Mayday

by Karen Harrington

  Every time Grandpa saw me, he had an order for me to go and do something useful. And it was fine by me. I was trying my best to avoid him. On a scale from one to awkward, we were off the charts.

  New topic.

  Get-well cards.

  Did you know there was a man in New York who received a winning lottery ticket inside a get-well card while he was in the hospital? He did. When he scratched it off, he realized he’d won seven million dollars.

  True story.

  Our kitchen countertop was littered with cards, some of which included bad poetry. One was from my dad. He wrote that he’d try to stop by soon. My dad was remarried now and had a new little kid. They didn’t even live far from us. You would think that would make it easy to stop by. You would think.

  “You should go do something with your dad,” Mom said.

  Why? I was still annoyed about not driving home from the hospital with him. I could have written him a note, but he could have stayed, too.

  “Because he’s your dad,” she said.

  So?

  “You’re being stubborn. It’s good to be around him a little bit,” she said. “He can teach you man things.”

  Man things?

  “You know what I mean.”

  No. No, I didn’t.

  So I told her I’d think about it so that she wouldn’t get all worked up.

  Some other get-well cards declared that every cloud had a silver lining.

  The poet John Milton is the originator of this saying.

  I looked it up.

  Well, I had been inside an actual cloud. Its lining was not silver. It was more of a dirty cotton ball. (That is a fact, Mr. Milton.)

  This just proved my theory about poets. They are making stuff up so that life will sound better than it is. I didn’t know why Sandy was such a fan.

  If there was any silver lining in my situation, it was that the plane had crashed during Christmas break. I planned to hide out on Cedar Drive as long as possible.

  But the Saturday morning after I’d stayed awake watching the rain through my window, school came to me.

  “Wayne,” Grandpa called. “Report to the front door. A trio of friends is here to see you.”

  My mind raced. A trio?

  There were three kids from Beatty Middle School in my entryway. Their mouths hung open. Eyes fixed on me with the kind of looks people displayed when they drove past a car crash. I’d forget that my face was all beat up, and then someone would look at me and I’d remember all over again.

  “Hi, Wayne,” Mysti said. She handed me a card. I was sure it was a get-well card.

  “Duuuuuude. Your face,” Anibal said.

  Anibal stretched the word dude into two syllables. Rama elbowed him hard in the rib cage.

  Coming to my house was probably the idea of Mysti Murphy and Rama Khan. Those two girls had nice ideas, such as letting me sit at their lunch table or sharing delicious pizza sticks.

  No way was it shoe-stealing Anibal Gomez’s idea. He did not have a reputation for having nice ideas. He had a reputation for having ideas only he thought were funny, like stealing my shoes and hiding them in the library.

  So the fact that he was involved in coming to Cedar Drive put me on high alert.

  “Has Sandy seen you, man?” Anibal said, cocking his head to the right.

  “Don’t listen to him, Wayne,” Rama said. “He’s a fetus.”

  No, Sandy hasn’t seen me. Why? What has she told you?

  They studied me. Studied me like I was a test and they had to memorize details. The fill-in-the-blank spot where my eyebrow used to live. The L shape of stitches across my face. And also, my new, shorter hair. Mom thought it was a good idea for both of us to shorten our hair. Good idea for her, maybe. I just did it because I was doing whatever she said.

  My mouth went dry and then tried to cough up something to say, but all that came out was Errrr.

  “We brought you something,” Mysti said.

  She handed me a brown paper sack. It said GOODWILL in red lettering on the outside.

  “We brought you shoes,” Anibal said, at which point Rama elbowed him a second time. “What? They’re shoes. Which is kinda funny coming from me, but that’s how we knew your shoe size. Ironic, huh?”

  Stupid irony.

  “Don’t make me regret bringing you with us, Anibal,” Mysti said. “Anyway, we heard you lost your shoes, and, well, Anibal did know your shoe size.”

  I didn’t lose them. I left them behind.

  Do you know why flight attendants tell you to take off your shoes and remove any pens or pencils from your pockets before an emergency landing? This is because the emergency slides are inflatable. They don’t want any shoes or pens to puncture the slide on the way down.

  I looked it up.

  Somewhere in the chaos of the plane’s free fall, I’d followed those instructions. Which turned out to be stupid because there were no slides for our emergency exit.

  “Sorry they aren’t new shoes,” Mysti said. “We couldn’t afford much right now.”

  I couldn’t say anything. And then I realized that I didn’t want to say anything.

  I wanted to disappear.

  “Well, my mom is waiting for us in the car,” Rama said. “We hope you get better and come back to school soon.”

  Mysti looked like she might cry. I swallowed hard. I stared at the brown bag. I suddenly wanted them to leave.

  I wondered how I could avoid school. Maybe my plane-crash status would free me for the rest of the semester, let me make up my classes during the summer. I would look it up later and check.

  I’d seen a reflection of the new Wayne Kovok in their eyes. I didn’t like it.

  Do you know how to make this look? Okay, just as your dog straight-tails it and takes a dump, glance over at him. You got it? You are repulsed. The dog is humiliated. It’s awful for all parties involved.

  So that was how Mysti, Rama, and Anibal looked at my face.

  With the dog-dump stare.

  And they were my friends. How would nonfriends look at me?

  I opened the Goodwill bag. There was an old, beat-up pair of dingy white tennis shoes. Someone else’s shoes.

  And they fit perfectly because I was now, in fact, someone else. Someone from another country. Another planet.

  I decided right then that I didn’t want to see my Beatty Middle School friends. More accurately, I didn’t want to be seen by them. I wanted to hide. I’d figure out a way.

  So I went to our computer and typed out an e-mail before I lost my nerve.

  Data sent to Mysti via e-mail because she was the only one safe to tell:

  Dear Mysti,

  Thanks for the shoes. No offense, but I don’t want to be around anyone at all right now. I’m going to go monk for a while. Or maybe I should say go mime, without the stupid striped shirt. I already have the no-voice part down. Explain this to Rama. I’m writing this to you because you know how she is—she will try to convince me I should talk to you guys. I want to be alone now, okay? Please understand.

  W

  Data received from Mysti via e-mail:

  Wayne,

  I understand. Once my mother put a bowl on my head and then cut my hair. It was hideous. I wanted to disappear! Rama said to look up emu oil for your face, BTW. Sorry about stupid Anibal.

  M

  And that was how I said good-bye to my old friends.

  And a friend said good-bye to me.

  A friend who sort of compared surviving a plane crash to having a horrible haircut.

  A friend who took my request for being a middle school monk without any protest.

  I mean, I expected a little protest.

  A tiny protest.

  A crumb of a protest.

  Do you know what happened to that crocodile that survived the plane crash in the Congo? I’ll tell you what happened because I looked it up. (Uncle Reed left out one very interesting detail about that story.)

  The crocodile? It got
a machete chop by first responders at the crash site. Yeah. It survived the whole plummet and fall and crash. It survived!

  And then it was sliced through the head, dead.

  I’m not saying that Mysti’s e-mail was the same as a machete chop. No way. I’m saying that plane-crash survivors don’t have any special superpowers. They can still get hurt after the crash.

  True story.

  CHAPTER 9

  It was New Year’s Eve, and I decided the day had to be good.

  Good-bye, year that tried to kill me!

  That’s what I could write on a card. No poetry. All truth.

  Wasn’t New Year’s the time to move forward? Make goals?

  Right after lunch, do you know what hit me out of the blue? No, not an idea. A notebook.

  A coffee-scented notebook.

  “Don’t leave your stuff lying around, Wayne,” Grandpa said.

  Man, the trouble with not being able to talk is that you can’t shoot off a remark to the person throwing things at you. You have to hurry up and write it down, and by then the person has turned his back to you so that he can get more coffee. Not that I would have said or written anything.

  I picked up the notebook.

  And I guess I stared at the wall thinking about my weird life for longer than a person should stare at a wall. Because Uncle Reed’s official army photo was on the Wall of Honor now. I couldn’t help but stare at it. The colors in it were so new and bright compared to the other photos.

  “Why are you looking at that wall for so long?” Grandpa asked.

  Because that’s what voiceless people in the country of AFTER do now. They stare at things.

  “If you wait any longer, you’ll turn thirteen right here in this hallway.”

  I shrugged. Citizens of this new land also shrug. A lot.

  “If this wall could talk, huh?” he said. “What stories these photos, these men would tell.”

  If this wall could talk? Really? He was more interested in learning the language of a wall than understanding me and the reason I had notebooks all over the house?

  I waited him out. Maybe he would tell a patriotic story or order me to go and do a chore. It could have gone either way.

  Grandpa took a long sip from his coffee mug. “If you’ve got time to stare at a wall, you’ve got time to unload the dryer and fold the clothes.”

  Do you know what? It went the way I predicted it would.

  I did that chore, and then he ordered me to do a new one.

  “What you need for your recovery is to stay busy,” he said. “That will make you stronger.”

  I looked at the clock. I was counting the hours until Grandpa left for some appointment. He was going to see a doctor because his back hurt. My back hurt, too.

  Hellooooo, I fell out of the sky!

  “Son, are you listening?” he asked. “Hank Williams needs to eat at noon.”

  I wrote: I know!

  “When are you expected back at school?”

  Christmas break!!!

  “Oh, going soft, are you?”

  Grrrr.

  My New Year’s attitude was sinking. I was still in my PJs. Maybe I would just go back to bed. Read. Hide.

  I wrote on my notepad: Not soft, G.

  “Who is this G?” Grandpa asked.

  You! Grandpa = G.

  “Oh, okay, W,” Grandpa said.

  School. I wasn’t going to go back. Not like this. Not with my zippered-up face. Not without a voice full of facts to shield me from awkward situations.

  So Grandpa finally left for his appointment and then Mom rang her little bell, and all my hopes for New Year’s Eve being good evaporated. I pinned my hopes on the new year itself. What choice did I have?

  “Would you bring me an ice pack, honey?” she asked.

  I brought her an ice pack. We sat in her room watching the news. Before the crash, I never watched the news. Didn’t care at all. But now I got up every day thinking, This is the day. This is the day the news will say something about the flag.

  A woman named Liz Delaney reported every other day. She’d give an update on passengers newly released from the hospital. Some new fact. Some new piece of debris retrieved. Some amazing story about witnesses in town watching the plane as it came down. An aviation expert giving his opinion on the cause of the crash. All the reports were pretty interesting.

  What if today was the day?

  It wasn’t.

  Liz Delaney reported that two suitcases had been miraculously found on a roadside with hardly any scratches. She thought it was so miraculous that there was a pristine wrapped Christmas present the size of a cereal box on the roof of a barn. Not a single singe or tear in the paper. The curly red bow still intact.

  Liz Delaney concluded her report with, “In addition to finding a seat belt in Fred Haney’s goat pen, we’ve also discovered a copy of the Bible. What do you think of that, Mr. Haney?”

  “Well, I always suspected my goats were God-loving mammals.”

  “It’s not confirmed, but this might be further debris from the airline tragedy that occurred two weeks ago. This is Liz Delaney reporting from Marshall, Texas, for KTSB-Three News.”

  “I guess they have a lot of ground to cover,” Mom said. I had the feeling she got up every day expecting to hear news about Uncle Reed’s flag. Just like me.

  I guess.

  “I mean, they have to find it. How hard can it be?”

  Pretty hard.

  Mom didn’t know it, but a couple of days ago, I’d looked up Liz Delaney’s e-mail and shot her a message.

  Dear Ms. Delaney,

  I am a survivor of Flight 56 that crashed near Marshall, Texas. I’m following your newscasts about found objects. I’m searching for my uncle’s American flag. Our family received this at his funeral. It’s very important to us. I hope you will help. Please write back.

  Wayne H. Kovok

  Sending the message made me feel like I was doing something. It was a major new step in the right direction. Putting things right on the Wall of Honor.

  “You’re probably so bored, Wayne, and can’t wait to go back to school, huh?” Mom twisted her hair.

  Skip school next semester?

  “What? I don’t know, Wayne.”

  So I wrote to Mom that I didn’t feel like going back to Beatty Middle School. Look at my eyebrow-challenged, stitched-up face if you have questions.

  I underlined eyebrow three times.

  And she reached out to touch my face the way moms can’t help doing ever, and I flinched because it hurt. Even my pillow hurt my face.

  “It’s not that bad,” she said.

  Yes. It. IS. My face is epically unbalanced. Eyebrows are important!

  She eased off the bed with her one good arm and went into her bathroom for a few minutes. She returned to her bed and smiled at me. She’d shaved off her perfectly good left eyebrow! Shaved it clean off for no good reason. I raised my right eyebrow.

  Wait, what? Why did you do that?

  “See, it doesn’t look as strange as you think it does.”

  But it did. It did look strange. God gave us two eyebrows for a reason. Balance. Symmetry. Expression.

  Why?

  “It’s solidarity. We will heal and grow eyebrows together,” she said. “Now, eventually you have to go to school just like I have to go back to work. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but we have to move forward.”

  I nodded.

  “You’ve given me an idea,” she said, typing fast on her laptop. She could type pretty fast for someone with a big brace down one arm.

  “There. I have a friend whose daughter goes to this school.” She pointed to her computer screen. The West Academy. A school for star athletes, actors, or special students who went to school for half the day and trained, acted, or were otherwise special for the other half.

  “What do you think? I bet we could get you in there. Half days, too. New friends.”

  Can we afford it?

  “Leav
e that up to me,” she said. “The airline is going to settle with the passengers, so I think we’d be covered.” We’d gone months without a new dishwasher. And I wanted to replace my lost laptop. A private school seemed like a stretch.

  I couldn’t stop staring at the space on her face that had once had a perfect eyebrow. The skin was really white where her eyebrow had been. Who messed up their face on purpose? I forced myself to stop staring. I looked at the school where I could be considered special for no good reason.

  It made sense to be in a place where no one knew me. Keep my head down. No expectations. No history. No friends. The idea had promise.

  Mom cried.

  Okay. Okay. I’ll go to school.

  “It’s not that.”

  Your eyebrow?

  “No. Never mind. I’m fine. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Quickly, I wrote her a note.

  Did you know that there’s a guy in Australia who collected his own belly button lint for more than twenty years? He had three jars of it.

  It wasn’t exactly a dazzling fact.

  “You definitely need to go back to school.”

  You need a new eyebrow!

  “It’s temporary.”

  Why were you crying?

  “I don’t know. I get sad in waves. I guess a wave hit me.”

  Sorry.

  A few hours later, I was invited to a party. Okay, I was invited to a party by my dad, who rarely invited me to anything. Mom said I should go, listen to music, try to have fun. It’s hard to argue the definition of fun with a sad, one-browed parent. So I agreed to go.

  He said he’d be here at nine.

  I stood at the kitchen window, waiting for his car to roll up. Five minutes after nine.

  Be on time. Be on time!

  It was ten minutes after nine and still nothing. But so what. What’s ten minutes?

  Grandpa hovered behind me. Waiting for my dad to be late. I knew it. He didn’t like my dad. I once overheard him saying my dad had the backbone of an éclair. I’m pretty sure he was the one who’d started calling him the Flee.

  “You want a ride over there?” Grandpa asked.