by Susie Salom
“What do you mean?” Meowsie finally says something helpful.
“What things aren’t working out?” I ask.
Marcy’s face gets all pink. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like it’s all too much. Like maybe there’s a reason why I was where I was before.”
“You mean before you came to Georgia O’Keeffe?” I ask.
“Yeah. Just, before I transferred. Before we found hearing aids that worked this well and stayed working.” She takes a breath. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, there’s things that I really like about the way everything is now but sometimes, I don’t know. Sometimes I just wish that my life could be the way it was. Less complicated. With teachers that I’ve known forever and friends who just got everything without me having to explain.”
“I think I understand,” I say.
“You do?” Marcy asks.
“Sure.”
Meowsie stares at me.
“I think finding a way to make someone understand you is probably the hardest thing on the planet,” I tell her. “Especially when everything is different. It’s easy to feel like things are nutso butso at first.”
“Even more so when mean people stand in your way,” Meowsie says.
Marcy and Meowsie look at each other out of the corner of their eyes.
“Are you scared of Ino?” I ask her.
“No, it’s not that.”
“’Cause I’ll kick his Hulky beehonks for you.”
“Kiki.”
“I’m just kidding,” I tell Meowsie. Which is mostly true.
He takes a breath and starts to do that growing pupil thing he does when he’s thinking. Marcy gets quiet as she waits for him to talk again. It’s funny because most people kind of lose track of Meowsie when he starts to think before he talks again. Like they forget that he’s there because he’s kind of gone inside himself. But Marcy’s not like that. She’s more patient or something.
“Don’t feel bad about Kyle being grounded,” he tells her. “She’s in trouble for more than just punching the dirt bucket who was bugging you.”
“You are?” Marcy asks.
I start to peel my orange and shrug. “Kinda. ”
“She also got in trouble for getting on the wrong bus.”
“My bus?”
“Sorta.”
“Why’d you get on the wrong bus?”
“What can I say?” I pop in an orange slice and forget not to talk with my mouth full. “Guess I’m just a very adventuresome person.” I give them a wink and one of those little clicks where you suck the side of your tongue with your teeth. I saw a girl do it on TV the other day and I’ve been wanting to try it out for a trademark.
“You have the spirit of a Polynesian wayfinder,” Meowsie tells me.
“What’s a wayfinder?” Marcy asks him.
“We’re learning about them in Mr. Arriéta’s class.”
“Mr. Arriéta? What school do you go to?”
Meowsie shifts in his chair and clears his throat.
“He goes to Emily Dickinson,” I tell her.
“Oh,” Marcy says. “What grade are you in?”
“Fifth,” Meowsie mumbles. “Anyway, Mr. Arriéta says wayfinders are a very rare breed because they don’t depend on GPS or anything like it. They memorize the houses of the stars, where they come out and go back into the ocean, to make maps in their heads. They also use the movements of waves, planets, birds and sea creatures to set their course. Did you know that clouds get a brown color on the bottom when they’re over land? If wayfinders notice the shift in the color of the clouds on the horizon, they can use that to tell them something about what’s up ahead.”
I feel a wave of respect for my brother, moving from me to him and then curling back. Just picturing the crud-face dorf nuggets who’ve picked on him for being quiet and keeping to himself over the years makes me wanna thump my chest and let out a couple Tarzan yells.
“There was this girl in one of my therapy groups,” Marcy tells Meowsie. “She was born blind and she used to click her tongue to make maps of the rooms in her house with the echoes. Not every human can do that, but she could.”
“So, do you feel like being in a school where you depend mostly on hearing aids is taking something away from you?” Meowsie asks her.
“No,” she starts, “because if that’s all that you knew, you’d think I wasn’t grateful. And I am. But”—she looks at her hands and twists them—“sometimes I do take my hearing aids out. It’s not that I don’t want to hear.” She looks back up at us. “It’s just that since I didn’t have ones that worked consistently for so long, I figured out other ways of being in the world. So when the hearing aids go in and I can hear everything in the normal way”—she hangs air quotes when she says ‘normal’—“it’s like the volume goes down on other mysteries.”
“What kind of mysteries?” Meowsie moves in closer to Marcy.
“I don’t know how to explain it exactly,” she says. “But it’s like, have you ever been sitting on the bleachers and you just knew someone was behind you? You couldn’t hear them or anything, but you still knew they were there.”
“How did you know they were behind you if you couldn’t hear them or see them?” I ask.
“Because,” Marcy says, “you can feel them.”
“You mean like with your thoughts?” I get up on my knees in the chair. Sometimes when I get excited about something I have to move around a little.
“Not with your thoughts,” she says. “I mean like with whatever part of you is touching the bleachers.”
I scrunch my face. “Your butt?”
She smiles and Meowsie does, too.
“Ask the Great and Powerful Gazanka.” I raise both hands. “It knows all.”
Meowsie elbows me and I drop my arms.
“It’s like,” Marcy says, “when someone is standing on the bleachers behind you, even if they’re trying to be sneaky, you can feel their approach depending on what you’re both touching at the same time.”
“Kind of like the waves in the ocean,” Meowsie says.
The front door opens and Mom walks in, flinging her suit jacket on the coat tree in the front hall.
“Kyle?” she says in a tired voice. “Michael?”
“Over here,” Meowsie says.
Mom comes around the corner and looks at Marcy with kind of surprised eyes.
“Well, hello there,” she says.
Marcy stands and offers Mom her hand. “I’m Marcy,” she says. “I was close by and just came to see Kyle for a few minutes.”
Mom gives me an icicle look.
“You have a very kind daughter, Mrs. Constantini,” Marcy says. “She’s really helped make things easier for me in a new school.”
Mom’s face changes a bit.
“I was really scared on the first day, but Kyle was like my angel sent from heaven.”
Now, Mom gives her a look like that’s hard to believe.
There’s a knock on the door. Mom moves back across the den to open it and a tall, blond girl with teeth in the shape of Chiclets steps inside.
“You ready, Marce?” she says after saying hello to Mom.
“Just a minute.” Marcy slides a piece of paper off the homework table. “May I?”
“What’s mine is yours,” I tell her.
She rips it in half and writes something on it then hands it to Meowsie.
“This is my screen name on Instant,” she says.
I try to look over her shoulder. I wanna know her screen name on Instant.
“I’d really like to hear more about wayfinders if you learn any more interesting things in your class,” she tells Meowsie.
He takes the paper and stares at it like it’s the map to El Dorado.
Marcy bounces across the den then turns at the door and looks at me. “See you tomorrow.”
Then she tells Mom nice to meet her and says bye. As soon as she and the blond girl are gone, I plop open a book on the table while Mom stares
at the closed door.
“Just doing homework,” I sing.
“Is that the girl you stood up for in gym?” Mom asks me.
I stop flipping through the pages and look up at her.
“Is it?” she asks.
I nod.
“I just came from Principal Bracamontes’ office.” She steps across the den and comes to the table. “We still haven’t come up with a suitable substitute form of discipline. All he offered was detention for a month, but I think that will interfere with establishing a proper homework routine. Besides that, Roger’s not an experienced enough driver to be picking you up forty-five minutes later than the bus. I certainly can’t be doing that for four weeks.”
I picture Mrs. Ockfatrea waiting for me at the curb after school in her turdy Datsun and kneel in front of my mother.
“Mom, please just let me do NAVS.” I clasp my hands. “Michael says I have the spirit of a wayfinder and Marcy’s teaching me all about the ears in my butt and I can use all that to help my school win the challenge. I’m so sorry that I didn’t know Mrs. A. wasn’t going to be at Donna’s, but I didn’t start the water fight, it was Cameron—”
“Get up off the floor, Kyle.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Finish your homework and then come into the kitchen to set the dinner table.”
I nod and take a seat, sitting with my back so straight my head might fall behind me. I stack a single loose paper like a secretary and search my backpack for a sharpened pencil. It’s only the first week of school and already I’m out of pencils. There’s gotta be a star map somewhere to lead humanity to the stash of missing pencils.
“I don’t want you getting excited about this NAVS competition, Kyle,” Mom says from the kitchen after she washes her hands and pulls a salad bowl out of the cabinet. “There’s no way your father and I will allow you to go over to a team member’s house while you’re still grounded.”
“Mom, Marcy’s having a hard time at our school,” I say.
Mom pulls a bottle of salad dressing out of the fridge. “I can imagine.”
“It’s hard for her, Mom. She misses her old school and she needs something to make her feel like this is all worth it.” A flash of brilliance lights up my brain. “Like joining NAVS!”
Mom moves her eyes to mine. “I fail to see the connection, Kyle.”
“We see what we wanna see, Mom.”
“Don’t sass me, Kyle Alexandra.”
“Sorry,” I say. Even though I’m not, really.
“It doesn’t seem like grounding Kyle from NAVS is the only way to handle what happened at Donna’s,” Meowsie offers. “It seems like NAVS is good for her. And could be good for Marcy.”
“That’s enough from the both of you,” Mom says. “Now, Kyle, Marcy is not your responsibility. If she wants to join NAVS, that is her business. I’m concerned with your business. The business of making sure that you are not acting out in a violent way, disregarding rules and then lying to cover up your actions.”
Put like that, I do sound like a nerf herder.
“I’m sure that makes sense to the two of you. You’re both very bright and I don’t think I need to keep spelling this out.”
“But, Mom—”
“No buts.”
Yeah, right.
“Now go wash your hands and set the table. And what are all those papers and books on the ground?”
I look at the stuff I chucked on the carpet when Marcy came in and snarl. So much for impressing my mother with homework.
But hang on just a tiny second. Didn’t she say that I can’t be going over to people’s houses? Because if that’s the case, she never said a word about what I do with my free time while I’m at school now, did she?
Monday morning before classes start, Sheroo is busy whispering and giggling with one of her new friends in the quadrangle. I don’t think they’re talking about me or anything, but I am a little surprised at how quickly she’s gotten in with a different group.
Okay, this is stupid. I’m just going to walk over there and straighten all this out. Sheroo, me and Brooke have been best friends since the second grade. How hard can it be to just march right over and set the old record straight once and for all?
I grip my books to my chest as I try to get up the guts to interrupt Sheroo and some girl who—just as I predicted!—is wearing aquamarine lip gloss and a shirt sliding off her shoulder.
That’s when I notice Sheroo is pretty much still doing her own thing. She’s got on one of her corduroy rompers with candy-apple tights. I feel weirdly proud of her for not running out and turning into a creature from Sasha Poblansky Island.
“I’m going to the library.”
Brooke is standing next to me.
“What for?” I turn to look at her.
“I want to use the computer lab. Send a quick email.”
I shoot a last look at Sheroo and her new friend as they move into the bathroom, away from me and Brooke. I can’t tell if she even noticed we were right down the hall from her.
I turn on one foot and follow Brooke down another hall.
“Can I come with?” I fall in step beside her.
She shrugs. “Free country.”
The Georgia O’Keeffe campus is a lot bigger than Emily Dickinson. I imagine I’m a wayfinder, using windows instead of stars to navigate this strange and untamed continent.
We get to the doors to the library and Brooke hauls one of them open. She heads straight for the research labs and I see that one computer is down and two of the other three are taken. One of them holds the blue baboon bottom of one Inocente Doublefart Nevarez.
“Kyle! Brooke!”
We look at one of the other computers and see Cameron waving at us.
“He-hey! Cameroon Lagoon.” I pretend not to even notice Ino and slap my books down by Cameron’s station. Brooke pulls up to the other empty slot while I drag a chair over to Cameron’s. He’s looking at me like I just sprouted a third eye.
“Cameroon Lagoon?”
I smile at him, showing all my teeth. “Can I use your computer for like twenty seconds?”
“I doubt you could find whatever you’re looking for that fast,” he says.
“You doubt the Amazing Constantini?”
“Kyle.” Cameron tilts his head. Still, he smiles. Mua-ha. A chink in the mighty armor.
“Well, what are you looking up?” I ask.
“Extra credit. For history. I’m writing an oral report on the Manhattan Project, but I want more information on molecular chain reactions.”
“Oo-kay,” I say, “I’m sure that’s super gripping but can I please just look up one tiny, super-small, extra tiny, little word?”
“All depends.” Cameron leans back and rests his fingers in a tepee. “Do you have hummus in your lunch?”
“How do you know I get hummus?”
“I saw it on your table the other day,” he says. “But I noticed you didn’t eat it.”
I squinch one eye. Mom’s always packing me stuff like flaxseed crackers with hummus or spicy nori—for a snack! I’d give anything for a plain and honest Oreo for once in my life.
“I might have it again today,” I tell Cam.
“I’ll type in one search item”—he lifts a finger—“if you let me have your hummus.”
“Sure!” I stop myself before saying he can take my hummus for the rest of the year.
“How do I know you’ll keep your word?” he asks.
I roll my eyes. “I swear on my blue fedora,” I tell him. “You will reach the shore alive.”
“What?”
“Just look up Polynesian wayfinders.”
“That’s two words,” he says. “Not to mention they’re not small.”
“Cameron.”
“Type it, Cameron,” Ino says from his computer. “Else she’ll punch you.”
Oh, go take a leap through a flying donut, pimple puss.
“You punch people?” Cameron looks at me.
/> “She punched him.” Brooke jabs her thumb at Ino without moving her eyes from her own screen.
“Look, just type already!” I say.
“Okay, okay.”
Cameron opens up a new browser window, types in ‘wayfinders’ and starts to read from the first link.
“Wayfinding is a method for navigating open waters without the use of a compass, radio, sextant or satellites.”
“What’s a sextant?” I ask.
“I’m telling you guys are looking up stuff about sex,” Ino says.
“A sextant”—Cameron sneaks an irritated glance at Ino—“determines latitude and longitude at sea.”
“Doesn’t matter where you do it,” Ino says.
“Ino, just be quiet, why don’t you?” I tell him. “We’re tryna work.”
“Oh, so this is work for your little club,” he says. “I could have been in that club, but I’m not a nerdy loser.”
“Yeah, you’d rather pick up people’s gnarly garbage after lunch,” I say.
Cameron covers his mouth as he tries not to laugh but out pops a rebel snort. Ino gathers his books and stands up from the computer. Here we go again.
“Already told you, Wonder Woman.” He comes up to me and flicks my fedora to the ground. Brooke stops typing and fishes it up. “You better watch yourself. ”
“Well, now I’m telling,” Cameron says.
Ino gets in his face and Cameron leans back a little.
“What are you going to tell, you little walrus butt whisker?” Ino asks.
“That you’re threatening Kyle,” Cameron says. Then he looks at Brooke. “There are three witnesses. And if I had to guess, there are probably cameras in here, too. So you better watch yourself. ”
Brooke hands me my hat.
“You guys are a bunch of nerds, babies and losers.” Ino stays in Cameron’s face for a few seconds before backing away. “I don’t have time for this. I’m outta here.”
After Ino leaves, Cameron shudders. Then he scratches the back of his neck really quick and leans in to the screen to read more. “The wayfinder depends on the stars, the sun, the tides and other signs in nature for clues to direction,” he says. Then he leans back. “You know what’s odd?”