Feathers

by Jacqueline Woodson

  “It’s not your store,” I said. “It’s your mama’s.”

  “It’s my inheritance.”

  I guess that’s better than inheriting a gab gift, but I didn’t say anything. After that, we ate mostly without doing a whole lot of talking about the boy.

  Samantha ate her food delicately, all ladylike. Every way that she was ladylike, I wasn’t. I looked down at my turtleneck—it was light blue, but a big drop of greasy ketchup had spilled on it. I took a deep breath. Sometimes, I wished Samantha and me could trade places and I could see what it felt like to be like her, to be all delicate and careful and sure like that.

  I moved a little bit closer to her, pulled my napkin off my tray and wiped at the stain. It just smeared to a light brown. Maribel looked at the spot, made a face and looked away.

  Later on, when we were all out in the school yard, me and Samantha split a chocolate cupcake. Just as we were finishing up, standing there licking the frosting off of our fingers, Rayray, Trevor, Chris and some other guys went over to the boy. He was sitting on the ground with his arms wrapped around his knees, not even caring that the ground was all wet. He had on dark brown boots and was kicking his heel into the snow, just minding his own business.

  “What’s your name anyway,” Rayray said.

  And the boy looked at him—kind of squinty-eyed—like a million things were going on inside his own head that were miles and miles away from all of us. When I was a baby, Mama said old people would look at me and say, “Oh Lord, this child’s got an old spirit. She’s been here before.” It was the way you looked at everyone and everything, Mama said. Like you were taking every little bit and piece of it in. I’d never really understood what they were talking about until now.

  “My boy Rayray asked you your name,” Trevor said. “You deaf or something?” Rayray started hitting at his own ears and making strange mumbling sounds.

  I flinched a little bit. It was no good when people said things like you deaf or something. My brother was deaf and deaf was something.

  I leaned against the school yard fence with Samantha, both of us watching but neither of us saying anything. Samantha took a napkin from her bag and rubbed the last of the frosting from her fingers. She offered it to me but I just held out my hand, showing her how clean I’d licked it.

  Most days, I broke away from the fence and went and jumped rope or played handball with other kids. But Samantha was always by the fence when I returned. Sometimes, she was bent over her tiny Bible. I could see Maribel out in the school yard, doing “Down, Down Baby” with three other girls.

  Down, down baby

  Down by the rollercoaster

  Sweet, sweet baby I will never let you go,

  Jimmy, jimmy coco-pop. Jimmy jimmy pow!

  I know a lady . . .

  Maribel’s hand went the wrong way and she was out. I couldn’t help smiling. When I looked back, Trevor was still talking junk.

  The sign for believe flashed into my head—the way Sean signed it—his pointer finger against the side of his head like he’s saying “think,” then his hands coming together—like the sign for marry. I stood there thinking, for the first time, about how perfect that word was—to have a thought in your head and then to marry it, to take it into your heart forever . . .

  “I can’t believe Trevor’s still messing with that boy,” I whispered, hoping I hadn’t just made the sign. Sometimes I did that, talked to myself in sign language.

  Rayray made some stupid fake signs with his hands, then grunted. “I guess we gotta talk to him like a deaf guy, huh?” he said. The other boys laughed. But when Rayray looked over and saw me watching, he stopped, put his hands in his pockets and got quiet.

  The boy just looked up at all of them. Then he did something amazing. He took his hands out of his pocket and signed, No, I’m not deaf. Then he looked over at me and smiled—like he’d known all along I was standing over by the fence, watching him. I looked away real fast, hoping he hadn’t seen the surprise on my face.

  “Are those real signs?” Samantha asked me. “Or is he just being jive and faking it?”

  “It’s real,” I said. “He’s saying he’s not deaf, that’s all.”

  “Well, how does he know that?”

  “How am I supposed to know? I don’t know that boy!”

  Maribel had come back over to the fence and was standing on the other side of Samantha. “It’s not like you have to be a genius or something to know some signs,” she said.

  But Samantha looked at the boy like she was seeing something new and magical in him.

  “You look like Jesus,” Trevor said. Then he kicked the boy’s boot and said, “You better learn how to answer a soul brother when they be talking to you, Jesus Boy.”

  “He does look like Jesus,” Samantha said slowly.

  “Kind of, I guess,” Maribel said. “There used to be this boy at the Casey School who looked like Michael Jackson. But he couldn’t even dance.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Maribel Tanks. If you didn’t have a neck, your head would just float away.”

  Samantha smiled but she didn’t take her eyes off the Jesus Boy.

  He was looking down at the ground. After a few minutes, he lifted his head a little bit and stared calmly past everything and everybody—his lips pressed together, his hair lifting up in the wind. I tried to see all the things he was seeing. But all I saw was the highway out past the school yard. A tiny dot of an airplane. The sun slipping back behind some clouds. And miles and miles of wet, gray sky.

  3

  Imagine, my brother signed. Imagine if somebody built a bridge right outside our window and we could just walk across the highway and be on the other side.

  We were sitting together on the window seat, staring out at the wet snow, the gray sky and the cars moving along the highway—tiny and slow in the distance. I was thinking about the Jesus Boy. There weren’t white people on this side of the highway. You didn’t notice until one appeared. And then you saw all the brown and light brown everywhere. And then you started to wonder. The first time I asked Mama about it, she said, They don’t want to live over here. And the way she said it made me wonder what was so wrong with our side of the highway.

  Why would we want to cross the highway, anyway? I asked Sean. What would we want to see?

  What wouldn’t you want to see? Sean said.

  I wish I could explain the sign for what. With sign language, there are different ways of moving your face and hands for the same word. Like there’s what that means “Shut up, kid, you’re bothering me.” And there’s what that’s “really interested in what somebody wants to say to you.” You do sort of the same thing with your hands, but your face does other stuff.

  I like this side, I said.

  Sean kept staring out the window.

  Maybe if you were standing somewhere else and looking over here, you’d think the houses weren’t real special. The way some of them could use new windows or some new paint. The way the doors hung off of some and other ones had some cardboard sometimes where a window should be.

  Or maybe you’d see our apartment building and wonder about the names written on it or the way, just outside the fifth floor, someone’s laundry had frozen on the line.

  It was snowing hard again. I lifted the window a bit and stuck my hand out, caught some flakes in it and licked them off. Sean shivered and pulled the window closed.

  You’re crazy, he said.

  What’s wrong with walking down to the overpass?

  If you wanted to cross the highway from where we lived, you had to pray first. Then you had to run real fast. Or you could walk a half mile down and then there’s an overpass that takes you to that other side. Either way, it was a lot of trouble.

  It’s different, Sean said. I mean, like imagine if there was a bridge from every single window in the world to some whole new place. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? It would mean we could all just step out of our worlds into these whole new ones.

  I
shook my head. It’s fine here. It’s beautiful.

  It was beautiful. Somebody had written some names on our building, and even though all the grown-ups complained about it and tried to wash them off, I secretly loved the bright colors of the spray paint—the way the names looked super-big written out like that—like some giant had come along with giant markers. And when I looked at the windows that had pieces of cardboard trying to fill in the places where the glass should be, I thought about the way the sun had to climb over and through the spaces where the cardboard wasn’t to sneak into that house. And when the sun found its way through, I figured it left these beautiful bright yellow lines over everything inside.

  We had everything we needed on this side—huge supermarkets like Bohack when you have to do the big family shop once a week, tiny old Tanks store when you were last-minute desperate for something like high-priced milk. We had the Price School, where I went—Mama said we could make-believe it was named for Leontyne Price, the black opera singer, but it’s really named for Major Price, the white mayor from a long time ago—and the Daffodil School, where Sean went. The Daffodil School’s for kids who don’t learn like other kids. Like Sean. He can’t hear, so you have to use sign language with him. He can talk a little bit, but most people don’t understand what he’s saying. I guess that’s because you have to listen real hard and most people don’t want to spend a lot of energy on listening to people. Across the highway, there’s another school like Sean’s called Starship Academy. Mama said even if we lived on that side of the highway, she’d cross it every day to come to the Daffodil School because there was no way on God’s green earth she’d send Sean to a school that sounded like it was for people from outer space. There’s a regular school over there called Eastbay. You always saw cars on the highway that said MY CHILD’S AN HONOR STUDENT AT EASTBAY, which was basically another way of saying I LIVE ON THE WHITE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY. Price had those bumper stickers too. Samantha had gotten a couple of them, and once she even gave me one, but Daddy said maybe we should wait until I actually was an honor student before he put it on his bumper.

  On our side of the highway we also have a library. Mama calls the library “the day care center” because most of the kids in there are waiting for their parents to get home from work. There’s a real day care center called Little Sprouts and one for kids with things different about them called Special Little Sprouts. Both of them got flowers and little hands painted on the windows, and some days, if it was raining or just real cloudy, I walked by and saw those flowers and those tiny little painted hands and it filled me with such an emptiness. Some days, it felt like the times when I got to make handprints and flowers and stuff just slipped away from me before I even got a chance to figure out how much fun being a little kid was. Seems the minute I turned around, I was already more than eleven years old.

  Some days, eleven felt like a whole long lifetime. All heavy like that.

  If somebody did build that bridge, Sean, I said, who do you think would be the first to cross it? Somebody from that side? Or somebody from our side?

  I’d cross it, Sean said. I don’t mind being the first.

  And then what?

  I don’t know. Sean shrugged and kept staring out the window, his eyes getting that faraway look. His hands quiet on the sill.

  4

  On the second day after the Jesus Boy got to our school, Trevor was absent and Rayray said it was because he broke his arm. Then everybody wanted to know how, crowding around Rayray to be the first ones to get the information.

  “He missed the fence,” Rayray said. “He was tryna jump from the big swings to this high fence that’s like three feet away and he wasn’t swinging high enough. I told that jive turkey before he even jumped that he needed to be swinging higher than that because even a fool knows you gotta get some height to fly over to the fence! When his mama was taking him to the emergency room, she said, ‘If your arm isn’t broken, I’m gonna break it because I told you about jumping out of those swings like that.’ ”

  Everybody laughed, but it was hard for me not to imagine Trevor falling through the air—how scared he must have been, reaching and grabbing at nothing. I turned and looked at Samantha. She was shaking her head but maybe she was thinking the same thing.

  In the summertime, Trevor’s skin turned the prettiest copper brown. Once, when he was standing next to me at the park, I saw his bare arms up close, just hanging all quiet along his sides—and the skin, the way it had so many beautiful colors in it, the way it looked all golden somehow, stopped me. I stared at his arms and saw the Trevor that was maybe inside of the Evil Trevor—just a regular boy with beautiful skin. I saw that, even though he was mean all the time, the sun still stopped and colored him and warmed him—like it did to everybody else.

  When I got to my desk, I looked up and saw the Jesus Boy looking at me. I couldn’t tell what his face was trying to say—it was just blank and open and strange. I cut my eyes at him and opened my notebook even though I didn’t have to yet.

  Maribel’s seat was right behind mine.

  “That Jesus Boy is always looking at you,” she whispered.

  “Only way you’d know is if you’re always looking at him,” I whispered back. I felt her poke me in the back, but ignored it.

  I wrote my name at the top of the page. Beneath it, I wrote the date. Beneath that, I drew a picture of a kid on a swing. Kids said it felt like flying to jump through the air, catch onto that fence, then let yourself climb down. They said something about being up that high let you see all over the place in a way that felt different than looking at the world from a window. I thought back to the day before when me and Sean were talking about those bridges he wanted built. Seems kids on this side of the highway were always trying to figure out ways to fly and run and cross over things and . . . get free or something.

  Maribel was wearing a green sweater with THE CASEY SCHOOL written across the front in white letters. The sweater was too small and there were tiny lint balls on it. Everybody always seemed to be thinking about some other place.

  I snuck another look at the Boy. He was still staring at me. I stuck out my tongue at him and turned to a clean page.

  Ms. Johnson came in, took attendance and then she said, “Did everyone get a chance to personally introduce themselves to . . .” And then she said the new boy’s name again—like she’d done the day before.

  But I don’t remember it now because the minute she called it, he stood up and said, “Everybody calls me Jesus, Ms. Johnson.” Some of the kids laughed. Most of us just looked at him.

  Ms. Johnson looked around at all of us and all of us found other stuff besides her to look at.

  “I like Jesus,” the boy said and sat back down.

  I don’t know if he meant he liked Jesus the person or Jesus the name, but I guess Ms. Johnson thought it was Jesus the name because she said, “Okay . . . Jesus.” Her face just stayed calm so we couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “There’s only two things wrong with that,” Rayray said. He was sitting way in the back of the classroom and everybody turned around real fast to look at him. For a minute, the only sound was chair legs scraping against the floor.

  “What’s that?” Ms. Johnson said. She was frowning now. Ms. Johnson’s a good teacher in a lot of ways. She laughs and I like teachers who laugh. And once a week she brings some kinda snack for us all—like doughnuts or mini candy bars or cinnamon graham crackers or really sweet cherries. And she always seems to bring the snacks on a day when I’m the hungriest, which is usually a day when school lunch is the worst—like on goulash day when they pour this stewy stuff that has things like green peppers and eggplant in it all over perfectly good rice and completely ruin it. Whenever they have that, I ask if I could just have the rice and Miss Costa always says No like it’s against some kind of school-lunch law to serve goulash and rice separately. So on those days I’m really hungry and that’s usually when Ms. Johnson decides to pull out her snacks.

>   The other nice thing about Ms. Johnson is she wants you to understand stuff. I mean, she doesn’t just teach us and if we don’t get it, she keeps on moving. She really cares about us understanding things and she’ll take a real long time explaining something until she’s sure everybody’s got it. Sometimes that’s a little bit boring if you already understand it and she’s still explaining it. But that doesn’t happen with me because I’m usually the last one to get it. The things I don’t understand the most are science, math, grammar and geography. I understand independent reading and journal time and I understand the story part of writing but not things like diagramming a sentence or semicolons. Anyway, that’s why when Rayray said what he said, Ms. Johnson stopped taking attendance to ask him about it. She wanted herself and all of us to understand.

  “What are the two things wrong with it, Rayray?” And that’s another thing I like about Ms. Johnson—Rayray’s name is really Raymond Raysen, but he decided he wanted everyone to call him Rayray. When he told Ms. Johnson that, she jumped right into calling him the name he wanted. Everybody calls me Frannie and so does Ms. Johnson, but even if I would’ve said, “Call me Floyjoy McCoy from now on, Ms. Johnson,” my name would be Floyjoy McCoy. I guess it’s strange that nobody ever calls me by my first name—Abigail or even Abby. I guess it’s because Sean can almost say Frannie—it sounds kind of crooked, like somebody saying it underwater, but we know what he’s saying. And maybe that’s why it stuck—because of him.

  Rayray leaned back in his chair. He was wearing this big shirt that said BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL with a black hand making a Black Power fist underneath the words. The shirt was too big for Rayray. He’s real skinny, so when he wears big clothes, mostly you see the clothes, not Rayray. He slouched down in his seat and just about disappeared into that big shirt.