Sometimes my head will tic-jerk to the side or my shoulders will shrug, but I work really hard to keep my hands still on her stomach. It’s kind of a relief when we stop again and I can let go of her. I hop off the four-wheeler and pull off my helmet. So does Hope, except she does it with a victory dance. I slap her a double high five. Janie unwraps herself from my brother so she can do the same. Really, Dean is the only one who isn’t in on this little celebration.
“I’ll just be a minute,” he says. “I need to check this pressure gauge.”
Yeah, right. The pressure gauge in his pants. He’s awkwardly hunched over the front of the four-wheeler, and it couldn’t be more obvious what he’s hiding. Well, to me, anyway. The girls actually don’t seem to notice, even though it takes a full five minutes before he decides the “pressure gauge” has been adequately checked.
Hope and Janie and I are already walking around the slave cemetery. The sun filters through the leaves, but it feels like it’s casting shadows instead of light. It makes us speak in hushed voices.
In front of me is a scooped-out hollow in the ground, all covered in grass and leaves. To the left and right are a few more hollows, forming a row. They’re graves. Over time, they’ve sunk a few inches lower than the rest of the ground. There are other rows, sometimes with as many as six graves, sometimes only three, depending on how much space there is between the trees. Every now and then, they’re marked with stones. Not the big headstones with writing and stuff. Just gray rocks the size of a cantaloupe or a large shoe.
“I can’t believe there are slaves buried here,” Hope whispers. “And it really wasn’t that long ago.”
“I know,” I say. A hundred and fifty years. I try to figure out how many great-great-grandparents it would take to count back until I got to someone who was alive when people still actually BOUGHT AND SOLD other people. It makes me sick just thinking about it.
“What were they here for?” asks Janie. “I mean, do you know what they did while they were here?”
“There were some fields a few miles from here. Cotton, I think. But they weren’t our fields,” I rush to say. “I mean, my family didn’t own the land way back then.”
I guess I just can’t stand her wondering.
“One time I found an arrowhead in front of this tree,” I say. “It’s crazy to think there’re four-wheeler paths on top of old lumber roads by Depression-era shacks near a slave cemetery in a grove of trees where a Cherokee family maybe used to live. There’s so much history stacked in layers on one plot of land.”
Hope steps closer to me, like it’ll help her see all the overlapping histories I’m seeing. “It makes you wonder what sorts of things you’ll leave behind. And what the people a hundred years in the future will be thinking about you.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“You guys give me hope for the future, you know that?” says Janie.
Dean, who desperately needs to turn this into yet another opportunity to show off in front of Janie, starts talking in this weird, deep, serious voice. “Oh, yeah. I think it’s really important to take everything we can from history, so we don’t repeat the same mistakes in the future. The land can tell us so much.” He kneels and touches a headstone dramatically. “These graves can tell us so much.”
I mean, jeez, you’d think he went back in time and abolished slavery himself. Does he really think Janie’s going to buy any of that? I hazard a glance at Hope. She is giving him extreme side-eye.
It makes me feel like doing something bold. And stupid. “Hey, Dean, remember the time you and Tater—that’s our cousin, Tater—tried to dig up one of the graves?”
Janie’s face blanches white as a beech tree. “You dug up one of the graves?”
Dean looks like he may just murder me when we get home (if he can hold off that long), but Hope is snickering into her fist, so I press on. “They started to, but they got all scared because it was getting dark, so they stopped before they could finish. And when they came home, they were covered in chigger bites.” I pause for dramatic emphasis. “Do you know what a chigger is?”
Dean shakes his head sharply. His eyes have gone full Minotaur, but every wedgie he’s ever given me is playing in my head, and there’s nothing I can do. “It’s this teeny-tiny red bug that drills a hole in your skin and uses its saliva enzymes to break up your cells from the inside out so it can slurp up the skin-cell juice like soup.”
Janie looks like she swallowed a slug. “That is the second most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” she says. “The first being disrupting the final resting places of people who were treated as less than human.”
“I was—” starts Dean, but I cut him off.
“So, anyway, they come home covered with bites, and Pam said it was God punishing them, and Mimi said they better go out to the yard and pick a switch because God may be done with them but she wasn’t. And they went and picked the smallest, thinnest ones they could find, which is a rookie move because everyone knows the small ones lash your skin up the most. They couldn’t sit down for a week.”
Hope’s eyes bulge. “Your parents really hit you like that?”
I shrug self-consciously. “I mean, yeah. But only if we do really bad stuff. So, like, not very often or anything. People, uh, don’t do that in Decatur?”
“Definitely not.”
I’ve been looking at Hope during most of the story, but now that it’s over, I finally remember to look at my brother. And I realize I am in for probably the worst and most painful revenge ever devised. He probably won’t beat the crap out of me. At least, not here in front of Janie and everything. But sometime. Soon. My demise is imminent.
He forces the scariest fake smile ever onto his face. “It was really stupid and wrong, and I’m really embarrassed I did it,” he says.
Then, he turns and gets on his four-wheeler and cranks the engine.
That’s it? Janie really is a miracle worker. I mean, I know I’m in for it later, but still.
Hope moves past Dean to get to the other four-wheeler, but he grabs her arm.
“Hey, Hope, ride with me on the way back.” He raises his eyebrows at me when he says it.
“Um, okay.” She sits behind him on the four-wheeler and the insides of her legs touch the outsides of his.
Janie bounces onto my four-wheeler behind me. “I’m glad I get a chance to hang out with you,” she says. “Hope talks about you all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It sounds like you’re a pretty great friend.”
Friend. “Thanks.”
Up ahead of us, Dean guns the engine so Hope has to press herself tight against him.
Everything is different. I can feel it even before Dean squeals to a stop beside me. Before Hope pulls off her helmet and shakes out her corn-silk hair. They’re both laughing at some joke that’s just for them, and he holds out his hand to help her down, and when she takes it, there it is. A dazed, dreamy look settles over her face, and she hangs on a second too long, and I think now would be a good time to go flush myself down the toilet. For the rest of the day, she giggles whenever he calls her Birdsong.
I don’t get it. I don’t get why one minute it feels like Hope is maybe starting to like me, but then one four-wheeler ride with my brother is enough to turn it all upside down. I wish it was easier to make sense of the world.
I go to my room and pull out a notebook. I guess if I had to throw some labels on me and Hope and categorize our relationship like so many devil scorpions, this is what it would look like:
A TAXONOMY OF HOPE AND SPENCER
What I Want to Be When I Grow Up
By: Hope Birdsong
I fall in love with countries the way other people fall in love with people. So does my sister. It must have come hardwired into our DNA. We hear about a place we want to go to and have to learn everything about it, become consumed with it, until I swear I know exactly what crêpes Suzette tastes like even though I’ve never been to France. Until I feel
the winds from the Mediterranean calling to me in my sleep.
I want to have adventures that I’ll never forget. I want to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef, and I want to go to every continent, even Antarctica. I want to watch the great wildebeest migration across the Serengeti, cruise down the Amazon in a riverboat. I want to walk the entire Appalachian Trail, all 2189.2 miles of it, and maybe someday even swim/bike/run the Hawaiian IRONMAN Triathlon.
My mom says I was born in the wrong time period because I should have been an explorer like Marco Polo or one of those other guys. People say everything’s been discovered nowadays, but they’re wrong. You don’t have to be the first to see something for it to count. If you can see it differently, if you can make other people see it differently, if you can leave a mark and change something for the better, that all counts, too.
Because it’s not just the things I want to do, it’s the people I want to help. Sometimes I care about them so much it hurts. The kids who don’t learn to read because they don’t have a single book at home, and the babies in developing countries who die of measles because they don’t have access to vaccinations. When I see pictures and read stories, I can’t just forget. I turn them over and over and over inside my head, and sometimes I feel like the knowing could swallow me whole. But it never does. Because I know my big sister is out there, doing things—big things—that could maybe someday fix stuff.
So, what do I want to be when I grow up? I want to be my sister. I want to see everything there is to see. I want to change the world.
“Janie, you are SO annoying.” Hope stomps into the living room of the cabin where the Birdsongs are staying, carrying an empty pitcher.
Janie looks up from her book, her nose scrunched in irritation. “What?”
Hope brandishes the pitcher. “Is there any more peach tea?”
Janie takes a sheepish sip of the peach tea she’s holding. “Oh. Sorry!” she says.
“It’s fine,” says Hope, but her eye-roll says that it isn’t really.
Janie holds out her glass. “Do you want some?”
“I said it was fine,” Hope grumbles.
She goes to the fridge to get something else. I follow.
She lowers her voice. “She always manages to get the last one of everything. It’s a dark gift.”
“Kind of like your dark gift for always spilling stuff on my shirts when you borrow them!” Janie yells from the other room.
Hope sticks her tongue out at her when we come back with our (barely tolerable, might as well be poisoned) root beer.
She told me this would happen. For the first six days, they’d be falling all over each other with excitement, but by the seventh, that feeling of missing each other would wear off, and they would become capable of annoying each other like normal siblings.
Her idea of normal siblings is still a heck of a lot more kumbaya than mine.
I’m just finishing my root beer when I get a text from Pam:
Hi Spencer,
Come home and pack for camp!
Love, Pam
She always writes them like that, like it’s a mini–e-mail or something.
I look at Hope, who is making huffy noises into her empty root beer bottle, and Janie, who is turning the pages of her book with audible vehemence, and decide that writing my name on all my boxers in Sharpie is a super critical task that I should be performing, like, right now.
“Okay, see you guys,” I say awkwardly quick and rush out the door.
As soon as I enter the Barton cabin, I am greeted by Dean. With a headlock.
Speaking of annoying siblings.
“Hey, Spencer, I wanna try some new wrestling moves.” He clamps his armpit tighter against the back of my head. He smells terrible.
“Yeah, well, I don’t.”
I try to pull my head out. I’m tired of being his practice dummy. Plus, I can’t stop thinking about the dazed way Hope was looking at him after their four-wheeler ride.
“Well, I didn’t want you to tell Janie all kinds of embarrassing crap about me, but sometimes we don’t get what we want.” He keeps squeezing.
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Keep it down,” snaps my dad. “I’m watching a game.”
He goes back to Braves vs. Mets.
I manage to get my head free, but Dean attaches himself to my leg, safe in the knowledge that I can’t cry out under threat of meeting Dad’s wrath (which goes from a nine to an eleven any time the Braves are playing the Mets).
He drops me to the ground using one of the fancy moves his coach taught him. He’s going for the pin. I could give up. If I let him pin me, I can go upstairs like I want.
But I am so over this crap.
I fight back. Hard. I am ferocious. I am a praying mantis. A black spitting thicktail scorpion. An entire swarm of killer bees. He is not going to pin me. Never again. I slip out of his hold like I’m slathered in baby oil. Fast as a dragonfly. I snake my forearm under his neck and lock it with my other arm and use the momentum to throw him off me. Fear flashes in his eyes. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to know. He’s scared I might win.
His fear is my adrenaline. Knowing that, it’s huge. It changes everything. We’re no longer playing our specified battle roles. Dean: offense. Spencer: defense. I am attacking the crap out of him, and I. Just. Might. Win.
I go for his leg, and I’ve got him, I can feel it. If I can just twist his arm a little more. Shift my weight by a couple degrees. Crap. He jerks out of it. And before I can get him again, we’re crashing into an end table. The one that holds my dad’s beer during games. I wait for the beer and my dad’s temper to come crashing down on my head.
They don’t. In fact, my hair is refreshingly beer-free. And my dad, he’s smiling at me.
“Where did you learn to do that?” The smile melts into his voice.
I duck my head. “I don’t know. I guess I must have picked up a few things from Dean.”
He shakes his head like he’s still working on believing what he saw. “It’s more than that. You’ve got a hunger. You’re small, too. It’s hard to find guys like you. Are you going out for wrestling this year? You’d be a natural.”
“You actually would,” Dean agrees. He doesn’t even seem pissed that I almost pinned him. “I could work with you on your moves and stuff.”
“Next year,” I say. “They don’t have wrestling in eighth grade. But I could do it next year.”
Did I just say that? I’ve never even thought about wrestling, but the way my dad is looking at me, with his arms crossed and his chest puffed up—it has never happened before, and I don’t want it to end.
We eat our Fourth of July feast outside on two wooden picnic tables pushed together. Hot dogs and hamburgers, corn on the cob, chips with salsa, and two kinds of guacamole because Pam and Mimi almost had a throwdown over cilantro. (Personally, I think it tastes like soap, but there was no way I was putting my foot in that.)
I spoon some guac onto my plate, sneakily so as not to trigger the apocalypse. Hope’s dad goes for more pimento cheese dip.
“This dip is delicious. Where did you get it?”
Pam grins. “I made it myself.”
“Okay, you have to tell me your secret.”
They jump into a conversation on cooking that sounds like it could last the whole night. On the other end of the table, Mimi fans herself with her napkin.
“It is hot as Hades out here, don’t y’all think? Lord, and they say global warming is a myth.” She takes another sip of sweet tea. “Whew. So, Janie. Spencer tells me you’ve been in South Africa for the past year. I want to hear all about it.”
(Everything you need to know about Mimi: She was the first female reporter for the Macon Telegraph at a time when working was something women down here simply did not do. She also claims to be the first Democrat in all of Peach Valley, though I haven’t fact-checked that one.)
Mimi trains her reporter eyes on Janie and asks her every question under the su
n about South Africa, the foundation, and her work. Janie gushes about how excited she is to go to work every day, how her next project is going to revolutionize access to health care. My head jerks to the side a bunch of times while she talks, but everyone lets the conversation flow right around my tics like water, even Janie, who seems totally used to them even though she hasn’t been around me that long.
“Well, that’s just wonderful,” says Mimi.
Mrs. Birdsong squeezes Janie’s shoulder. “We’re really proud of her.” She beams at Janie for a second before putting her other arm around Hope. “And, of course, we’re proud of our Hope, too. She’s next.”
Hope feigns shyness, but her grin could light up the world.
“I can’t wait for you to come and visit,” says Janie, touching Hope’s hand. “Everyone at my work would love you, especially Max.”
“And who’s Max?” asks Mimi.
“He’s my new boyfriend,” says Janie.
Dean wrinkles his nose and picks at the chili on his fourth hot dog. She’s twenty-three years old, dude. It wasn’t going to happen anyway. But Dean’s girl logic is very simple: I like her, therefore I will go for her.
“I thought Jonathan was your new boyfriend,” says Mrs. Birdsong.
“That was her last new boyfriend,” says Mr. Birdsong across the table. “Max is her new new boyfriend.”
Janie rolls her eyes. “You know, not everyone meets their soul mate when they’re fifteen years old. I don’t even think I would have wanted to. You’ve got so much to figure out still.”
Janie keeps talking about life and figuring things out. Dean seems less than interested.
“Psst. Hey, Birdsong, think fast.” He launches a tortilla chip at Hope, and she giggles.
The plan was to eat as the sky fades to orange-pink-purpleblack, and then set off fireworks. My brother and I can’t wait that long. We were antsy at pink, and have completely lost the ability to sit still by purple. If you saw the set of fireworks my dad bought at Big Zack’s, you’d understand. This thing is the mother lode, and really, it’s not our fault that he didn’t think to hide it somewhere better than the garage.
A Taxonomy of Love Page 4