Adam Canfield, Watch Your Back!

by Michael Winerip

  Adam repeated that it was his, but his voice was trembly, and when he tried to grab the ball, the tall boy dribbled behind his back and his laugh crackled in Adam’s ears.

  Adam could feel tears coming, the last thing he needed, and was about to lunge for the ball, when there was another voice, low and calm.

  “Hey, Dex. Everything OK?”

  The tall boy stopped his dribble, held the ball for a moment, then softly tossed it to Adam.

  “My bad, junior cheese,” the tall boy said.

  Adam clutched the ball. Getting it back felt like a miracle.

  Something suddenly dawned on him: Guess who is making my brother go to jail? How could Adam be such an idiot? He turned and scanned the sidelines, but there was just space between the chain links.

  Adam wheeled back around. He needed to thank Tish; he owed him two thank-yous now. Jennifer had been right about him. But Tish was gone, too — not totally gone, but two courts over, shooting with older kids, including that boy Dex, their backs to Adam.

  A single thought pounded in Adam’s brain: I want to go home.

  “Whoa, babies! Passing on the left!”

  A bike zipped by and Jennifer startled, nearly losing balance. “Watch it!” she yelled. “What kind of idiot . . . ? Wait! I know exactly what kind.” She hopped back on and caught up to him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I missed you.”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Right,” she said.

  “I thought maybe you could use some help,” said Adam. They were a block from the Pine Street AME Zion Church in the Willows, where Jennifer was heading to interview Reverend Shorty about renaming the street for Dr. King.

  Jennifer looked upset.

  “What?” said Adam. “Can’t a coeditor help a coeditor?”

  “Look, I’m glad to see you,” said Jennifer. “It’s just — to get you rolling on a story, I usually have to chase you to the far corners of the earth, then pester you till the end of time. Now you suddenly drop out of the sky — it’s weird. You think I can’t do this story?”

  “Of course you can,” said Adam.

  “You better not think I can’t,” she said. Jennifer was steamed. Before she had headed out that afternoon, even her father had tried giving her a big lecture on how Pine Street Church in the Willows was different from where they went. “Yes, I live in River Bluffs, and yes, I go to church at Saint Mark’s Episcopal in North Tremble, but that doesn’t mean I can’t handle business in the Willows —”

  “I know,” said Adam. “That’s exactly what I told Mrs. Willard.”

  “Told Mrs. Willard?” said Jennifer. “See! She is thinking that. It’s the same thing as Tish giving me that cookie crap.”

  “What was that?” asked Adam. “I didn’t get that.”

  “Oreo,” said Jennifer. “Adam don’t you know anything? Black on the outside, white on the inside. It’s an insult for black people, like you forgot your roots.”

  “Jennifer,” said Adam. “To me, you look like a Mrs. Radin’s Famous Homemade Super-Chunk Buckets O’ Chocolate Moisty Deluxe chocolate-chip cookie.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Jennifer. “Is that racial, too?”

  “No,” said Adam. “It’s my favorite cookie.”

  She was quiet. Then she gave him a smile — Adam hadn’t seen many smiles like that. It made him feel all butterscotchy inside.

  “Oh, Adam,” she said.

  “They’re really delicious,” he said.

  “I guess so,” she said. “So why are you here?”

  “To be honest,” said Adam, “I had a bad day yesterday. I don’t want to stop . . . you know . . . being back. I mean, I’m back. I just want to stay back.”

  “Of course you’re back,” said Jennifer. “You are back.”

  “I thought a juicy investigation like this Dr. King story would be good for me,” he said. “Because, you know, I’m back.”

  “You’re definitely back,” said Jennifer. “Let’s go. If I don’t get back before dark, I’m dead.”

  As they locked their bikes to a No Parking sign out front, Jennifer said, “It is a big difference.” Jennifer’s church, Saint Mark’s, was a towering stone structure, with large stained-glass windows, vaulted ceilings, and polished oak pews. Pine Street looked like a yellow ranch house with aluminum siding.

  In the churchyard, little boys in white shirts and gray slacks and little girls in dresses and buckle shoes, their winter coats wide open, were racing around, shouting and playing.

  On the way up the front walk, Adam thought he noticed Tish Osborne on the far side of the playground, watching over a bunch of squirrelly little boys. Adam started walking toward the boys, but Jennifer stopped him.

  “Not now,” she said. “We need to do this. I’m nervous to get started.”

  A woman led them to an office in the rear of the church, where Reverend Shorty and Mrs. Willard were talking.

  “Well, hello,” said Mrs. Willard. “If it isn’t Ebony and Ivory, together in two-part harmony. How you doing, Adam? I haven’t been expecting you.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Willard,” said Adam. “Yeah. Well, I was feeling kind of guilty after our last phone call —”

  “Good,” said Mrs. Willard. “That was the idea. Sooo”— she was giving Jennifer a good up and down —“this is the famous Jennifer. Praise Jesus, Adam; you never cease to amaze me, boy. You got a sharp eye for a yummy-looking treat.”

  Adam had warned Jennifer, but she still looked mortified.

  “Am I embarrassing you, child?” said Mrs. Willard.

  “A little bit,” said Jennifer, trying to sound diplomatic about being a yummy treat for the second time that day.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Willard. “I’m famous for it — ain’t that so, Shorty? Oh, Lordy, what is wrong with me? I didn’t introduce nobody. This here’s our minister, Mr. Cyrus Williams, but when he’s churching, he goes by Reverend Shorty. You’ll never meet a finer man.”

  Reverend Shorty wasn’t short. To Adam, the minister looked big enough to play power forward in the NBA. When they shook hello, their hands looked like kitten paws in Reverend Shorty’s.

  “Don’t let Mrs. Willard here rattle you,” Reverend Shorty said to Jennifer. “She is nowhere near as nasty as she’d like you to believe.”

  “One man’s opinion,” said Mrs. Willard.

  Jennifer explained that the Slash editors suspected there was some problem with naming the street for Dr. King. “A source tipped off my coeditor here that people in the Willows are opposed to it,” Jennifer said.

  “That weren’t no source,” Mrs. Willard butted in again. “That was me. Hello.”

  “Um, Mrs. Willard,” said Adam. “Remember you told me you didn’t want to be in the paper? So I told Jennifer it was off the record.”

  “To protect you,” said Jennifer.

  “The boy was protecting me?” said Mrs. Willard. “You something, Adam. Can I ask a question? Now, Adam, you just close your ears. I want to ask Jennifer here something, folk to folk.

  “First time I met your Adam,” Mrs. Willard said, “he just rode his bike up Grand and started going about his reportering business like he was right at home. A lot of white boys, I don’t think they’d be so comfortable. It’s like he don’t see color so much — you know what I’m saying?”

  Jennifer did, though she’d never said it out loud before. She would have preferred keeping it a private thought, especially with Adam sitting there, but this lady had a major case of nose trouble.

  “It’s not so much that Adam’s not prejudiced,” Jennifer began. “It’s more that he’s totally oblivious. A lot of times, he’s in a fog, and when he is paying attention, he only seems to notice big stuff.”

  “Geez,” said Adam. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Shush,” said Mrs. Willard. “Your ears supposed to be closed.”

  “Well, it makes you rare,” said Reverend Shorty. “We certainly could use a little more good o
blivion in the world.”

  And Mrs. Willard said, “Amen to that, Shorty.”

  Jennifer had taken five pages of notes, but wasn’t getting a thing. Every quote sounded dodgy. They asked if Reverend Shorty was upset about naming a street for Dr. King, and he talked about how much he admired Dr. King. They asked if he knew why there was no date for the ceremony, and he said that was a question to ask school and county officials. They asked if the minister had plans to lead a protest, and he said that plans were a dime a dozen but nothing was settled.

  It frustrated the coeditors. What was wrong?

  “This isn’t doing you much good, is it?” Reverend Shorty said. “Can I make a suggestion? Put those pens down. . . . Now let’s just talk, then we’ll try to figure out if any of this can go in your paper.”

  Jennifer and Adam glanced at each other. They needed Reverend Shorty to tell the truth but feared they’d lose his great quotes. Even if he did agree to let them write the story when he finished, Reverend Shorty’s quotes would be so guarded by then, they’d sound fake.

  “How about this?” said Adam. “This is off the record; we can’t use any of it unless you say. But we’d still like to take notes to remember the details — in case you do let us quote you.”

  “No,” said Reverend Shorty. “This is too hot. It’s not that we don’t trust you — well, it is a little bit that — but mostly we need to go slow. This reaches to the top of Tremble County. If it comes out wrong, the Willows could be flattened. Literally.”

  “But —” said Jennifer.

  “You listen,” said Reverend Shorty, and his voice was stern. “There are people in this church who think I’m crazy talking to two kid reporters for a student paper. ‘If that was some real newspaper, it wouldn’t have no name like Slash.’ That’s what they say. But I prayed on it and decided there was two reasons to put my trust in you. Number one, no one else gives a bird turd about us. The Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser and News 12 would never do a story. They’re owned by the Bolands. They print what the Bolands let them print, and the Bolands sure as hell aren’t going to let this story out unless it’s some puff job on all the great food the Boland Foundation is donating. So, you are all we have.”

  Adam felt like a pathetic last resort. Reverend Shorty was starting to seem mean.

  “The second reason,” he continued, “is that Mrs. Willard here says your paper did remarkable on the story about the crooked Harris principal. Says you appear to be truth tellers, which is a big compliment in our church. She thinks we can trust you. And Mrs. Willard — she’s famous for having high standards.”

  Mrs. Willard was shaking her head. “You know, Rev,” she said, “I put in a lot of time and effort, building a reputation as a foul-mouthed idiot. Now you go sugarcoating me.”

  “One man’s opinion,” Reverend Shorty said, smiling.

  “Strictly off the record, these folks making all this hoopla about renaming that street don’t have a clue what Dr. King stood for,” Reverend Shorty said. “Church members, like Mother Willard — you know why she lives in the Willows? For years, she couldn’t buy in no neighborhood except the Willows. None of our people could. I know men and women, hardworking Christians, they’d see a house for sale in some nice section of Tremble. They’d call; some even put on a white voice, fool those salespeople. But the moment our people arrived, their dark skin disqualified them. Suddenly the seller decides to take the house off the market or raise the price way up. Nothing you could prove — no, sir. Catching a man in the act of prejudice is as wispy as catching fog. It’s all around; you feel it on your skin, smell it in your nostrils, see it plain as day, but you can’t grab it and it’s nothing you can carry into court.”

  “Now, Dr. King,” Reverend Shorty went on, “he didn’t stand for black people living with black and whites with white. King was an integration man.”

  “Hold on,” said Mrs. Willard. “I didn’t care nothing about living with whites. But I knew if I had a house on a street where whites would buy, I could sell my house for more money ’cause whites had more money.

  “You look at the streets in this country named for Dr. King,” Mrs. Willard continued. “Most cities, it’s the worst streets — drug dealers on the corner. That ain’t no way to honor Dr. King. You’re reporters — go do some reportering. No one in the Willows signed no petition to have no street name switched.” And here, Mrs. Willard made a disgusted, spitting noise. “You, girl, you live in River Bluffs. I bet it’s nice. Maybe we should rename your street. You think white people on your street be dancing the jig if one morning they wake up and they’re living on Martin Luther King Drive?”

  Jennifer looked too shocked to say a word.

  Reverend Shorty was out of his seat again, but this time he stood behind Mrs. Willard and placed one large hand on each of her shoulders.

  “Look at me, honey,” he said to Jennifer. “You got no reason to feel bad. I’ve learned enough from Mother Willard here to fill a hundred books, but that don’t mean we agree on everything. Maybe because I’m younger than Mother Willard, I’m more hopeful. . . .”

  “Or more stupid,” said Mrs. Willard, but she was laughing now.

  “In my humble opinion, we are making progress,” continued Reverend Shorty. “My grandpa was a stable man on an old Tremble River summer estate, and Daddy was a painter at the boatyard and here I am, second-shift foreman. And we got families coming to Tremble, like your daddy, got jobs at big city law firms. Don’t look surprised, I know. Our people, they have professor jobs now, and doctor jobs. They can buy in River Bluffs or River Path or Riverdale or River View. And that’s a proud thing, so long as you know where the story begins.”

  “We’re not picking on you, girl,” Mrs. Willard said, then jabbed her finger at Adam. “You think that nice little white coeditor — his folks going to move to Martin Luther King Drive? I’m talking to you, Mr. Ivory.”

  Adam couldn’t think what to say, but Reverend Shorty saved him.

  “Maybe Adam’s parents would,” Reverend Shorty said. “They’ve done a nice job so far. Now, we’re only half done. We need to take a ride. To really see why our people’s so outraged about the Bolands’ jolly Dr. King party, you got to come along for Reverend Shorty’s guided tour of the Willows, see what’s going down.”

  “Um, Reverend Shorty, sir,” said Adam. “One question. If you do the protest march, will that be at the renaming ceremony?”

  “Don’t think we’ll have to,” said Reverend Shorty.

  “What?” said Jennifer.

  “You’ll figure it out,” said Reverend Shorty, making it sound like a riddle with a trick answer. “Come on,” he said, heading for the door. “If you need to be home before dark, we got to go.” Then he loaded their bikes into the back of his pickup and drove Adam and Jennifer up and down the streets of the Willows, stopping at nine boarded-up houses, all with signs saying they’d been sold to Boland Realtors, Inc.

  It wasn’t fair. Every time Adam crossed something off his To-Do list, something new popped on. He felt like he was in a Greek myth in Mr. Brooks’s world history class, where the brave warrior Adameus chopped off the serpent’s head, only to have two new to-dos grow back.

  To do: His science fair abstract had to be in tomorrow.

  To do: He needed to track down Shadow. The stuff Shadow had been saying that day at the courts — it must have had something to do with the mugging.

  To do: He had to save the three-hundred-year-old tree story. Jennifer wanted to kill it! She didn’t trust Phoebe’s reporting, claimed Phoebe was biased in favor of the tree. Clearly, Jennifer had been exposed to a near-fatal overdose of Phoebe, and it had totally clouded her coediting judgment. Adam thought of Phoebe like radiation. She was great in small doses; she was a force for good when pointed at the right spot. But a sustained dose of Phoebe over a large area? It could destroy all mankind. He had to find some way to make Jennifer love that climbing tree as much as he and Phoebe did.

  To do: They
had to figure how to get the Dr. King story on the record.

  To do: The deadline for the February Slash was just ten days away.

  And Adam wasn’t even counting stuff that he didn’t have to do but wanted to do. Like see Danny. Adam kept sending Danny e-mails, but hadn’t heard back. That had never happened before. Danny was always there when Adam needed him. Where was Danny?

  Adam knew he should ask his dad. His dad and Danny had been friends since college. His dad might know how Danny could disappear like this. Danny was a pretty exciting guy — he probably had some secret grown-up hideouts Adam didn’t know. The problem was, Adam did not want his parents finding out why he was looking for Danny. Their latest thing was that he needed to talk to a quote-unquote “professional” about how the snow-shoveling mugging had traumatized him. Adam was really starting to get pissed off about it. Those five jerks who’d stolen his money were the psychos, not him.

  Adam was ready to talk, but not with some “professional”— whatever that meant. He wanted Danny.

  It was nearly midnight, and Adam was still staring at the science project title he’d written on his screen. The words had to be exactly right. In the last four months, he’d handed in four drafts for four different ideas, none of which he was actually going to do. Now he finally had a project he was excited about, but he needed to keep it secret for as long as possible.

  If Adam didn’t get the title perfect, he’d ruin everything. His title had to fake out Devillio. If he pulled it off, the whole science fair as it now worked — with parents doing the top projects — would come crumbling down. And in its place, Adam envisioned a fair fair.

  Or something like that.

  The problem was, if Devillio figured out too soon what Adam was up to, he would erupt worse than a papier-mâché volcano doused in Heinz vinegar. He’d kill Adam’s idea; then he’d kill Adam.

  Adam considered handing in a phony description and then secretly doing the real project. It might work. Devillio was famous for not reading his students’ research papers. He was famous for not paying attention to anything, until the awards ceremony at the end of the fair, when the winners were announced. Adam was sure his secret project could win a top award before Devillio ever realized what was up. Adam would be onstage getting his prize, the packed auditorium cheering wildly, and it would be too late for the Devil to stop him.