Once You Know This

by Emily Blejwas

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Emily Blejwas

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Jori van der Linde

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524700973 (hc) — ISBN 978524700980 (lib. bdg.) ebook ISBN 9781524700997

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Every day Mr. McInnis tells us to imagine our future.

  He’s been saying it since the first day of school and we’re already past Halloween and it’s still not working. The boys imagine themselves in the NBA and fight over if you have to be for the Bulls when you live in Chicago. I don’t know if any of them believe it or if they’re just pretending they won’t end up like all their brothers and cousins who don’t make it to the NBA or to college or even past the end of the block, where they huddle on the corners like cold pigeons.

  The girls don’t imagine the NBA. Girls with good voices like Marisol want to be singers, but the rest of us can’t think of much. We say we won’t have babies young like our moms but deep down we’re scared we might.

  But Mr. McInnis keeps telling us, like he doesn’t know what else to say.

  I feel bad for him because he’s so nice and it’s his first year being a teacher and he came all the way here from Mississippi. But at least he didn’t end up in the high school where they lock you in class until the bell rings.

  • • •

  Mom’s waiting for me after school wearing a skirt and lipstick, which makes my stomach drop because she only wears skirts and lipstick when Jack is home. I used to wear skirts until I met Jack and now I only wear pants ’cause I don’t want to do anything he likes. I don’t call him Dad and he doesn’t like that either.

  “How was school?” Mom asks.

  “Good.”

  “Good.” She tries to turn Tommy’s stroller but it gets stuck in a crack because one of its wheels always limps behind the others, like Patches’s paw the day we found him. I bend down and pull the wheel over. “Thanks,” Mom says. Then she pushes it fast over the rest of the cracks because we have to get to WIC on time. WIC stands for Women, Infants, and Children, but Mom will use our vouchers to buy big, ugly blocks of cheese to make lasagna for Jack. The noodles and sauce are cheap but the cheese is expensive.

  • • •

  WIC is packed because it always is. All the moms are exhausted and all the kids are bored and all the chairs are hard. The women behind the window pretend they can’t see us and act like they work in a regular office. Drinking coffee and laughing on their phones and shopping for sweaters on the computer. Tommy’s whining in his stroller because he just learned to crawl and wants to get down. Some of the moms let their babies crawl on the floor but not my mom.

  I pull out my notebook to do my homework and it flips to the first page from the first day of school when Mr. McInnis made us write as the first thing Imagine my future. That’s the only thing on the page. It makes me sad that we let him down. That not one of us can imagine the kind of future he means when he says that. That we all know we’ll be on the street corner and at WIC for eternity.

  • • •

  The grocery store took so long and the bus ride even longer so it’s black dark when we get home and too late for lasagna. Jack’s nowhere in sight. Tommy and I are starving. My great-grandma Daisy is sitting in the living room with no lights on. “Sorry, Granny!” Mom says. She switches on the lamp with the sticky knob even though she’s carrying Tommy and a million grocery bags and lots of them have cans. Granny stares at us like waking up from a dream and seeing some other world than our living room with the cat-clawed couch and the crooked left blind. “Can you sit with her, Brit? While I make dinner?” Her lipstick’s rubbed off in the middle but still around the edges like it’s trying to hang on.

  I sit next to Granny and talk my math problems out loud because voices seem to calm her even though she hardly talks at all. When she first got here she could still make sentences. Most of them were a bunch of mixed-up words that almost made sense, like those puzzles where you have to unscramble the letters to make the word. But now, almost nothing. Granny leans back against the couch cushions and watches my pencil scratch across the paper and the eraser dust fly into the air.

  • • •

  Mom’s nervous walking to school even though it’s seven-thirty in the morning and the sun is so bright no one could get away with anything. Plus there are plenty of moms and grandmas and some dads walking their kids to school, too, and two crossing guards, and even a policeman leaning against the hood of his car rubbing his black gloves together. But Mom’s always nervous walking. Jack says it’s ’cause she’s a country mouse and never got used to the city but I don’t think the city is supposed to feel like this.

  She stops all of a sudden and my stomach floats because Mom never stops. “Is that really you?” she asks. Laila’s stumbling onto her stoop, which is covered in leaves because she doesn’t believe in raking. She always says she’s waiting for the wind to do it and Mom says You’ll spend your whole life waiting, girl. Laila’s wearing silver sunglasses shiny as tinfoil and there’s still glitter on her cheeks from last night. She put some on me once and Mom rubbed it right off with a baby wipe. It was embarrassing.

  Laila mashes a blue ski cap down on her head but her curls are still everywhere. Bobby pins are hanging from some and all of them shimmer in the sun like new pennies. One time Marisol’s cousin called my hair mouse-brown and that’s exactly how I feel next to Laila. Like a small, plain mouse. “Miles has a doctor’s appointment at eight,” she says. “Eight! Why would anyone be open that early?” She digs around in her purse and drops her keys in the leaves.

  Mom bends down to Miles, whose scarf is wound around him so many times he looks like a mummy but he’s wearing flip-flops. He stares at Mom with rainy-window eyes. “Don’t worry,” she tells him. “Next year, I’ll walk you to kindergarten.”

  Laila’s trying to light a cigarette while kicking leaves around looking for her keys. “I’ll hold you to it,” she tells Mom, and the cigarette bounces in her mouth. “Hey, you hear about Chitter-Chatter? You know him, right? Walks that little brown dog with half a tail and picks up trash with a stick? Last night a bunch a—”

  “Hey,” Mom says. “Tell me later.” Laila nods and puffs
out smoke through her mouth and nose. She reminds me of a wild orange dragon from a book I had when I was little that I haven’t seen since we moved into Jack’s house so I guess it’s gone now. The dragon blew fire and puffed smoke because he was a dragon and that’s all he knew. But deep down he wanted to be peaceful, so every night he snuck out of his cave and crept down to the beach to sit by the ocean. It was so black that all he could see was the white line of foam when each wave crashed on the shore and the shiny stars above.

  No one knew his secret except a small crab who watched him from the sand. (The crab was also misunderstood because he pinched people all the time.) One night, the rhythm of the waves lulled the dragon to sleep and some fishermen found him early in the morning and tied a big net around him and started dragging him to the castle. But the crab followed along pinching holes in the net and soon the dragon was free. The story didn’t say if the dragon kept going back to the beach at night after that. I hope so.

  • • •

  Mr. McInnis believes in cultural arts. He says because we don’t have an art teacher or music teacher or Spanish or French teacher, he has to be all kinds of teachers in one. That’s why he makes us sing “This Land Is Your Land” every morning after announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance when all the normal classes are sharpening their pencils. It’s ridiculous.

  Marisol wishes she was in my class because she also believes in cultural arts but I told her to be grateful she has Ms. Sanogo, who teaches regular things plus tells real stories like about the time that python got into the well in her village. Still, every morning when we sing When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling / in the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, I close my eyes and picture walking somewhere golden like Kansas, or possibly Nebraska.

  Mr. McInnis also believes in interdisciplinary education, which means doing a lot of subjects at once. Like learning about Chicago is history and government and economics, which is money and power together. Mr. McInnis writes Haymarket Riot on the board and tells us how workers were trying to get rights so they only had to work eight hours a day and the people and police got in a big fight. The boys like the fight with police part. Lots of Mr. McInnis’s lessons involve people trying to get rights.

  “Any questions?” he asks and Leon raises his hand. “Yes, Leon?”

  “Why are we doing all this about Chicago?”

  “Because you live here. Don’t you want to know about your own city?”

  “No.”

  Mr. McInnis squints, which he does when approaching something from a different angle. “Maybe because Chicago is all you know, you think everywhere is the same,” he says. “But it’s not. Every place is different. If you go somewhere else, it won’t feel like Chicago.” That sounds good to me but then Mr. McInnis says, “I guess maybe you have to leave a place before you can be proud of it.”

  I look out the window at the houses on the street behind the school, slumped over and propped up with boards, and try to be proud of Chicago. It’s trash day so all the cans are out, but it’s the Windy City so half of them are tipped over and papers and wrappers and napkins are blowing down the street like kids running away from their moms at the playground. An old lady is bent over her garbage can, tossing stuff back in. But when she finishes she’s not strong enough to lift it back up so she just goes inside.

  • • •

  I finished my homework way before dinner so I’m lying on my stomach on my bed swinging my bare feet around trying to draw that orange dragon when I hear the music. It’s like nothing we ever hear on our block, smooth and kind, and it’s loud. Granny’s already at the living room window with her palms pressed to the glass. Her breath makes tiny circles on the pane like she’s trying to call out.

  The sun is white in the sky, still above the telephone poles over the parking lot, and Mom is asleep on her bed with Tommy curled up sweaty next to her chest. “We’ll just stay on the stoop,” I whisper to Granny.

  I put our shoes on and take Granny’s hand. I unlock all the locks and we step out. The air has a strange warm line under its cold belly and we can see where the music’s coming from now. Some guys in faded mechanic suits are fixing a car down the block. They’re speaking some other language and I’ve never seen them before. They don’t know to stay in and stay quiet so they’re blasting an old-fashioned song that sounds like it was dipped in honey so the whole neighborhood can hear it.

  Granny walks down the steps without even holding the railing. “Granny!” I grab her hand again but she keeps walking, down the sidewalk toward the beat-up, broken-down car. “Wait!” I whisper. “We can’t go down there, Granny. We don’t know those guys.” She keeps walking. We’re a few houses away and one of them looks up. “We can hear the music from the steps, Granny! We have to go back.” It’s too late. All three men quit working to wait for us.

  Granny stops next to the car. “You like the music?” the oldest one asks. His accent is heavy and his teeth are mostly missing and the ones he has are small and pointed and yellow. “Beautiful, no? Bessie Smith. An American classic!”

  Granny doesn’t even seem to see him. “She doesn’t really talk,” I say. “Granny, we gotta go back. Mom will be worried.”

  “Ah, but she can listen,” he tells me. “Always she can listen.”

  The song ends and Granny blinks. The men start working again. We walk back down the sidewalk and up our three cracked steps and into the house and thankfully Mom and Tommy are still asleep. I bring my dragon sketch to the couch where Granny sits listening to regular night-starting-up sounds: cars gunning and bass buzzing and sirens close and far and random shouts, some happy and some not.

  Jack crashes through the door in the middle of the night but I pretend none of it’s real. Not his elbows bumping down the hallway, not the spitting words or crying, or the worst part: the silence after. It wasn’t always like this. He used to try to be nice. Once he even took me to a carnival and spent more than thirty bucks on rides. It got bad when Tommy was born and Granny came to live with us, which happened at about the same time so I don’t know which one set him off like a messed-up firecracker. But either way it makes no sense. They’re both quiet and sweet and easy. All that noise and neither one even woke up.

  • • •

  In the morning Jack’s gone but he left a red mark on Mom’s face. She’s drinking her coffee slow. Granny’s sitting next to her also drinking her coffee slow. But their eyes are different. Mom has the long-lost eyes and Granny has the nervous horse. My first-grade teacher used to say actions speak louder than words but really I think eyes speak louder than words because I’ve seen a lot of people do things they don’t really want to do, but every time you can see the truth in their eyes.

  Like when Jack hugs Mom before he leaves and grabs all different parts of her and she hugs him back, she has the icicle eyes. And when Cart Man on the corner growls at the kids who touch his shopping cart, looking and sounding just like a lion with his matted mane, his eyes aren’t fierce at all. They’re saddest of sad. Like a lion stuck in a cage who wants to be back in the jungle.

  • • •

  Some of Mr. McInnis’s cultural arts ideas are okay but this one is terrible, even worse than “This Land Is Your Land.” We’re all down at the computer lab learning about our family heritage so we can make a family crest. Mr. McInnis knows the county in Scotland where his ancestors came from and the fabric they used for their kilts. He shows us a picture of the McInnis castle and says the McInnis men were warriors and archers and they still shoot with bows and arrows in the Mississippi woods.

  My dad is not a warrior or an archer. His name is Leszek Kowalksi and he met Mom when she was a waitress at an Irish pub across the street from a Polish restaurant where Grandma Jane told me he would sit and calculate and drink shots of vodka from a bottle holding a single blade of bison grass. Mom glared at Grandma when she told me that, about the vodka, but I was happy because then I could think about grass instead of the nothing that was the
re before. I drew lots of pictures of grass that summer in all different shades of green but I left the bottle out, for Mom’s sake.

  My dad had a student visa to study some kind of math at the University of Chicago. He tried to explain it to Mom once but she didn’t understand it even though she’s good with numbers. He had thick blond hair that stood up off his head and a nice smile and a gray coat and was not very tall.

  After Mom told him she was pregnant with me, he disappeared. She never saw him again, at the Polish restaurant or anywhere. When she tried to ask the waitresses about him, they pretended not to speak English even though they spoke it to the customers all day. Somehow that part of the story makes Mom the maddest, like the Polish waitresses were the ones who betrayed her. Maybe she thought they would understand because they were also waitresses or because they were women. I don’t know.

  In the computer lab I have ten minutes for my turn and this is what I learn:

  1. Kowalski is the second most common last name in Poland.

  2. It is basically the Polish version of Smith.

  3. I will never find my dad.

  4. Kowalski sausage has made a major impact on the American meatpacking industry.

  Back in the classroom I draw a huge sausage on my family crest. It looks weird so I give it a smiley face, which makes it look even weirder. Next to me, DeMarcus White is wearing his white crayon down to the end coloring his whole crest white even though the paper’s already white. He looks up and I smile quick and he looks over at my happy hot dog and shakes his head, then goes back to his work. DeMarcus can focus in any situation the way Mr. McInnis says the eye stays calm in the middle of a hurricane. He has seven brothers and sisters so maybe that’s why. I’ve been in class with DeMarcus since second grade and if anyone should be able to imagine their future, it’s him.