by Mike Jung
“Er, well, no, we don’t need a speaker.”
“No worries, I’m cool with listening on your computer!”
“Okay. We, er, have to go downstairs …”
“—out-and-out lies, it’s maddening. And the moderators, holy—”
Hector tilted his head in the direction of the kitchen, where Mom and Dad were talking about everything terrible about the world—racism, sexism, the usual stuff. “Toxic masculinity” was the major topic lately.
“Dude, you’re eavesdropping. On my parents.”
“What, you don’t listen in on your parents? I do it all the time,” Hector said, sounding like that was just totally normal. “Wow, your mom and dad are intense!”
“Tell me about it.”
“Are they talking about the presidential debate?”
“Yeah. You have to admit, that debate was completely bananas.”
“Yeah, my dad just yelled ‘¡no sabes nada!’ at the TV over and over again.”
“Yup, it was bad.” I turned my head toward the kitchen. “HEY, MOM. HEY, DAD!”
“Easy with the yelling, babe,” Mom said. Hector cracked up.
“What?” I said, irritated and embarrassed.
“Babe!” Hector said, laughing and holding his stomach with both hands. “Dude, that’s so cute!”
“All right, all right, cut it out,” I said. “Hang on a minute.”
I walked through the living room and stuck my head into the kitchen, where Mom was holding a magazine article out for Dad to look at. They were both laughing.
“Isn’t that just perfect?” Mom said.
“Spot-on. This might be my favorite political cartoon ever.”
“Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad,” I said.
“Thank you for not bellowing at us from across the house,” Dad said. “Who was that at the door?”
“A friend. Can he stay over for a while?”
“Honey, you know Eric’s always welcome here,” Mom said. “Wait a minute, when you say ‘a friend,’ do you mean …”
“It’s not Eric.”
Mom and Dad turned in their chairs and looked at me in unison, which was always funny, even though it was also a tiny bit creepy.
“Not Eric?” Dad said in the kind of voice you might use to say “unicorns are real?”
“Honey! A new friend, that’s so great!” Mom tossed the magazine onto the table and raised her arms in a V shape, which of course is exactly when Hector decided to poke his head into the kitchen too, because I obviously wasn’t embarrassed enough already.
“Hi,” he said, standing close enough to me that our shoulders were touching.
“Hello! Welcome!” Dad bounced up out of his chair so fast that it looked like he was doing a jumping jack, took two fast steps toward us, and stuck out his hand. I halfway expected Hector to back away in terror, but he gave Dad a patented Hector Morales grin instead.
“Thanks,” Hector said. “I’m Hector.”
“Steven Park,” Dad said. “Matt’s dad.”
“Hi, Hector!” Mom was just as terrifyingly perky as Dad. She reached out, grabbed both of Hector’s hands in her hands, and pumped all four hands up and down seven or eight times. “I’m Jen. It’s so good to meet you!”
“Hi, Mrs. Park,” Hector said, bobbing his head up and down a couple of times. Mom and Dad paused their campaign of embarrassment to smile goofily at each other, and Hector took the chance to grin at me and throw an elbow into my ribs.
“Ow,” I said under my breath. “We’re going downstairs,” I said, louder.
“Do you guys want a snack or something?” Dad said, twisting his upper half and looking around the kitchen over his shoulder. “We might have some—”
“NO! I mean, no thanks, it’s okay, no,” I said, imagining Dad finishing off my social humiliation by pulling out a bag of sriracha-flavored kale chips or something. That would have been totally fine back in Cedarville, but Hector wasn’t from Cedarville.
“How about you, Hector?” Dad said. He zeroed in on the cupboard next to the microwave.
“Sure,” Hector said. “I mean, yes, thank you.”
I almost warned Hector not to accept anything made with coconut flour, but I stopped myself because I didn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings, then wondered exactly how I became the world’s biggest goody-two-shoes doofus. Complicated moment.
“Here you go!” Dad handed Hector a box of green tea cookies. Okay, those were actually good.
“Thank you!” Hector flashed his big, toothy smile again, held the box up with both hands, and bobbed his head a couple of times.
“Dude, what are these?” Hector said under his breath as we went down the stairs.
“Green tea cookies. Try one.”
“Never had ’em before,” Hector said. Not ever having them before didn’t stop him from having the box open by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs, though.
“You’re lucky, these are good.” I grabbed two cookies as Hector pulled the crinkly plastic tray partway out of the box. “Dad has some other stuff that’s … uh, less good. What do you think?”
That last part came out more like “whuduhdoo thinmgh” because my mouth had a cookie stuffed in it. Hector didn’t even try to talk through his full mouth, but he looked at me with his eyes very wide open and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Unggmmfh,” he said, swallowing hard. “I mean, they’re awesome!”
“I know, right?”
“Are these Korean? You’re Korean, right?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, no, they’re not Korean, but yeah, I’m Korean American. Dad says those”—I pointed a thumb at the cookies as we got to the bottom of the stairs—“are American rip-offs of a Japanese thing.”
“Huh,” Hector said, walking around the room and looking at stuff. “Like burritos.”
“What about burritos?” I sat in front of my computer, woke it up from sleep mode, and opened the music app.
“Burritos are a made-up American thing.” Hector stopped in front of the drawing of Petra Ursu taped to the wall over my futon and pointed at it. “This is really good!”
“Thanks. So …”
I was interrupted by the guitar riff at the start of “The Watcher,” the first song on the new album by—
“Galactic Herald!” Hector held a cookie up in the air, exactly like the silvery alien on the cover of their first album, Worlds within Worlds, before cramming it dramatically into his mouth, and I couldn’t help laughing. Hector laughed too, spraying a few crumbs in the air, then started air-drumming along. I already had the printed-out lyrics on my desk, so I picked them up, turned up the volume and started singing along. Hector joined in, which is when I found out he has a really good voice, and it was fun, even without Eric there, and for a second I wondered if maybe not everything would be terrible after he moved.
“Did you pack a hat? It gets really sunny there,” Dad said, looking up at the sky as if the sun was about to explode right then.
“Yes.”
“You’ve got your meds, right?”
“Dad. Yes. Please calm down.”
Dad blew out a gust of breath. “It’s times like these when I almost wish you had a phone.”
“There’s a way to make that wish come true, you—”
“We’ll talk about it when you get home, Matt. Seriously.”
Woo-hoo! Awesome! I mean, it would have been awesome if Eric and I didn’t have a plan that would end up with us getting suspended at the very least. I was suddenly queasy, and felt a horrible urge to confess everything to Dad before we’d even done it.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“There’s Eric!” Dad waved as a car pulled up to the curb about halfway down the block from us. Eric and his mom both waved as they stopped. There were too many other cars already in front of school for Eric’s mom to get past easily, so after Eric got out of the car with his stuff she did a three-point turn, which actually created a new roadblock behind her. Someone honked at her, and she h
onked back, and I wondered if a full-blown car horn war was about to break out, but she managed to turn around and head back the way she’d come without any more hostilities. Eric lurched toward us with a giant duffel bag slung across his back.
“Hey!” he said as he dumped the bag on the sidewalk next to my suitcase and backpack. “Hi, Mr. Park!”
“Hey, Eric!” Dad said. “Okay, guys, can you handle it on your own from here?”
“Absolutely,” Eric said.
“Yup,” I said, partly because Eric and I had stuff to discuss, and partly because I felt a totally bananas urge to say “next time I see you I’ll probably be suspended and kicked out of marching band!”
“Okay.” Dad took a deep breath, and I could tell he was forcing himself to not hug me or kiss me on top of the head. Mom and Dad are both pretty good about that kind of thing, but I hugged him anyway, in a “we who are about to go on a super-long bus ride salute you” way.
“Are you nervous?” I asked Eric as Dad walked up the street and around the corner to the car.
“No, but you are,” Eric said as he unzipped his duffel bag, pulled out a backpack, and rezipped the duffel bag, which looked only a little less full than it did before.
“Dude, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about how you ask me if I’m nervous whenever you’re nervous.” Eric put on the backpack and grinned.
“Oh, come on, I don’t do that.”
“Every time.”
“No.”
“Are you nervous right now?”
…
“Well, yeah,” I said after a minute.
“So am I!” Eric grabbed my hand, held it up in front of him, and high-fived it with his other hand.
“So awkward,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing, nervous or not.
“ATTENTION, MUSICIAN-SCHOLARS!”
Principal Mendez was out on the sidewalk with her bullhorn. She has a thing about calling the marching band “musician-scholars,” which most kids at school think is ridiculous, but I secretly like. Some of us actually do try to learn stuff, after all.
“Foghorn Mendez is about to blow,” someone in the crowd said.
“YOU MAKE US PROUD, MUSICIAN-SCHOLARS!” she went on. “SHOW THE WORLD WHY HILLTOP SUMMIT HAS THE BEST MARCHING BAND IN THE STATE!”
Here’s the thing about marching band: We have bullies, terrible students, and kids who’ll totally lie to their parents and go to a comic book convention when they’re supposed to be at World of Amazement instead, but most of us love being in the band. We’re proud of being in the band, even though we’re also super embarrassed about being in the band, which is why most of the band clapped and cheered really loudly when Mendez said what she said. All the parents that were there clapped and cheered too—all that band geek pride came from somewhere, after all.
Principal Mendez handed the bullhorn to Mr. D, waved with both hands, then turned and walked back into the building as Mr. D stepped into her place on the sidewalk.
“OKAY, LISTEN UP!” Mr. D bellowed. “BRING YOUR LUGGAGE TO MR. STELLA. HE’LL LOAD IT ONTO THE BUS FOR YOU! WHEN YOU HEAR YOUR NAME, YOU CAN BOARD THE BUS!”
And so it began. Getting on the bus was slightly less nightmarish than expected because we had to wait until our names were called, so Eric and I ended up in pretty good seats—closer to the front of the bus than the back, but not too close to the front. We got lucky when the bully cohort (with Kenny, but minus Sean) headed for the back of the bus without paying any attention to us, but Sean gave us the serious evil eye as he passed our seats a couple of minutes later.
“Eh, don’t worry about him,” Eric said.
“Do I look worried?”
“Yes.”
“No I don’t.”
“Okay, maybe it’s, you know”—Eric made a circling motion in front of his face—“just how your face looks, then.”
“Har dee har har.”
The bus was super loud for a while—Mr. D had to tell us to stop yelling more than once—but the excitement of getting on the road wore off after half an hour, and everyone started getting crabby after a full hour, even with a bathroom break at a rest area thrown in. After two hours we stopped for lunch at EZ Take-Out, where the burgers were awesome and the bathrooms were like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie, and twenty minutes after getting back on the bus people started falling asleep, which meant I had some peace and quiet for the first time all day.
I’d brought three books on the trip, and I was halfway through my third time reading Two Naomis, an awesome book about two girls named Naomi whose lives get totally messed up when their totally selfish divorced parents (one mom and one dad) decide to start dating each other and eventually get married. So the girls start out not liking each other, but then become friends, and then sisters. It’d become my favorite book even though it had zero in the way of science fiction or fantasy—it made me think about how amazing it would be if Eric and I were brothers, even though I’d never tell anyone that—but I knew I couldn’t just read it while everyone else was there to see because the cover was a picture of the two Naomis, and the Naomis are girls, and the only thing that’s as bad for your social life as being the only boy piccolo player in the history of your school is … okay, nothing’s as bad for your social life as that, but being a boy who reads books with girls on the cover (wearing stuff like flowery purple dresses, even) isn’t a lot better.
Now, though? With people napping, reading their own books, or staring at their phones like zombies? Perfect timing. I opened the book to my favorite chapter—the one where the Naomis go to their favorite bakery for the last time—and I looked over at Eric, asleep in the seat next to me with his face mashed into a folded-up sweatshirt, which was mashed up against the bus window, and tried not to think about how horrible it was going to be when he moved. Then I started reading, but the bus felt sweaty and warm, and even though I can’t fall asleep in cars I must have fallen asleep anyway, without meaning to. One second I was reading my book and the next second I was jerking awake at the sound of a voice right in my ear.
“Wake up, queer boy.”
I opened my eyes, blinked in the hazy afternoon light coming through the bus windows, turned my head, and stared right into the face of Kenny Delacroix’s gargoyle face, which was maybe two millimeters away from mine. I leaned away, grossed out, but I froze in horror when I saw what Kenny held in one of his gorilla paws. It was a book with a cover showing two girls in flowery dresses sitting on the porch of an apartment building.
My book.
Two Naomis.
“Give that back!” I grabbed wildly for the book, but Kenny pulled it just out of reach, cackling like a loon. He hooked one meaty arm over the top of the seat across the aisle from me, semicrushing Hector’s head before Hector could move out of the way, and started reading the back cover.
“Get off me, man!” Hector said, rubbing his head.
“‘A moving tale of friendship, empathy, and girl power. I love the Naomis so much’—HOLY CRAP, THIS IS SO GAY! Are you actually a girl, Wang?”
Laughter broke out—too much laughter. It wasn’t the whole band or anything like that, but it was enough of the band to make me feel super disappointed.
“Drop it, you jerk.” Eric actually climbed over me to grab at the book, and he got his fingertips on it before Kenny yanked it away again.
“Sit down, Tiny Tim,” he said.
“Oh geez, that’s an amazing burn, I’m so mad,” Eric said in a bored voice.
I jabbed Kenny in the armpit with my fingertips—desperation makes people do dangerous things, I guess—and Kenny grunted and dropped the book. I grabbed it off the floor and yelped as Kenny tried to stomp on my hand, missing by a few inches. I looked up at him in fear—I’ll admit it, I’m not proud—just in time for him to grab the front of my shirt with his right hand, twist it up in a fist, brace his left hand against the back of my seat, and yank me up into a standing position, halfway strangli
ng me in the process. His fist looked approximately the size of a bowling ball.
“You don’t EVER touch me, Chicken Chow Mein—OW!”
Kenny let go of my shirt—oxygen!—and grabbed the back of his head. He twisted around and looked behind him at Skye Oh, who had an orange belt in aikido, and had apparently just smacked Kenny in the back of the head.
“Hey, that hurt!” Kenny said in a super-babyish voice. I would have laughed if I wasn’t already so terrified and enraged. “You could have at least taken off your rings, Skye HO!”
Skye made a brushing motion on one shoulder and raised her hands about waist high.
“What did you call me?” she said in a deadly quiet voice.
“I called you Skye Ho, you slanty-eyed—OW!”
Kenny tried to block Skye, but holy cow, she was fast! WACK, she smacked Kenny on the side of the head (the one facing away from the teachers), then POOF, she vanished from my line of sight a nanosecond before Mr. D got up from his seat to stare back at us. Luckily everyone else was up and staring over the back of their seats too, so he couldn’t see much.
“There better not be any nonsense going on back there,” he said in his ominous tone of voice, bobbing and weaving to try to get a better view.
“Mr. D, Skye just karate kicked me,” Kenny yelled like the yelling liar he was.
“I saw it,” Sean said from somewhere behind me, almost making my head explode.
“Sean, you’re such a liar!” I said.
“Sean, you’re such a liar,” he said in a nasal, super-high voice. “Why don’t—OWWW, what—”
I couldn’t see what happened, but I heard Skye’s voice at low volume. Kenny was still looming over me like a killer grizzly bear, but he was also completely blocking me from Mr. D’s view, so I risked ducking my head into the aisle and looking toward the back of the bus.
Skye was on the opposite side of the bus, one row back from ours, which explained how she could smack Kenny and get back in her seat so fast. Sean was hunched over next to her in the aisle, and at first I thought he was hiding behind Kenny like I was, but then I realized Skye had his wrist in some kind of complicated, painful-looking twist. She let go and he straightened up fast, not even trying to pretend his wrist didn’t hurt.