Slave Day

by Rob Thomas

  Martians killed Elvis. Santa Claus lands on the roof of our trailer every Christmas. Yale Drama School is going to offer me a full scholarship. And Mr. History … he was the first Speller.

  BRENDAN

  11:22 A.M. Third period, yearbook

  Almost as soon as I sit down at one of the LONS to start writing captions for my school carnival photos, Deena comes strolling over. Win, Win.

  “Is it true that you’re cousins with Tiffany Delvoe?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, shifting into industrious mode. “We’re just friends. That’s all.”

  “A hundred dollars—that sure is a lot of money,” Deena says.

  I shrug.

  Lloyd laughed at me for signing up for yearbook. He said I was a major socialite wanna-be. Not true. I just knew that Deena had signed up for the class. I waited until she turned in her choice sheet last spring, then I hacked into the schedule bank. Deena keeps standing next to me. She’s so perfectly pretty. Now, I don’t mean perfect like Tiffany or Annabella are perfect. I mean perfect like “exactly right.” For me, that is. She’s short—real short. Barely five feet. She has dark, shoulder-length hair, and her face is made up of all these small elf parts: thin lips, tiny nose, penny-size green eyes. I know the way I’m describing her she might not sound pretty, but she is. Best of all, she’s got a flaw. Just like a Shakespearean hero. See, one of her two front teeth is dead, so it’s gray. Grosses out some guys—including Lloyd—but I don’t mind.

  Damien Collier, our editor, approaches us. I know he’s been uptight about deadline, but today he’s Mr. Perpetual Motion.

  “So what are y’all working on?” he says, knowing full well that we’re just talking.

  “Deena’s helping me with my captions,” I say. Deena expresses thanks with her tiny eyes.

  “Cool,” says Damien. Then, unexpectedly, he sits down at the LONS next to me. I look at Deena.

  “I guess I can take it from here,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. “Let me know if you need any more help.” Then she returns to her seat.

  Damien starts typing insanishly. I’m thinking Deena and I might’ve pulled off the deceptification when Damien mutters, “Women.” Guess not. I look down at the first carnival photo and see it’s of Blimp Stimmons throwing a paper airplane through a hula hoop. At most schools you could just write a caption that says SOPHOMORE RANDY STIMMONS THROWS A PAPER AIRPLANE THROUGH A HULA HOOP and be done with it. Not if you work for the Stars & Bars. Damien has lectured on caption writing a zillion times.

  “Anyone can look at a photo and see what’s going on. Your job is to tell the reader the story behind the picture. Tell them something they can’t see for themselves!” he says.

  Okay. How ’bout …

  IN JUNIOR HIGH, BLIMP STIMMONS WAS YOUR GENERIC, PUDDING-GUTTED, INVISIBLE, PIMPLE-FACED LEPER. HE WAS A BUDDY, THOUGH. A COUPLE YEARS WITH A WEIGHT SET AND AN EXPENSIVE DERMATOLOGIST TURNED HIM INTO THE VARSITY-FOOTBALL-PLAYING BLOCKHEAD WE ALL KNOW AND DESPISE TODAY. HERE HE TOSSES PAPER AIRPLANES THROUGH A HULA HOOP OBLIVIOUS TO THE FACT THAT HIS GIRLFRIEND IS OUT COPULATING WITH TIMM TRIMBLE.

  I’m pretty sure that won’t make it in the book, but Damien might get a good laugh out of it. I look next to me, and I’m surprised to see he’s already gone. What the hey. I call up the Dark Side of the Moon. Let’s see what the intelligentsia have to say.

  Ah, yes. I should have known they wouldn’t let me down.

  First of all, Lloyd has begun a list of Possible Reasons Tiffany Delvoe spent $100 on Brendan Young. My favorites …

  SHE MISUNDERSTOOD SOMEONE MARVELING OVER THE SIZE OF BRENDAN’S HARD “DISK”—THE FALCON

  NO ONE’S TOLD HER THE REAL REASON WE CALL BRENDAN “MICROSOFT”—Q

  I also discover that my so-called friends have set up a betting board revolving around my performance for the day. I’m getting even money on “sitting on her bed.” Everything else goes rapidly downhill. My “making it” with Tiffany is paying out at a thousand to one (minimum bet—one dollar), kissing her (above the ankle) pays ten to one, her kissing me (anywhere) goes up to twenty to one. Other milestones: holding hands at school (twenty to one), second date (thirty to one), Tiffany sitting in Brendan’s lap (ten to one), Brendan sitting in Tiffany’s lap (two to one).

  I post a new memo:

  LAMOIDS,

  F.Y.I. TIFFANY HAS ALREADY KISSED ME. I CAN STILL FEEL THE HOT TRAIL OF HER SALIVA RUNNING FROM MY JAWBONE TO EARLOBE. SHE CAN BARELY KEEP HER HANDS TO HERSELF. CAN YOU BLAME THE POOR GIRL? SHE’S ONLY HUMAN.

  KEENE

  11:29 A.M. Third period, typing

  “I almost didn’t come to school today.”

  I look up from my typing workbook. Speaking to me is Sleepy Roberts. This is shocking for any number of reasons: First, Sleepy is rarely awake during the school day; second, this is the third class I’ve had with him, but it’s the first time I’ve heard him talk. Even though Sleepy’s tall and bony, his voice comes out sounding like Barry White’s.

  “Why?” I ask, wondering why he ever comes at all.

  “I read your letter. I dug it.”

  “So what made you decide to show up?”

  “I knew it wouldn’t work,” he says.

  “Why not?” I ask, way too defensively for a person who didn’t participate in his own boycott.

  “Because no letter’s gonna get a bunch of redneck administrators and retired-Klan school board members to change their racist traditions.”

  The most common rumor about Sleepy is that he’s a twenty-something-year-old who’s failed three or four times, but I’ve heard other stories: One, that he got kicked out of private school because someone caught him making a bomb in his dorm room; and another, that he’s the illegitimate child of an African monarch sent away for an education in America. He doesn’t have an accent, Texan or foreign, but he is darker than anyone here. He makes me look Swedish. I think he’s going to say more, but he just stands there staring at me like he’s never laid eyes on me before.

  Eventually, Sleepy pulls up a chair from the empty desk next to mine and continues to enlighten me about Southern politics.

  “If you want to get them to get rid of Slave Day, you’re going to have to hit them with something they care about. Now, do you think they really give a shit whether a bunch of colored nobodies no-show for a day?”

  “Well it makes a statement …”

  “Twenty-four hours later that statement wouldn’t mean dick to anyone who could actually change anything.”

  “So we just live with it? Laugh it off each year?”

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Sleepy’s voice gets even lower. “No,” he says, “we figure out something they do care about, and we aim there.” I’m trying to figure out what he means by that, when Sleepy leans closer to me. “You know, you got some people on your side out there before class.”

  “You think?”

  At first I was sure my cotton plan had backfired on me. I thought Shawn had put on such a minstrel show that everyone was too entertained to get the point. But then, right at the end, I had a feeling he pushed it too far. By the time we reached the foyer not everyone was laughing. I was watching the eyes of some of our brothers and sisters who didn’t think much of Shawn’s act. Maybe some of them had started out laughing, but if they watched it too long, their expressions began to change. Now that I think about it, I can remember Sleepy—Kool & The Gang Afro and all—glaring at Shawn.

  Shawn gloated afterward and offered to “get me some lemonade from the big house.” It was clear that he thought he’d had the last word.

  I look at Sleepy, and I know Shawn was wrong.

  JENNY

  11:32 A.M. Third period, yearbook

  You know how, if you watch one of those National Geographic shows where they show you some animal you’ve never heard of, and they talk about how this animal thrives in the desert because that’s the only place where this certain beetle that the animal eats lives? Well,
that’s Damien in the yearbook room. This is where Damien thrives.

  I want to talk to him, but he’s cruising around, making sure everyone’s doing something constructive. Our first deadline is a week from tomorrow. The way he handles people—it’s amazing. It needs to be, because you know Mr. McCartney isn’t gonna crack the whip. McCartney even gave Damien a key to the room, so that he could come up here and work anytime. So there goes Damien: helping Roberto with his French Club story, showing Everly and Kim for the eighth time how to number the mugshots, telling Eric which photos he needed printed yesterday. If I told Eric I needed something ASAP, he’d say, “Blow me,” and I’d get the shots a week later. But with Damien, it’s like, “No problem, boss.”

  When he’s here, in this room, he’s got everybody’s respect and he knows how to use it. It’s when he’s out with Clint, or worse, Clint and Alex, that he crashes and burns. He tries too hard. Clint and Alex listen to all that rap stuff and end up talking like the Beastie Boys. Damien just ends up sounding dumb … well, dumber. On top of that, Damien’s not a big guy, but he tries to keep up when those two start drinking. It seems like Damien’s always the guy they end up having to drive home and put to bed. He’s been drinking a lot lately, even though those other two quit: Clint because of his promise to me, and Alex out of respect for football season.

  Last year in Mrs. Sessom’s English class, I made the mistake of saying out loud that it was ironic that Damien Collier, Alex Clayton, and Clint DeFreisz all ended up sitting next to one another. (She puts everyone in alphabetical rows.) Mrs. Sessom heard me. She says, “Honey, there’s nothing ironic about that. It’s just coincidence. Irony is when words convey the opposite of their intended meaning.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s like when you call a huge man Tiny,” she explained further.

  “Or like when we call Damien the Beast,” Clint added, high-fiving Alex.

  So that’s how I remember what irony is—Damien being the Beast. He got the name because of all those Omen movies where the devil was supposedly named Damien, and they kept referring to him as “the beast.” But our Damien is the furthest thing from a beast. He’s always polite. He looks at you when you’re talking to him. You can tell he’s really listening to every word and thinking about what you say.

  The three of them have been friends since Boy Scouts. There’s a picture of their troop hanging up at Clint’s. They’ve never grown apart. That’s amazing in some ways, because they all have completely different life plans. Alex is going to go to Central and get a degree in whatever will make him enough money to raise a family and play golf every weekend. He may never leave Deerfield. Clint wants a scholarship offer to a major college, “One where ESPN gives the highlights every week.” There he plans to study sports medicine. When he was a freshman he snapped a tendon playing ball. “It sounded like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle.”—he’s said that a hundred times. He had arthroscopic surgery and was back in the lineup four weeks later. Anyway, it was this miracle of science that gave Clint his calling as a healer.

  Damien says all he wants is to see the world.

  “Not like a tourist, though,” he says. “I want to work and live overseas. Argue politics on the Champs-Elysées. Have affairs in Barcelona with women named Isabella and Carmen. Swill Guinness in a Dublin pub.”

  Like he has enough guts to skip college. We’ll see.

  I’ll hand it to Clint; he’s never deserted his friends. Even after he became a big-time jock. Last year, when he was the only sophomore on the team, he kept getting invited to senior parties, plus a couple of the older guys really wanted to take him under their wings, but Clint just shrugged off all the attention, kept hanging with his buds, didn’t go anywhere that Alex and Damien weren’t welcome.

  So then, what was Damien thinking when he was bidding on me today? That’s what I need to talk to him about.

  But Damien’s in his editor zone. Now he’s working on the computers. Maybe if I sit here looking confused about this layout he’ll rush over to see what’s wrong. Normally Damien and I either hang out or work together (I’m the Student Life section editor) all period, but today he hasn’t said one word to me. I watch him as he grabs something out of the printer, reads it to himself, folds it, writes something on it, and puts it in his pocket. He tells Mr. McCartney he’s leaving to do interviews (for what?). It looks like I won’t talk to him all period. He grabs his Goodwill-special sports jacket and pushes his glasses back up his nose, but before he walks out the door, he fishes the paper out of his pocket and sets it in front of me. I read what he’s written on the outside.

  READ THIS, THEN DESTROY IT.

  KEENE

  11:39 A.M. Third period, library

  I got permission to come to the library after Sleepy helped me come up with a plan. We decided my job for the day was to use Shawn to raise grassroots consciousness. We had to think for a while to come up with something as showy as we wanted. When we finally had an idea, I asked Sleepy if he thought we were going too far.

  “How could we?” he said.

  But I’m wondering again as I search the index of one of the Robert E. Lee biographies I’ve found.

  “See, what you don’t understand,” Sleepy explained earlier, “is that Shawn’s the kind of guy who wants it both ways. He’s even more afraid of upsetting white people than his own kind.”

  Still …

  Everyone knows Robert E. Lee, the guy with his picture up all over the school, was a general for the Confederacy and that he was a slave owner, but what’s less known is that he made a number of speeches about slavery as well. Speeches that compared blacks to livestock. At least that’s what Sleepy says. That’s the sort of thing I’m looking for now, but I’m not having any luck. I’m not surprised, since all three biographies the library has available were written before 1959. Every one of them talks about what a great man and patriot Robert E. Lee was. How was he a patriot? More people died in the Civil War—lots of them because of what he did—than in any other U.S. war. And what for? So a bunch of rich Southerners could keep getting their tobacco harvested for free. Not exactly my definition of a patriot. John Brown tries to arm the slaves, and we’re taught he was a madman.

  I’m waiting in line to get help finding some newer articles, but Miss Carlson’s spending all her time with that cowboy Speller. Behind the counter I notice Tamika Jackson with her head in a book. The pin on her shirt says LIBRARY AIDE, so I’m tempted to ask her for help, but she’s got this glassy look in her eyes that makes me afraid of interrupting her reading. I was in the same AP English class as Tamika last year. I hardly ever talked to her, but I feel like I know her through her essays. Mr. Sullivan had Tamika stand up and read everything she wrote.

  When she would finish reading, Mr. Sullivan would give the class a lecture about how if we put more time, effort, “and most importantly … heart” into our work, we would one day deserve to breathe the same air as Tamika Jackson. You’d think that after all that, people would tend to hate the sister, but no one did. I think everyone looked forward to hearing her stories. She did write with more heart than any of the rest of us.

  I remember this story she wrote about a popular boy she fell in love with in seventh grade who didn’t know she was alive. Every day she goes to school and figures out random, funny ways of making him notice her. Everyone laughed when she read it, but when she finished, a few of the girls were crying and I was trying hard not to. It was just so sad. It’s the kind of story that probably everyone, especially me, has lived out, but she was able to make everyone experience it again in their heads.

  I used to think a lot about her last year, when we were in the same class. I mean, she really seemed to have it together. Plus—and I’m not just saying this—she’s one of the finest girls in school. She’s got these Chinese eyes that make her look exotic. Half the time her hair’s in cornrows, like today, and she dresses like a Gypsy with all these scarves and earrings that go all the way around on
e of her ears.

  I usually make it a practice to not think too much about high school girls. It seems like most of the sisters here won’t even talk to you unless you’re on some sports team. College is going to be different. In college, girls start looking for different things: a good mind, values, someone who doesn’t want to play the whole planet. At least that’s what Mom told me. Dad said I ought to go out for the basketball team. For a while I went to the park and played some, but it wasn’t really working, so I would tell him I was going to play, but I’d take a book with me and read instead. Somewhere along the line we came to an understanding.

  I guess one of the best things about Tamika is that I always got the feeling that she was more interested in what was going on inside a person than what they could do with a ball in their hands. A couple times in English we had to peer-edit each other’s papers, and I’d scan her whole essay looking for a place I could underline a linking verb or suggest a comma. Usually without any luck. She’d bring me my paper back after she’d read it, and she’d ask me what I wanted the reader to learn from the story. Then she’d tell me what she took away from it, and if the two didn’t match, she’d suggest ways of getting my point across. Now, I’m a capable writer, but I promise you, the best papers I turned in to Mr. Sullivan all year were the ones Tamika helped me with.

  She looks up and catches me staring at her.

  “Hi, Keene,” she says, wiping her eyes. “Can I help you find something?”