Or that we would be the ones to start it.
Screenless, I looked out the window at the flash of trees. I felt Bench’s elbow in my side.
“Check this out,” he said. He showed me a picture somebody had already posted of Principal Wittingham’s face pasted onto Darth Vader’s body, crushing a Photoshopped cell phone in his hand. “Behold the power of the dark side.”
I nodded and smiled. Then went back to watching the trees.
The bus—this bus—was where it all started. At least for me.
This was where I met Bench.
It was the last week of August. Sixth grade was well under way and I had made zero progress finding my people, despite my mother’s promise. I’d eaten my lunches by myself. Spent my classes sitting in the back. Walked down the halls trying not to accidentally brush up against anyone. I told myself I was just feeling everybody out, getting a sense of the place, but the truth was I felt cut off, stuck behind an invisible wall. Life sucked, middle school sucked, and I was pretty sure I was destined to spend the next three years miserable and alone.
Then one day this boy stepped on. Black hair buzzed to nearly bald, wearing a Calvin Johnson jersey and expensive-looking high-tops, slapping his hands on the back of every seat he passed as if he were marking his territory. I hadn’t seen him before.
I stuffed my nose back into my book—reading was the easiest way to avoid making eye contact—and waited for him to go by. He shuffled past, and then he stopped, turned around, and plopped right down in the seat beside me.
“You saving this?”
I nodded, then shook my head, then tucked my feet back a little so he couldn’t see the cheap shoes I was wearing. Saving it. Funny. Like there was a waiting list of people that wanted to sit next to me. The bus rumbled on. The boy rubbed his head and smiled. He had a really big smile. A count-all-the-teeth smile.
“Cool hat,” he said, pointing at the Detroit ball cap I wore every day to school.
“Thanks,” I mumbled. I made a point of turning a page of the book even though I hadn’t actually bothered to read it yet.
“You like the Tigers?” the boy asked.
“It was my dad’s,” I explained. “He gave it to me. He used to like them. Now he likes the Marlins.” Dad kept threatening to take me to a game in Miami the next time I came to visit even though I really didn’t like baseball and probably couldn’t name more than ten teams, the Tigers and Marlins included.
The boy looked offended. “What? You gotta be kidding me. The Marlins are terrible!” He said it with the conviction of a holy man. “I mean, they got, like, Stanton and Alvarez, but for the most part, they suck big ol’ donkey turds through a straw.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wasn’t sure why anyone would suck a donkey turd, or if it could even fit up a straw, but I could appreciate a good image when I heard one. “Honestly, I just wear it because he gave it to me.”
“Naw, that’s cool,” the boy said. “I didn’t mean anything bad about your dad or anything. Just . . . you know . . . the Marlins?” He shook his head. “Throw a tiger into a baby pool with a fish and see who comes out on top. That’s all I’m saying.”
“They’re pretty big fish,” I said. “I’m not sure they’d even fit in a baby pool.” My father sent me a picture of a marlin that he caught on a chartered fishing trip his first year down there. It was almost as big as he was. “They’re fast, too. And they have swords for noses.” I suddenly realized how nerdy I sounded and shut up.
“Swords for noses?” The boy raised his eyebrows. “Man, that’s got to be awkward.”
I didn’t know what he meant, this strange kid who just sat next to me and started talking about donkeys and tigers for no reason whatsoever, so I just stared at him.
“I mean, how they ever going to kiss another fish without stabbing ’em in the face?” He smiled all teeth again.
I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Just picturing two marlins trying to make out, writhing around, filleting each other in the process. “Yeah. Guess I never thought about that.”
“They’d be, like, poking out each other’s eyes and stuff.”
“Right.”
“Not that fish kiss each other or anything.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Though they got the lips for it.”
Then the boy made a fishy-kiss face by pressing his cheeks and working his lips up and down. He went cross-eyed in the process. It was pretty hilarious.
“You kind of laugh like a donkey,” he told me.
I stopped laughing. I realized it had actually been a really long time since I laughed in front of anyone but my mother. She always said she loved my laugh. I think maybe she was required to, though.
“It’s cool,” the boy said. “Could be worse. My dad farts every time he laughs too hard. That’s why nobody makes any jokes at dinner.” He raised both eyebrows again to let me know he was dead serious this time. Then he stuck out his fist. “I’m J.J.,” he said.
“Eric,” I said, receiving the first fist bump of my middle school career. “But most people call me Frost.” Actually, most people didn’t call me anything, but when they did, they called me Frost.
“Frost, huh? How’d you get that?”
I told him it was a long story, even though it really wasn’t, but we were already pulling into the school parking lot. “I’ll have to tell you some other time.”
The boy named J.J. shrugged.
“What period you got lunch?” he asked.
And that was all it took. A fish face and a fist bump and I suddenly wasn’t alone anymore. I had J.J., soon to become Bench. He lived within walking distance of my house, liked video games, and had a trampoline in his backyard. More importantly, he filled the empty seat beside me and made me laugh.
It was just the two of us for a while. We didn’t complete the tribe until the sixth-grade fall field trip to Newaygo State Park, the teachers trying to squeeze in some appreciation for Mother Nature before winter bit us in the butt. We ate lunch in the grass and then set out on a two-mile trail—ninety-eight sixth graders following teachers like waddling ducklings. But Bench and I wandered off into the woods and got separated from everyone else. By the time we found our way back to the trail the herd had moved on, so we set out on our own, keeping our ears perked for barking teachers, until we ran into two other kids just as lost as we were.
They introduced themselves as Advik and Morgan. We introduced ourselves as J.J. and Frost. We agreed to stick together, working along the trails until we found the rest of the class. It only took thirty minutes, but in that thirty, and in the ten more of scolding from Principal Wittingham that followed, we clicked, just snapped together like Legos.
I’m still not sure what it was about that day, that trip, that moment. Maybe it was the four of us daring each other to pee in the Muskegon River, or Bench climbing a tree and getting his undies snagged on a branch, or Deedee claiming to have found a print in the mud that he swore came from a velociraptor. Or maybe we all just kind of subconsciously realized that there was strength in numbers. That four was better than two and two.
We rode the bus together that afternoon, talking the whole way back to school. About everything. Favorite bands. Lame movies. Best video games. Lousy parents. Worst teachers. The smell on the bus (gasoline, damp leaves, sweat). The odd fact that we had never talked to each other before even though we had a few classes together. How strange it was for us to get lost at the same time, to just run into each other in the woods like that. How Deedee’s farts sounded like a dying baby elephant. How Principal Wittingham looked like he was going to pop when he found out the four of us had wandered off on our own. How none of us really liked our first names.
I remember laughing hysterically and eating most of Deedee’s goldfish crackers. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, feeling like I was a part of something.
The next day at lunch we found each other and just picked up where we left off.
Mom
was right. You make your tribe. Sometimes I hate it when she’s right, but not that time.
Looking back on it, I think it had to be something like getting lost in the woods. Otherwise we might have just gone on ignoring each other. I don’t want to make it out to be some big gooey, sappy thing. We didn’t share the same pair of traveling pants or promise over spit shakes to be BFFs. We just kind of glommed together.
And we managed to stay that way for two whole years. Just the four of us. Pretty much perfect.
Then she came along. And the war started.
And everything came unglued.
That first Monday—after the cell phone crackdown—I went to my locker before seventh period to grab my Spanish notebook. Attached to the metal door above the combination was a sticky note. Standard yellow. From one of the packs that every student was required to buy at the start of the year for no real reason whatsoever.
It was from Deedee.
Welcome to the Dark Ages, it said.
He didn’t sign it, but I knew it was from him. No one else would be so melodramatic.
That was the first one. The one that started it all, I guess.
I folded it in half and dropped it in the bottom of my locker without a second thought.
THE VARIABLE
SO, FROST.
Deedee, Bench, Wolf. Tribal names. All names we gave to each other. All except Frost. I was Frost before I ever met them.
Word of advice: if you ever get the chance to win your fifth-grade district-wide poetry competition, don’t. Or if you do, try to keep it to yourself.
Because sometimes things stick. They attach themselves like burrs on your socks and they follow you. Like that story your parents always tell your friends’ parents at dinner about how you got into the pantry when you were four and ate a whole box of lemon Jell-O—the raw powder, not the jiggly stuff—straight out of the package, turning your tongue bright orange and forcing them to call Poison Control. From that moment on, you know those people will never eat the stuff without laughing. You will forever be Jell-O Boy, in addition to all the other things you’ve become.
More often—in school, at least—it’s a label, thrown out on a whim, maybe, by some kid trying to get a giggle from the kid next to him. But then it’s picked up on and passed around until it becomes a part of you.
Kid Who Never Brushes Her Hair.
Kid Whose Crack Is Always Showing.
Kid with the Giant Schnoz.
Kid Who Always Gets Picked Last.
Kid Who Blew Chunks Onstage.
These are all real people, except I can’t tell you most of their names. Even I know them only by what stuck. Except the Kid Who Always Gets Picked Last. That’s Deedee.
If you’re lucky—or at least not terribly unlucky—the thing that sticks to you will just be a nickname, and not a pathetic one.
Like Frost.
Ask most twelve-year-old kids to name a poet and they will probably tell you Shakespeare or Shel Silverstein or Kendrick Lamar. Some of them will probably say Dr. Seuss, though, like my dad says, just because your stuff rhymes, it doesn’t necessarily make you a poet. I don’t imagine a whole lot of kids would tell you their favorite poet is Robert Frost. I’m probably the only one.
I blame my father, in fact. He’s the one who introduced us—me and Frost. On a tedious summer Sunday, a glass of wine in his hand, sitting across from me on the porch and handing me a copy of Frost’s Selected Poems. This was before the Sarasota Shuffle. The Big Split. Back when my parents tried to just ignore each other as much as possible and I tried to ignore their ignoring. When the house would speak to us in creaks that we could hear because nobody else dared to speak because they were afraid of what they might say.
We sat on the porch in the backyard by my mother’s bright fuchsia azaleas, just the two of us, the sun baking the grass. “I think you’re old enough,” he said to me with a nod, and for a moment I thought he was going to hand me his glass for a sip. Instead he gave me the book.
Some dads take their kids fishing. Or play catch. My dad wrote for a living. Just my luck.
“I don’t like poetry,” I said, which wasn’t entirely true then and certainly isn’t now. When we did the fifty-book challenge in the fourth grade I was the only one who had a volume of poetry on my list. Jack Prelutsky. But the book my dad handed me wasn’t anything like Jack Prelutsky. For starters, there were no illustrations. Plus the cover looked kind of prissy, all blue-and-white flowers. I tried to hand it back, but my father just reached over and flipped to a flap-cornered page.
“Start with this one,” he said. “It’s one of his most famous.”
The poem was called “The Road Not Taken.” Dad told me to read it out loud. He wasn’t the kind of father you said no to, not unless you wanted an hour-long lecture on the topic of “things that are good for you.”
“‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” I began, and I read it all, careful not to sound too bored, so as not to offend my father, or too interested, so as not to encourage him either. When I was finished he asked me what I thought about it.
I shrugged. “Pretty good, I guess,” which is actually what I thought. I’d had to read worse stuff in school. I figured that was the end of it—it hadn’t dawned on me that my dad might actually be interested in my opinion, but he told me to read it again. Quietly. To myself.
So I did. With him sitting across from me, looking out over the porch at the heavy clouds and grimacing at the birds in the maples. I read it again. And again. And when I looked back up after the third reading he asked, “How does it make you feel?”
I could feel his cloud-gray eyes on me. He wanted a real answer. He seemed to be holding his breath.
“Guilty,” I said at last. Though I wasn’t sure why. That was just the first word that came to mind.
My dad reached over and scuffed my hair. “It’s not guilt,” he said, “it’s regret. They aren’t quite the same.” He took another sip of wine and went back into the house, leaving me and Robert Frost on the porch.
He moved out three months later.
I read all 114 poems in the book that summer. Most more than once. That next winter, with my father and mother still haggling on the phone about what to do with the house that he didn’t even live in anymore, I came home with an assignment to write something for the thirteenth annual Branton School District Young Authors’ Competition. It could be a poem or a short story. You could illustrate it if you wanted to. The winner would receive a medal and a fifty-dollar gift card to Barnes & Noble.
I wrote a poem inspired by Frost’s “Mending Wall,” my personal favorite of the 114. Frost’s poem was about these two guys who meet in the middle of a field to repair this broken old stone wall that separates their properties, and it has this line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” which the speaker of the poem thinks is total crap, and yet he goes on and keeps building the fence anyways. And you kind of wonder why? What would happen if they left the wall broken, or tore it down completely? Wouldn’t they still be good neighbors? Would they maybe be better neighbors? Would they maybe be something more? Like friends?
My poem was called “The Elf’s Mischief” and it began, “I am the thing that does not love a wall.” It was about all those questions. About broken walls, and whether good fences ever made for good families too.
Maybe it was because it wasn’t another haiku lazily written in the back of the bus on the way to school. Or maybe the teachers who were acting as judges had fence issues of their own or divorced parents or both, because I won. Pretty much the only time in my life I’ve won anything.
The day after the awards ceremony my name was called over the morning announcements at school. The teacher made me show everyone the medal and then asked me to stand in front of the class and read the poem out loud. The other kids asked if they could have the gift card. Without even thinking, Mrs. Beck said, “We now have our very own Robert Frost.”
Boom. That was it. One comment from my fifth
-grade teacher and I became someone else, the junior poet laureate of Falsin County.
That same night that I earned my new nickname, my mother drove me to the Barnes & Nobles in Portage, about an hour away, to spend my reward. I bought her a Frappuccino and spent the rest on comic books. As we passed the sign welcoming us back to Branton, sitting right out in the middle of an empty field, I thought about my father and Sarasota and Frost and how there were actually a whole buttload of fences out in the world, but most of them were invisible. Deep thoughts for an eleven-year-old, I guess, but reading Robert Frost all summer after your parents split will do that to you.
When I got home I called my father to tell him about my victory and what the kids were calling me at school, but he wasn’t there.
I didn’t bother to leave a message.
I told you the whole thing started with Ruby Sandels, and in a way it did. But it was another girl who got the most attention.
Her name—her actual name—was Rose. Like the delicate flower. Though “delicate” is not the first word I would use to describe her. I know most of it—the war, the notes, the thing with Wolf—probably would have happened regardless. But without her it would have gone so much differently.
She came the same week that the school’s ban on cell phones took effect, the same week Ruby was allowed to return to school after her suspension, the same week that my father wrote me an email telling me about the trip we were going to take next summer to Cape Canaveral. At least it wasn’t to Miami for a ball game—space shuttles and giant rockets were more up my alley.
Rose Holland came that week and everything changed.
There’s a famous Alfred Hitchcock movie called The Birds. It sounds like a documentary, but trust me, it’s not. In the movie all the birds in this small California town go all avian apocalypse and start attacking people—plucking out eyes, blowing up gas stations, pecking everyone to death—just about the same time that this one woman shows up. Whether or not she’s the reason the birds attack isn’t entirely clear. It could just be a fluke. Or maybe there is something about this lady that makes the birds batty. I watched the movie with Bench, who conked out about halfway through after muttering for an hour straight that any movie without at least one CGI character was bound to be boring. I watched to the end, though. I wanted to see if the woman was going to make it out of the town alive or if the birds would get her.
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