The Fight for Kidsboro

by Marshal Younger

  My mom put her hand over her mouth, and her fury instantly vanished. “Everything?”

  “Except for Dad. He wasn’t mentioned, except to say that he’s alive.”

  “I should call Mr. Henson.” Mr. Henson was the agent assigned to keep us safe. We knew my dad was close by, because he had called our house the previous winter. He knew what state we were in but possibly nothing more. He could narrow it down to an area code, but our next three digits didn’t give away anything. The local exchange numbers Mr. Henson had given to us weren’t found anywhere else in the state. But the more word got out about us, the easier it would be for him to find us.

  Mr. Henson came by to talk to all of us. My mother asked Mr. Whittaker to stay for emotional support, and he did.

  “We’ll confiscate all copies of the newspaper,” he said.

  “There’s a reporter for the Odyssey Times that’s been asking questions in Kidsboro,” I said. “What if the Times gets it?”

  “I can talk to Dale Jacobs,” Mr. Whittaker said. Dale Jacobs was the editor. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t print this.”

  “Good,” Mr. Henson said. He sighed and looked at my mom and me. “Listen, I want to give you this option one more time. I know you like Odyssey, but we can safely move you away. We can change your names again, change everything.”

  I loved Odyssey, and I never wanted to move. Mom and I exchanged pitiful looks. I was sure she was feeling the same way I was. “I’m tired of running, Mr. Henson,” she told him. “This is the place I want to be. I’m not going to let him dictate our lives any more.”

  “Ms. Cummings,” Mr. Henson said, looking to Mr. Whittaker to see if he would back him up, “this is for your own safety.”

  “I know it is, and I appreciate your concern. But we need to put an end to this now. If he finds us once, he’ll find us again.”

  Mr. Henson breathed heavily and stood up from the couch. “I’ll put the police on alert. We have his picture up at the station. Everybody knows who to look for. But if you change your mind …” He looked at my mom and must have decided not to finish his sentence. She would not change her mind.

  He glanced at me before he went out the door. “The article didn’t mention the abuse. Don’t tell your friends about it. The more you tell, the more danger you put them in if he comes around asking questions.” He nodded to Mr. Whittaker and left.

  There was no pretending it never happened. Everywhere I went I was reminded that I was no longer Ryan, mayor of Kidsboro. I was now Jim, the fraud who punches people. I tried to slink to my office unnoticed, but all my friends wanted to know if the Barnacle story was true, and all my enemies wanted to dig their nails into my skin.

  The last person I wanted to see, Max, ran over from Bettertown to see me. “Jimbo! Hey, buddy!”

  “Go away, Max.”

  “Wow. It’s true. You really are a new man. I like it. You’re not gonna punch me, are you? You know, I’m definitely voting for you in the next election.” “You don’t get a vote.”

  “Oh, I’ll get my vote in there somehow.”

  “I’ve got stuff to do.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Mayor stuff. Bills to sign, laws to write, people to send to the hospital …”

  “Go back to your own town.”

  “You know, you’ve inspired me. I’m thinking about completely changing my image too. Hey, you’d know this. Where would I go for a fake ID card?”

  “Max—”

  “No, just call me Dirk from now on. I think I look more like a Dirk.”

  “I have a meeting.”

  “It must be so cool to be able to reinvent yourself like that. Nobody even knows who you are any more. Not even your friends. The only thing we all know for sure is that you’re a liar and a thug.”

  I had tried my best to ignore him, but his last statement struck me. Did my friends really feel this way?

  We held a scheduled city council meeting to discuss the new budget, but when I got to the meeting hall, the only item on anyone’s agenda was getting to the bottom of the whole Jim Bowers story.

  I sat down and took out my notes. No one was there to discuss the budget. They all just stared at me like I didn’t belong any more. I needed to get this over with.

  “It’s all true,” I said. “I lied about my past because I had to. I can’t really tell you any more than that. It’s about my family, and it’s very personal, and I hope you can understand that I … I just can’t talk about it. I was upset that the information got out, and that’s why I hit Jake. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. I’ll apologize as soon as I see him. Could we please not mention it again?”

  I could tell from their faces that they were not satisfied with my answer. They probably felt betrayed because I didn’t trust them, but apparently nobody trusted me, either.

  No one said anything for a solid minute. I stared at my hands. My city council sat there frustrated, not allowed to ask any of the hundred questions that must have been on their lips.

  Finally, Scott asked a pretty harmless one. “Do you want us to call you Jim?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m Ryan.”

  After another few quiet moments, Police Chief Alice spoke up. “Mayor, I must ask you this. Are you and your mother fugitives from the law?”

  “No,” I said, even more firmly. “Absolutely not.”

  “I had to ask,” she said. I rolled my eyes.

  Then Jill said, “Ryan, look … I know you have to keep this whole thing secret, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to say something.”

  “Why, so you can get a juicy story?” I said, more harshly than I probably should have.

  “You have an image problem, Ryan. Nobody trusts you any more.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did a poll for tomorrow’s edition of the Chronicle. Your approval numbers are way down. From 78 percent to 33 percent. You lied to everybody, Ryan.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, but you need to fix it.”

  “It would be nice if I had some help from the press. It would be nice if the press didn’t print that my approval numbers are down to 33 percent. Maybe if my closest friends didn’t think I was a fugitive from the law, I could convince other people to trust me. You think that might make it easier?”

  I threw my papers down, and they scattered across the floor. Without looking at any of them, I stomped off and left Kidsboro.

  4

  KISSING AND MAKING UP

  I THREW OPEN THE door to my room and slammed my notebook on the desk. I could stay in my room for the summer. I didn’t have to go back to Kidsboro. Maybe Mr. Henson was right. Maybe we could leave Odyssey and just start over again. I could make new friends—ones who would trust me. I could start a new Kidsboro in … I don’t know, Florida or someplace. Maybe I could be this new kid in Florida like Max was talking about. One that hits people. I hadn’t had much luck lately being the nice, fair, leader type.

  I laid down on my bed with my arms crossed, ready to give up on everything. I wanted to lay here until all This was over.

  I gazed around. My room was littered with Kidsboro stuff. On my wall was the Kidsboro flag, which looked just like the American flag, only with thinner stripes and a tree in the field of blue instead of stars. There was a framed copy of the Kidsboro Chronicle in which Jill had interviewed me, the brand new mayor, just a year before. The city charter was bound and sitting on my bookshelf. I’d helped write it, and I was very proud of what we had written.

  My desk had folders of paperwork scattered across it. I got up and was about to throw it all away when something caught my eye. The proposal from Valerie’s feminist group lay on top. The farmers’ budget was underneath it, followed by the Clean Up Kidsboro plan to save the Earth.

  I shouldn’t have laughed at them. They all had concerns and needs and looked to their government to help them. There was nothing wrong with that. If I had been a true leader, I would’ve compro
mised. I would’ve found a way to make their plans work.

  Perhaps I wasn’t a good leader at all. Maybe that was the real problem. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted because there was nothing in me that was worthy of trust.

  I sat down at my desk and began leafing through all the proposals. For some reason, I suddenly didn’t see anything so unreasonable in these requests. These people had probably worked just as hard on their proposals as I had worked putting together the city charter. Was it right for me to just shoot them down?

  I grabbed a pencil and my note book with new energy and started writing furiously. I could make this work. They would all see that I hadn’t lost my ability to lead. A33 percent approval rating indeed! I would double that number by the weekend.

  People were still whispering about me as I passed them on the way into Kidsboro the next day, but I didn’t care. I had five copies of my 10-page proposal under my arm and I was ready to present it to the city council. I had worked on it until 11:30 the night before. It was well thought out, organized, and in my eyes, un-rejectable.

  I was the first one in the meeting hall, but the other four members filed in just after me.

  “You’re here?” Scott asked, as if he expected my hasty exit from the last meeting to have been my last.

  “Yep,” I said with a smile.

  “You’re happy?”

  “Yep.”

  Everyone arrived with pretty much the same response. They were all unsure, even hesitant to sit down. Was this the same person who’d stomped out of the city council meeting just the day before?

  I got right to it. “I wrote a budget plan last night. I reconsidered the proposals given to us by all of the groups that made their presentations the other day, and I think I’ve come up with some good compromises.”

  “Compromises?” Nelson asked as he took a proposal and handed another to Jill.

  “Yes. I think we were too quick to turn these people away. Some of the things they asked for were quite reasonable—”

  “Which ones?” Nelson asked.

  “You can read it all right there. I haven’t given in to every demand, just the ones that make sense.”

  They all looked at the plan with their mouths wide open.

  “You’re giving money to Clean Up Kidsboro?” Jill asked.

  “Not as much as they wanted, but yes. We should care about the environment. And I think the outdoor bathroom was a good idea.”

  “You want to legalize slingshots?” Alice asked, probably because she had never been allowed to carry a weapon herself, yet other people were going to get to.

  “On a limited basis: only the small slingshots and not within the city limits. Only in designated slingshot areas.”

  “Wow. You’re giving the feminists everything?” Jill asked.

  “Not everything. I think we should agree to give girls more government jobs. And we’ll look into equal salaries for boys and girls. I’m still against adding another girl to the city council because that would make six people, which will create a lot of ties. But I’m open to the possibility.”

  Alice turned to the feminist page and her eyes widened. She apparently liked what she saw.

  It was Scott’s turn. “You’re doubling Corey’s salary? He’s a garbage man! He’s making more than me!” This was a weak comparison since Scott barely made any money from his detective agency.

  “He has to pick up garbage. It’s disgusting, and he should be paid well for it. I’m not giving him what he asked for, only part.”

  They continued to read through the proposal, glued to every word. Their heads nodded, except for Nelson’s. “We can’t do this,” he said. “This is going to cost too much. We don’t have this kind of money.”

  “That’s not for us to decide. That’s for the taxpayers to decide. They’re the ones who are going to be paying for all of it.”

  “Taxes are going to go through the roof.”

  “It’ll be a sacrifice.”

  “It’ll be a suicide. They’ll be paying half their salaries in taxes,” Nelson said.

  “When we bring this proposal before the town, we’ll explain all of that. It’s up to them,” I insisted.

  “We can’t bring this before the town.”

  “That’s what we’re here to vote on. The city council votes on what we present to the town. If you don’t like it, don’t vote for it.”

  “This is insane!” Nelson said loudly.

  “That’s fine if you think that, but the rest of us might not agree with you. Has everybody had a chance to read it?” I asked.

  They all nodded.

  “Okay, then I say we vote on it. Who votes that we present this budget plan to the town? Raise your hands.”

  I raised my hand immediately. Alice, Jill, and Scott leafed through the plan, skimming the main points before they made their decision. Nelson had his hands on his hips, amazed that we were even considering this. Scott flipped over the last page and raised his hand. I knew his reasoning. He didn’t care about high taxes because he made so little money that it wouldn’t affect him that much. He was probably excited about using a slingshot.

  Jill breathed a heavy sigh and raised her hand. She was probably pleased that I was giving in to the feminist group and would vote for it based solely on that.

  Alice liked the part about equal salaries for girls. The Clean Up Kidsboro section mentioned harsher penalties for litterers. I’m sure the vision of throwing litterers to the ground and handcuffing them flashed before her eyes. She lived for moments like that. She raised her hand without hesitation. Nelson bowed his head in his hand. “This is a mistake,” he said.

  “The town doesn’t have to vote for it.”

  “Can I campaign against it?” he asked.

  “Go right ahead,” I said, even though I didn’t like the idea of the town seeing that the city council was divided.

  Jill printed a special edition of the Kidsboro Chronicle, which included the entire budget in chart form and a written explanation of what each of the items in the chart meant. Jill also wrote up a point/counterpoint-type article in which she interviewed both Nelson and me to show the opposing sides to the issue. Nelson’s essay on tax increases and government waste was well written, scary, and probably very effective. I wrote my essay on the government’s responsibility to take care of its citizens and the citizens’ responsibility to take care of each other. Both gave the reader something to think about, which was the point. The article ended by informing everyone that we would vote on the budget in a city wide vote the next day at four o’clock at the meeting hall.

  One very nice thing happened after this article came out. People started looking me in the eye again, especially people who were members of the groups that would benefit from this budget. Mark, head of Clean Up Kidsboro, smiled at me as I walked past him. The farmers were reading the article as I passed them, and they gave me a thumbs-up sign. Even Valerie gave me a slight grin.

  Suddenly, I felt like the mayor again. I had made them forget about Jim Bowers.

  I would stack Kidsboro’s voting record against that of any country. In the United States, only about 50 percent of registered voters vote. But in Kidsboro, everybody votes. I like to think it’s because we care about the issues that affect our city and our lives. But if I wanted to be honest about it, it’s probably because we have such a small number of citizens. Everyone knows exactly how important his or her vote is.

  Maybe people must have thought that this vote was going to be close, because everyone showed up at the ballot box the next day. The meeting hall was packed. I looked around at all the people and tried to figure it out. Valerie’s group, plus the Clean Up Kidsboro group, plus the farmers, plus the slingshotters, plus the animal rights guys … It appeared that there were about 16 or so people in the hall who were in at least one of these groups. If I had all of their votes, I would need only a few more people to agree to the budget for it to pass.

  There was a big box on the front table with a hole in
the top. Everyone waited for the polls to open. We’d agreed that there would be a brief discussion time before we started.

  Jill was the moderator. She stood up and called for attention. “Does anyone have anything they want to say before we start the voting?”

  Nelson popped up immediately. “This budget plan would send taxes soaring. The economy wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

  A boy stood up in the back. “He’s right. And what are we spending our money on? We don’t need slingshots and bathrooms. We especially don’t need vegetables.”

  Nelson raised his hand. “I have a suggestion. Can we at least vote on all these items separately? One vote for the slingshots, another for the farmers …”

  Mark stood up and addressed Nelson directly. “No! Then everybody would just vote for their own cause, and nothing would get passed. It’s all or nothing.”

  “This budget could bankrupt us,” Nelson stated.

  “The only reason you care so much is that you’re rich. You’ll have to pay the most in taxes,” Mark said.

  Everybody started speaking at once, and none of it was audible. Mark was right. Nelson was the richest person in town, and if we took a percentage of income from each person in Kidsboro, the rich would have to pay a lot more than anyone else.

  Jill yelled at the top of her lungs, but couldn’t restore order. After a few moments of utter mayhem, she stood up on the table. “Quiet!!!”

  The noise subsided. She cleared her throat. “Does anyone have anything constructive to say?” I raised my hand. “Yes, Ryan?” She nodded at me.

  I stood up and turned to face as many people as I could. “I understand how Nelson feels. But I think we should always be looking for ways to make this city better. The only way we can do that is through the sacrifices of our people. It will be a sacrifice for us, yes. No doubt about it, taxes will increase, but the rewards could be great.” This was followed by the applause of about half of those present.