Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  To Mac, Ms. Donalvan said, “Is that a pack of peanuts? I know you are not eating in my library stacks.”

  “Um” was the best Mac could do. I couldn’t see him, but I heard the crinkle as he scooped up his peanuts.

  My stomach growled in spite of the ninja librarian scolding all of us. I gripped Night on Fire, my grandmother’s copy of Night on Fire, desperate to see what happened next to CiCi Robinson, Leslie Marks, and Ole Miss.

  Ms. Donalvan wasn’t having any of it. She pointed at the stacks of books spread around the carrel. “Put those on the cart against the far wall, right now. For future reference, you may have three books out of the stacks at any one time, and no more than five in a carrel.”

  “These are my aunt’s books,” Mac said, pulling most of his stack toward his legs. “They’re from the store. Here, see? They don’t have cards to check out.”

  Ms. Donalvan gave him a suspicious look and bent to inspect his pile. While she was busy, Dr. Harper quickly picked up the newspapers he had brought into the carrel, scooped up the journals, and started out with them. I closed Night on Fire, tucked it under my arm, got up, and helped Indri carry books to the cart Ms. Donalvan had indicated. It didn’t take long to fill it.

  “Didn’t know there were limits, sorry,” Indri managed as we went back for another load.

  Ms. Donalvan closed the last book in Mac’s stack. “Dr. Harper knew,” she grumbled as he returned to gather more journals. “He brought you all in here, so as far as I’m concerned, this is his responsibility.”

  “No worries, Jessica.” He kept trying to sound friendly instead of so completely busted. “I’ll take care of it. See? Almost done.”

  She followed him as he carried the rest of his journals back to the periodicals section, scolding as she went about courtesy privileges, suspending his carrel agreement for three days until he reviewed policies, why limits were necessary, and how professors, of all people, should respect library rules.

  “I’m cleaning that carrel myself,” she told him. “If I find any more food, or any damaged materials, we’ll be talking, Fred Harper.”

  “So sorry,” he kept repeating.

  We barely got out of that basement in one piece. It was all Dr. Harper could do to convince her to let him check out Grandma’s copy of Night on Fire.

  16

  ANSWERS LEADING TO MORE QUESTIONS

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 403

  We threw ourselves on the floorboards. I tasted dirt and my own sweat.

  “What do we do?” Leslie shrilled from the back.

  “Hush!”

  Rat-tat. Rat-tat! Pop! Pop! It sounded like fireworks. People started shrieking. Horns blared. Somebody smashed into us from behind. The car lurched forward and crushed into the bumper ahead of us.

  I banged my head on the glove box. Pain shot across my forehead and Leslie started to whimper. The car squealed as the other vehicle moved and towed ours with it. The impact had smashed the metal of the bumpers together.

  Trapped!

  We wouldn’t be driving away from Ole Miss tonight. My heart thundered in my chest, and all I could think about was my boy, my son, my poor, poor little boy about to be without a mother because his mother was a fool.

  Outside, the yelling and hollering and popping and chants and slurs and cars revving blended into a mind-numbing roar. Somebody shot out campus lights one at a time, and with each bang, the world got darker.

  The car rocked back and forth as people knocked against it. Somebody tried the passenger handle, but the door didn’t open. It was only a matter of time before that door did get yanked wide, and Leslie and I would get dragged into the middle of a full-on riot.

  “We got to get out of here,” I shouted to Leslie. “Make for the Lyceum and get behind it; try to get to Jim’s office!”

  “We’ll be killed if we go out there!” She sounded like the child she was now, and I cursed myself for being a fool twice over. When I died on this campus tonight, I’d orphan my son and leave this helpless bit of good intentions to her fate. What kind of a person was I?

  A rock smashed against the back windshield, and I let out a shriek right along with Leslie. That seemed to decide things for her. I felt the car shimmy as she leaped toward the door. I pushed myself up and grabbed hold of the passenger handle.

  We spilled onto the pavement together on our hands and knees.

  Clouds billowed around us, thick and white and burning. Tear gas. I coughed and wheezed. My eyes watered and started to swell. A hand fumbled against mine, and I grabbed Leslie’s fingers. We huddled against the car, helping each other pull our shirt necks up around our mouths and noses.

  When we got to our feet, tears streaming, a single spotlight illuminated the Circle flag—only it wasn’t the stars and bars of the United States, or even Mississippi’s standard. A starred blue X stood out against a red background as the Confederate flag flapped wildly above the rising clouds of gas.

  “Move,” I told Leslie, and we ran into the clouds and the crowd, heads down, holding hands to stay together.

  Bottles and bricks sailed past us. A rock clipped Leslie’s forearm. She cried out but kept running. The night turned into dark prisms as I squinted to see through my gas-induced flood of tears, mixed with real tears. I gasped out sobs, so terrified I couldn’t take a whole breath, tainted or not.

  People jostled against us. Students. Uniforms. Suits. White T-shirts and jeans. People wrapped in Confederate flags. We ran and we ran and we ran. Bullets pinged off the Lyceum bricks as we ducked to the side, half-falling, half-scrambling toward the bushes and the back of the building.

  We pelted around the back corner and I steered toward Bondurant and Jim Devon’s office. A minute, maybe two, and we’d be clear—

  Leslie stopped dead and jerked my arm so hard my shoulder wrenched. Off balance, I spun into her and we went face-to-face, me swearing from the pain.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled, but clamped my mouth shut at her flat, frozen look.

  All of a sudden, I didn’t want to see what had made her pull us up short. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.

  Slowly, keeping my arms flat against my body, ignoring my throbbing shoulder and my pounding head and my thumping heart and my swollen eyes and wheezing breath, I turned.

  A line of men and boys faced us, holding bats and clubs and rifles and long, swinging socks crammed with God-only-knew-what.

  One of them, a bearded old-timer wearing jeans and a Confederate-flag T-shirt, stepped forward and leveled his shotgun at my chest. He stared at us for a few seconds, then just at me.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, deep-South accent heavy enough to make those words two syllables each. He spit tobacco juice to his left without shifting the rifle. “Boys, just look here at what we caught ourselves tonight.”

  WHEN I GOT HOME, MOM and Dad didn’t seem to know we were all persona non grata in the library system for seventy-two hours, so I wasn’t grounded. Yet. In fact, my parents seemed to be impressed that I was finally reading Night on Fire. Or maybe they were shocked stupid. It was hard to tell.

  After we fed Grandma, I hugged them and went to bed early, without even taking off my clothes. I just wanted to read.

  When Leslie stepped in front of me, I was so surprised I almost fell down. I tried to grab the fool girl and pull her back, but she wouldn’t budge. Before I could stop her, she held up both hands.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Leslie said, doing a fair job of a cultured Southern accent.

  “What you want don’t matter, girl.” The man with the shotgun kept his aim steady even though he’d have to shoot Leslie to get at me. “You got trouble, right here and right now, comin’ onto this campus with the likes of that filth behind you.” He spat again, then drawled a string of racial slurs that made my stomach heave.

  Leslie didn’t give ground. “I’ll thank you to watch your language,” she said, smooth a
s any high-dollar society lady, with just the right touch of cold Southern politeness. And then, somehow, she lied better than I ever had in my entire life. “We didn’t know there would be so much happening tonight. This woman is my maid, and I need her help to carry the books Dr. Devon bought for my Sunday School class.”

  A few of the boys behind the gunman shifted uncomfortably and glanced at each other. One of them spoke up to the man with the rifle, saying, “Look here, Curtis—”

  “Shut up,” Curtis growled.

  I shook all over, waiting for the shotgun blast.

  “Sarah Jane,” Leslie said to me, reaching back and grabbing my wrist even as she pulled that made-up name straight out of the air. “Come on with me. We’re going to Bondurant right this minute. This is no place for ladies, and I need to wash my face before that horrid gas ruins my complexion.”

  Curtis gaped at her. “You seriously think I’m lettin’ you pass by me, woman?”

  “Oh, you won’t shoot me, Curtis.” Leslie walked toward him, dragging me along behind her. “Because if you did, one of these fine young men would tell my husband and the police your name.” She stuck out her chin as she drew almost even with the barrel of his rifle. “In Oxford, people respect ladies with God’s work to do.”

  As we passed the dumbfounded Curtis, Leslie pulled me around her so I was in front, and she stayed between me and any aimed guns. “This violence isn’t God’s work, gentlemen,” she called back over her shoulder, her accent falling away just enough to scare me into next week. “I can’t believe you’d tear down our beautiful campus like this. You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

  It was later, around midnight, when I finally closed Night on Fire. My notepad was pretty empty because I hadn’t stopped to take notes. Notes just didn’t seem that important when people were getting shot at and firebombed on the Ole Miss campus.

  I was so relieved that they got away. Did Avadelle really do that for my grandmother? And if they escaped the mob like that, how did my grandmother get hurt? Answers leading to more questions—so frustrating!

  I knew Mac still had books to read, and Dr. Harper was going over Grandma’s articles again, and Indri had planned to research Avadelle’s short stories online, using her mom’s library account. Had they found something I didn’t know?

  And before we got jumped by the librarian, Dr. Harper had been looking up lockboxes to be sure the key really did go to the one he saw, and—

  Oh.

  Oh no.

  Sweat broke across the back of my neck as I jumped all the way out of my bed. My heart hammered as I crammed my hands in my jeans pockets.

  They were empty.

  “No,” I said out loud. I ran to the chair where I’d dropped my pack, grabbed it, unzipped the big pocket and the front pocket and fished around.

  Nothing.

  I dumped the pack on the bed and examined everything. Grandma’s envelope was there, but it held only papers.

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  I couldn’t have been that stupid. I couldn’t have been! I checked my pockets again, and the pack, and my covers, and all around the room, even though I knew the truth.

  No key.

  I didn’t have Grandma’s key, because in all the confusion, I’d left it on the floor of the library carrel.

  17

  BECAUSE IT’S MINE

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 420

  “Was it worth it, what happened to get James Meredith into Ole Miss?” Leslie asked me the next day at my school, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital for all the Black people hurt in the unrest in town. We had beatings, whippings, knife wounds, and gunshots to deal with—and none of these folks were even on campus when they ran into trouble.

  I touched the two stitches over my right eye, feeling each bruise and scrape from the riot as I reached for bandages to work on a man’s cut arm.

  “It was worth it,” I said, and I tried to sound sure of myself, even as my traitor mind whispered, Was it? Will it make any difference?

  WHEN YOU REALLY SCREW SOMETHING up for someone, it’s so hard to face that person. This stays true even if it’s the morning after the worst night of your life, and the person has Alzheimer’s disease and doesn’t even open her eyes when you check her pulse and her breathing, then apologize sixty thousand times for maybe sort of losing her precious key and maybe sort of destroying the only chance for her to find peace about a fight with her best friend before she dies.

  It stays true even when you’re convincing your skeptical mom and grumpy post-migraine dad that you really, really do need one more day away from Creative Arts Camp to work with an old professor researching history they don’t really want you reading about, even if that’s just a cover story. Never mind what happens when you call your best friend and have to admit YOU LOST THE FLIPPING KEY TO EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE.

  Your ex–other best friend, Worm Dung, who really deserves to get his name back now, might surprise you. He might stay calm and tell you he’ll meet you on the steps of Ventress Hall, and to stop worrying. He might promise that since his Aunt Naomi is looking after his crazy GG, he’ll help you get the key back, because you have to get it back. That’s the only allowable outcome. Period.

  No matter what happens, no matter what you have to do—You. Will. Find. That. Key.

  “I’m not certain this is the best idea,” Indri said as the three of us crowded toward the library door. She rubbed her elbows for the umpteenth time like she might be cold, which wasn’t even possible, because like Night on Fire said about Oxford, It was hot.

  “Ms. Donalvan might kill us on sight,” Mac said. He had on jeans and a sleeveless black tank with a white guitar on it, and unlike me, he wasn’t sweating. “I mean, she suspended Dr. Harper’s library privileges for three days because of us. Left him babbling about bearding the lioness in her own den and stuff.”

  “Bearded—what?” Indri gave him one of her looks as she shoved up the sleeves on her purple blouse. “What does that even mean?”

  “Ms. Donalvan said she was going to clean the carrel herself though,” I reminded them. “She probably found the key.”

  “We’ll get it back for you,” Mac said, sounding confident.

  “What, now you’re Dani’s big hero?” Indri muttered. “Just a few weeks ago, you were blowing her off forever, remember?”

  Mac didn’t say a word back to her, but I saw his head droop a little. He wouldn’t look at me, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t look at him, either.

  We got to the front doors of the library, and Mac pulled one open and held it for Indri and me, old-school gentleman-style. I thanked him. Indri just glared.

  We found the ninja librarian herself at the main desk. She wore all black again, pants and big shirt. All she needed was a cape, and she would have looked just like an evil wizard in one my favorite fantasy books. My teeth actually rattled together as we stepped back to give her room.

  “What, may I ask, do you three want now?” Her glare fell on Mac first, then Indri, and finally rested on me.

  Were her dark eyes glittering like a snake?

  I shuddered, then had a sudden, wild thought that she could sense my grandmother’s copy of Night on Fire in my backpack, and that if I moved or spoke, she’d leap forward and snatch it straight through the fabric.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Err” was all Indri could manage.

  Mac, standing straight and tall with a big, friendly grin, said, “Hello, Ms. Donalvan. We seem to have lost a key in Dr. Harper’s carrel yesterday, and we were hoping you found it.”

  Indri gaped in his general direction. I pasted a polite smile on my face and tried to ignore the sweat trickling down my back.

  Ms. Donalvan shifted the full force of her evil wizardly attention to Mac. “A key.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mac said, way too bright and happy.

  “If I did find such a thing in a professor’s w
orkspace,” she said, her tone a cross between a purr and a growl, “why would I give it to you?”

  “Because it’s mine,” I meant to say forcefully, but in a friendly tone. It ended up sounding like a mouse whisper, but my words were loud enough to bring that glittering gaze back to my face.

  Ms. Donalvan studied me so intently I wondered if she might be searching for freckles even though I didn’t have any. Slowly, way too slowly, she folded her arms, all the while keeping her stare right on my face. Finally, she said, “Interesting.”

  What?

  But—

  “Excuse me?” Indri’s question popped out, then she covered her mouth, turning lemur-eyes above her fingers.

  “I said that was interesting, you claiming ownership of the key.” Ms. Donalvan leaned toward me. “That’s not what Dr. Harper said when I phoned him this morning.”

  Excitement competed with hope in my chest, but dread also made an appearance. “So . . . you found the key? And you called Dr. Harper?”

  Ms. Donalvan nodded, like she might be dealing with first graders incapable of understanding her complex grammar, or maybe fraudulent delinquents making a bid for jail time. She still scared me to death, but also, she was starting to tick me off.

  “The key belongs to Dani,” Indri said, politely, but with just a touch of ice. “Her grandmother gave it to her.”

  “We’d just like to get it back,” Mac added, all sweetness and light.

  Ms. Donalvan glared at me for another few seconds, then shifted her focus to Mac. “Well, then. I suggest you speak to Dr. Harper, since he picked it up from me about an hour ago.”

  Mac and Indri immediately looked at me like I’d have something to say, but I didn’t. My brain fogged up and the world got spinny.

  Dr. Harper apologized to us at Square Books. Wasn’t he a good guy again? Why would a good guy come pick up the key without saying a word to us? I couldn’t help thinking about that look he got the first time I talked about the key. What if—what if he still had Grandma’s lockbox?