Each Tiny Spark

by Pablo Cartaya

  I don’t want to add the Fourth of July Festival to my Merryville tourism guide. What if someone visits and doesn’t like loud noises, like me?

  I spot Gus walking down the hall, but I stay a few paces behind because I still might run away. There’s a song playing, but it’s tough to hear what it is with all the students screaming.

  “Who has a pep rally on a Monday?” I ask Gus, catching up to him.

  “What?!” Gus responds.

  I put my hands over my ears. “Please don’t yell like that,” I tell him.

  “Sorry!” He can’t help it. “Hey, you sure you want to go inside?”

  “You know how much I love pep rallies,” I say sarcastically. “Who are we cheering on today? The middle-school football team? Soccer? Track and field? Do we have a new curling team?”

  Gus laughs. “No curling. It’s basketball,” he says, peeking inside. “Actually, I think we’re going to be pretty good this year. What are your thoughts on the team?”

  “I think, yes,” I say. “For sure. Way better.”

  I don’t know if we were good last year or not. What has made them “pretty good” as opposed to last year? Is it a new player? A new coach? Are the opponents weaker and therefore our team becomes superior because the competition isn’t as great?

  “Emilia?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You don’t know anything about the team, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  Clarissa and Lacey stop right outside the gym. Clarissa waves at me. She’s carrying her mellophone case.

  “Emi Rose! I’m going to play!”

  “Really? That’s cool!”

  “Right? Jennine is out sick and Mr. Carmichael said I get to jump in!”

  “Awesome, Clarissa. Congratulations.”

  “You and Lacey should sit front row so you have the best view.”

  I glance behind Clarissa toward the rumbling gym.

  “I’m really glad you’re playing,” I whisper, “but I don’t want to be in there.”

  “Don’t worry, Emi Rose,” Clarissa says, putting her arm around me. “You’ll come sit in the front row with Lacey and just make sure to keep eye contact with me the whole time. Okay?”

  “Um,” I say, looking around. “It’s just so loud.”

  Clarissa has known I hate loud noises since the first time we had a fire drill in kindergarten. The alarm suddenly blared across the room in the middle of class. The teacher laid out the rules for what to do, but I just froze, holding my ears. It was like someone had poured ice water on my head. I started crying while kids dutifully followed the teacher’s directions.

  Clarissa took my hand and told me it would be okay. She was the only person I could see or hear. It was like she gave me focus in all that chaos.

  “Do you trust me, Emi Rose?” Clarissa says, bringing me back to the pep rally.

  “Yeah.”

  “The mellophone is one of the nicest-sounding instruments. If you just focus on me playing, you’ll be all right.”

  “Hey, you can wear these,” Gus adds, pulling out his headphones.

  I take his headphones and offer a smile. “Thanks.”

  “Come on, Emi Rose, let’s go!” I put the headphones on and stop just outside the entrance to look back at Gus as Clarissa takes my hand.

  “Gus, come sit with Lacey and me.”

  Gus has taken out his video camera from his backpack and is inspecting it while Clarissa inspects him.

  “I mean,” Clarissa says in a singsong voice, “it’s already pretty crowded in the front.”

  “Go ahead,” he says. “I’m going to stand on the side where I can get better footage. You know, get some close-ups of your tuba playing, Clarissa.”

  “It’s a mellophone, Gustavo.”

  Clarissa places the case on the floor and pulls out her horn. She shows it to Gus and then puts her lips to it. The mellophone makes a fart sound before settling into a note.

  Lacey throws her head onto my shoulder, cracking up.

  “Clarissa! You better show that horn some manners!”

  “Shush it, Lacey Roberts!” Clarissa blurts. “I just needed to warm it up.”

  “Well, señoritas, I’ll see you all inside.”

  “Bye, Gus,” Lacey says.

  “Hasta luego, Señor Gus,” I say.

  Clarissa just nods. The door swings open and Mr. Carmichael pops into the hall.

  “Clarissa Anderson, what in the world are you doing standing around? Get on in there and get ready!”

  “Right, sorry, Mr. Carmichael!”

  Clarissa scurries inside, dragging her half-open case in one hand, her backpack falling down her arm, and the mellophone in the other hand.

  “Bye! Sit up front!”

  Lacey and I follow Gus inside.

  “You can just sit with us, Gus. It’s fine,” Lacey says.

  Chinh and Barry jump down from the bleachers and land by our side.

  “Hey, can I be the boom mic operator again, G? You know, wear those headphones?”

  “Not necessary,” Gus says. “Plenty of sound in this place.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Barry’s eyes shift around. I can see he’s uncomfortable.

  “Hey,” I say, handing him the headphones Gus gave me. “You wanna share these?”

  “Huh? Nah, I’m okay. You use them, Emi.”

  “Hey, B,” Gus interrupts. “Can you use your phone to film some extra shots? We’ll put them all together in editing.”

  “Yup!” he says. Both jog over to where Mr. Carmichael is standing.

  “Where’d G-money and Barry go?” Chinh missed the whole thing because he was on his phone.

  “They’re filming over there,” I tell him.

  Chinh nods. “Cool.”

  “Wanna sit with us?”

  “Huh? Oh yeah, sure.”

  Chinh puts his phone in his pocket and walks over to the bench where Lacey has saved my seat.

  “Oh hey, Chinh!” Lacey says.

  “Yo.”

  I think I see Lacey’s neck blush a little as Chinh sits. I scoot over and try to block out the sounds of the band practicing, the cheerleaders jumping and cheering, and Sammy the Screaming Eagle making the crowd get louder and louder with each “caw-caw, caw-caw!”

  Clarissa is trying to get my attention. She gets scolded by Mr. Carmichael for not being in place as the Merryville Middle pep band initiates a messy jumble of drums, cymbals, and horns.

  * * *

  After the pep rally, Clarissa and Lacey head off together and I walk to homeroom to try to get this day over with. I need to pick up the books from my locker that I’ll use for homework tonight. My phone is in there too. Mom usually texts me after school to make sure I take all of my work home with me. She must still be traveling.

  There’s a tap on my shoulder, and I know it’s Gus before he says anything because I see his black Adidas with scuffed white tips.

  “So, how was life in the front bleachers?” he asks. “Any new chisme to report? I need to keep up with school news.”

  I laugh. “Call it chisme or call it gossip, but definitely don’t call it news.”

  “Touché,” he says, showing me his camera screen. He plays footage he took of the mascot. Sammy is supposed to be an eagle, but it’s more like a bird whose face froze the second it heard something terrible.

  “Did the headphones work?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “I mean, they helped a little, but it was still disorienting. Seeing people jumping around quietly is almost as loud as noise. That’s why I took them off.”

  “There was a moment when I thought my camera broke and I almost called you,” he says. “But I fixed it.”

  I love solving problems and fi
guring out how to fix things. I think I get it from my mom. She’s a computer genius.

  On my ninth birthday, Abuela found an Easy-Bake Oven for sale online and bought it for me. I like eating sweets more than making them, so I decided to take the oven apart to see what was inside—what made it hot. It was an incandescent bulb, which is a pretty standard heat lamp and not very interesting. Anyway, I left a mess everywhere. Abuela didn’t like that.

  “Emilia?” Gus asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “¿Qué pasa in there?” He grins and points to my head.

  I squint at him. Of all people, he already knows the answer to that.

  Gus lets out one of his classic laughs and it echoes across the classroom. Kids stop and stare at him, but he doesn’t care.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask.

  “I love the way your mind works, Emilia Torres.”

  After school, Gus and I walk down Main Street toward the auto shop. I don’t take the bus after school because Gus and I like to walk and hang out before we start our homework. He usually does his homework in Abuela’s office and I go home to study with Mom. We tried studying together at the beginning of the year, but I kept getting distracted every time the compressor hissed to add air to a tire. Mom said I needed to be at home, where there was less going on. Abuela said I should learn to adapt.

  “Necesita aprender estudiar así,” Abuela said.

  “She doesn’t need to learn to study in an auto repair shop. She needs to learn to study. Period,” Mom corrected.

  Mom offered for Gus to come to the house to study, but his dad said he preferred for Gus to stay at the auto shop and work in Abuela’s office.

  Our mechanic-and-auto-body shop is the only one of either in town. We do basic services like oil changes, air-filter replacements, and tire rotations. We also do cosmetic work like dent repair, paint jobs, and buffing. And if a car needs to be completely fixed up, we can do that, too. Abuela’s office is in a little trailer overlooking each stall. I like it in there because Abuela has a wall-unit air conditioner that blasts icy air when it’s hot and a heater that keeps the office warm like an oven when it gets cold.

  “Have you given any thought to Mr. Richt’s project?” I ask Gus as we cross Main Street.

  “Sí,” he says. “¡Algo con horror! Like the pep rally today.”

  “That was pretty terrifying.”

  “Seriously, though. I’ve been thinking about myths. It’d be cool to film a tour of all the places that are connected to cool myths in Merryville, ¿verdad?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Do you know of any?”

  “When I lived in Mobile, there was a myth about a mysterious creature called the Wolf Woman of Mobile, Alabama.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Gus says, getting closer. “Back in the 1970s, witnesses described a creature with the lower body of a wolf and the head of a woman. She was seen at night, stalking residents, but she never harmed anybody.”

  “No way!” I say, playfully shoving him.

  “It’s true! People reported sightings. It was in the paper and everything.”

  Gus has what teachers like to call “an active imagination.”

  He stops kicking rocks down the sidewalk and turns to me, wide-eyed, wiggling his dark bushy eyebrows like he’s just figured out something incredible.

  “Can you imagine what monsters must be lurking in the shadows around this old town?” Gus gazes past the train tracks toward the edge of the woods. “So many possibilities yet to discover! And it could be a serious boost to the tourism in Merryville!”

  “We hardly have tourism here.”

  “¡Exactamente!” Gus says, picking up another rock and bouncing it on his knee before kicking it off again. “I can help start it.”

  “¡Es una idea fantástica, Señor Gus!”

  “¡Gracias, Señorita Emilia! I’m going to go to the library to research monster myths from this region.”

  This town seems perfect for legends. All the buildings are super-old, like the brick shops with faded and flaking Coca-Cola signs plastered on the sides. Or Jimmy’s Diner, which has been around since the sixties and barely seats twelve people.

  Main Street can have an eerie vibe, depending on the time of day. There are lots of shops, some boarded up, like the one next to Eddy’s Hardware.

  The movie theater that used to only play one movie was refurbished about two years ago and turned into a multiplex that screens three movies.

  There’s the large clock tower that faces away from Main Street. It’s like the people who built it didn’t want to be reminded of the time while they walked down the street.

  We get to the end of Main Street, past Delucci’s, which has a sign in the window. I have to squint to read it. It says HELP WANTED: BILINGUAL WAITSTAff.

  “If they want a bilingual staff,” I say, “shouldn’t they include which language they want the staff to be bilingual in?”

  Gus stops and thinks about what I just said.

  “You make an excellent point.”

  We continue walking and it isn’t long before we reach the Methodist church, just across the street from the Catholic church, and walk right onto the gravel driveway of Toni’s Auto Repair.

  Gus’s dad is in one of the stalls, wearing a mask while carefully painting the exterior of a car a dark blue-green color. He puts his paint gun down and lifts his mask when he sees us.

  “¡Hola, chicos! ¿Cómo les fue hoy?”

  “Bien, Apá,” Gus replies.

  “Gustavo, ¿quieres ayudarme después de terminar la tarea?”

  “No, gracias,” Gus says quickly, trying to avoid any further conversation of helping his dad paint the car.

  Gus turns to me and whispers, “He’s always trying to get me to paint a car with him, but I always find a way to stain my clothes. Even when I wear coveralls. It makes no sense.”

  “So you don’t want to get car paint on you, but you don’t care about fake blood when you’re shooting a horror movie?”

  “First of all, movie blood is just red food coloring inside little balloons hooked up to explosive devices called squibs. Totally different from toxic car paint that doesn’t wash off in the laundry.”

  Abuela approaches from her office and waves at Gus.

  “¿Qué tal, mi’jo?” she asks, standing next to me.

  “Hola, Doña Aurelia,” Gus responds.

  It always sounds weird when Gus calls Abuela “Doña.” He should just call her Aurelia or something. Gus says the “Doña” is simply out of respect. Personally, I think it’s overkill.

  Agustín, one of the mechanics, catches my eye as he fastens a trailer hitch and tow to an SUV. I don’t know how he can even see what he’s doing when his baseball cap practically touches his nose. He’s a senior at Park View High School. He’s been working afternoons and weekends at the shop since his sophomore year, except when it’s soccer season. He got accepted to Georgia Tech a month ago, and his family threw a huge barbecue for him. We all went to his house to celebrate. I asked him what he wanted to study, and he said electrical engineering. Then out of earshot he whispered, “But if I’m being real, I’m excited to have some kind of social life outside this little town.”

  His sister, Amanda, is in tenth grade, and Agustín tells me she’s a way better student than he ever was. His dad helps manage a flower farm in Blairsville and his mom works at a bakery in town.

  “¡Hola, Agustín!” I wave.

  “Hey! Emilia, how’s life in middle school?”

  “Fine,” I tell him. “It feels like we have a pep rally every week.”

  “I hated pep rallies. Definitely happy to be done with those.”

  “Seriously.”

  “What’s up, Gustavito?”

  Gus thinks Agustín is the coolest guy in town. I have to admit, he’s def
initely the coolest teenager.

  Agustín turns back to the hitch. He wipes his hands on his jeans and inspects his work.

  “It’s like he’s not even trying to be awesome,” Gus says, “but yet somehow, he is.”

  “Orestes,” Abuela says to Gus’s dad, “¿por qué no ayudas a Agustín?”

  Gus’s dad goes over to help Agustín tighten the hitch, but Agustín waves him off.

  “I got it, Doña. Don’t worry,” he says. “I learned from the best.” He bows at Abuela and smiles. He knows exactly what to say to her. Gus’s dad slaps Agustín on the shoulder and heads back to the paint job.

  I nod at Gus. “He is cool.”

  Just then, a bright blue Toyota Camry pulls into the garage. Abuela turns around and waves at the driver.

  “Oh, hello there, Mary!” Abuela says, approaching the car.

  It’s Clarissa’s mom. She steps out wearing a white V-neck and jeans, her brown hair in a tight ponytail that exposes streaks of blond at the ends. I tug at my own hair. My ponytail didn’t really survive the day. I have loose strands along the sides that have frizzed into super-curls around my ears.

  “Oh, Aurelia,” she replies. “The engine light is on and I’m worried my car is going to break down! And I have to pick up Clarissa from band practice in fifteen minutes! Save me!”

  “We’ll have that checked out right away.” Abuela motions for Gus’s dad to join them.

  “Orestes?” she calls out. “Can you please look at Mrs. Anderson’s Camry? The check engine light is on.”

  “I’ll take a look,” Agustín says.

  “Oh, that’s sweet of you, young man, but I’m in a hurry and I need a professional.”

  Agustín stops short of the car and eyes Clarissa’s mom. Before he says anything, Gus’s dad has already arrived.

  “Yo me encargo de este trabajo, mi’jo,” Señor Orestes says to Agustín.

  Agustín doesn’t argue, but he watches Clarissa’s mom for a moment. He lifts his cap, and his hair puffs out under the bridge of his hat before he heads to the stall to work on a Honda Civic that needs a new transmission.