by James Howe
Friday, After School
Friday, and I’m meeting the gang
at our favorite place to hang out.
I ask DuShawn to come along,
but he’s, like, “Your gang.”
“Don’t say it like that,” I say.
“Like what?”
“Like it’s strange.”
“Well, why you got to say ‘gang’?”
“Why you got to say ‘got to say’?”
And we go on this way until
“You missed your bus,” I tell
DuShawn and there’s Tonni’s
mother waving and Tonni
shouting, “You want a ride,
DuShawn?” And DuShawn
calling, “Yo, girl, wait up!”
and to me, “See ya, Addie.”
I watch him go
and ask myself, “Now why
is it you love school again?”
It sure is not this part, this
why-do-I-always-say-the-
wrong-thing part, when I don’t
even know if I’m saying the
wrong thing.
I pick up my
backpack from where I’ve
dropped it and call out,
“See ya, DuShawn.” But
he’s already gone. I hear him
laughing, though.
Thank goodness
for Joe. When I call out “Yo!”
he looks at me like I’ve grown
another head.
“Dude,” he says
as I fall into step beside him,
“you have been spending way
too much time with DuShawn.”
He decides I’m a “dudette”
and not a “dude,” and this gets
me laughing even after I
tell him to stop, and Joe being
Joe, he won’t, and that makes
me feel good because it’s how
we are, and even when I say
something dumb I never have
to worry I’ve said something
wrong.
Santa Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
We are walking down Main Street in the little town
of Paintbrush Falls, New York, where I have lived
all my life, Joe since the age of four. It’s April, and
winter’s bite is still in the air, but Santa doesn’t live
here anymore. The Easter Bunny in his pastel vest
has taken Plastic Santa’s place in the dreary display
window of the Paintbrush Falls Electric & Hardware
Store. “About time,” Joe snaps. “Santa must have
been missing Mrs. Claus, and what about the elves
and Rudolph and Blitzer and Madonna and Twister?
Didn’t anybody notice Santa never made it back
to the North Pole? We should have filed a report
with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Plastic Santas!” “Are you going to rant like this
the rest of the way?” I ask, and Joe says, “I might.
’Tain’t right, Beulah Mae. We got to look out for
our little plastic friends.” His rant doesn’t end. He
carries on in what he calls his hick-town voice,
punctuating bad grammatical constructions with
Beulah Maes and Jimmy-Bobs, his names for us
in moments like this. I join in, doing my best to
keep up. I know moments like this won’t last
forever. One day he’ll move away and so will I.
Someone else will have to watch out for our little
plastic friends. Beulah Mae and Jimmy-Bob
won’t live here anymore.
Torn Red Leatherette
This is my home away from home,
this booth in the back of the Candy Kitchen,
this torn red leatherette seat,
this place where I meet up with my friends
to talk and to eat.
We call our meet-ups the Forum.
We call ourselves the Gang of Five,
although we were only four at first—
Joe and Bobby and Skeezie and me.
Now we are five or six or even seven,
but it doesn’t matter who we are
as much as where we are, and the fact
of the tear in the seat just to the left
of my left hand, the tear I touch
as soon as I sit down, always there.
I never say it, but I think it every time,
how I have been coming here
my whole life, thirteen years. How,
except for the jukebox that’s gone,
everything is the same:
The way you can see your face reflected
in the candy case just inside the door.
Across the street, the view of Awkworth & Ames
Department Store. The taste of the shakes.
The size of the fries, long and skinny, like me.
HELLO MY NAME IS, the name tags
read, CHRIS or STEFFI or SAM or EDDIE.
“Do you guys know what you want?
I’m ready for your order.” And us?
We are always ready.
Skeezie’s Fangs
The fries have all been salted and eaten,
except for two Skeezie has tucked between
his lips and canine teeth. “I vant to suck
your blood,” he says for the third time.
He has been doing this since third grade,
so no one pays attention except Zachary,
who is new and polite and doesn’t know
that to love Skeezie is to ignore him.
“Moving on,” I say as Skeezie sucks his fangs
into his maw and his molars move into action,
mashing and grinding and finding more fun
in two sticks of starch than in Disney World
and Six Flags combined. I remind myself
to ignore him and repeat “moving on” when
he belches and says, “Well, excuse you, Addie.”
Maddening, really, but what can you do?
“This is what I get for hanging out with boys,”
I say with a sigh. “It’s an established fact that
boys mature more slowly than girls.” The boys—
except Zachary, see above—roll their eyes
as I wonder why it is I do hang out with them,
why I am not at the mall with an all-girl posse,
applying lip liner at the Body Shop. Why I am
here, preferring fangs dripping ketchup blood
to lips all glittered and glossy.
The Way the Forum Works
I pick a topic, something really important such as What I’d Do for Love or
How to End World Hunger,
and then, after we’ve eaten our burgers and fries (a veggie burger for me,
on a whole-grain bun)
we order our ice cream and talk about the topic of the day. Well, to be
honest, it’s often about school—
something that happened or something that’s going to happen, like an
election or a dance
or what a teacher had to say or what we think is wrong and needs fixing,
and that’s an endless topic.
I write everything down, every word, even if it’s about ice cream or
Skeezie’s french-fried fangs,
because these are the minutes of our meetings and I only wish there could
be minutes of every minute we live.
Today we discuss the Gay Straight Alliance and the disgusting homophobic
display put on by the boys
running past room two-twenty-two, the pounding on the door and the
shouting of names.
We are all very serious, even Skeezie, because he knows enough to know
that this is about Joe
and Joe is right
here at the table. “I think,” says Skeezie, “that we should
track down who did it and
cut off their—” I cut him off, saying, “That’s a tad medieval, and one evil
does not negate another.”
Bobby says, “How about the Day of Silence Mr. D suggested?” I write it
down, underlining twice:
a day of no speaking to express solidarity with those who are silenced for
being themselves.
“I don’t get it,” says Zachary. “Why should anyone have to be silent about
who they are? That’s so . . .”
We wait. Is he going to say it? No way. My pencil breaks its point before
Zachary makes his.
He looks at each of us in turn. “That’s so ridiculous,” he says as the rest of
us exhale collectively.
Joe thinks Zachary is gay but doesn’t know it. I agree, but it isn’t p.c. to
label, and anyway,
“who cares” is the whole point. It’s decided we’ll do the Day of Silence,
and I want to talk more
with Joe as we head home together. But Joe’s walking with Zachary today
and they’re talking video games
and Skeezie says, “I’d like to see you be silent for a whole day, Addie!” And
this is the way the Forum works.
Writing it down
is the way I make it real,
the way I find my way
into what it is I feel.
The words on paper or
computer screen
tell me more than
what I knew before
I wrote them,
help me remember
what I’m afraid
I’ll forget,
let me keep
what I don’t want
to lose,
say to me:
You
were
here.
So I walk home alone
thinking about Joe and how it used to be
before Zachary moved to the neighborhood.
I like Zachary, don’t get me wrong, but
I miss Joe when I’m walking home alone.
I think of that poem from the book I read
when I was little, the one that said, “I
loved my friend. He went away from me.”
Oh, I know Joe is still my friend and I’m
just being silly, but I miss how we’d talk
and how he’d blurt out “Ministry of Silly
Walks!” and start slicing his legs through
the air like a pair of psychotic scissors,
unhinged and devil-may-care, shouting,
“Keep up, Addie, it’s Monty Python Time!”
I could never keep up with Joe, and yet
somehow we’d always end up with our arms
wrapped around each other’s waists, kicking
like the Rockettes, or swaying like a couple
of drunks before we even knew what that
meant. Now I walk home thinking the kinds
of serious thoughts Joe helped me to forget.
Grounded
When I get home from school,
there in the front yard my dad
is swinging the three-year-old
from two houses down around
and around. She has one arm
and one leg splayed, reaching
for the sky, her eyes squeezed
tight, her mouth open wide,
crying, “Look at me, I’m flying!”
“Hey, Addie,” my dad says as I
say nothing back but run inside
to throw myself on the sofa
and cry. It’s ridiculous, I know,
how my body aches to be lifted
and flown. But I will never fly
again. I’m grounded. I’m grown.
Kennedy and Johnson
Cats have radar
for girls who are thirteen
and in tears.
They come out from hiding
or wake from their naps
to rub up against you
or jump in your lap.
And even though they themselves don’t cry,
they understand distress.
They never ask why
or what’s going on,
they just present themselves
as if to say,
We’re here now, you’ll be okay.
Kennedy and Johnson
(those are my cats)
are older than me
and wiser, too.
They don’t cry
over what’s lost
and never again will be.
They don’t cry
that they never had a dad
who made them fly
like me.
10 Haikus : 2 Cats
I’ve known Kennedy
my whole life. “And who are you?”
his eyes sometimes ask.
He bathes his privates,
then sweetly comes to kiss me.
“In your dreams,” I say.
The pillow was his.
The sofa he would share, but
the pillow was his.
Kennedy looked at
the new cat. He hissed. He spat.
And then: That was that.
Kennedy’s pillow
Kennedy soon discovered
was perfect for two.
Now they curl in sleep,
deep in contentment and dreams,
their heads tucked under.
They demand their food
in the same high voices, then
reject our choices.
Like bookends they sit
on each arm of the sofa,
and we are the books.
Johnson loves to lick.
Kennedy loves to be licked.
Two cats in heaven.
What must it be like
to move through your days always
in step with a friend?
The Girl in the Mirror
The girl in the mirror holds her lifted hand
at the back of her neck, fingering the unseen
clasp to the necklace she has worn every day
since Christmas. She considers her plain face
framed by a drape of straight falling hair: no
drama there, more a face that might be found
on the cover of a novel set on the prairie
than on a poster for a movie about, say,
vampire lust.
Why must she have her mother’s face? Her
mother’s mother, neither plain nor a beauty,
was always pretty and still is, in an old-
people sort of way. The girl in the mirror
furrows her forehead thinking about her grand-
mother’s arrival the next day. She loves her
grandmother but always feels a little smaller
in her presence. Does her mother feel
that way, too? Does her mother see herself
as ordinary, plain?
My fingers unclasp the necklace. It falls away
into my hand. The girl in the mirror smiles
as we remember the boy who first clicked the
clasp, stepped back to check it out, and said,
“You look nice.”
Pretty
My dad tells me I’m pretty,
then laughs and says,
“I guess all dads think
their daughters are pretty.”
Thanks, Dad.
Questions I Ask Myself in the Dark
What does Becca Wrightsman want?
Should I let her give me a makeover?
Why would I do that?
Why am I even thinking about it?
Why did Becca have to move back here?
Why did she have to change?
Does everyone have to change?
Does DuShawn like Tonni more than me?
What does he see in me, anyway?
If he breaks up with me,
will I have to give back the necklace?
Why does Ms. Wyman hate me?
Why do I stare at Ms. Watkins’ hair?
Why do I notice what she wears?
Will Joe always be my friend?
Does my dad wish I was little again?
Why do I act like I know everything
when inside all I really know are
questions?
Love Songs
The first week of April
and Grandma’s in her Birkenstocks
even though we had snow only last week. “Honey,” she says,
“shoes are foot prisons, trust me. Feet are meant to be free.
Now, let me look at you.” She’s shorter than me by an inch,
which is news to both of us. It’s only been since the summer
that we saw each other and I was looking up at her and she
was looking down. The kitchen fixture reflects in her eyes,
twin specks of light shining with the intensity of miners’ lamps
as she turns the beams of her determination this way and
that, digging for something, until “Eureka!” she cries. “I hit
gold. I see it in your eyes, Addie.” “What, Grandma?” “Love,
girl!” My face goes red hot as if it were a piece of dry wood
her focused rays have ignited. “DuShawn, is that his name?
Oh, Lyddie,” she says, turning to my mother, who is crushing
garlic with the bottom of last year’s National Public Radio mug,
“how much do you love that our Addie went and got herself
a black boyfriend?” “Grandma!” I cry. “I didn’t ‘go and get’
anybody, and it doesn’t matter that he’s black!” “Exactly my
point,” she replies, and where have I heard that before. “This
is what we fought for, marched for, Lydia, that it wouldn’t matter
what color anybody’s boyfriend is. What about Joe? What’s his
boyfriend like?” I am tempted to say he’s green with orange
polka dots, but I tell the truth. “His boyfriend is in the closet,