“You know I’m not tryin’ to call them. Plus, call and ask them what? Hey, did y’all just make up my name? Nah. I mean, I could call my mom, but I just don’t wanna hear her be sad, man. She’d probably be like, Your father named you, and burst into tears. And if I call my pops, he’d probably be like, Why, you don’t think it’s good enough? Or It’s the Lee that matters, son.” Ganke picked up one of his sneakers and kissed it, imitating his father. “What about you? You know what your name means?”
“I’m surprised you ain’t already look it up.”
“Well, real friends don’t let friends get out of doing their own homework,” Ganke said. “But whatever. Let’s see. Miles. Miles. Hmm.” Ganke let the name ring out while he pretended to ponder.
“I mean, it probably just means distance or something like that,” Miles said.
Ganke side-eyed his friend. “That’s the best you could come up with? Really? If anything, it means desk breaker.” He swiveled in his chair back to his laptop. His fingers clicked and clacked on the keys, then his eyes shot left to right. “Hmm,” Ganke hummed again. He picked the laptop up, rolled back over to Miles and set it in his lap. “Here. Read.”
Miles tilted the screen back.
Miles /’maIlz/ is a male name from the Latin, miles, a soldier.
“Soldier?” Miles’s eyes narrowed, scrolling up and down the screen to verify.
“Soldier.”
Miles should’ve known something was up in Ms. Blaufuss’s class when Alicia didn’t want to share her name poem. As a matter of fact, Alicia didn’t participate in class at all. After the class turned in their name sijos—including the soldier poem that Miles wasn’t very proud of, and Ganke’s piece, entitled “Korean Untitled”—Ms. Blaufuss went on a nerd-rant about this poet, U T’ak, and this sijo he wrote about a spring breeze melting snow on the hills. Ms. Blaufuss prodded the class to respond.
“What does he mean when he says he wishes it would melt the aging frost forming in his ears?” she asked. Miles expected Alicia to answer, because he knew she understood poetry in a way most people didn’t. But instead, Ryan offered his interpretation.
“The way I see it, the breeze is really like a soft caress,” he said. He was met by a chorus of groans. Except for Alicia, whose face was slanted down at the notebook on her desk as she scribbled ferociously through the entire class. She and Miles hadn’t spoken, which was no surprise, but Alicia hadn’t really spoken to anyone. Not Winnie. Not even Ms. Blaufuss, besides a short “Hey” at the beginning of class.
After lunch—Ganke tried to get Miles to imagine what a catfish would look like if it were actually half-cat, half-fish—Miles headed to history class. He came in, took his seat at the now shaky, bowlegged desk, while Mr. Chamberlain started his usual routine of writing a quote on the board: the text of the Thirteenth Amendment. Alicia walked in among a bunch of other students, sneakers squeaking, backpacks hitting the floor, chair legs scraping against linoleum. Alicia beelined for her seat, dropped her bag. She glanced at Miles quickly, but just long enough for him to see something in her eyes. Not fear. Rage. She whipped around and strode right up to the chalkboard where Chamberlain was mid-scrawl, and picked up a piece of chalk from the chalk tray.
“Alicia?” Mr. Chamberlain eyed her as she began to write just underneath his quote in all capital letters.
WE ARE PEOPLE
WE ARE NOT PINCUSHIONS
“Alicia!” Chamberlain shouted. But Alicia continued.
WE ARE NOT PUNCHING BAGS
WE ARE NOT PUPPETS
Miles couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The entire class was silent. Even Mr. Chamberlain stood frozen in shock. Finally, he grabbed an eraser and started erasing what he could, but Alicia just moved to a different spot on the board, as if playing an intense game of tag, and scribbled on.
WE ARE NOT PETS
WE ARE NOT PAWNS
WE ARE PEOPLE
WE ARE PEOPLE
WE ARE
“That’s enough, Alicia!” Chamberlain dropped the eraser. “Have you lost your mind?” He reached over and grabbed her arm, yanking it away from the board.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, pulling away from him. Miles lifted himself off his seat instinctively, the backs of his knees sizzling, ready to pounce. Chamberlain stepped back. Miles eased up. “Don’t ever, ever put your hands on me.” Alicia scowled, and then she began to recite what she had written out loud: “We are people. We are not pincushions. We are not punching bags.”
“Go down to the office, right now,” Chamberlain growled, his nostrils flaring.
Alicia turned to the rest of the class, all of whom sat with their mouths open, some, like Brad Canby, surprisingly, nodding.
“We are not puppets. We are not pets. We are not pawns.”
“Get out of my class, Alicia! This is out of line. I’ll have you suspended! Expelled!”
Alicia looked directly at Miles. Directly into him, her eyes glazing over. “We are people. People.” She looked back at Mr. Chamberlain. Threw the piece of chalk on the floor, grabbed her backpack, and left.
So Wednesday wasn’t totally uneventful.
Not as uneventful as Thursday.
Miles had pretty much been on his absolute best behavior. No hangouts, his secret crush had basically been crushed, and unfortunately, no Campus Convenience job to go to. Just school. And wondering about Alicia. He knew she had been suspended, and he couldn’t help but think about what he could’ve done, even if it just meant reciting the words with her. But he couldn’t do that. No, he could’ve. He just didn’t.
But she was back in class on Friday, the last day of their sijo unit. She took her seat, keeping her back to Miles. He tried to speak, but couldn’t find the words. Somehow he’d misplaced his hellos.
Ms. Blaufuss wrote on the board in loopy cursive, If only…
“This is how I want each of you to begin your poems. You will all write one, and before class is over, we will read them one after another as a single continuous poem, the perfect cap to this unit.” Ms. Blaufuss, who was wearing an old-school Janet Jackson concert T-shirt, gave the class thirty minutes. When the time was up, she started at the front of the room with Shannon Offerman and worked backward. The ongoing poem snaked through the room, jumping from issues with mothers, to the desire to have longer hair, to “If only I could love you”—that one, of course, coming from Ryan. Eventually it landed on Alicia.
“If only life weren’t such a strangely complicated pattern,
every person in the world a single fly stuck to the web,
And fear is the spider waiting for the right moment to feast.”
Ganke slapped Miles on the back.
“She talking ’bout you,” he whispered.
“No, she’s not,” Miles replied, even though he felt like she might’ve been. But she hadn’t been paying him any mind, so he pretty much spent most of his class time trying to pretend she wasn’t there. Every time he met her eyes, he immediately felt like he was somewhere between naked and invisible.
Winnie was supposed to be next, but she was absent, so Miles was up. Perfect. He cleared the cobwebs from his throat. “Um…” he croaked. “I think I might’ve done this one wrong.”
“No such thing, Miles. As good as your name poem was, I’m sure it’s fine. Maybe different, but not wrong,” Ms. Blaufuss reassured him.
Miles gave a half nod, stared down at his paper and began.
“If only is what’s circling in my mind every morning
before I breathe in beauty and breathe out bad decisions;
If only is the cool breeze before I spin the world apart.”
Miles could hear Ganke’s paper rustle behind him.
Ms. Blaufuss’s lips spread into a warm smile. “Very nice, Miles. Next, Ganke.”
“Skip,” Ganke said.
“What? Why?” Ms. Blaufuss asked. Miles turned around. Ganke was always eager to recite.
“I’m not ready,” Ganke explaine
d, but Miles could see that his poem was done.
“Doesn’t matter. Let’s hear it. I’m sure what you have is beautiful,” Ms. Blaufuss said. She had a way of seeing the good in everything. Everyone. Tripley with less trip. And everybody loved that about her.
“Okay.
“If only our parents knew how much we really loved them,
how much we really need them to smile and look at each other
with eyes that say they still love each other as much as we do.
“That’s not really how I wanted to say it,” Ganke explained.
“It’s good, Ganke. It’s fine. Let’s keep going. Next.”
Miles turned around, gave Ganke a nod.
Though the rest of the week in Ms. Blaufuss’s class had been poetry, Mr. Chamberlain’s class, since the battle of Alicia, had been war. Same crazy talk about the “days of old Dixie,” and how after the South lost the war, they were forced to end slavery.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment. Mr. Chamberlain had written it on the board Wednesday, but after everything that happened, he decided to reteach the lesson Thursday. He explained how the amendment came to be, the key players (or “disrupters,” as he called them) but it was Friday, after all this setup, that he drove home his main point about it.
“The beauty of it all,” Mr. Chamberlain said, “the subtle triumph in such tragedy for the Confederacy, is this.” He took a piece of chalk and raked it across the board underneath the words except as a punishment for crime. “See, the South rose up again, by a new, much smarter form of slavery. Prison.” He smiled, and his eyes were open—a break from his typical blind-gnome stance. Actually, he had been keeping his eyes open constantly since Tuesday, since Miles crushed the desk—which, by the way, had fallen apart completely. Now only the top of the desk, no legs, was sitting on the floor. Mr. Chamberlain still made Miles work at it, even though it was more like a step stool than a desk. And not only was he forced to be at the desk, he had to abandon his seat and squat in order for him to actually use the surface. Miles had been squatting when he’d scribbled other notes about the amendment, and tidbits of Mr. Chamberlain’s rant about the forefathers who wrote it, in his notebook the previous day. And he’d been squatting today—Friday—doing the same thing, when Mr. Chamberlain decided it wasn’t enough.
“It would be much easier for you on your knees, Morales,” Mr. Chamberlain said to Miles. When he said it, he glanced at Alicia too. She had returned to class after a one-day suspension and Chamberlain was watching her as if he was scared she’d spring from her desk and tackle him. “You may only use a chair if that chair is sitting level with an accompanying desk, and well, seeing as though yours isn’t, because you decided to destroy it, I suppose I’d have to write you up if you chose that option.”
“But the only reason he—”
“Oh, Alicia.” Mr. Chamberlain cut her off. “We’re not going to have a repeat episode, are we?” Miles noticed Alicia’s foot tapping, and even though he couldn’t see her face, he knew she was biting her lip. “You know, you can always join him down there if you like.”
Alicia stopped talking. Just hung her head in defeat and disgust. Miles did too. He couldn’t be written up again. He couldn’t be suspended, or expelled. This school was his shot. His opportunity. His parents reminded him of that. His whole neighborhood reminded him of that. So Miles, embarrassed, got down on his knees and continued scribbling his notes using the low, legless desktop.
It took everything in Miles to not lose it. To not break what was left of the desk over Chamberlain’s head. To not break him open to see if he was full of white cat fur or something. Because there was definitely something. But Miles continued to swallow it, convulsing with his screaming spidey-sense, his handwriting becoming jagged streams of ink. Along with that, he had to deal with the awkward glances of his classmates, their mouths silent—no unchecked, snarky Chamberlain jokes, no nothing. Miles figured they were now all looking at him as both a charity case and some kind of loose cannon. Making up all kinds of stories about him. A sko-low trapped in his own temper, probably dealing with family issues.
But before Miles could explode again, he was once more saved by the bell. Alicia immediately jumped from her seat to help Miles up. And even though it was a nice gesture, Miles couldn’t help but pull away from her, upset. Small. Miles looked down, studied the floor for a second before slowly taking her face in, and letting her see his. His eyes were glassy. Hers were as well. Now he could see she was, in fact, biting down hard on her bottom lip, shaking her head, trying to find what to say.
“I…my family,” she eked out, shaking her head.
Miles nodded. He understood. “Yeah, mine too,” he replied, a baseball stuck in his throat.
Alicia turned to Mr. Chamberlain, tried to cut him with her eyes, but he turned around and began erasing the board. His back a Don’t bother.
Alicia stormed out of the room in the midst of the clamor of squeaks and screeches. Miles followed.
“Morales, can I have a word before you leave, please?” Chamberlain said, stopping Miles in his tracks. Miles stepped up to the old man, who had taken two erasers in his hands. Got right up on him, close enough to see the white hair hanging in his nostrils, and the chafed skin outlining his lips. Close enough to take him out. “You know,” Chamberlain began, “as long as you stay where you belong, in the place you made for yourself, you’ll survive.” Then Chamberlain took the two erasers and clapped them together, and asked, “Oh, and how’s the job?” And watching Miles’s face crack beneath the skin, in the midst of the cloud of chalk dust, Chamberlain added, finally, “What a tangled web we weave.”
After a class like that, an experience like that, Miles needed to do something with all that rage. He could go into camouflage, kick over trash cans, put holes in walls. He could do what he’d done a few days before—go looking for trouble, save someone else from it. And do it all behind the mask, letting Spider-Man do Miles’s dirty work to somehow cleanse himself. Or maybe he could approach Alicia humbly and now get on board with organizing something with the Dream Defenders. Something to speak out against Chamberlain.
But before he could decide on any of these things—Buzz.
A text message. Miles rammed the door of the building open, the hinges challenged by the force, and was blinded by the sun. He turned his back to block it out so he could check his phone. He figured it was Ganke asking about what happened in Chamberlain’s class. But it wasn’t.
2:51pm 1 New Message from Dad
TMW MORN
And then another came through. Buzz.
2:53pm 1 New Message from Dad
AUSTIN
And those three words were enough to help Miles get a grip and dial himself down. That and what he found when he finally got back to their dorm.
Ganke. Being Ganke.
Music was blasting. Hip-hop from the eighties. Old break-beat stuff that Ganke had found online. Stuff that Miles’s father talked about whenever he was trying to prove a point about what was “real hip-hop.” Ganke was stepping, sliding, and gliding around the room in his socks, ticking, popping, rocking, dancing like he had just won the lottery.
When Miles came in the room, Ganke robotted his way over to him, a silly grin on his face. He held his hand out for a five. Miles slapped it, and Ganke waved his arm up to his shoulder and down his arm again as if Miles had just sent an electrical current through him. Then, he stopped the music.
“Is this what you do when I’m not around and you’re not playing video games?” Miles asked.
“Maybe. I mean, sometimes. How you think I keep this physique?” Ganke wiped sweat from his forehead, flopped down on his chair, and reclined on its back legs. “Psych, nah. I heard about what happened in the reality TV show that is Chamberlain’s class, and I kne
w you would be in a funky mood. So I figured this would at least take some of the edge off…by putting you in a real…funky mood.” Ganke nodded slowly.
“Thanks, man.” Miles threw his backpack on his bed. Took a seat. “But I’m okay. My pops told me we’re going to see my cousin…well, Austin, tomorrow.”
“Word?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t mean seeing you pretend to be Crazy Legs—Was that his name? Crazy Legs?”
“Whose name?”
“Never mind. Just sayin’ I still appreciate you trying to make me feel better, dude.”
“Well, to be honest, it was for me too,” Ganke said. “Man, it’s Friday. And you know better than anybody that that means I gotta go home to my weird house.” Ganke cracked his knuckles, stared at his own reflection in the black screen of the turned-off television. “And guess what, because I’m not going to be around on Sunday, my pops is gonna come over tonight to do, like, the family dinner thing. So my Friday night will basically be the three of us sitting there quiet, eating kimchi jigae. And trust me: the pork and potatoes and all that is good stuff, but it don’t taste the same when nobody’s talking. And I bet it’s gonna taste even worse with all this happening on a Friday. A Friday, Miles.”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“It sucks. So I just needed to get it out, y’know.”
Miles thought of all the plans that had been running through his mind before the texts from his dad. “Yeah, I do.”
Ganke turned to Miles. “You should try it.”
“What…no. Nah.”
“Come on, man. It’s just us in here.” Ganke got up and turned the music back on, the bass thumping, bouncing off the plastered walls. He bobbed his head. “Let me see what you got, homie. Just let yourself go.” Ganke shook out his arms, while Miles crossed his.
“We have to go.” They had a train home to catch.
“We will. As soon as you hit me with a move.”
“I know what you doing, Ganke.”
Miles Morales Page 12