Hope Wins, page 5
like the bones of an idea.
Or the bones of a hope.
A dream.
Hopes and dreams have bones?
What did that mean?
I knew better than to ask. Mr. H would say,
What do you think it means?
Mr. H wanted you to figure things out on your own.
It was the library.
That’s where I grew
the first bone.
In all those stories and spines.
The class went for an afternoon visit.
Mr. H planted himself in a corner chair, a level above
the rest of us
like a king or
a god.
He read a book with a black bird on the cover.
He never looked up. Not once.
He still busted
two kids who had been
messing around.
We all wanted to know
What did he say?
Are you in trouble?
They told us
He said something about opportunities.
Everyone cracked up.
He said something about paying attention.
And not being able to hear
hopes and dreams.
That old man
is crazy.
Everyone laughed again. Even me, but deep down
I started to wonder if I
wasn’t paying attention.
I went back to the library.
Again and again.
The librarian always let me
stay
for as long as I wanted
hunting, absorbing, wondering.
Dreaming.
I checked the same books out
over and over and over.
Stories of magic.
Belonging.
And impossible odds.
Jenny, you have to give others a chance to read these.
But there was no one else in the library, and besides,
they weren’t looking for the same
magic.
I read poetry,
mythology,
Shakespeare.
That was my secret.
My friends wouldn’t understand.
I read
when no one was looking.
Once, I saw some of the same books tucked behind Mr. H’s desk and I wondered
if he kept them
a secret too.
I asked him about them.
He said something about doorways to new worlds.
He gave me books
to read.
After I returned them, he always asked,
How was the journey?
The words spoke to me,
the poetry sang to me.
I felt something
deep
deeper than bones.
Truth: I started
to write poems
to understand the world.
I once walked on clouds and breathed beneath the sea.
I knew how to fly until they told me what to be.
What to be.
So many voices telling telling telling.
The world doesn’t work that way.
Don’t waste your time.
That’s a bad idea.
Girls don’t do that.
It’s in the spines I wanted to say.
In the bones.
Mr. H
he was different.
He said things like
Dream away.
You can be anything you want.
Just make the journey
worth it.
It was only
a small idea
Hidden there
in the pages of my journal
between the maybes and
what-ifs.
But whoever becomes somebody
when they live on a street that no one can pronounce?
I took the bus to the city library.
My friends liked to go for the deli across the street. Two-for-one BLTs
with extra bacon.
I looked up famous authors
studied their lives.
Did they know that they wanted
to be writers?
Artists?
Storytellers?
They lived in big cities.
They looked very serious.
They went to big schools.
Knew the right people.
Mostly men.
Sometimes women.
A bone.
But who says they want to be
a writer?
Too big. Too grand.
Too Everything.
I put Shakespeare away.
I tossed the myths
into boxes.
I did other things
to Belong.
Did you know
bones grow until you’re twenty-five?
You can break them
and they heal.
Some say they grow back
stronger.
I’ve never broken a bone.
I saw it once.
Ugly, twisted—bloodied
flesh that screamed pain.
Before graduation
Mr. H told me to remember
the bones of
my hopes and dreams.
I promised.
But what if I wasn’t born with the right bones, I wanted to say.
I got busy.
Sports, and beaches
and slumber parties.
I got busy
listening to music
I didn’t like.
I tried on faces and voices and skin
that didn’t fit.
I tried
to be like everyone else.
They seemed happy knowing
nothing about bones.
Why can’t I be like them?
Every time I tried,
I broke another
bone.
Sometimes I would see
Mr. H’s van in the old
school parking lot after hours and I’d pop in to say, Hi.
I worried
he’d ask if I had remembered
my promise.
If I had kept it, but
he never did.
He’d just show me
a new map or
book or fossil he’d collected.
It made me wonder,
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
He set the fossil aside.
Everything.
No one can
be everything.
I can, he said.
Or at least
everything I wanted.
How?
I’m a scientist,
an artist,
a mathematician, an engineer,
an archaeologist
all because I’m
a teacher.
But
what if it’s too hard?
What then?
He shrugged
pulled another book from his shelf.
Have you read this one?
A few years later,
Mr. H left that school.
I never saw him again.
I wished
everyone got a teacher as good as he was
at least once
in their life.
For years
I forgot him.
Left him on the grounds
of that school.
But in my mind,
he was always there,
in that classroom with his stacks of books,
his planet posters,
and piles of old maps. Looking at the world
through the eyes in the back of his head,
paying attention
to his dreams.
Here’s the thing
about hopes and dreams—
they know how
to sleep.
And they know when
to wake up.
In college I wrote things.
Not stories.
Things about theories and arguments
and “great literature.”
Things about dead authors: Dickens and Twain and Hemingway.
I read a line
by Maya Angelou:
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story within you.
I wondered if the hard stuff,
the stuff we hide
is where our
true stories lie.
The stories we keep hidden
from the world,
because it’s easier
to play small than
to dream big.
I wish
I still had the pencil
I used that day.
I didn’t know those words would become
a book.
Hopes and dreams
they don’t always come
fully formed.
Sometimes they arrive
in bits
and pieces,
like a puzzle you have to put together
over time.
Sometimes with the help
of many hands.
And sometimes
it’s too late
to turn back.
Too late
because you’ve had a taste
of a new world
where you can be
Everything.
The words came that day.
They poured out of me every day.
And the next day
and the next
and the next.
In those stories
I got to be
a witch,
and a baseball player,
a demon, and a god,
a broken-hearted teen,
and a hero.
I got to be
Everything.
When I began to teach English at the university,
I thought about Mr. H.
I knew he would like that I had figured it out
on my own.
The bones of my hopes and
dreams.
That I’d kept
my promise
after all.
That first day
I walked into the classroom
I began with these words,
We’re going to start with the bones.
* * *
• • •
J.C. CERVANTES is a New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults. Her books have appeared on national lists, including the American Booksellers Association New Voices, Barnes and Noble’s Best Young Reader Books, and Amazon’s Best Books of the Month. She has earned multiple awards and recognitions, including the New Mexico Book Award and the Zia Book Award.
She currently resides in the Land of Enchantment with her family, three spoiled dogs, and a lifetime collection of books. But she keeps part of her heart in Southern California, where she was born and raised. When she isn’t writing, she is haunting bookstores and searching for magic in all corners of the world.
THE DAY THE HOT DOG TRUCK CAME TO TOWN
by Max Brallier
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be someone else.
Or, no, that’s not quite right. It’s more like—
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be someone else.
But not BE SOMEONE in that BIG way, like when some teacher says so-and-so is gonna grow up and really “be someone!”
I just wanted to be . . . some one.
One of a kind.
Although, hold on, pause—that’s not exactly accurate, either. Because when a person is “one of a kind” it means that person is wow—a singularly unique and magnificent character. Like, “Remember Billy Mears? How he jumped the old ravine on that rusted Huffy, one training wheel still clinging to it, clanging away? Billy, man, Billy was one of a kind.”
No, I wanted to be one of a kind in the most literal way. In the way that there are kinds of things, I wanted to be a kind of person.
There are kinds of movies: comedy, action, horror. And kinds of candy: sweet, sour, chewy, hard.
And at some point during elementary school, I saw kids begin to fall into kinds: geeks, nerds, athletes, troublemakers, cool troublemakers, took-it-too-far troublemakers.
In fourth grade, my kind was the new kid kind. I had moved to a new state, new city, and new school a few months into the school year. It was an awful kind.
Then it all got even worse. On that day in November when the hot dog truck came to town.
My dad wrote books. Not fiction, like I do now. He wrote books full of quotes, collections of trivia, compendiums of jokes. And when I was in fourth grade, he wrote The Hot Dog Cookbook: The Wiener Work the World Awaited. It was full of weird hot dog recipes: hot dog stew, hot dog birthday cake, hot dog lasagna, hot dog everything.
I was particularly aware of this book because it made our new house smell awful. See, my dad had to personally cook and eat every single weird hot dog concoction in the book.
“Why?” I asked.
“Lawyers,” he answered.
My dad had to be sure none of his hot dog recipes would kill someone or make them barf or make their hair fall out. No author wants some ticked-off, barfy, prematurely balding customer racing back to the bookstore to return a cookbook.
The day the hot dog truck came to town, the final bell at school rang, like always. Kids were talking and joking and banging lockers and swinging backpacks. I was walking alone because that’s what the new kid kind does.
As I shuffled toward the school’s big swinging front doors, I became aware of hubbub. Action. Activity outside.
And then I heard my name. No one was talking to me—they were talking about me. First, a few kids saying, “Max.” A few others whispering, “That new kid.”
Then everyone was looking at me.
I didn’t know why. I just knew it made me want to barf. Like I had just eaten hot dog gumbo (that’s in The Hot Dog Cookbook, recipe 22, page 98).
I lowered my head, eyes on my sneakers, making my way through the front doors. A hill sloped down from the school. I looked. And at the bottom of the hill, parked directly in front of the school, was the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. It was not big—it was HUGE. LONG AND SHINY, ORANGE AND YELLOW. A MASSIVE HOT DOG, so big it fully blocked out three houses across the street and, if I recall, partially blocked out the sun.
I knew before I actually knew. My name, my dad’s stupid hot dog cookbook, and now a giant hot dog truck in front of the school. Couldn’t be coincidence.
The big hot dog’s door slid open like something on a flying saucer—and there was my dad. Waving. He couldn’t have spotted me among the hundreds of other kids leaving the school—but in my memory, he does. He sees me and he’s smiling so big and he’s also sort of laughing because he knows how absurd and funny it is, and he knows he’s surprised me good, and just thinking about it now, I feel that urge to barf starting to rush back again.
Someone said, “Hey, new kid—is that guy hanging out of the big hot dog your dad?”
“No.”
“You sure? ’Cause the guy hanging out of the big hot dog is saying he’s your dad.”
I knew, then, what it must feel like to be a spy and have your cover blown.
“Nope,” I said, and I spun around, saying something like, “I forgot my jacket,” and I quick-walked through the school. A plan formed, fast. The side hallway. At the end, a door. It led to the back parking lot. From there, I could sneak home. It was the long way home—but it was the only way home that would allow me to avoid that giant rolling hot dog monstrosity.
I made it to the back parking lot. Then to the street. Just two more blocks, then I could cut across the playground and slip into our backyard.
I didn’t make it the two blocks. I didn’t make it two houses.
The ground began to tremble. I can’t promise it was exactly like this, it’s too much like a scene from a bad musical—but in my head, I swear, it’s exactly like this.
I looked back. The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile was rumbling up the street, coming toward me, massive, the vehicle’s hot-dog-shaped front looking like the nose on a 747. Some dude barely old enough to have a driver’s license behind the wheel, sporting a hot-dog-shaped hat.
And there was my dad, hanging out the side, waving, two hundred kids hurrying alongside.
All coming for me.
I was caught. If it were a bank heist, this was the moment when a dozen cop cars would pull up, sirens blaring, screeching to a stop from all angles. It’s the moment when the thief-with-a-heart-of-gold has no place to run. It’s all over. And the movie camera zooms in on his sad face.
I thought. Okay, Max, you’re caught. Only one option now: get in the hot dog truck, try to do it without barfing, demand the dude in the hot-dog-shaped hat drive away, fast. And after that, well, we’ll have to move. Again. The whole family. Gotta blow town. New state, new city, new school. We’ll need fake names. I’ll need a new haircut. Possibly a fake mustache.
I got in the motorized hot dog. All my classmates peered in. Kids poked the big wheels. They cheered, “Hot dog! Hot dog!” whenever its horn honked. It was the most exciting thing to happen in that town since Billy jumped the old ravine on that rusted Huffy, one training wheel still clinging to it, clanging away.
But the torment was not over!
We drove around town—for hours. The window was lowered, and I had to wave out it like I was the homecoming queen in a parade.
After that . . . still not over.
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile parked in our driveway. For two whole days. And remember, we had just moved to this town. So, our neighbors thought it was our actual car.
“Hey, Betty, get a load of this,” I imagined Mr. Saunders across the street saying, as he peered out his window. “The new neighbors . . . they got two cars. One’s a baby-blue Chrysler. The other is A GIANT HOT DOG.”
