Soar

by Tracy Edward Wymer

  Below the macaw I write:

  Bird: Scarlet macaw (Silvio)

  Location: Gabriela’s House

  Note: Silvio is the most impressive bird I’ve ever seen up close.

  Dad: You should’ve seen this scarlet macaw! You would’ve loved it.

  I have a question for you.

  Do you think I’ll ever have another best friend?

  Honey Strikes Twice

  The first day of school is usually a drag, but I have a feeling seventh grade will be different.

  To start with, I’m going to find out who stole my bike.

  That next morning I stroll toward the bus stop, as Mom drives by and honks. “See you at school, honey,” she says, blowing smoke out the window.

  I take the bus in the morning because my parents always wanted me to experience school like a normal kid, like someone whose mom isn’t the head janitor there. Mom seems okay with me taking the bus, since she gets to take me home every day.

  We’ve owned Mom’s car since before I was born. I call it Hoopty, because it’s basically a piece of junk on wheels. It’s an old Impala with rusted side panels, and brakes that squeak loud enough for the whole town to hear. If it weren’t in such bad condition, it would be a cool ride. Mom paid Sandy, my bus driver, a dollar for the car. One dollar! Hamburgers cost a dollar, not cars. Sandy told my dad it was to avoid paying some sort of tax and—in his words—giving the government more than they deserve.

  Now Mom refuses to part with Hoopty. It has over two hundred thousand miles on it, the radio only works with a coat hanger attached to where the antenna’s supposed to go, and the muffler belches black smoke. Mom always tells me “Hoopty” isn’t a word. I tell her it’s in the urban dictionary, and it’s a word that means “a beat-up car.” Then she says the urban dictionary is not a real dictionary. I can’t win with her sometimes.

  A couple of high school kids laugh when Mom drives away. They ride the bus with us because the high school is right next to the middle school. I want to tell them to get lost, but they’re a lot bigger than me.

  Gabriela stands alone, wearing a red dress.

  Then I see him.

  Mouton.

  MOO-TAWN.

  The Biggest, Most Annoying Kid Who Ever Lived.

  His hair is sticking up in all directions and looks like a bad case of bed head. He’s wearing an oversize white T-shirt and camouflage cargo shorts with strings dangling from the bottom. One of his black high-top shoes is untied.

  “Your mom is a loser,” he says to me, leaning against the stop sign. He spits, and a wet streak splats onto the pavement. He’s as tall as Dad was, but he’s a lot wider and shaped like a pear.

  Mouton and I are like verbs. We have a past, present, and future. Mom says when we were little, we played together at the park in the sandbox, but then we started kindergarten, and for some reason, everything changed.

  Here are some examples of our past:

  In first grade Mouton sat on me during recess. In second grade he dumped his science project volcano lava onto my desk and ruined my Cooper’s hawk drawing. In third grade he stole my shoes and hid them under the teacher’s desk. In fourth grade he started calling me Fish Boy (because of Camilla), and so did everyone else. In fifth grade he locked me in the equipment room, and I was stuck in there for the last two periods of the day.

  But last year, in sixth grade, the weirdest thing happened. He didn’t do anything. Maybe he was too busy ruining someone else’s life.

  So it’s obvious that we just can’t get along, mostly because he’s always picking fights with me and being an annoying ogre.

  As far as our future together, well, I hope he’s not part of mine.

  There’s something else to know about Mouton. He has Tourette’s syndrome, a brain disorder that makes him blurt out words, even if it’s at inappropriate times. The worst part is when he gets stuck on a word or phrase and then repeats it until you can’t take it anymore. My mom says they’re called vocal tics. Mouton has the same one all the time (Yip!), which gets worse when he’s nervous. I know I’m supposed to ignore his outbursts, but it’s hard to do that when he makes my life miserable on purpose.

  I decide to stay where I’m standing, and keep my distance from Mouton. “Leave my mom out of it,” I say.

  “Sure thing, Big Bird,” he says.

  “Did you steal my bike?” I ask him.

  “What bike?” he says. He picks a pebble up off the street and throws it at my cheek.

  “Ouch.” I rub my cheek to make the stinging go away.

  “What’s wrong?” he says. “Got a little boo-boo? Maybe mommy can help you when you get to school. Or maybe she’s too busy cleaning toilets.”

  I ignore Mouton. Sometimes it’s the only way to handle him. Up until third grade I gave it right back to him, but now he’s three times my size.

  Gabriela looks at me, like she’s waiting for my response to Mouton. If only I could explain to her that he comes with special handling instructions, and if you’re not careful, he’ll explode and stomp on buildings like Godzilla.

  Bus number thirteen squeals to a stop, black smoke spiraling from the tailpipe. The door opens.

  Mouton shoves me aside and cuts in front of everyone.

  Gabriela steps back from the crowd, letting others get on the bus in front of her. I hang back a little too, until we’re the only ones left standing outside the bus.

  Mouton sticks his head out the back window and yells, “Eddie-shovel-truck! Eddie-shovel-truck!”

  He’s been saying that for two years now, and no one knows why. I think it’s because he wants to dump me into a trash truck and then bury me with a shovel.

  I turn to Gabriela and say, “He’s a jerk. Just ignore him.”

  “What is a jerk?” she asks.

  I could go many places with this one, most of them dark and ugly, but instead I say, “Someone who acts like Mouton.”

  “The jerk is named Mouton?”

  “ ‘Ogre’ is what I call him. It means ‘a big, clumsy monster.’ ”

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Can you believe his parents named him Mouton? What were they thinking?”

  “The name Mouton is interesting,” she says. “I like it better than ‘Eddie.’ ”

  I can’t decide whether to be embarrassed or mad or both. So what do I do? I say the dumbest thing ever said in The History of Responses to Girls:

  “Yeah, you’re right. My name is stupid.”

  Sandy, the bus driver, whistles. “Come on, lovebirds. I’ve got a schedule to keep,” he says, waving us up the steps.

  I walk up the first two steps, and Sandy looks up at me from underneath his gray hat, which is round in the front and flat on top. “Good to see you, Eddie.”

  I smile at Sandy and say, “Good to see you, too.”

  I drift down the aisle and stop short of the back row. Mouton lies down and stretches out across two seats. He sleeps every morning on the way to school. Most days he ends up snoring by the time we pull into the parking lot. I always think about getting revenge while he’s sleeping—taking his backpack and hiding it—but then I chicken out and end up looking out the window.

  I sling my backpack into a seat and fall in next to it.

  Gabriela sets her bag down and eases into the seat across the aisle. She reaches into her bag, pulls out an orange notebook, and places it next to her. The notebook matches the orange design on her red dress, like it’s part of her special first-day-of-school outfit.

  Gabriela clicks her pen, opens to the first page, and begins writing.

  “What’s with the notebook?” I ask her.

  She ignores me.

  I try again. “What’s with the—”

  “I hear you,” she says. “The notebook is a gift from Papa. It is to write down important words so I can learn better English.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “ ‘Pry’? What does this mean?”

&
nbsp; “It means ‘to stick your nose in someone’s business.’ ”

  “ ‘Pry.’ I will write that one down. Thank you, Eddie.”

  She begins writing it in her notebook, so I spell it for her. “P-R-Y.” She looks up and smiles, this time a full smile, like she’s suddenly comfortable around me.

  “How is the bump on your head?” she asks me.

  “It’s getting better. The swelling went down.” I point it out, showing her where the bump used to be. “See?”

  “Yes, I see.” She closes her notebook.

  “Thanks for the bag of ice. I think it helped a lot.”

  “You are welcome, Eddie. You are—how do you say it?—very sweet.”

  She giggles, covering her smile. Her cheeks turn pink.

  I take in a deep breath. The clothes I’m wearing—stained khaki shorts, Dad’s faded Black Crowes T-shirt, and sneakers with holes in them—suddenly feel like a brand-new first-day-of-school outfit, just like Gabriela’s.

  Maybe there’s hope for our friendship, after all.

  Gabriela goes back to writing in her notebook.

  I stare out the window, looking for cardinals and hawks and golden eagles. I don’t see any of those, but I hear a downy woodpecker in a tree. No one else is listening closely enough to hear it, so I just sit back and smile while letting the morning breeze hit my face.

  Finally the bus pulls into the school parking lot.

  Mouton wakes up and elbows his way to the front, saying he has to see the principal about his schedule.

  Gabriela tucks her notebook into her bag and starts down the aisle. I follow close behind, hoping she asks for help finding her locker or homeroom. Who better to ask than me? I’ve got experience in helping students from other countries.

  As we get to the front, Sandy sticks out his arm and stops me. “Eddie,” he says. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I say, stopping to listen.

  Gabriela walks down the steps without me, without her “pal” for the day, and she doesn’t even look back to say “bye.” What will she do without me? How will she find her way around? Who will tell her what words like “pry” mean?

  Sandy pokes his hat with his finger and it tilts up on his head. “How’s your mom doing?” he asks.

  “Okay.” I keep my response short.

  Gabriela is already out of sight. I’ll never see her again, because she’ll be whisked away by the popular girls, and the popular girls don’t ever talk to me.

  “You sure about that?” Sandy asks.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Okay. But remember, I’m here if you two need anything. I mean it. I’m right here, in the driver’s seat.”

  “Thanks, Sandy. I know where to find you.”

  Sandy grins. He’s not fully toothless, but he’s missing two teeth in his smile.

  Dad and Sandy were good friends. They talked a lot about birds, and Dad always brought Sandy leftovers from dinner. But Sandy didn’t show up at Dad’s funeral. Mom said it was wrong of Sandy to stand Dad up like that, so she hasn’t talked to him since then.

  I jump down the bus steps and walk toward school.

  There’s no chance of finding Gabriela in the first day chaos, so instead I search for my locker in the seventh-grade hallway. I rummage in my bag for a slip of paper with my locker combo scribbled on it. I give the lock a couple of turns and pull up on the handle.

  Right away something smells funny.

  Not funny, but sweet.

  It’s actually a nice smell, like Mom came by and de-germed my locker. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had. Mom does a lot of awesome things like that. Last year, on the first day of sixth grade, I opened my locker and found a note with a folded-up twenty-dollar bill in it. Mom said that it was my reward for making it to middle school.

  Thinking nothing else of the smell, I take my books, pencil, and bird journal out of my backpack and throw my backpack into the locker. My bag lands in a lump of translucent brown goo.

  I walk closer to the locker, stick my head inside, and smell.

  It’s honey.

  I pull my backpack from the locker, but it’s too late. The bottom of it is caked in stickiness.

  “Problem, honey?”

  It’s him again.

  Mouton.

  MOO-TAWN.

  He’s leaning against his locker on the other side of the hallway.

  “ ‘Look out, look out. I need to talk to the principal about my schedule.’ You really bought that bag of smoke, didn’t you, Bird Boy?”

  I wipe my hands across my shorts, but that only spreads the honey and makes everything twice as sticky.

  I throw my backpack down and take off toward the bathroom.

  Grabbing the bathroom door handle, I slam face-first into a sheet of red, otherwise known as Gabriela’s dress.

  “Eddie?” she says. “This is the girls’ bathroom.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I say.

  I turn around and hurry away, my face and neck and every other part of me becoming hot and tingly.

  “Eddie,” Gabriela calls after me. “What is wrong?”

  “Mouton!” I say, without turning around.

  Great. The first day of seventh grade is going just how I imagined it.

  Not.

  Blue-Ribbon Redemption

  I’ve been in science class for twenty minutes, and my dad was right, Mr. Dover is full of hot air. First off, he wears a navy-blue bow tie. Everyone knows that only people who think they’re really smart wear bow ties. The only good part about his bow tie is that it’s covered with little white ducks.

  Mr. Dover began class by talking about rocks and minerals, and then he started talking about a rock he found at his house, and the next thing you know he’s telling a story about an owl plucking a rodent from his property. I don’t mind stories about birds. I mean, owls are silent assassins and ninja-like hunters, so I can see why Mr. Dover talks about them. But every other sentence out of Mr. Dover’s mouth has to be about his property.

  Mr. Dover rolls up his sleeves and takes a green marker from the white-board tray. He writes “SCIENCE SYMPOSIUM” in capital letters on the white board.

  “West Plains has a reputation for producing world-class scientists,” he says. “Seventh graders, just like you, who have gone on to become leading experts in their fields. You have a chance to become one of them when you display your project at our annual event, the Seventh-Grade Science Symposium.”

  Last year, when I was in sixth grade, the whole grade was invited to tour the symposium during the last fifteen minutes, once the parents and judges had seen all the projects.

  If you ask me, the projects were pretty average.

  There were the usual inventions: automatic dog food dispenser, high-tech garden-watering system, and lap desk with lights and drink holders. One kid actually tried to create a real homework machine that only did math. The homework machine would’ve been cool, but every answer came out wrong.

  There were also creative projects: blindfolded roller-skating dogs, pickle jar binoculars, and diet candy that makes you lose weight.

  Then there were the real contenders: sheep and their abnormal family structure, microwavable shape-shifting Play-Doh, the social networking agenda of flowers, and the winner—professional sports and its influence on the lightning bug’s life cycle.

  There was only one project about birds, but it was sloppily thrown together—probably the night before. It compared the red-bellied woodpecker with the red-headed woodpecker, which is the most ridiculous and most obvious bird project ever done, if you could really call it a project.

  When my dad was in seventh grade, he won the blue ribbon. His symposium project proved that the number of sharp-shinned hawks in a given territory negatively correlates to the number of songbirds. Basically, the more sharp-shinned hawks, the fewer songbirds, because the hawks eat them all.

  If I can just find that golden eagle, and win the blue ribbon—like Dad—then m
aybe everyone will believe Dad actually saw it—that he really was telling the truth.

  Mr. Dover caps the green marker, and the classroom door opens. Standing there is Mrs. Hughes, with her arm around Gabriela!

  I smile big and wave at her. She smiles back, but doesn’t wave.

  “Mr. Dover,” Mrs. Hughes says, “this is our newest seventh grader, Gabriela.”

  Mr. Dover steps forward, drumming the green marker in his hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Hughes.”

  Mrs. Hughes pats Gabriela on the arm and walks out, closing the door behind her.

  “Gabriela,” Mr. Dover says, “we were just discussing the science symposium.”

  “I have been told it is a big event,” she says.

  “You hear that, folks? Even our newest student knows about the symposium.”

  Gabriela smiles, her cheeks turning pink.

  “But for now,” Mr. Dover says, “we’re going to move on to our first unit. For the first few weeks we’ll be studying birds.”

  My heart flutters and flaps its wings. I want to stand up and shout “Yes!” so the entire school can hear me. But instead I rest my hand on top of my bird journal, which is sitting on top of my science book.

  “I hate birds,” Mouton says.

  I glare at Mouton, my eyes telling him to BE QUIET!

  Mr. Dover ignores him and keeps talking. “A bird-watcher is a special kind of person. Most of the time they live a solitary life, one that revolves around their subjects. It takes patience, commitment, and compassion to understand the full existence of a bird.”

  I feel like Mr. Dover wrote this lesson for me!

  Mr. Dover straightens his bow tie, and the little white ducks move (fly) up and down. “Does anyone know the three rules to bird-watching?” he asks.

  I shoot my hand into the air. So does Mouton.

  I’m pretty sure that Mouton doesn’t know the difference between a canary and a crow. He definitely doesn’t know the Rules of Birding.

  Mr. Dover calls on me. “Eddie, go ahead and tell us.”

  “I prefer the term ‘birding’, not ‘bird-watching.’ ‘Birding’ includes everything: adaptations, calls, nesting and feeding habits, migration patterns, mating, not just watching birds.”