“Okay. Just know I’m here for you. I got eight whole minutes before basketball pickup.”
“Thanks, Rodney.” I go down the three sloshy steps, and I’m out in the cold.
Rodney calls down through the open door. “Hey, next time you see Bauer, tell him to get on the purple…Wait, no, don’t tell him that.” He pauses, then makes a fist and says, “Keep up the good fight!”
* * *
“Want a grilled cheese?” Murphy asks. He’s standing at the stove holding a spatula.
“Yeah. Thanks.” I look into the pot. “Tomato soup too? Chef Murphy.”
Murphy smiles. “Yeah, right. All I can make is grilled cheese.”
“Not true. Once you made toast.”
“You got me.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“I actually only work six days a week. Can you believe it? It’s my night off.”
“And on the seventh day he made grilled cheese,” I say. Murphy smiles and lays another piece of bread in the pan and it sizzles. “So are you gonna play baseball or what?”
He sighs. “Nope.”
“Mom really wants you to. It would mean a lot to her.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Because, Justin. I can’t just think like you and Mom. It’s different now. I have to think like Dad. And Dad took care of his family first.”
“Not really!” I yell, surprising both of us. “He got drunk and got hit by a Christmas trolley. Do you know how embarrassing that is?” Murphy blinks at me. “Have you ever gone to seventh grade after your dad got killed by a Christmas trolley driving twenty miles an hour?” Murphy waits. “Well I have, and it sucks!”
“He didn’t mean for it to happen,” Murphy says quietly.
“Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. But it happened. And if this family’s in trouble, that’s Dad’s fault. Not yours. Just play baseball, Murphy!” I start to cry. I can’t help it. Actually, maybe I can help it, but I don’t try. “Please play baseball!”
Murphy turns his head and wipes a few tears away so I won’t see them.
“Just play!” I sob. My chest starts to catch and heave like a car breaking down.
Murphy pulls me to him and bear hugs me. I want so bad to sit on the bleachers with Mom and watch Murphy play ball. I’ve never wanted anything more in my entire life, which makes me realize that Laura Ingalls Wilder possibly wasn’t so lame for wanting an orange for Christmas. Life is crazy that way. Probably especially on the prairie.
“I wish I could, Monk,” Murphy says. “Maybe next year, okay?” He pats my back. “Maybe next year.”
* * *
I’m back on the bench at the place where Dad died, staring at the frozen lake. Before Grandpa stopped talking, all his conversations were about birds. He had a stack of bird books on his nightstand and Dad strung up like ten bird feeders on a wire outside his window at the nursing home so Grandpa could watch birds all day. Going to visit him was the worst, because what do you say about a nuthatch except “Yep. There he is.” And what would I say about these ice houses in their little rows except “Yep. There they are.”
“Hello,” a voice says. I look up and stare. It’s Benny H., the most famous man in Wicapi. Our only homeless man. I mean, technically he’s not homeless. (They should put that on a bumper sticker. Wicapi! A town where not even the homeless man is homeless!) He has a bedroom at his sister’s house, but Benny H. doesn’t like to stay there. He likes the streets. And the library. He always sits at a table in the nonfiction section, where I only go if I have to do a report for school. I heard he used to be a history professor, but I guess something happened. The bakery gives him one cup of coffee and one doughnut for free every morning. I don’t know if he has any other deals in town. I don’t know why he wanders around either, but he’s been doing it since way before I was born, so no one bothers to question it anymore. Benny H. just is Benny H.
“Hello,” I say back.
“Mind if I sit?”
“No, I don’t mind.” I scoot over one centimeter, since I’m already at the end of the bench, but it seems like the polite thing to do. Benny H. sits down, and his body fills up most of the empty space. His winter beard’s gotten long, and he’s got his black top hat on. The edges of his ears are red, and his hands too. I’ve never been this close to him, except once in the library when I reached behind him to get a book on the snow leopard. He smells like smoke and leaves and baby powder. I look around to see if anyone’s watching, but we’re the only ones out. Which figures, since it’s probably twenty degrees. “Um, Benny H.?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“This isn’t, like, your bench, is it? ’Cause I can move.”
Benny H. laughs like a giant. I’m serious. Like the Jolly Green Giant statue on the way to Iowa might laugh if he wasn’t, you know, a statue. Benny H.’s hair is matted and his coat is faded but that laugh comes from somewhere else. “No, these benches belong to the Town of Wicapi,” he says. “They are equally yours and mine.” I nod. I like the way he says “equally.” “Not much to see with the ice on,” he adds.
“I like to picture the fish swimming around underneath, doing everything they normally do. Like the ice doesn’t even faze them.” Oh, jeez. Shut up, Justin!
Benny H. turns and looks at me. His eyes are very green, like the algae in the lake in the summertime. “Is that so?” I shrug. “Did you know this lake was sacred to the Dakota?” He coughs for a few seconds, then pulls out a dark blue handkerchief and spits into it. “Used to be burial mounds all around here.” He waves his hand at the lake. “Right where we’re sitting.”
“No way.”
“True. Truth.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“To the mounds?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we dug ’em up, of course. Got ourselves some souvenirs. Beads, pipes, bones. A real-life treasure hunt!” My stomach starts to feel like a slinky gathering speed down the stairs. “Then we plowed through ’em,” Benny H. says. “Needed the farmland, ya know. Logged the trees. Needed those too. Built houses and roads and a whole town right on top of those holy bones. Laid down train tracks to Minneapolis. You go to school. You know the drill.”
“Yeah.” I go to school. But I’d never heard anything like this.
“You know Breezy Point?” Benny H. asks, and I nod. “That’s where Spirit Knob used to be, right at the tip of a mound that reached sixty feet up.” Benny H. looks up and so do I, like the mound might still be there, in spirit, in the sky. “It was the most sacred spot on the lake to the Dakota—where the lake got its power.”
“What happened to it?” I ask, even though I don’t want to know. At all.
“Leveled. In 1884. For a country club.”
I look over at the hill sloping up by the baseball diamond, where we’d sit and watch Dad play softball when I was little. He was the right fielder, with the lake always tossing behind him. He had a strong arm. I can still picture him there, or his outline at least, like a ghost. And all around him I can see Dakota ghosts, ducking softballs while Dad’s team warms up.
* * *
Of all the rooms in Minnetonka Junior High School, the cafeteria is the worst. The whisper words and sticker smiles and stares are everywhere. It’s like the hallway times a billion. At least in the hallway you can keep moving. In the cafeteria you’re just stuck. Like in the penalty box. Waiting for the bell to end it.
“Clam chowder day is the best,” Phuc says, and rips open his pack of oyster crackers. Phuc, on the other hand, is perfectly happy in the cafeteria because Phuc is perfectly happy everywhere. He’s like one of those catfish in Texas. When their pond dried up, they just evolved to grow feet and walked to the next pond. If I was a catfish and my pond dried up, I would definitely die.
“Are you serious?” I
ask. “It’s, like, literally the grossest soup ever.”
“Nuh-uh,” Phuc says. “Split pea is.”
“You win.”
“Anyway, I don’t eat the soup. I’m working on my record.”
“Oh. Right.”
Phuc tosses up the crackers one by one and catches them in his open mouth. He misses on number seven. “Dang it!”
“What’s your record again?” I ask.
“Eight. I’m gonna get all ten by the end of the year. Mark my words.”
“You want my pack?”
“No. That’s cheating.” He looks down sadly at his clam chowder and puts his hands together like praying. “You have defeated me again, clam chowder. You are a worthy opponent.” His mouth keeps moving after he stops talking, like the Japanese ninja movies he loves so much that are always out of sync. I smile. I can’t help it. “So are you gonna ask Jenni-with-an-i to the dance?” he asks.
My stomach leaps into my chest, just hearing her name. How ridiculous. “Why would I?”
“She gave you a heart-o-gram. So. Your move.” Phuc takes a bite of cheesy bread. It’s the only thing you can eat on clam chowder day. Besides the crackers. And Phuc eats the tapioca pudding, but just the thought of those little balls makes me want to vomit.
“How do you know she gave me a heart-o-gram?”
Phuc swallows. “Dude, do you even listen when you walk through the halls?”
“No. When I walk through the halls, I do the opposite of listening.” What I do: Pick a point, far away, and stare at it until I get there. Then pick another point. “Are you going to the dance?”
“No way,” Phuc says. “There’s a total lunar eclipse that night, and my mom just set up our new telescope.”
“You’re the biggest nerd alive.”
“Thanks.”
“Can I watch with you?”
“Sure, second-biggest nerd.”
Mitchell walks by and bangs into my shoulder. “Sorry,” he says. “Not.”
We wait in silence while he walks away. Then I whisper to Phuc, “What’s with that dude? He’s been doing crap like that ever since I came back to school.”
“You seriously don’t know?”
“No. Do you?”
Phuc shakes his head like he can’t imagine what it’s like to be me, living under a rock. But it’s more like living in a cloud. I see outlines of things, but it’s hard to focus on them. “He likes Jenni-with-an-i, but she turned him down because, obviously, she likes you.”
“Wait. How do you know this?”
“He gave her this super lame teddy bear for Christmas, and she, like, didn’t want to take it and give him the wrong idea, I guess? I don’t know. I heard it was super awkward.”
“Great.” I don’t realize I’m staring at Mitchell until he catches my eye from over by the trash can, and smirks.
* * *
Mr. Bauer made the rookie mistake of setting packs of matches on all the tables and then leaving the room, so Mike is lighting matches one after another after another, letting each one burn until the very last second when the flame almost touches his thumb. Then a bunch of other kids start doing it too, and all the tiny fires all over the room remind me of my first day back at school after Dad died, the day the Iraqi army blew up the oil fields in Kuwait.
There were six hundred oil wells in flames, some burning black smoke and some white, so the whole scene was a bunch of fires spread out everywhere, and the ground in between them was black with orange in the cracks. It looked like the whole world was on fire. It looked like a horror movie. Like the apocalypse. It was broad daylight, but the sun was a shadow behind the smoke. A soldier came on TV and said, “It looks like how I envision hell. The country of Kuwait is burning.” I missed Dad so much at that moment I felt like I was burning too.
Then Mom switched the TV off and said, “Time to go.”
“Where?”
“School.”
“But it’s a Tuesday,” I told her. “Don’t you think I should start on a Monday? Shouldn’t you call first?”
Mom walked over to the couch, where I was staring at the empty TV screen but still seeing the choked-out sun, and put both hands on my shoulders. “Justin, sometimes you just gotta jump in. You know, like at the lake, how it’s better to run off the end of the dock instead of sticking your toe in first?”
“The lake is not the same as seventh grade.”
But I went. What choice did I have? And those fires stuck with me all week. I saw the halls and the kids and the classrooms and everything, but it was like there was smoke all around them, making everything hazy. And here’s something even freakier: they’re still fighting those same fires. And they have no idea how long it will take. Yesterday on the news a reporter said there is “no timeline for completion.” And I knew exactly what she meant.
* * *
When I first wake up, before real life comes back, I think Mom and Dad are in the kitchen because I hear the voices parents use when something’s wrong but the kids are asleep. I walk out of my room, rubbing my eyes. The sun is a pale orange stripe behind the trees, and it’s not Mom and Dad (obviously). It’s Mom and Murphy. “Hey, Monk,” Murphy says.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“Car won’t start. Go back to bed. It’s early.”
I sit down at the table. “No, I’m good. Can I help?”
Mom smiles. “Nothing to do. We’re just figuring out how to get everyone where they need to go. You want some eggs?”
“No. I’ll have cereal.” Mom goes to the cabinet, but I get up. “I can get it,” I tell her, and my voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
She raises both hands, like surrendering. “Fine.”
She and Murphy keep talking, about Mom’s boss, who thinks he runs the world instead of a pharmacy, and Murphy’s three tardies already this quarter, and maybe Mom can work late to make up for it. Maybe she can get a ride with Brenda. Maybe Jake can cover Murphy’s shift tonight. Which tow truck was the one Jerry said was such a rip-off? I crunch my Frosted Flakes loud, trying not to listen.
They don’t talk about the real problem, which is paying for the tow truck and whatever’s wrong with the car. Because One day at a time. That’s what Mom says now. When we had to pick the cheapest coffin, she said, One day at a time. When the hospital bill came, she said, One day at a time. When she slipped on the ice and wrapped her ankle in an Ace bandage and stood on it for the next eight hours counting pills and it swelled up like a water balloon, she said, One day at a time. When Murphy holds the phone to his chest and tells Mom it’ll be eighty bucks to tow the car, I know what’s coming. I run to my room and slam the door, just so I won’t have to hear it.
* * *
Figures. Jenni’s walking with five other girls. Five! Why do girls do that? Why are they never alone?
“Hi,” she says, passing by.
“Hi.” I lean against the wall and watch her keep walking. I’m never gonna talk to her. And why should I? She deserves someone better. Someone with clothes not from Kmart. Someone who knows the score of the North Stars game last night. Or who they played or if they even played at all. Someone who’s not afraid of a school dance. But then her friends turn in to a classroom and she’s still walking. Alone. I start running. Everyone’s staring at me, but I’ve learned how to look straight ahead. She’s getting closer and closer. She is my faraway point.
“Hey.” I’m out of breath when I get to her.
“Hey. You okay?”
“Yeah. I just…I saw you, so I…ran.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Jenni.”
“Yeah?” She stops walking and turns toward me, and her eyes get a little bigger.
“I can’t ask you to the dance.” Stupid, stupid.
“Okaaaay.” Her cheeks turn a
little pink, and she looks around to see who’s listening.
“I’m sorry. I can’t explain it. I just…can’t.” In my head, my fists are punching my brain. Kicking the crap out of it. She turns to go. Do something! Anything! “But, um. Do you like pizza?”
“I mean, I’m not an alien,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Yes. I like pizza.”
“Oh. Great. So, would you, like, want to go get some sometime? With me?”
She smiles and shrugs. “Sure.”
“Thank you!”
Jenni laughs. “You know something, Justin? You’re a unique person.”
“Thanks?”
“You’re welcome.”
* * *
If there was a volume meter that measured houses, Phuc’s would be a ninety-nine and mine would be a five. (Only because Axl Rose meows so much. Otherwise it would be a zero. Okay, maybe a one.) You would not believe how loud little sisters are. The good part is that Phuc has his own room. All three of his sisters have to share, and their room looks like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol exploded in the middle of it, then a bunch of ponies pranced in for a drink and puked up glitter. It’s a nightmare. Phuc’s room is small, but it has a glow-in-the-dark universe on the ceiling and NASA posters all over the walls and an iguana named Copernicus in a tank. Plus, Phuc’s room is the only one that goes straight to the roof.
We climb out the window, and Phuc’s dad already set out two lawn chairs with blankets in them, next to the telescope. Can you imagine? A dad setting out lawn chairs with blankets in them?
“Check it out,” Phuc says. “It already started.” The moon is massive and white and full in the cold sky, like the Georgia O’Keeffe painting in the art room, the one of a blooming white flower. A shadow is covering a sliver of one side.
“What’s happening again?” I ask.
Phuc’s bent down, looking through the telescope. “It’s called a lunar eclipse,” he says slowly.
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