But then I have to listen to the story. Peter Rabbit is running through McGregor’s garden now. He’s gonna get caught momentarily. Once old McGregor pops that basket over him, that’s it. That rabbit ain’t going nowhere. Then Peter gets sick and starts sneezing, and I ask, “Miss Robinson, are you a real teacher?”

  Tasha glares at me. I know she’s thinking, Here he goes with those pestery questions again.

  “You work at the Auburn Street School, right?” I ask. I’ve seen her little red car there.

  “I only work there one day a week.”

  “Is that all?” I ask. She’s a good teacher. She ought to work more than that.

  “I work at King School one day. That’s it. Two days a week. I work at a grocery store at night.”

  “Where at?” I ask.

  Tasha rolls her eyes. If she talked more, she’d tell me to shut up, but I’m not ready.

  “Past the gun factory. Up Edwards Street,” says Miss Robinson.

  “You have to drive up there?” I ask.

  Tasha puts her hand on her hip and smunches her eyebrows down. Mad.

  “Yeah, it’s a couple of miles away,” the teacher says.

  “You get paid to work here?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Miss Robinson reaches down and starts pulling markers and paper out of her bag.

  “Then what do you come here for?” I ask.

  I can’t help it, I want to know.

  “Junebug, you hush up,” Tasha says to me, all exasperated. I bet she’s afraid the reading teacher will get sick of my questions and not come back, and then we won’t have anywhere to visit after school.

  But Miss Robinson smiles at me. “I know how to teach reading, and Mrs. Swanson’s church put out an ad for a volunteer, so I came on over. And met you!”

  “And Tasha,” I add.

  The teacher reaches into her bag and puts a brown spiky thing on the table. “I thought we’d make a book of poems,” she says.

  “Poems?” asks Tasha, her eyebrows arching up now.

  “You know. Rhymes. Like in Cat in the Hat,” I explain. “Hey, what is that thing?”

  “It’s a pinecone. From a pine tree.”

  “Must have been a big tree,” I say. That pinecone is as tall as a coffee can.

  But Tasha’s looking confused. We saw some pine trees on a picnic up at the state park last summer. Mama and Harriet Ames love to go on picnics in the summertime. There was a bunch of pine trees in the grove by the picnic table. But maybe Tasha doesn’t remember.

  “Christmas trees have these,” I tell her.

  “That’s a ornament?” she asks, even more confused.

  “The seeds for a new pine tree are kept inside here,” says Miss Robinson. “When the pinecone falls to the ground, the seeds fall out and a new tree can grow.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I knew that.”

  Miss Robinson folds a big wad of paper and creases it like a book. On the front she writes, “Poems are a magic carpet.” Then she opens to a blank page.

  “I brought something unusual on purpose. Stare into the pinecone as if it’s a crystal ball. See what it tells you. What does it remind you of?”

  Tasha reaches right out and takes it. She stares into the stiff little branches and turns it around.

  “It looks like a brown-armed ballerina, twirling on a stage.” She whispers right near the teacher’s ear so the big girls with the crayons can’t hear.

  Tasha says that because she wants to be a dancer. Miss Robinson writes it in big letters in the book. Then it’s my turn.

  I take the pinecone and stare at it. I feel loose, like when I’m looking out the window through the bottles, far away.

  “It’s a fountain of wooden water, spraying frozen time.”

  Miss Robinson looks astonished. Then she writes it down just the way I said it.

  “I knew you two would be good at this,” she says. “Anything else?”

  Tasha thinks for a minute. Then she whispers, “I can fly.”

  Miss Robinson puts that in the book, too, while Tasha leans over her, watching. Then Tasha reaches out and points at the letters. Slowly she says, “I can fly.”

  Miss Robinson gives Tasha a big hug.

  “Tasha,” she says, “someday soon you’re going to be reading Peter Rabbit to me.”

  Tasha doesn’t say anything, but she’s smiling a big old grin.

  For some reason, I’m thinking about my homework. The empty page I left upstairs on my bed. I wonder if Miss Robinson could help me with that. It seems like I’m stuck. First I feel kind of hopeful, like maybe I could write a great paragraph. But right after that, I get angry. Seems that all teachers do, the nice ones anyway, is get your hopes up.

  “Tasha’s doing great, isn’t she?” Miss Robinson asks me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess.”

  I sit there staring at nothing, in a funny mood. Then I hear a voice. “Junebug!”

  It’s Jolita. She’s at the door.

  “Come here a second,” she says. She glances at Mrs. Swanson, but doesn’t come in.

  Jolita’s got her hands behind her back. This time she’s with her usual pain-in-the-neck girlfriend, Georgina. Georgina’s saying, “Come on. We don’t have all day.”

  “All right. Hold on. Junebug, hurry it up,” Jolita says.

  She’ll do just about anything Georgina tells her. I go on over to the door.

  “Yeah? What?” I ask.

  She brings her hands around front and opens them up.

  “Ta-dah!” she says.

  She’s got four little perfume bottles, all different. I take them quick, before they disappear. One has little ridges cut in the glass, one is flared out at the bottom like a genie’s bottle, one is round like a ball, and one is narrow and skinny.

  I look up at Jolita. “Thanks?”

  She starts to smile at me.

  Georgina makes a disgusted noise and takes Jolita’s arm. “Come on,” she says. “We gotta go.”

  Four

  Mama gets home after five o’clock. She works at a nursing home for the elderly and has to take the bus. Then she has to climb all the stairs, just like us. She says you never know who’s going to get in the elevator with you. Same thing with the parking garages downtown. She won’t go in those, either.

  We get out the macaroni and cheese from yesterday, and hot dogs, too, while Mama changes out of her work clothes. She’s not a nurse, but she’s an assistant. She wears a badge that tells what she is, and she’s got white sneakers that she cleans off every night.

  Tasha and I help get the table set and pour drinks and everything. No matter how tired she feels, Mama makes us do it right. We can’t even have the TV on while we eat. That’s why Robert doesn’t like to eat over with us. He can hardly swallow unless the TV tells him how.

  “Where’s your Aunt Jolita?” Mama asks us finally.

  We both shrug and sit down. Neither one of us wants to be the one to tell her Jolita wasn’t here to babysit, as she’s supposed to. And I don’t want to mention that Jolita’s been hanging around with Georgina. We watch Mama’s face while she dishes out the macaroni and angrily slaps that spoon down on the plates.

  Mama sits down to eat, but she kind of pokes at her food. Not too hungry, I guess. When Mama pushes her plate away and looks up, I say, “Guess what?”

  Tasha runs to get a piece of paper and a pencil from next to the telephone.

  “What?” asks Mama in a tired voice.

  “You gotta guess,” I say, bouncing on my feet.

  She starts to smile. “We won TriState Megabucks?” she asks.

  “Nope. Guess again!”

  “Oh, Lord, I don’t know.”

  “Tasha can read!” I yell out.

  “Junior!” Mama says sharply. She doesn’t want me making fun of Tasha, because the teachers told Mama that she learns slow.

  “She can. Watch this,” I say.

  I write “I can fly” on the paper and pass it to Tasha.

  “I can fly,” she whispers.

  Mama stares at her as if she doesn’t believe it.

  “Write something else,” she says to me.

  So I write “I can run” and Tasha reads that, too.

  Then Mama gives Tasha a great big hug. She holds Tasha’s round cheeks and rubs her forehead against hers. It looks like she might cry a little.

  “Did she learn that in school?” Mama asks.

  “Nope,” I say. “That reading teacher who comes here in the little room downstairs. She taught her. Took awhile.”

  “You thank her for me,” Mama says. “Be sure you thank her tomorrow.”

  I nod. “Okay.” But I’m thinking, what would Trevor say if he knew I was hanging out, helping my little sister learn to read, instead of going out with the guys?

  Mama starts clearing the dishes. I have to help scrape the plates into the trash. Tasha gets to go play.

  “So, Junior, it’s going to be your birthday in a couple of weeks.”

  “No way!” I say back.

  “What are you talking about?” Mama looks at me. “You know it is. May 18. You’ll be ten. What do you want for a present?”

  “Corks,” I say. “That’s all I need. Corks.”

  “Young man,” says Mama, “I do not understand you at all. That’s what you want is corks?”

  “Yep. They’ll do the trick.” I give her a big wide smile. Even Mama doesn’t know my secret plan. Of course I need corks! How can you send a message in a bottle without a cork in the top?

  Mama’s standing at the sink now with her hands in the soapy water. She squeezes out a sponge and starts wiping the countertop real slow. I can tell she’s thinking about something. She’s had something on her mind since she asked us where Jolita was today. I’m getting a little nervous waiting for it to come out. Maybe I did something wrong. Seems like when you’re a kid you’re always doing something wrong. But I can’t think what.

  “My supervisor at work is going to be starting up a new program. Group apartments for the elderly, for the ones who aren’t so sick. She asked me if I wanted to be a resident supervisor for a group.”

  “Where at?” I ask, frowning. What’s going on here?

  “Across town. You and Tasha would have to go to King Elementary.”

  Group apartments for elderly people? Now hold on.

  “We’d be living with old people?” I ask, making a face.

  “We’d have our own place. Smaller than this, though.”

  “Smaller?” I repeat with a squeak. Seems like I turned into an echo. How can any apartment be smaller unless it’s a dollhouse and we’re toys?

  “Yes. Smaller,” Mama says. “It would mean Jolita’d have to get her own apartment. We’d be on our own.”

  “Oh, man,” I mumble.

  I can’t get all this straight. King Elementary is big. I’ve been there before. There’s an indoor swimming pool over there, and the kids are a great big bunch of show-offs because they have the newest school in town. Besides, what about leaving my buddies here, like Robert and Darnell and Miss Robinson? I have to hang with my buddies. And what about Jolita? Where would she go? Are we just going to go off and leave her?

  “Don’t you want to move?” Mama asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  I never thought about it much. I never thought we could move. And didn’t Mama say we’d be living with old people? I don’t know about that. I really don’t. Look at Mrs. Swanson. She’s old. Old and mean! Imagine a whole apartment building full of Mrs. Swansons. What if we hated it there and wanted to come back? There’s a two-year waiting list at the Housing Authority to get into Auburn Street Plaza. I’d be twelve years old by then.

  “Aren’t old people grouchy?” I ask.

  Mama shrugs, wiping off the stove now.

  “Some are. Some aren’t. Just like everybody else.”

  She smiles at me. The counter can’t get much cleaner. She’s rubbing the holes right out of the sponge.

  But now I’m thinking the other way. Maybe we should move. A swimming pool is almost like the ocean. A little square ocean smelling like chlorine. Maybe I could learn to be a good swimmer over at King. Maybe. And I could get away from Trevor and Georgina, and Trevor’s gang.

  But what about Jolita? She brought me bottles today. Maybe we could get to be friends.

  “I don’t know if I want the job. I’ve never been in charge of something like that. On my own. Managing elderly people is not always easy,” she says. Then she sighs. “So I don’t know. Something to think about, I guess.”

  After everything’s cleaned up, I go over to the living-room window. There it is again. That ugly old gun factory. Rising up so high, it blocks the sky. I try to look way past it like I did with the pinecone, but words don’t come. I see a big, dirty wall, shattered and busted up.

  If we move, will it be someplace else just like this? Or will it be different?

  Down on the tar, I see Darnell come out of the back door of the building, walking slow. He kicks at a loose piece of tar, kicks it into the chain-link fence. Then he lays his head against that rusty wire and stands there. No older guys are with him now. Bet I can run down there real quick and see what he’s up to.

  “Mama,” I holler, heading for my jacket.

  “You don’t have to yell,” she says, coming out of the bathroom.

  “Can I go outside and see Darnell?”

  She frowns for a second because it’s almost dark out.

  “Yeah, I guess. But don’t go wandering off.”

  “I won’t,” I call out, already out the door.

  Darnell’s mother used to be my babysitter, and Darnell likes to think he’s my big brother, bossing me around, giving me his old toys, watching out for me. This past year, Darnell started growing like a weed. His sneakers are huge. Size 13. His hands are big, too. He’s over six feet tall, bigger than his older brother, Gabe. Robert and I like to tell Darnell he’s going to be NBA material, but Darnell says he’s got other plans. I bang open the back door and run out to the playground.

  “Darnell!” I yell. “What’s up?”

  “Nothin’ much.”

  He glances at me and breaks off a hard little piece of smile. He tosses it at me like a coin. I gotta be quick and grab at it. He swats my head when I get closer, but I duck. He smiles again, a little longer this time.

  “Your girlfriend break up with you?” I ask, wondering why he’s sad.

  He looks at me for a moment, as if maybe he’s going to tell me something, and I hold my breath to see if he will. Then he just shakes his head.

  “Nah,” he says.

  “Want me to go get Robert? We can play a little two-on-one. Robert’s getting real good.”

  He laughs and shakes his head. Puts his face down close to mine. “No,” he says. “Listen, Junebug, catch you later. I need to be alone for a while, okay?”

  My face gets frowny. I bet I look like Tasha, but I can’t help it. But I have to go. I respect Darnell, I always do what he says.

  “Okay,” I say.

  I start to walk backward toward the door. He gives me one more little smile, then zips up his jacket and heads out front. I get the feeling the place he’s going isn’t much fun.

  I go back upstairs to my bedroom. Tasha’s playing doll babies on her bed. My side of the room is getting real crowded. My bottles are everywhere. I take the four new tiny ones into the bathroom and give them a good rinsing to try to get all that perfume smell out.

  “Whew!” Mama calls from the living room. “What are you doing in there? Taking a bath in cologne?”

  Those bottles sure do smell. I dry them off on the bath towel. Each one is cleaned and shined. No gooey labels stuck on them either. I set the new ones on my dresser and get to work on my notes. Nice, neat handwriting. I asked Miss Jenkins how you write to somebody you don’t know. She said to put “To Whom It May Concern” at the top. So I already started putting that part on, even though it sounds terrible.

  After I write a few notes, I line up my bottles from little to big. First the new tiny ones from Aunt Jolita. Then some hand-lotion bottles. Ketchup bottles. A.l. Sauce. A great big cider jug. All kinds of soda bottles.

  I like looking at them. I can picture them in my mind, floating on top of the waves, each one carrying my secret wish to a far-off place. When I think about that and see it all happening, I don’t feel so scared about turning ten.

  These bottles are going to be my birthday flotilla. I’m just waiting on those corks.

  Later I’m lying in bed, asleep. When I open my eyes, I realize I’ve been hearing Mama and Jolita’s voices. Loud and angry. Mama’s saying something about how Jolita never helps out, how she should help watch us kids if she’s not going to get a job.

  “You spoil those kids,” Jolita shouts at Mama.

  That makes me mad. She does not. I want to get out of bed and go protect my mama. Then, in the half-dark room, I see Tasha sit up and flip her covers back. I hear her sniffling. She slides across the floor in her bare feet, sucking on her two middle fingers and crying. I push back my covers and let her climb in.

  She lies down and closes her eyes. I rub her back a little, the way I know Mama would if she didn’t have to be up in the middle of the night, trying to set Jolita straight.

  “You baby them! Junebug’s almost ten years old, and what’s he doing most of the time?” Jolita says, real loud. “Collecting bottles and hanging around his little sister, when he should be out with kids his own age.”

  “This discussion is not about my children,” Mama says in a quiet voice. “It’s about you helping out as part of this family.”

  I’m proud of my mama for saying that. Mama goes into her bedroom and shuts the door. Jolita goes into the bathroom, and I can hear the water running. A little later all the lights go out, but I lie awake a long time, worrying about everything in the world it seems, while Tasha lies next to me, sleeping through her dried-up tears.

  And my last worry of all? I still didn’t do my paragraph for homework. Guess I’ll stay in from recess and get that done. First time I didn’t do something I’m supposed to.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8