Mrs. Winstead squints at me. She looks at the paper again. Then says, “Your u’s look like w’s.”
“Jonny Quest is a cartoon—” I start to explain.
Mrs. Winstead interrupts, saying, “Cartoons are not literature.”
“I know that! But I’ve seen it a hundred times. I wouldn’t spell Quest with a w. I know it’s a u.”
“Fine. I’ll give you a 95. Minus five points for bad penmanship.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My fingers curl into fists. But I’m not Sam. I don’t solve problems with my fists. Instead, I say, “By the way, your math is wrong. You only gave the class nineteen words, when there’s supposed to be twenty. You forgot a word. Here, let me give you a recommendation for one.”
Instead, of saying it, I write it at the top of my paper in capital letters.
P-R-E-J-U-D-I-C-E.
Without looking at her, I storm out of her classroom. For the first time in days, I can feel a big grin on my face.
THE NEXT DAY, MY VICTORY VIBES HAVE VANISHED. I’M ALL nervous when I walk into English. I expect Mrs. Winstead to hand me a detention slip or send me straight to the principal. Instead, she looks down at her desk, embarrassed-like. That confuses me.
When the bell rings, Mrs. Winstead walks to the front of the class, saying, “Everyone, pull out your books. Free reading starts now.” Then she walks over to the door, wringing her hands like they’re wet, and says, “Mr. Ogle, may I see you in the hallway please?”
A lot of the kids go, “Oooooh,” and some go, “You’re in trouble.” Some just snicker or whisper. Now I’m pretty sure Mrs. Winstead is going to give me detention. Or maybe I’ll be suspended. Or worse, maybe a police officer is waiting outside the classroom. I can’t go to jail for being rude to a teacher, can I? It sounds crazy, but I’m sweating like it’s real possible.
When I walk out of the classroom, the hallway is all empty. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it like this, all silent, without students. It looks all wrong, which makes me even more nervous.
Mrs. Winstead closes the door so it’s just me and her. I open my mouth to apologize, thinking maybe it’s not too late to save myself, but the English teacher cuts me off. “I’m not a racist,” she says. “I am a devout Christian and attend church every Sunday. I have an open heart to all people, blacks, Asians, even Hispanics, like you—”
I am about to explain I’m only half, but she cuts me off.
“I am a good person.” She pauses. “But you were right. I have shown . . . prejudice toward you. And I owe you an apology.”
“No, you don’t,” I whisper, still worried about detention.
“Yes. Yes, I do,” she says. “I am sorry.”
I don’t know what to say. Mrs. Winstead has always looked so tough and mean—until now. She’s never looked so old before. And shaky, almost fragile, like Abuela did the other day. I feel real horrible about the whole thing, but also glad she’s apologizing.
For the first time, she looks at me. Right in the eyes. It’s kinda uncomfortable, ’cause I’ve never looked at a teacher like this for this long.
She asks, “Do you forgive me?”
I shake my head. “Yeah. Sure.”
I surprise myself when I say it, ’cause I realize I mean it. I guess if I can forgive Mom and Sam for all the things they do, it’s a whole lot easier to forgive other people for the real small stuff.
GLASS EYE
In industrial shop, we are cutting wood to make birdhouses. Mr. Lopez says we can take them home and hang them in our trees in our yard. I don’t have a yard. But I decide I can give it to Abuela for Christmas.
This kid, Jake Russo, runs across the shop. He play-punches Kent Graham in the arm, then pushes me. I’m sliding a piece of wood under a giant saw when he does this, and I nearly lose a finger. I’m about to freak out when Jake says, “You’ll never guess what I just spent my lunch money on!”
“What?” Kent says.
“Guess!”
I say, “You pushed me when I was using the saw, you idiot.”
“Lunch?” Kent guesses again.
“Nope. Guess again.”
“A skateboard?” Kent guesses.
“No. Guess again.”
I say, “We’re done guessing. Just tell us.”
Jake Russo says, “I paid Tommy Garcia to take out his eyeball.”
“Seriously?” I take off the protective glasses and look past the electric saw machines and wood planks for Tommy. He’s in our grade but he’s a foot taller and two years older. He’s failed twice. He wears a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off, and his hair is long, down to his waist, like a rock star.
Kent asks, “What do you mean, he took out his eye? Like it fell out?”
“No, he has a glass eye. I gave him two dollars to take it out.”
I ask, “Was there blood?”
“No, but it was so gross—and sooo awesome!”
“You just went up to him and asked him to take out his eye? How did you know he had a glass eye? I didn’t.”
“I heard about it from Jenny Patel in first period. She said he did it last week on a dare. I wanted to see. I asked if he’d show me and he asked how much money I had. It was the best two dollars I’ve ever spent. You have to see it!”
I don’t know why, but I really want to.
It’s like when all my friends see some new scary movie, and I haven’t. Everyone keeps talking about it, and I’m all annoyed ’cause I want to see stuff too. Only this time, only one person has seen the scary movie, so I have a chance to see it early, be one of the cool kids who sees it first. Only, I don’t have two dollars. Though I do have four quarters.
Every day, when I come home from school, I do this thing where I go through the apartment laundry room and check all the coin returns. People are always forgetting to do that, so I get the left-behind quarters. I also check the pay phone. Sometimes there’re coins in it too. I planned on using the change to get a bag of chips or a Kit-Kat from the new vending machines at school, but I’d rather see Tommy’s glass eye.
“I have a dollar,” I say.
“I have a dollar too,” Kent adds. “Want to go together?”
“Yes!” I don’t even hesitate. In my head, I keep imagining what it must look like. If there’s goo or slime or like stringy eye snot or maybe some blood. I get goose bumps thinking about it.
“When should we do it?” Kent asks.
“Now,” I say.
We walk over together, but we’re both going real slow. There’s sawdust and woodchips all over the ground. Mr. Lopez is too busy reading a car magazine to notice. I’m getting all nervous. I think maybe part of me is freaked out, or maybe worried that Tommy will get mad and cut us in half with one of the table saws. I mean, I know that’s stupid and he won’t, but that’s the kinda stuff that runs through my head.
Anyways, Kent and I both get to Tommy and just stand there.
After a minute, Tommy looks up from sweeping his area and says, “What?”
Kent looks at his hands and doesn’t say anything. I step like one inch forward and try to talk. “Um, we were, uh, wondering, if . . . we could, I don’t know, maybe . . .”
“Spit it out,” Tommy says.
“You know . . . see your eye . . . like Jake Russo.”
Tommy stares at me for what feels like more than a full minute. Then he rolls his eyes, only one doesn’t go all the way up. “You got two bucks?”
We hand him the money.
“It’s two dollars each,” Tommy says.
“Oh. Uh, that’s all we got.”
Tommy is annoyed. Looks at us like he’s going to punch us both in the face. He could too. He’s kinda a giant compared to us. Finally, he sighs. “Fine.”
He waves us into the corner. He checks over my shoulder to make sure Mr. Lopez isn’t watching. He isn’t. So Tommy reaches up, digs his fingers into his eye socket. He fishes around for a few seconds. Then with the sound of a tiny suction, he
pulls out the glass eye.
It’s not the whole eyeball like I thought. It’s just the front part. But I’m not staring at the glass eye—I’m staring at the socket, where the eye was. It’s pink and fleshy and hollow.
“Can I hold it?” Kent asks.
“Hell no,” Tommy says. He turns around and struggles to put it back in. We don’t wait. We run off.
At lunch, I sat down next to Ethan and say, “You’ll never guess what I saw!” When I tell him, Ethan loses it. He keeps asking me all these gory questions about every little detail. He thinks it’s sick and awesome too, just like me.
The next day, I see Tommy being led into the vice principal’s office. I wonder if he got sent in for taking out his eye. It seems like one of those weird things that you can’t really get in trouble for, since you aren’t hurting anybody, but that teachers will get real annoyed about anyway.
When I see him next in industrial shop, I ask, “Did you get in trouble?”
Tommy says, “Yeah, bunch of preppies ratted me out. Thought I was gonna get suspended or detention. Vice principal probably woulda but I told her I was just doing it for lunch money. Can’t get mad if I’m trying to feed myself.”
“Is that true?” I ask. “Were you doing it for lunch money?”
“Nah,” he laughs. “I get my lunch for free.”
He said it. Just like that. No shame. No embarrassment. Just, wham!, here’s the truth.
I can’t explain it, but suddenly I feel like Tommy and I are closer. Like we’re family. Or at least friends. I mean, I knew someone else had to get a free lunch, but I didn’t know who. I always wanted to look in the red folder to see, but felt like that’s an invasion of privacy or something. Anyway, I must have some ridiculous grin on my face ’cause Tommy says, “What? Why you looking at me like that?”
“I’m—I’m in the Free Lunch Program too,” I say. “You want to, I don’t know, maybe sit together sometime?”
Tommy laughs real hard at that. He says, “Nah, dude. I don’t sit with losers.”
HOUSE
After school, I walk up the stairs to the apartment. I fish my keys out of my backpack, but I don’t need them.
The door is wide open. Busted out with a hammer, the lock hangs there like a dead metal animal. Pieces of a sheet of a paper are taped to the door, but someone’s ripped it off so nothing’s left but the corners.
My first thought is, We’ve been robbed again. The first time someone broke into our place was pretty horrible. They stole my first Walkman and all my cassette tapes and our cat got out and never came back. The last time we got robbed, joke was on the robbers. We didn’t have anything to steal, so they broke through the window for nothing. The weird part is you get robbed more living in bad neighborhoods than if you live in nice ones. I’d think bad folks would wanna steal nicer stuff.
But now, as I peer inside my apartment, there’s no thieves. Just Mom packing. She’s doing it real fast. We don’t own much, but what we do have is tossed into cardboard boxes in the center of the living room. I don’t understand what’s happening. The air escapes from my lungs. “What’s going on?!”
“What’s it look like, stupid? We’re moving,” Mom says.
I flash back to fourth grade, when I changed schools five times in less than four months ’cause we kept moving while Mom and Sam looked for work. Having to start over with new friends and new teachers and new classes at a new school in a new town is hard enough. It’s even worse when your parents pick you up in the middle of the day in a packed truck, and you don’t get to say goodbye to anyone. One day you have a new friend, and the next you’ll never see them again.
“No!” I shout. I grab a box and dump it out on the floor. “No way. Uh-uh. I like Birmingham. I like my friends. I’m not going anywhere! I’m not moving again!”
Mom rolls her eyes. “Quit being so dramatic. We’re not leaving Birmingham. We’re moving across town, walking distance from your school. You won’t even have to ride the bus anymore.”
“Wait, really?” I think of the neighborhood I see every day on the bus ride to school. It’s all pretty houses on tree-lined streets. The houses aren’t huge, maybe only three or four are two stories high. But the places are real cute, painted nice pastels. A lot of them have white picket fences. One has this big red rose garden and a stone fountain with a mermaid in it. Even the ones that aren’t that nice are a lot nicer than Vista Nueva.
I’ve never lived in a house before. Even if it needs work, that’s OK. I can paint the house, the insides and the outside. Sam can do the lawn with the chemicals from his job. Mom is good at cleaning, so she can make the inside real nice.
We’d have a little yard for Ford to play in. Maybe we could get a dog. I could have friends over and not feel embarrassed about the roaches or the creepy neighbors. Maybe we’d even get furniture.
“Are we really moving to a new house?” I ask.
“It’s not new, but it’ll be new for us.”
“Used is fine,” I say. I’m so giddy, I want to know every detail. “When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“’Cause it’s none of your business,” Mom says. “We needed a change. Change is good, right?”
I nod. I run into my room and start packing, the whole time daydreaming about our new house. It only takes me twenty minutes to pack everything I own. After, I help Mom finish packing everything else. We take it all downstairs and load it into the back of Sam’s work truck. That’s the good part of not having furniture—moving is super easy.
I run over and say bye to Benny and Brad. I make sure to write down their phone number so I can call them. We can still hang out since Sam and their dad are drinking buddies. I consider running over to Liam’s to tell him the news, but Mom says we don’t have time. Liam and I never hang out anymore anyway. Maybe things’ll be different when I’m in a house. We can practice football in the backyard. Or the front yard.
I feel all light and glowy and warm. I can’t name the feeling for a while, and then I realize I’m just really happy. Not just for me, but for my whole family too. I bet even Mom will be happier. I’m excited for something new.
As we eat McDonald’s for dinner, I’m giggling at everything. “Do Ford and I have our own rooms?” I ask.
“No,” Mom says. “It’s a two-bedroom, one bath.”
That sounds like our apartment, but that’s fine. A house is better than an apartment, ’cause it means you have more money. Plus, we’ll have a yard. “Can I paint my room?”
“I don’t care,” Mom says. “As long as you pay for the paint.”
“Cool!” I say. I ask Ford, “What color do you want our room to be?”
He says, “Bwack!”
“Black? Like a cave? That might be cool.”
“You’re not painting your room black,” Mom says.
“Pink?” Ford asks.
“No,” Sam grumbles. “P-p-pink is a g-g-girl’s color.”
I realize that Sam’s been quiet this whole time. Mom is grumpy too, but she’s always grumpy.
“Why aren’t the two of you more excited?” I ask. “Aren’t you excited?”
Mom shrugs.
I consider asking where they got the money for a house, but I know better than to talk about money in public. It’s a touchy subject. We’re obviously renting, not buying. Renting is cheaper than buying.
“So tomorrow, when we move in, the first thing I’ll want to do is—” Mom starts, but I interrupt her.
“Tomorrow? We’re not going tonight?”
“No. Tomorrow.”
I ask, “Where are we sleeping tonight?”
“In the car and the truck,” Mom says like it’s nothing.
“What?!” I squeal, completely confused.
“It’s just for one night,” Mom says.
“Why can’t we just spend the night at our new place?”
“It won’t be ready until tomorrow at noon.”
“Can’t we get a motel?”
“You hate camping! And it’s December! It’s freezing outside!”
“You aren’t sleeping outside. You’re sleeping in your sleeping bag inside the car,” she says.
My voice squeaks when I ask, “Where am I supposed to shower before school?”
“You can skip a shower for one day. It’s not going to kill you if you stink a little.”
“I don’t want to stink!”
Sam slaps his fries off the table. They fly, scattering all across the floor. Other families look over at us. Sam growls, “Sh-sh-shut u-u-up! B-b-both of y-y-you! N-not another w-word.”
I’m so caught up in my own thoughts, I don’t realize till now that Sam isn’t just quiet, he’s pissed off. He won’t make eye contact with me. Is he mad cause we’re sleeping in our vehicles, or is it something else?
Now I’m wondering about the broken lock and the taped note on the door that I never saw.
Maybe moving so suddenly wasn’t our choice.
Maybe we had to leave.
Quietly, I ask, “Did we get kicked out of Vista Nueva?”
Sam throws the rest of his burger at me, pegging me in the chest with it. Ketchup and mustard splash my shirt. He shouts, “G-g-god-d-d-dammit!” He storms out to his truck. Outside the window, I can see him kicking and hitting it. Mom glares at me. “Look what you did. Are you happy?”
I’m not happy, but I also don’t see the big deal. So we got kicked out? At least we’re moving into a new (used) house. That’s good, right?
That night, Sam sleeps in the cab of his work truck. Mom and Ford sleep in there too. I sleep in Mom’s car, alone, in the driver’s seat. The passenger seat is piled with boxes, and there’s so much in the backseat, I can’t recline. With the steering wheel in the way, I can’t get comfortable. There’s also a streetlamp just above, glaring off the windshield. I toss and turn all night, can’t sleep. When I finally get up, I have this horrible crick in my neck.
Free Lunch Page 11