He held out his cigarette and made the ashes fall on the sidewalk.
The bus pulled around the corner, past the other apartment building across from ours. It was a weird-colored bus. Most buses are yellow. The bus that AK47 drove was the color of mouthwash, since it used to belong to a hospital and was so old that it was only a little green.
Alf quickly threw the cigarette on the ground and covered it with his foot.
It was 8:55 a.m. The bus stopped and the front door opened.
“I know, I know,” AK47 said. “I’m late. I know.”
In the windows I could see my two friends Yoda and Hamsa waving. I waved at them. Yoda had his face pressed up against the glass. He looked like a pancake with a mouth.
“Hey, Annie,” Alf said. “Was just keeping the birthday girl company.”
He patted my shoulder.
“She doesn’t like being touched, you boob,” AK47 said.
AK47 has short hair like a man, almost buzzed, and doesn’t wear dresses or skirts. She is also half black, which makes a lot of people nervous, since Gert and I are white and all of Gert’s old tribe, from high school, didn’t like black people.
She waved at me. “Come on, Zee.”
I told Alf to have a nice day.
“Let me know when we can have some dinner together,” Alf called to AK47, who shook her head and closed the door.
If he continued trying to steal AK47 from Gert, he would definitely be added to the list of villains.
* * *
I got on the bus and went to sit down in the back with Yoda and Hamsa, who were in seats across from each other. We always sit in the back, since that’s where all the legendary people sit in high school. Gert used to sit in the back with his friends, and they were the coolest people, so we sit there too. We were never the cool kids on regular buses, so now, on AK47’s bus, we were allowed to be cool.
AK47 told me to sit up front, so I sat on the seat next to AK47.
“And wipe your hands on this.” She pulled a piece of Kleenex from the box between her steering wheel and the big glass window. “That sweaty motherfucker creeps me out.”
Hamsa and Yoda both wished me happy birthday. They didn’t get up from their seats, since getting up while the bus is moving is against the RULES OF THE BUS.
“Happy birthday!” Yoda shouted, and I yelled, “Thank you!” and then Hamsa yelled the same thing, and then they wished each other happy birthday, even though neither of them were born on the same day I was.
I didn’t mind that. Part of a good birthday is sharing it with the people you like, members of your tribe, and so I did not mind sharing my birthday strength with them.
“Yes, it’s everybody’s birthday,” AK47 said. “Whoopee.”
“How was it?” she asked. “Good?”
I told her that Gert got me the Viking, who was actually a stripper. “But he didn’t take off any of his clothes when he came to my birthday.”
She shook her head and said, “That idiot brother of yours.”
The bus started rolling down the street. Another car came around the corner and AK47 didn’t even slow down to go around it. She is a better driver than anyone I have ever seen, even Gert, who can drive fast and never gets into accidents.
AK47 said, “Okay, are you ready for your gift?”
I said I was. She told me to look under the seat. There was a box and I pulled it out. The wrapping paper had Christmas trees and Santa Claus on it.
“Sorry. Ran out of birthday paper.”
“It’s okay, I like Christmas a lot.”
She told me I could open it any way I wanted, and so I opened along the taped parts, since I don’t like tearing things.
“Did you get a present?” Hamsa said from the back.
“Mind your own beeswax,” AK47 said.
I took off the Christmas paper. The box wasn’t very big. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a powerful gift, since small things can be strong, like AK47, who was only a little bit taller than me.
“Holy crap,” I said. Inside the box was a Viking sword.
“I know it’s not very big, but I figure it’s a start.”
She stopped the bus in front of the Community Center. To go with the sword, she handed me a piece of paper that had RULES OF THE VIKING SWORD on it.
“Since I know you like having rules, I thought this would help.”
I read the paper.
RULES OF THE VIKING SWORD
You are not allowed to use the sword for evil.
When you’re not using the sword, it must be put in its box and left there.
Nobody else is allowed to use the sword.
AK47 said that the exceptions to that rule were her and Gert.
“But I’m going to hold on to it for you today. And when we hang out, you can play with it.”
“Vikings don’t play,” I said. “Especially not with weapons.”
AK47 nodded and said that was true, that weapons were not toys. Yoda and Hamsa ran to the front of the bus.
“Holy crap,” Yoda said. “Is that a real sword?”
“It’s real metal,” I said.
“Can I see?” Hamsa said.
I told them it wasn’t allowed out of the box until AK47 said it was okay. They looked at AK47, who had turned off the engine and took out her key.
“Everyone but Zelda off,” AK47 said.
Hamsa and Yoda got off. AK47 gave them both fist pounds. They had seen AK47 and I do the fist pounds and had started doing them too.
“Have a good day, you goons,” AK47 said.
That was another thing they liked. They liked the weird things AK47 called them, like goons or critters, which means something small, even though they are bigger than her, and bigger than me, and adults and not small animals too.
“Can I have a sword?” Hamsa said when AK47 and I shuffled off the bus.
“Or a lightsaber,” Yoda said, meaning a sword made of light from the movie Star Wars.
“Those don’t exist,” AK47 said, patting him on the back.
I took the sword out. It was not very big. I held it in my hands, trying not to touch the metal of the blade. I didn’t want to cut my hand. Viking swords are always really sharp. Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings says warriors spend a lot of time sharpening their swords before a battle.
The little Viking sword was shorter than a ruler. I held it in my hand in front of me and imagined that the bus was moving quickly toward a tribe of Vikings. Their swords would be bigger, but it isn’t how big your sword is, AK47 is always saying, it’s how you use it.
“I asked them to make sure the stuff on the handle was Viking,” she said.
The markings on the handle were runes, which are small symbols that have a lot of power.
“They’re supposed to be authentic. Pur, or whatever, is on there. I guess that means Thor. It’s a replica of this Thurmuth sword,” she said.
The sword had some very powerful runes. According to Kepple’s, those two runes combined to make the person using the sword a gargantuan warrior.
My favorite rune is called Dagaz, only you say it like “thaw gozz.” It looks almost like an H.
Dagaz means to become awake or to transform. That is what I want to do in my legend: I want to go from a normal Viking to a hero.
I asked AK47 if we were going to battle, if that was why she gave me the sword.
“Every day’s a battle, sweet pea,” AK47 said. “It’s not full-size, but be careful.”
I gave it to her. Even though a Viking is not ready to defeat villains without a weapon, I knew AK47 would keep it safe, and she said she would give it back to me at the end of the day.
Because AK47 had given me a sword, I realized that I could now cross that off of my list of THINGS LEGENDS NEED. I now had three things that all Viking heroes need: a fair maiden, a powerful weapon, and a wise man.
chapter five
Every day the Community Center has two hours where everyone like me and Hamsa and Yoda and Marxy
can talk and play in the gymnasium if they want. These are people who are “retarded,” which is a word I do not care about, but is one of the words that nobody is allowed to say, like the n-word Gert used to say before he and AK47 got together, and which I cannot even say out loud, even though this is my legend.
Sometimes at the Community Center we use the art room and do paintings. At night, twice a week, there are also literacy classes where we practice reading and writing and making sure our brains get exercise.
I go to the Community Center for half the day and eat lunch there, and then AK47 drives me home on the days that Gert can’t pick me up because he’s at school.
“The birthday girl,” Big Todd said when I walked into the Community Center. He gave me a high five instead of a pound.
“Big Todd, my man,” I said.
“Did you have a good birthday?”
I told him about the Viking stripper and the sword AK47 gave me. He asked me if I had it with me, since weapons weren’t allowed in the Community Center.
“Having a special weapon is one of the most important parts of being a hero,” I said.
“It’s not a weapon,” AK47 said, coming over. “And I’ll be holding on to it for today.”
“Does Gert know?”
“A Viking’s weapon belongs to the Viking and is nobody else’s business,” I said.
“Exactly,” AK47 said.
Big Todd is the person who runs the Community Center programs and gets us organized. He is tall and skinny and gay. His boyfriend, Noah, sometimes comes by to play basketball with us in the gym. He and Big Todd met playing basketball in college. Once I said to Gert that he should play basketball with Big Todd and Noah, since he was almost as good at basketball as he was at football, but Gert does not like faggots, a word that means gay but in a bad way, and is one of the words that AK47 told me never, ever to use.
Todd was the only gay person I had ever met in real life, and he was also one of the nicest people I had ever met, gay people or other people. I didn’t really understand how he had sex, since neither him or his boyfriend had vaginas. AK47 told me not to worry about it.
“They do just fine,” she said, and I know that when she says things like that, it’s time to stop asking questions.
The Community Center has big windows in front, and brown squares up the side that make me think of the Jenga game. A lot of different kinds of people go to the Community Center. There is a big gymnasium in it, and machines that can help you build muscles. Originally Gert used to go in there to work on his muscles while I was with Big Todd and Hamsa and Yoda and Marxy.
Inside of the classroom there are a bunch of orange and blue chairs, the plastic ones, and a whiteboard that used to be a chalkboard. It smells good. Everyone likes to smell the board, especially when someone uses the markers. Big Todd keeps an eye on who smells the markers for the board too long.
There are always a bunch of parents and brothers and sisters who wait for the class to start. I used to wish that Gert waited for class to start, like the other parents and brothers and sisters. Now, especially after my birthday, I felt like heroes needed to do things without parents and brothers and sisters. Also, people like Hamsa and Yoda and I did not have people waiting for us, since we came on the bus, which means we’re poor compared to other people. We do not have to pay for the bus or have cars, because it is a free service.
The people who were not part of the class left when Big Todd clapped his hands and asked us to get into pairs.
Yoda and Hamsa chose each other. I looked around for Marxy, but he had not arrived yet. Usually Hamsa, Yoda, Marxy, and I trade with each other, since we are all friends and we don’t do many weird things, so practicing isn’t very hard. It was hot in the room and the air conditioner in the window shot wind into my face as I went around, trying to find someone who was not weird.
Everyone had paired up except for me.
“Do you have a partner?” Big Todd asked.
“I am waiting for Marxy,” I said.
“Well, we can’t wait any longer.” Big Todd looked around. “There’s Sarah-Beth. Sarah-Beth, do you have a partner?”
Sarah-Beth shook her head. She was standing away from everyone, by the window but not looking outside. Even though she has been to the Community Center a hundred times, she is still afraid of everyone and acts weird. She is the worst person to be social with. She has Down syndrome like Hamsa, but is two years older than him. She has long hair that she plays with all the time. There are places on her head where the hair is gone and she is bald like an old man, only her hair is very long in other places.
Big Todd told Sarah-Beth that I was going to be her banking person and to join the others, who had already started sitting down.
“Okay,” I said to Sarah-Beth. We sat across from each other at the table. “No being weird and putting things in your mouth. Okay?”
“Okay,” Sarah-Beth said. She sat down on her hands to show me that they weren’t going to put her hair in her mouth.
Big Todd told us to pretend that we were in a bank and that we wanted to give them a check, which is a slip of paper that has money in it. Not actually in it, but when you give it to the bank, the bank puts money into your bank account. The last few times we practiced being social we talked about money and bank accounts, and how important it is to understand money if we all wanted to be independent adults.
“Think about banks as the place where all the money you make gets held for you,” Big Todd said. “That way you don’t always have to carry it around with you.”
I raised my hand. “So it’s like a treasure hoard,” I said.
“A what now?”
I explained that whenever Vikings defeated other tribes or monsters, like dragons, in battle, they took the treasure and kept it locked up in a hoard. “They don’t carry around the treasure, but if they ever need it, it’s there.”
Big Todd snapped his fingers. “Exactly. It’s like a treasure hoard. And debit cards let you take out some of the treasure from your hoard, your bank account, without having money with you all the time. Now, checks are pieces of paper where you promise to give some of your treasure to someone else.”
“And what happens if a check bounces?” I asked, since Dr. Laird had said that Gert’s check had bounced.
“It means you promised someone treasure from your hoard but you didn’t have as much as you promised in the check.”
So that meant that Gert’s hoard did not have enough money to pay Dr. Laird, which was why the check promising treasure to Dr. Laird so that he could help me bounced. I put my hand up again.
“Last one, Zelda,” Big Todd said. “Things’ll become clearer as we go along.”
“Where do you get more treasure for your hoard?”
“From jobs, dummy,” someone said from across the room. “Can we bank now?”
Big Todd shot over a dirty look.
* * *
Sarah-Beth stared at the piece of paper in front of her. It was supposed to be the check. There was a plastic box with a bunch of plastic cards that were supposed to be fake debit cards. Sarah-Beth and I had to share a debit card, which was bad because I knew she would start chewing on it. So I got the card first.
When I pretend-asked her to give me money from my bank account, using the plastic card from the basket, Sarah-Beth did not answer. Her mouth was full of her orange hair.
“I would like to deposit this check, using the bank account with my debit card,” I said, and showed her the check, and also the plastic card.
Instead of being a banker, she closed her eyes and plugged her nose like she was going underwater.
That wasn’t what people did in banks, I told her. Her eyes popped open.
“You don’t know everything,” she said. “My sister plays with her hair, and there’s nothing wrong.”
I raised my hand and tried to wave to Big Todd, who was going around listening to the banking happen.
“Good,” Big Todd said to another p
air at the other end of the table. “Good banking, everyone.”
My hand waved like crazy until he saw me and came over. “Who is working for the bank, and who is bringing in the check?” he asked.
“Sarah-Beth just eats her hair.”
Big Todd asked Sarah-Beth which she wanted to be, the banker or the customer. Her hair was covered in spit, and her hands were covered in spit too. If I worked in a bank, I wouldn’t want to touch a check with spit on it, and if I was bringing a check into a bank, I wouldn’t want spit to get on my check. I said that and Big Todd said to take it easy.
“Give her a chance.” He pulled up an extra chair and sat beside Sarah-Beth. He put a piece of paper, the fake check, on the table in front of her. He spoke really slowly to her. “So, this is a check. Remember what a check is?”
She nodded and pulled her hair straight.
“What is it?”
“Money,” she said.
“Right. And if Zelda’s the bank, what do we do with the check?”
“We bring it to Zelda, who will put it into our bank account.”
“Good.” Big Todd looked at me. “Well, Zelda? You’re the bank. What are you going to ask Sarah-Beth for?”
I sighed. “The check, and for her to sign the back of it, and to give me her plastic card.”
Big Todd smiled and asked Sarah-Beth if she had those things, and since we were pretending he gave her a fake plastic card. She signed the back of the check. It wasn’t a very good signature. We had been practicing signatures and hers didn’t look like it had any letters in it, except for the S and the M of Sarah-Beth’s last name, which I didn’t know.
“Great signature,” Big Todd said. His smile was gargantuan. “What do you think of that, Zelda? Pretty cool, right?”
Sarah-Beth had stopped chewing her hair. She was looking right at me. It was okay, I said. “But I don’t know how it says her name.”
Big Todd shook his head at me and asked if he could talk to me and we went to have a talk while Sarah-Beth kept chewing her hair. He took me by the window.
“Why were you being like that with Sarah-Beth?” he asked.
When We Were Vikings Page 5
