Asim nudges me in the ribs. “Be quiet,” he whispers. His breath is hot in my ear.
Badman stares at me. I watch his leg starting to twitch. Getting faster. I think of Mr. Kemp and his lit fuse. Something’s building up in Badman.
Suddenly he leans over and grabs Asim’s lunch box.
“No!” cries Asim before he can stop himself.
Badman laughs. He flicks up the lid. “What’s this stuff?” He holds the box near his face and sniffs. “Phew, it stinks!” He doubles over, pretending to vomit.
“Yuck, I can smell it from here,” says Joe, holding his nose.
“If it makes you spew, why don’t you give it back,” I snap.
But Badman is rooting around in the lunch box. “Oh, and look, there’s a note!” he crows, waving the piece of paper in Asim’s face. “It’s all in foreign scribble but wait,” he peers closer, “there’s something at the end, love from Dad and how cute, there’s a heart—”
Asim lunges at Badman, grabbing at his arm. “Give it back, you stupid!”
Badman gives a shout of laughter, holding the note higher. “You stupid,” he mimics in a high voice.
Asim’s eyes are filling. Hold it back, I’m willing him, just hold on.
Scrunching the note up in his fist, Badman shouts, “Ooh Daddy, where’s your daddy to protect you? Why don’t you go back to where you came from? No one wants you here, you stupid refugee.”
Asim makes a terrible choking noise. Tears are spurting down his face. He’s not even trying to wipe them away.
“Oh, look at him, the wuss. Cry about it!” “Shut your mouth,” I say. I say it quietly, almost in a whisper.
“What?”
“I said shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.”
“Oh, yeah, how will you do that, you wimp?”
Badman is leaning out over Asim. He shoves his face near mine and I can smell his stinking breath.
“What is it with you?” Anger is starting to cramp in my guts. “I bet you never got a note in your lunch box. Is that it? Who’d ever write you one, huh?” I’m trembling with rage. My head is going black, just this sea of hot burning darkness. “You’re a pathetic bastard, Badman. You spit on everything good. That’s why everyone hates you.”
Badman lets out a roar, so deep, so loud, it’s as if it’s been growing in him since he was born. It cracks the air like one of his explosions, like the engine on a Mustang, full throttle. He springs up and comes at me, throwing his body right at my chest so that we thud to the ground. Pain bites into my spine. He’s on top of me, and I can’t breathe. All the air has been punched out of me. His hands are on my throat, his thumb pressing hard into my windpipe. He’s swearing, purple in the face, but I can’t make out what he’s saying because there’s such a red roaring in my head. I’m dying here on the ground with the stones and pigeon poop digging into my back and a panic grips me so hard that I shoot out my fist and smash it hard against his hateful jaw.
Badman sways above me. I feel something hot and slippery on my fingers. His cheek is bleeding. He’s losing his hold and I heave myself sideways, trying to slide out. My shoulders are off the ground and I lift my head just as I see his white knuckles coming toward me. It happens in slow motion, like the car accident I was in once where there were only fractions of a second before the impact but it seemed to take forever. I unfreeze enough to turn my head before his fist slams into my ear.
The world explodes.
A rushing sound in my eardrum flows into the sea behind my eyes. It mixes with Joe’s voice, urgent, scared. His arm is around Asim’s neck in a headlock, and he’s yelling something at Badman, warning him. I close my eyes and when I open them there’s Mitch and Esmerelda grabbing Badman’s shoulders and old Norton hurtling up the path behind him.
Asim and I catch the three-thirty bus home. We sit quietly on the bus, looking out the windows.
“Badman got detention,” says Asim. “He saw the principal while you were in the nurse’s office. His jaw is pretty bruised. You know he said you hit him first.”
I shrug. “I did. We told them what happened.”
“There’s a note going home to his mother.”
“I bet he’s really broken up about that.”
The rushing sound in my ear is still there, but fainter now. It’s more like a distant surf breaking, right out the back.
I crack my knuckles four times. “Bastard,” I mutter.
Asim nods.
“Moron,” I go on, feeling the anger rise again, “dirty stinky-breath maggot.”
Asim nods again.
“I’d like to stick a firecracker up his butt and light it.”
Asim grins.
“I’d like to squash him like a fly and flick him into a spewing volcano—”
Asim holds up his hands. “You mustn’t say these things. It solves nothing.”
“But it makes you feel better, doesn’t it?”
Asim smiles briefly. “For a minute, yes. I just hope Badman never rules this country.”
We stare gloomily at the seat in front of us.
At Asim’s house there’s a new bag of chocolate chip cookies on the table and a bowl of green grapes in the fridge. We munch steadily and after a little while Asim says, “Come on, let’s go out to the shed.”
As we walk into the smell of clean wood and fresh paint, I take a deep breath. Asim goes over to the workbench and picks up the metal brackets, showing me how they work. We take two of the wooden walls of the house and angle them to form a corner. We measure them again from random spots, to make sure they’re all even. Exactly twelve inches high. We take turns to hold the wood in place and hammer, and Asim starts to whistle. It must be a Kurdish tune, I’m thinking, strange and haunting, making you think of wild places you’ve never been to. His whistling winds like a thread around the shed, coloring everything.
We finish one corner, and stand back to examine it. The join is smooth, perfect! We give each other a high five. Now we get started on the next. As we work I’m thinking how good this feels, to make a real object with my own hands. It makes me wonder if this is what I’d like to do for a career—work with wood and build something beautiful that is also really useful. I can’t wait to see if the possums like it enough to make it their home.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been leaving pieces of apple and banana out on the porch. Sometimes, late at night, I see a flash of fur dash across the table. Once I beamed the flashlight right into a pair of black eyes. The possum had a bit of apple in its paws, and it just went on nibbling in the spotlight. As soon as I inched forward, it fled. Maybe one day they won’t mind me sitting with them while they eat. In the morning, the fruit is all gone. It’s such a good feeling, looking at that empty tin plate. When their house is built, we’ll leave the food in there. Then they’ll have full tummies and they can just sleep where they eat, like a real home.
“I’m sorry you got hurt today because of me,” Asim says suddenly.
I take a moment to answer. I was far away. I sigh, because I don’t really want to come back. “He didn’t hit me because of you,” I say. “I make him angry all by myself.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have to do anything when he called me a stupid refugee—”
“Listen, you should have seen him all through math. He couldn’t wait to thump me. I think there’s a lot of people he wants to thump. His rage seems sort of spread out, and if you’re in the general direction, you take it.” I sigh again. “I’m so sick of trying to get out of the way.”
“Yes.”
“And Esmerelda,” I go on, “why does she even talk to him?” I feel angry again just thinking about it. “Just before lunch, on the way out of class, did you see her jabbering with him? And they were laughing together. When she talked, you could see him really listening. He was being nice. Well, nice for him. It made me want to puke.”
Asim is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “They talk about music, I think.”
“Yeah, what
ever, but why would you want to talk about anything with that maggot? I mean, say I met a person who shared the same interests as me, you know, maybe this person was an even-number freak or something, or they’d discovered that the answer to life was the number eight—well even so, I wouldn’t spend time chatting and laughing with him if I found out he was a murderer, you know, or a racist or a phone stalker…”
“But it was Ez who ran to get Norton and Ez who pulled him off you. She went white, you know. I saw her. She was really worried.” Asim puts down the hammer. “I wish it had been me who had stopped him.”
“No, but Joe—he had you in that headlock, you couldn’t—”
Asim shakes his head. “Not at first. We both were just standing there, staring. My legs wouldn’t move. It was as if they were stuck to the ground.”
“It’s okay, don’t—”
“No, I felt very bad and then I tried to run, to get help and that was when Joe grabbed me. But I was useless, like being stuck in a dream—”
“It’s okay, Asim.” I pick up the hammer. I want to go back to that soothing place I was in, with the wood and the possums. “Look, we just need another couple of nails in here and we’ll have made another perfect corner!”
“While you were at the nurse, quite a few kids came up to see how you were. Lilly was one of them. She said you were very brave. ‘I like that in a man,’ she said.”
I snort and we grin at each other.
“And what about Lilly,” I say. “Do you think Badman likes her?”
Asim shrugs.
“Do you? Do you think she’s hot, like everyone does?” He shrugs again. “I suppose so.”
“I don’t, really. It was strange that day at the beach—for a minute she looked at me like I was special. But it’s the same look she gives Mitch, you know, and then she just suddenly switches it off. Makes you feel you’re not as good as her somehow, like you haven’t found the right thing to keep her interest. Like you’re some lowly evolved insect in the food chain.”
Now Asim snorts. “Insects have amazing survival mechanisms.”
“I know. Take the cockroach. Did you know it’s the only living creature that could survive a nuclear blast?”
“That’s right. Because it has no central nervous system.”
“No kidding!” I stop and think about that for a while. “Anyway, the thing is, I think Lilly is an outside kind of person—you know, everything about her is on the outside, whereas Esmerelda is fuller, busier inside, and you’re always wanting to know what she’s thinking. To know the inside of her.”
When it’s my turn to hammer, I really whack in the nail. “But no matter what, I’m finished with Esmerelda if she’s friends with Badman after this. Finished.”
Asim grins. “Sure,” he says, and we stand back to look at the house.
It’s starting to get dark as we’re trimming the roof planks. Through the windows I can see the streetlights coming on. I’m thinking I should get home and that Mom may be worried, when sure enough we hear the phone ringing from the house. Asim runs across the grass to get it.
“It was your mom,” he pants as he comes back in. “She says we’ve got ten minutes. She invited me for dinner.”
“Good. Listen, don’t say anything about today to her, okay? She’s cranky, and I don’t want to make things worse. She’d probably go and yell at Badman’s mother or the principal or something.”
“All right. We can leave the roof now, and tomorrow we can nail it on. Then we’ll be ready to take it to your place and show the possums.”
As we’re packing up, I say, “You haven’t had any weird calls have you? You know, when you pick it up, no one on the other end, just heavy breathing?”
“No. Do you mean like the other night?”
“Yeah, and there’ve been more. It’s creepy. Do you think it’s Badman?”
Asim shakes his head. “I don’t know. He is not the type, I think. I don’t know if he could keep a secret. He just seems to go off like one of his firecrackers. But then you cannot be sure.”
The sun is setting behind the wires lacing the sky as we cross the road to my place. There are dinner smells in the air, and I wonder if the sausages are ours.
“But I did see something strange last night,” Asim says as we open the gate. “I tried to tell you this morning before math, and then I forgot after the fight. I saw that blue Mustang again.”
“The 777?”
“Yes. But this time it stopped a couple of times going down the street. It stopped at your place.”
I freeze on the path, my hand holding the gate wide open.
“There were two men in the car. The passenger man got out and put something in your mailbox.”
“When was this?”
“Last night, at about nine o’clock. I was coming to put the garbage out.”
“Maybe it’s still there!” I let the gate bang shut and lifted up the little door on the mailbox.
“No, I wouldn’t think so, your mother went to the mailbox right away. She must have seen the car stopping from the gate. Maybe she was putting out the garbage, like me.”
He’s right. I find nothing but a shiny flyer for Dominoes Pizza.
“What did the man look like?”
Asim thought for a moment. “Tall, thin man in a dark suit. I could not see the driver.”
“Strange, she didn’t say anything about it to me this morning.”
As we walk in the door and smell the sausages frying from the kitchen, I suddenly remember Mom swearing over her coffee this morning because she’d forgotten to put out the garbage can. “Don’t even know what day it is anymore,” she’d said, and her mouth had quivered as we stood looking at the mess of orange skins and milk cartons and cereal boxes still poking out of the plastic bags bulging from the wheelie can.
6. Esmerelda
“And now, give it up for … ES-MER-EL-DA!”
A hand at my back pushes me into the footlights. The shimmer is blinding, a wall of light. I know I’m here to sing, but my throat is blocked by a stone the size of an egg. Below me the audience swims in shadow. The neon sign, Blue Moon, blinks from the blur.
The hand pushes again and I’m falling, holding my head, waiting for the crash to Earth. But the dark just goes on and on. It’s not dead space—there are folds and rustles, soft as a car’s purr. A riff of guitar steals out, electric. The notes make me ache, rising so high and pure above the dark that they burn like stars and suddenly everything is clear.
The stone flies from my throat and drops like a dead thing. It smashes hard on something a world away. I’m so GLAD to hear the smash and my voice rips up through my throat and I’m singing.
Something clutches at my hand. The touch is gentle but in my hand the lightness becomes heavy, dragging me down. I’m not flying anymore—I’m sinking down to the bottom of the sea. I open my eyes and there’s Lilly smiling and nodding, her hand clamped on mine like a vice. She’s whispering something in my ear. Oops, she giggles and I’m wondering why her hair is all dry and golden when we are under the sea.
The weight of the water is crushing. It’s pressing on all the bones in my head. I tell her we won’t survive unless she lets go when suddenly, she does. She opens her hand and there, deadly as a cannonball, is the stone. She taps it against my head and the sound is like thunder, boom!
My heart goes wild with another crack of thunder and I’m dripping wet, tossing and turning but now there’s something soft wrapped around my legs and I look down to see my own sheets with the little blue boats on them and the curtains blowing out toward me with a gust of wind. I lie still, waiting for my heart to slow, feeling the edge of the dream curl back. I listen for the rain that should go with the thunder. But there’s only the low whine of wind and after a while, there’s no sound at all.
“Hey, Esmerelda, wait!”
Jackson. Damn. I stop and turn around. “Hi—listen Jackson, sorry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. I have to talk to Lilly about something befo
re class. There she is over at the lunch tables with Catrina and Mitch. I won’t have long.”
“But did you hear about Asim?”
“What? Can’t it wait?” I hear the impatience in my voice and bite the inside of my cheek.
“His mailbox was blown up last night.” Jackson’s lips go thin and angry.
Oh, not now!
“Can’t imagine who would do something like that, can you?” he says slowly. Sounds like he’s squeezing something nasty out of a tube.
No! I don’t want to think about it. I haven’t done my math homework, I don’t get this new reciprocal fractions business, and I’m thinking out my speech to Lilly.
“Blown apart,” Jackson goes on. “You know his dad made it himself? Looks like a little log cabin? Well the door was blown off. It’s the sort of thing you could do with copper pipe and dynamite. Although maybe if you had a bunch of powerful firecrackers like Thunders or Three-Quarters, you could do that much damage.”
I remember the soundtrack to my dream. “Where’s Asim now?”
“He’s coming later. Wants to help his dad fix the mailbox. He was too upset about it to come to school. He said he heard something in the night, but was too sleepy to get up and have a look. Did you hear anything?”
“Yes, but I was having this weird dream, and I thought it was thunder. Did it rain last night?”
“Ez, what are we gonna do about this? Badman—”
“Look, Jackson, that fight you had with him was terrible. I thought you were going to kill each other. He just goes crazy sometimes. But we don’t know for sure he’s responsible for this mailbox thing. It might’ve been one of those racist gangs that write on the store walls or maybe just … a bunch of idiots. You can’t always blame … anyway, he just likes to show off about his fireworks, you know that. I think he’s all talk.”
“Oh, come on. Everyone knows he did old Mrs. Shore’s mailbox down the road. Me and Asim saw him running away, the smoke practically hissing from his feet. You know his dad can get him those fancy fireworks—he buys them on the black market or something. You should see Asim, he’s a mess.”
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