I pick my head up. “No, you didn’t.”
“I did! She loves animals, right? Like, really loves them. Takes in every stray that passes by. Once she even picked up an earthworm! Little dude was burning up on the sidewalk, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s nice. She’s going to put him in the grass.’ Nope! She carried him home and made him a perfect earthworm habitat and nursed him back to health. It only took an hour, but she kept him three days, just to be sure.”
I smile, half because I could listen to Rodney talk all day and half because he’s going to have a nice wife.
“So anyway, now she’s got this turtle, and he’s been through something. I don’t know what. Had a crack in his shell and kept his head in all the time. All the time. I didn’t even think he had a head. And you know turtles, they bite, so I kept my distance. But Kimberly’s got him eating lettuce right out of her hand! She said he’s resilient, and I said, ‘He reminds me of this kid on my junior high route. Justin.’ ”
He takes his eyes off the road when he says my name, just for a second, to smile at me in the rearview mirror, and I look down so he can’t see me blushing. I didn’t even know he remembered my name.
“ ‘He’s had some bad luck in his life, but he’s not giving in,’ ” Rodney says. “ ‘He’s resilient. Just like Zippy.’ ”
Now I laugh the soap bubble laugh. “Thanks, I guess.”
Rodney nods.
“And congratulations.”
Rodney points at me in the mirror. “Right on!”
* * *
“Goal!” Murphy yells, and shoots both hands in the air like he scored it himself. “Goal, goal, goal!” He lifts me up and shakes me up and down, and I’m laughing but my teeth are banging together, which is a very weird but somehow awesome feeling. “Goal!” Murphy yells again, and he starts high-fiving everyone around him he can reach. Even when everything kind of settles down, there’s still an electric current in the crowd, and Murphy’s bouncing on his feet like he’s on a Pogo Ball.
“Can you believe these seats?” he asks, and his face is lit with everything—the white of the ice, and the lights, and the energy around us, and the white of the Ns on the North Stars’ jerseys, and maybe even the white of the stars outside, because Murphy is channeling everything bright, like a magnet. Pulling light to him. Something inside him is lit up too, like how the Dakota turned from stars to people but must have still been partly stars. Murphy. My Star Person.
“They’re so close,” I say.
“I know! When Rob gave me the tickets, I had no idea they’d be this good.”
“I still can’t believe you brought me.” I heard his shoes pounding up the stairs and when he burst into the apartment, yelling my name and holding up the tickets, I said, “Don’t you want to take one of your friends?” And Murphy said, “That’s exactly what I asked my boss, but he said, ‘Murphy, I’m proud of you. I know you’re dealing with a lot of crap, but you’re keeping it together. You’re on time. You do your work. You smile at the customers. You deserve this more than anyone else I know.’ ” Murphy ran a hand through his hair and looked at the wall then. He’s not used to bragging on himself. “That’s true,” I told him, and he said, “Well, ditto all that to you, Monk.”
Murphy reaches over and messes up my hair but keeps his eyes on the game. “You’re my good luck monk. Gotta bring you.”
It’s third period already, and Murphy keeps bouncing on his invisible ball, turning circles sometimes, change jingling in his pocket, whispering, “Just gotta hold ’em.” I keep my hand around my green rabbit’s foot in my coat pocket. I grabbed it from my sock drawer at the last second.
Then, the buzzer.
“We won?” Murphy looks at me, stunned. The score’s been 3–1 the whole period, but Murphy really is surprised, because he stopped expecting anything good since Dad died. I know because I’ve been doing the same thing. “We won!” Murphy says again.
“We won!” I tell him, nodding. “We totally won!”
“We won! We made the playoffs!” Murphy yells. He lifts me up and shakes me again, and he’s laughing and I’m laughing, and the whole stadium is laughing and cheering and jumping in a big happy roar. We’ve all been losing all season. Murphy, me, the North Stars, the fans. And now we’re all—what’s the word? Incredulous. Everyone is hugging and jumping and pumping their fists in the air and spilling their beer. Murphy’s shaking his head, still unbelieving, grinning at the players circling and waving and scooping up flowers from the ice.
The goalie tosses the puck into the stands, and time does this weird thing. It slows down, but not like slow motion, just like a freeze, a stillness. So I can hold it in my mind. Preserve it. And I understand why Dad wrote poems and Benny H. lives outside of time and Mr. Lindberg says we will never know everything. Because who could have predicted this? What mathematician could have looked at these stats—all the lost games, Dad’s body lying limp in front of a trolley, Mom counting pills on a bad ankle, Murphy frying chicken instead of playing baseball, and me getting pinned to the wall like a dead butterfly—what mathematician could have looked at all that and said, “Win. I predict a win.”
Then the moment speeds past and I cheer for the North Stars too, because tonight, it’s not so bad to be on Earth.
On the front page of the Star Tribune there’s a color photograph of Kurdish refugees on the side of a mountain in northern Iraq. They’re so packed together that at first I think they’re part of the mountain, like some kind of flower or grass. I read the article underneath, about where they’re going and why, but nothing sinks in because I can’t stop staring at that picture. Every time I look at it, I’m surprised that people can stand that close together and still move. That people can look so much like part of the landscape. We never learned anything like that in art class.
I’m still staring at it when Mom comes into the kitchen. “Hey,” she says. “You still here? You’d better hustle or you’re gonna miss the bus.” So I tear out the picture, gently, and Mom watches but doesn’t ask why, just like she didn’t ask why when I begged her not to cancel the newspaper last week. She just said into the phone, “You know what? Just keep it like it is. I changed my mind.” Then she hung up and smiled at me.
The bus is pulling up when I get to the corner, out of breath. I’m the last one on, and Phuc is the second-to-last because he was waiting for me a few steps from the bus stop, toward my apartment. It’s the kind of thing I notice now—the space between me and other people, if someone turns away or steps closer, and how they stand. Or if they’re like Phuc, who stands with me like he always did. We get on the bus and all of a sudden I realize Phuc probably waited in that spot, a few steps toward my apartment, through all those frozen weeks in January until I finally showed back up, and he nodded at me, like always.
We sit down, and Phuc takes the picture out of my hand. “What’s this?”
“Kurdish refugees.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah.”
Phuc studies the picture. “It makes me wonder about my parents,” he says.
“Really?”
“Yeah, because they never told us how they got here. Like, to this country.”
“You’re kidding me.”
Phuc shakes his head. “You know how Mr. Bauer still uses that old slide projector?”
“Yeah.”
Phuc keeps talking to me but looking at the picture. “And how when there’s a slide missing the screen goes white until he clicks to the next one? That’s like my parents. There’s all these pictures of their childhoods in Vietnam. Then a picture of them standing next to the university sign in Saigon. Then a blank white space. Then a picture of their first winter in Minnesota. They were so cold. There’s a picture of my dad standing in the snow with no coat on, holding up one foot to show off his new boots.” Phuc laughs. “Super lame moon boots, but
he loved them. He’s told me a billion times about buying those boots.” He hands the newspaper picture back to me. “But nothing about the white space in between.”
“My dad never talked about Vietnam either,” I say. I never thought about Phuc’s dad being like mine. About them having the same white space, in between, in Vietnam. Were they on different sides, or not really? Mr. Sorenson said there were actually all kinds of sides. “History is more like a prism,” he reminded us, “than a piece of paper.”
What would’ve happened if our dads had met? Like, really met. More than nodding to each other at parent night or in the hardware store. Or maybe they never really met on purpose. Maybe they looked at each other and knew that all the missing pieces had to stay in the white space, where nobody could find them.
* * *
When the principal calls my name at the assembly, I don’t hear it because I’m thinking about this: What if Phuc’s dad and my dad actually crossed paths in Vietnam? Like, what if they walked right by each other in the street? And what if at that moment they looked at each other, just for a second? And what if a bunch of years later they passed each other at Wicapi Elementary and did the same thing? Is that what déjà vu is? Just the universe connecting you to yourself in another dimension?
Kenny Olson elbows me in the ribs. “Dude!” he says. He’s grinning at me, and I never noticed before how many freckles he has, or how they look like stars tossed across his face. And I wonder why people make fun of freckles when they look so cool. “That’s you!” Kenny says, and jabs me again. “They called your name!”
“For what?” I whisper, and Kenny laughs.
“National History Project. You won for the whole district. You’re going to State!” He slaps me on the back. “Congratulations!”
I stand up at the very same moment that Brandon stands, shoots his fist into the air, and yells, “Cease-Fire!” which punches a bolt of happiness through my body that makes me laugh out loud. My legs are noodles like when Mitchell held me against the wall, but in a good way. I make it up the stairs, and the stage lights are five hundred degrees. Principal Berglund shakes my hand. His face is huge and bright like the white-flower moon, and his handshake is firm the way Dad taught me to do it. “Congratulations, son! So proud of you!” he booms, a human bass drum.
Someone takes a picture, and I look out and see all the faces turned to me, smiling. All the hands are clapping, and all these people, everyone in this whole lunchroom that still smells like green beans, are cheering. For me. I can see Jenni nodding and Phuc giving me the thumbs-up, and Mom standing in back in front of the windows with her red pharmacy vest on and her cheeks pink like she just ran in, just made it. And Murphy’s next to her, waving and whooping more than he did at the North Stars game, which I didn’t think was possible. The afternoon sun is behind them, lighting up the edges of their hair, so they look like the angels in the children’s Bible Pastor Steve gave all of us on first communion.
I walk to the podium and Mr. Sorenson hands me my certificate. “Congratulations, Justin,” he says. “Well done.” I turn to go back down the steps, but Mr. Sorenson says “Hold on a minute” into the microphone, and everyone gets quiet. “I have a confession to make. When Justin first told me his topic, I had doubts. I wasn’t sure if it fit the criteria. But this young man turned in the most detailed, well-researched National History Project that I have ever seen in my seventeen years at this school.”
The audience goes crazy again, and I look at the floor. I don’t know where else to look! It’s too much! And Mr. Sorenson keeps going! “And Justin’s project also reminded me of one very important thing. And that is, how critical it is to know our own history. To know our own land and our own people. All of the people who have called this place home. His project reminded me of how powerful that knowledge can be, and how lost we are without it. So I wanted to take a minute to say thank you to Justin.” I look up, and he smiles, perfect white beard, eyes twinkling, history-teacher-Santa-Claus. “Thank you for taking a risk on this project. And for reminding us to honor the history all around us, every day.”
* * *
I’ve biked up and down Water Street twice, and through a bunch of side streets. I went down by the beach and up the hill by the playground and back to the softball field, and past the corner bar and glassy apartments and paper shop where Mom got Dad’s stationery for his grocery lists. I circled the bench and the train tracks. I’ve been to the library and the bakery, and now I’m back at the library.
“Still didn’t see him?” the librarian asks, and I shake my head. She waves me over, and when I get to the desk, she whispers, “You know where his sister lives?”
“No,” I whisper back.
She looks around. “I’ll give you the address because I know you’re friends, but don’t share it, and you didn’t get it from me.”
I nod, fast, like Phuc when he solves a math problem. “Thank you so much,” I tell her.
She writes it on my hand with a pen, and it turns out Benny H.’s sister lives only two blocks away, in a little white house with a bright blue door that I’ve passed about five million times in my life. The doorstep always has tons of pumpkins on Halloween, representing every human/pumpkin emotion. I knock, and a woman answers who is better dressed than Benny H. and a little older, but has the exact same green algae eyes.
“Hi. Um. My name’s Justin, and I was looking for Benny H.? I wanted to give him this.” I hold up my National History Project certificate.
“What is it?”
“It’s…a certificate.” But it doesn’t look like it did in the lunchroom. It looks like a piece of paper with a gold sticker. Like they gave us in elementary school for perfect attendance. “It’s for a project he helped me with, and I just wanted to…give it to him.”
She looks at me the way Benny H. does, like she sees not just the outside of me (open coat with broken zipper, hair that needs to be cut, Murphy’s old sneakers one size too big), but everything inside too. All my blood and thoughts and dreams and past and future and connections to the universe. All the superstrings holding me in this spot. But it’s not the kind of look that makes me squirm, like when Mrs. Peterson asks me for a salient point. I don’t even look down. I just look back.
“Come on in,” she says.
Benny H. is sitting on the couch. His lips are red and chapped and his forehead’s pale without his hat, and for some reason, inside the house he looks so much older. He looks like an old man. He’s looking at the wall, at a spot where nothing is, muttering a little. “Benedict Henry. Someone here to see you,” his sister says, her hands on my shoulders. “Go ahead,” she tells me, and I walk toward him.
Benny H. turns. “Hey!” he says. Then he coughs and coughs. His sister steps forward, but he waves her back and she disappears into the kitchen. I wait, frozen. He keeps coughing and spitting into his handkerchief. “Sorry, sorry!” he booms, too loud, like he’s using his voice to prove himself. “What have you got there?”
I hand him the certificate, and he tips it toward the window to catch the fading light. “I won,” I tell him. “For my National History Project. The one on the Dakota. I won for the whole district. I’m going to State.”
Benny H.’s eyes shine. “You did it. Wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful.” He shakes his head. “But I’m not surprised. You’re a smart kid.”
“Yeah, well. I had a good teacher.”
Benny H. laughs his Jolly Green Giant laugh, then coughs some more. He tries to hand my certificate back, but I say, “Keep it. I wouldn’t have gotten it without you.”
He smiles at me, the big one where I can see the gap in his teeth, and my brain freezes this moment too, like at the North Stars game, so I’ll have it later, when I need it. “Thank you,” Benny H. says. “I will cherish this. I surely will.”
* * *
“I just don’t get how you can order strawberr
y when there’s chocolate,” I tell Murphy. “Or cookies and cream. Or anything that tastes like anything better than strawberry.”
Murphy shrugs. “I like strawberry. Besides, I’m paying, so quit complaining.”
“Good point.”
We sit on the bench with our backs to the ice cream shop and our fronts to the movie theater and the lake and the park. We’re at the corner of the whole town. The sun is weirdly strong for April, and everyone’s in shorts with their pale legs hanging out, wearing sunglasses and smiling. Even the dogs look happy. I take a deep breath and try to suck it all in—the sunshine, Murphy next to me, the blue water and white waves, and the old ghosts too.
On the bench next to us, a dad is sitting in between two little girls, telling jokes, and they’re shrieking with laughter, like Phuc’s sisters. The dad kisses one on the forehead. He brushes her hair back under her headband with his thumb.
“Murphy?” I ask.
“Dude. Lay off about the strawberry. It’s good. I like it. Just enjoy the moment, man.” Murphy’s wearing sunglasses with shiny orange lenses and has picked up the habit of saying “man” all the time. I think it’s because a new kid from California started working at KFC. Murphy also now says he’s stoked when something’s awesome and stopped cutting his hair, which is so long it’s curling at the tips.
“It’s not about the strawberry,” I tell him. “Which is not good. But whatever. It’s about Dad.”
Murphy doesn’t change his expression. At least I don’t think he does. I can’t see his eyes, so it’s hard to tell. He licks his ice cream. He’s sitting back with his right ankle propped on his left knee. Chilling, he would say. “What about him?”
“Do you ever feel cheated?” I ask.
“By Dad?”
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