swinging his stick.
West Virginia? I didn’t know there were mushroom-eating, hypnotizing, freckle-faced, leprechauns with little white Afros perambulating around in West Virginia.
10.
JUGGLING
In P.E., Xander and I get on the same team. We’re supposed to be warming up on our own while Stevins works with teams at the other end of the field. Javier—another good player who is built like a bulldog—is juggling. Solid skills, especially for somebody who likes to play keeper. No proble
m getting to forty, but he loses it before fifty. He tries again.
Xander watches him and then says to me that he can juggle to one hundred, no problem.
Javier loses his rhythm. “Is that a challenge?” He throws Xander the ball.
Bam. Xander pops it off his chest and catches it with the top of his foot. Bam. Bam. Juggles from foot to thigh to foot—
“Dang, I can do that,” Markus shouts. Everybody laughs because they all know he can’t.
Xander keeps going. Spotlight on him. Shoes gleaming. Everybody starts chanting out the count: thirty-nine, forty.…
He loses the ball at sixty-two, and his face turns bright red. He picks it up and tries to start again.
“No way,” Javier says. “You didn’t say you’d get to one hundred eventually. You said get to one hundred, period. And I guess you didn’t.”
“Still, I fried you,” Xander says.
Diamond grabs the ball and throws it to me. “You do it.”
A couple of other guys egg me on, too.
“Go ahead, Musgrove,” Xander says.
The ball feels good. Just the right amount of air. Bam. Bam. Juggling is something I am really good at because you don’t need a field to juggle, or even a team. You can juggle anywhere, even a parking lot with broken glass in it.
I hit twenty, and Diamond starts in with this song, “You got it, oh baby, yeah you got it,” to the same rhythm I’m making and people start counting to the beat.… I feel my face getting hot.… I am in this sweet zone, just me and the ball.… Sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two … It’s like the ball is connected to me, like it wants to keep coming back.… Seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two … eighty!
Coach Stevins’s whistle blows, and the ball hits the side of my foot and bounces away. The girls are cheering and people are clapping.
“Man, you could’ve kept going,” Javier says.
Feels so good! I’m about to break into my victory dance when I look up and realize I crossed Xander’s invisible line. His eyes are burning. He hates me for beating him. I should have come close, but not shown him up. I have to save the day quickly with one of my jokes, but Diamond’s laugh flies through the air like a knife. She says, “Trev beat you and he looked like he wasn’t even trying.” She gets in one more before I can even blink. “I guess if you got talent you don’t need fancy shoes.”
“Okay, people, let’s get going!” Coach Stevins blows his whistle again.
“I got lucky,” I try to say, but Xander won’t look at me.
During the game, I make sure to pass every ball I get to Xander. Quality passes. Xander scores five goals. I don’t take a single shot, just keep feeding them to him.
Javier, who’s our goalie, notices. “Nice assists,” he says to me when I’m nearby.
Twice Coach Stevins yells from the sidelines, “Play as a team, people!” In this case, people has to mean Xander.
“Great game,” I say to Xander when the whistle blows.
Xander doesn’t say a word.
Langley catches up with us when we’re walking in. “Did you guys win?”
“Yeah, but I could have used you,” Xander says. “It was like I was alone out there.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“My team fried, too,” Langley says. “That little Juan guy has got the moves. Hey, see you tomorrow, Musgrove. Remember, tryouts after school.”
Xander says, “Yeah. See you tomorrow, Mushroom.”
I could say something. I could say a whole lot of something, but I don’t. My mom says when people put you down, rise above it.
11.
SAVE THE CHILDREN
On the bus ride home, Diamond sits behind me and puts her arm over the seat between me and Juan. She jiggles the four quarters she has in her hand and begs for me to logo up her name. “Right here.” She turns her forearm.
I don’t answer.
She keeps bugging me until Juan says, “Man, just do it so she shuts up.”
“No.”
“I’ll show you where Save the Children is,” she says even though she already told me how to get there.
Markus grins. “The lovebirds are going shopping together.”
I’ve had it. “Keep your mouth shut—”
“What are you gonna do?” Markus stands up.
“Sit down right now,” the bus driver yells.
“Chill, man,” Juan whispers. “It ain’t worth it.”
Rise above it. I close my eyes.
“I was just doing a favor,” Diamond grumbles.
As soon as the bus arrives at Deadly Gardens, I take off running. Diamond says it’s a five-minute walk to Save the Children; it’s more like a fifteen-minute run. I’m going to get some cleats and shin guards and I’m going to get on The Plague and prove to Xander that I’m the kind of guy he wants on his team and everything is going to get back on track.
The place is crowded with merchandise, but they have only five pairs of cleats, three of which are Michael’s size, and none of which required the killing of a kangaroo. Quickly I try on the only two that are anywhere near close to my size. One is too big and the other is a little too small. The small ones pinch my feet, but even with two pairs of socks I am afraid the big ones will fly off. I take the smaller cleats, find the only pair of shin guards in the place, and run up to the counter, where an Indian girl with a long black ponytail is working. She has on blue gloves and is sorting men’s underwear from a large garbage bag into bins labeled small, medium, large, and extra large.
Everything is not a dollar, as Diamond said, and I’m two dollars short. I put on my best smile and pull out my money. “If you give me a discount, I’ll give you a valuable prize.”
She adjusts her scarf and narrows her eyes. “What is the prize?”
“My respect and your own satisfaction in helping out a rising soccer star. A valuable prize, indeed.”
She points to a poster board with words scribbled on it. NO BARGAINING. ALL SALES FINAL. NO RETURNS.
“But this is Save the Children.” I smile. “You’re supposed to save me.”
She doesn’t look up, doesn’t even crack a smile.
“Please don’t make me perambulate to the egress empty-handed!”
She gives me a look, like I’m an alien who just walked in from outer space.
Clearly my vocabularic genius isn’t doing it. I have to try another tactic. “I could work for it. I could do that.” I point to the big bag of not-so-whitey tighties.
Bingo. She leans forward. “Let me see those.”
I hand her the cleats and shin guards and she takes her time, looking at them as if they hold the answer.
Hurry.
“You’re only two dollars off?” she asks.
“Yep.”
“You’d do this whole bag?”
“Yes, I would.”
“The manager won’t like it.… He’s coming back in fifteen minutes.”
“I can do it in ten.”
She smiles and picks up her soda. “Deal.”
I take over her job, wishing I had gloves, while she sits back and sips her soda and talks on her cell phone. I work as quickly as I can, glancing at the clock. Nine minutes pass and I still have more to go. I work faster. Three minutes later, I toss the last one in the large bin. She hands me the shin guards and the cleats.
I stuff the shin guards in my backpack and swing the cleats around, singing, “I got it. I got it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got it.”
I sound like Diamond. Oh, well, I can’t help it.
The clerk laughs.
“I’m going to try out for a soccer team and be MVP and get my picture on the cover of a magazine,” I call back to her in one breath as I hustle to the egress.
“See you, famous boy,” she says.
“Hey! I need a notebook with no lines. Got any?”
“Try Rite Aid.”
It’s 5:20. I take off running. My mom is probably having a heart attack, but she’ll be proud of me as soon as I te
ll her what I did. She can’t say no to the team now. What’s there to say no to? I sing as I jog, “I got it. I got it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got it.”
A man waiting for the bus gives me a funny look as I pass by, but I keep singing and swinging my cleats. “I got it. I got it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got it.”
I pass by a print shop just as a guy is bringing out a box of paper to the recycling bin on the street.
“You recycling that?” I ask.
He nods. “Typo.”
Quality paper—creamy and thick—with a business name and address on the top and the rest blank.
“Can I have it?”
The guy shrugs. “Sure.”
I take the box and keep running. “I got it. I got it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I got it.”
An African woman with a bright green head scarf smiles broadly and calls out, “Boy, whatever you got, I want!”
12.
WAYNE
I run up the stairwell, but on the fourth floor I stop. The air smells worse than usual, like somebody peed, and something just doesn’t feel right. When I make the turn to go up to the fifth floor, I see a man sitting in the doorway that leads to the fifth floor hallway.
He’s the big man who was yelling at Diamond—I think it’s Derrick, her stepdad or her mom’s boyfriend—sleeping, propped up against the door frame. She said she doesn’t like going home if he’s there. I can see why. He has an empty bottle in one hand, and the concrete around him is wet. His face is heavy and sweaty and looks like it was made out of mud and he has on the biggest, muddiest boots I’ve ever seen.
I have no idea why he’s in my building. All I want to do is get home, but in order to do that I have to step over him. What if he’s not really asleep? What if he’s pretending and just when I get near him, he opens his eyelids and reaches out and grabs me? I stand for a few seconds, hearing music coming from somebody’s place on the floor above me. The man’s face is so still, he doesn’t look like he’s breathing. Maybe he’s dead?
The stink is evil. I tiptoe closer, holding my breath.