Things Seen from Above

by Shelley Pearsall

  Once outside, he wandered half-heartedly across the playground like somebody who’d been abandoned on a desert island—head down, hair awry—with one loose shoelace trailing behind him. A weird gold disk (stopwatch? compass?) dangled from a piece of red yarn around his neck.

  Was he sad? Upset? Angry? It was impossible to tell.

  Mostly, he looked totally alone.

  In spite of promising myself on Friday that I wouldn’t get involved, I could feel my older (and more sympathetic) self wanting to reach out to Joey and make things better somehow. In fourth grade—before Julie and I became friends—I used to draw pictures of myself as an alien whenever the girls in my class left me out of things. Which was often. So I could relate to the feeling.

  “Hey, Joey, you can come over and hang out with me for a while, if you want to,” I called out. I pointed to the open space on the Buddy Bench and did my best to sound cheerful and big sister–like, even though I wasn’t actually a big sister to anyone. In reality, I had a seventeen-year-old brother named Luke who seemed to forget my existence these days.

  The boy glanced up at the sound of his name and squinted blankly in my direction.

  “I’m April, one of the Buddy Bench helpers,” I added.

  Joey looked suddenly nervous and shook his head. His whispery reply drifted toward me like the jangle of a distant wind chime. “Thanks, I’m okay.”

  Then he flapped his hand in the air, as if telling me to go away, and made a beeline for the swing sets in the far corner of the playground. When he reached them, he glanced anxiously over his shoulder a couple of times as if to make sure I wasn’t following him.

  Okay, so that went well.

  I sighed.

  Sitting down, I flipped open my notebook and attempted to work on a poem about summer. Actually, it was a poem about Lake Michigan and the beach house where we go on vacation every year. I’d called the poem “Turquoise Summer” because of the brilliant color of the water.

  In between jotting down some new lines, I kept an eye on Joey because I had this gut feeling that he was going to bolt. He kept glancing in the direction of Mrs. Zeff, who was watching a soccer game on the sports fields. You could tell he was just waiting for the right moment to take off. And who could blame him, right?

  To be honest, the idea of running away occasionally crossed my mind too. When the social stuff at school was really bugging me, I would imagine going to our beach house and staying there until I was eighteen. Or I’d picture myself moving to some really remote place (like Alaska) where I could start over as someone completely new.

  In my alternate world, I’d skip junior high and be in high school already. I would hang out with this small group of smart but loyal friends. I’d wear casually cool clothes, and I wouldn’t care what people thought. And I’d change my name to something more fun sounding, like Haley or Jess.

  Jess Boxler. Didn’t that sound better than April?

  Of course, I would never run away in real life—unless sitting on a playground bench by yourself at recess counted as running away….

  * * *

  —

  Fortunately, Joey seemed to lose interest in escaping after a few minutes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wander toward the small metal slide near the swings. He was doing his usual foot-dragging walk again. Once or twice, he checked the gold disk around his neck.

  From what I could tell, he appeared to be making a bunch of large curves instead of his usual circles. Every so often he would stop, turn in place, and drag his foot around in a tighter semicircle. Then he would jump to a new spot. He repeated the same bizarre pattern over and over: walk in a curve for a while, then stop, make a tight turn, and jump.

  Surprisingly, he covered a lot of ground this way—nearly the entire area in front of the swings and slide. While he was focused on his feet, a soccer ball from the sports fields rolled right past him. Weirdly, he didn’t even bother to glance at it.

  Then a helicopter clacked overhead.

  Freezing in midstep, Joey stared upward, transfixed, until it disappeared from view. Why was he so interested in the helicopter? I wondered.

  The more I studied Joey, the more things I noticed. I made a mental list of them: How he walked with his hands clenched and his thumbs pointing outward like a hitchhiker. How his gray sweatpants were way too short and the elastic bunched above his ankles. How his mouth was pressed into such a tight line of concentration, it didn’t even look like he had lips.

  What was he concentrating on?

  It occurred to me that maybe the steps were some kind of a dance routine—the turns and hops sort of reminded me of one. Was he copying something he’d seen on television? Or in a YouTube video?

  As the recess bell rang and the fourth graders poured into the building, I waited for him to notice time was up. He didn’t. I finally had to wave and shout, “Hey, Joey, time to go in!”

  He drifted over at last. I’m not sure Mrs. Zeff even realized he was still outside. She’d already gone into the building.

  “Hey, I liked your dance,” I said when he got close enough. “That was really cool!”

  Joey stared at me with a blank expression. “What?” His dark, walnut-brown eyes were distant and hazy, as if he was miles away. A wood chip was stuck in his hair.

  I probably should have given up at that point, but I’m stubborn and I don’t quit easily.

  “Hey, I was just thinking that you’ll have to show me how to do that cool dance of yours someday,” I said. “I liked it. It was really cool.” Why did I keep using the word cool? Why did my voice sound so fake-happy?

  “I don’t know what you mean—goodbye,” Joey said in a rush and speed-walked into the building—leaving me behind in the dust.

  Behind Joey, the playground was covered with curling lines—and a bunch of fourth graders’ footprints.

  The footprints really annoyed Joey, but there was nothing he could do about them. Things on the playground were always temporary. He didn’t cry or get mad about it anymore, like he used to. He knew his tracings only lasted until 12:57, when the recess bell rang and everybody trampled his hard work like a herd of elephants.

  So what were the lines supposed to be?

  Waves, of course.

  He’d made more than he realized. Big waves of water curled in front of the swings and the metal slide. They rolled past the old jungle gym that nobody ever used. They gathered and swooped toward the back doors of the school in a roaring rush.

  Joey was sure that if the people in the helicopter were looking down, they probably guessed exactly what he was doing. It wasn’t that difficult. You just had to put two and two—or three and three—together.

  School. Fire drill. Waves.

  You couldn’t have an imaginary fire without an imaginary way to put it out, right?

  It made perfect sense to Joey, even if the Buddy Bench girl didn’t get it at all.

  Strangely, the subject of Joey came up again on my bus ride home on Monday—which wasn’t usually a place of great revelations.

  I got to the bus late on Monday (due to a jammed locker problem), so most of the good seats were already taken. Normally, I liked a window seat in the third or fourth row.

  Our driver’s name was Hank. He was probably about fifty and he always seemed to be in a bad mood. I was convinced that either he hated kids or he wished he was driving a race car instead of a school bus. Or both. When there was no traffic on the road (and no one to report him to the police), he would accelerate around curves and gun the bus down the street—which was why I never sat in the front row. I didn’t want to die.

  But you couldn’t sit too far back, because that’s where some seventh- and eighth-grade boys from the local private school always sat. They got picked up before us. Although they wore ties and looked like mini-adults—trust me, they weren’t. They would t
hrow literally anything over the seats at you while Hank was driving: empty Gatorade bottles, balled-up gym socks, dirt clods from their cleats, you name it.

  It was always a tricky choice—getting killed because of the bus driver’s bad driving vs. being nailed in the head by random objects thrown from the back.

  When I finally got to the bus, there was only one aisle seat left a few rows back. A younger girl was already sitting against the window. Sighing loudly, I slid into the open spot.

  The girl’s eyes glanced sideways. “Hi.”

  I pushed back some straggles of hair from my face. “Hi.”

  Next to her feet, the girl had a pink plaid backpack that appeared to be almost empty. It kind of made me wish for those days before sixth grade when we didn’t get homework in every subject. My backpack was the size and weight of a concrete boulder now.

  The girl kept chatting. “I know you from the playground. You’re the Buddy Bench person for us, aren’t you?”

  I mumbled and nodded. “Yeah, the fourth-grade recess.”

  “I’m in fourth grade.”

  “That’s good.” I forced a smile, because I was supposed to be a role model, right?

  The girl leaned closer and whispered, “Hey, did you see what Joey Byrd did today during the fire drill?”

  Weirdly, I felt suddenly protective of Joey—as if I was his big sister and it was my job to defend him. Although my older brother, Luke, was often a jerk these days, he used to stick up for me when we were younger.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged as if it was no big deal.

  “He’s in my class, you know.”

  I didn’t want to seem too curious about this fact, but I was. I couldn’t help casually asking, “So, what’s he like in class?”

  “Well”—the girl sniffed—“everybody says he shouldn’t be in fourth grade with the rest of us because he can’t read or do math like we can. He has to go to tutoring for special help almost every day. And he gets into trouble a lot for not doing his work. My friends and I are reading books for seventh graders, you know.”

  “That’s good,” I answered automatically. But something else about Joey suddenly popped into my head.

  I remembered how he’d left a couple of drawings in my Advice Box the year before. I hadn’t paid much attention to them. Other than Joey’s name, which was always written as JOEYBYRD, the notes had no words on them. They were just a bunch of scribbles and spirals drawn on torn pieces of construction paper.

  I’d assumed Joey was just goofing around—or that he didn’t understand what the box was for. The younger kids didn’t always get the concept of advice, and Joey had been a third grader last year.

  But now I wondered if I was wrong. Was it possible that he’d left the scribbles for me because he didn’t know how to ask for help? Or because he couldn’t read or write that well?

  Gosh—I’d never even considered that possibility.

  The girl next to me continued chattering. “Oh, and the other thing is he won’t wear orange and black on Spirit Days, like everybody else. He didn’t last year either,” she added.

  This might sound like a minor deal, but it wasn’t.

  We Are All Tigers wasn’t just written above the doorway of our school—it was everywhere. School spirit was more important than just about anything in Marshallville, including cereal—which is saying a lot. Practically the entire city dressed in Tigers colors on high school game days.

  “Maybe Joey doesn’t own anything orange or black.”

  The fourth grader rolled her eyes.

  “Or maybe his mom forgot to do the laundry—which has actually happened to me before,” I added. “Or maybe his family is too poor to afford the latest spirit wear.”

  Nothing seemed to make an impact on the girl.

  “Well, all the boys in my class hate him because he’s a traitor and he doesn’t like any sports,” she continued. “And nobody will sit with him at lunch because he eats funny.”

  “Please.” Sighing, I shook my head.

  The girl’s chin jutted out. “He does. He takes apart everything in his lunch.”

  “Takes apart?”

  “He says, ‘I don’t like anything I can’t see,’ ” she mimicked. “So he always pulls apart his sandwiches and puts one piece of bread here and one here”—the girl pantomimed with her hands. “Then he takes out everything inside, like the meat and the lettuce and the cheese, and he lays it all out on the table in front of him.”

  The girl wrinkled her nose. “It is so disgusting,” she said. “Then he usually eats the bread by itself like this.” She nibbled like a rabbit. “Then he eats everything else, piece by piece, really slowly.” The nibbling slowed.

  “Unless it’s pizza day.” She paused in her mocking demonstration. “Then he absolutely loves it and gobbles up one or two slices in, like, five seconds.” She gobbled up an invisible pizza slice.

  I didn’t want to keep encouraging the girl, so I said, “Okay, I get the picture. Thanks.” I pretended to rummage through the front zippered pocket of my backpack as if I was searching for something. I hoped the girl would get the clue that our talk was over.

  “I’m not lying,” she insisted. “You can ask anybody in fourth grade.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is my stop.” She lifted her almost-empty backpack and hugged it against her chest.

  I was relieved to let the girl out of the seat. Clearly, a pink plaid backpack didn’t automatically make you a sweet person.

  After the fourth grader left, I kept thinking about Joey. I jotted down a couple of the strangest details from the conversation on the palm of my hand so I wouldn’t forget them (and because I was too lazy to look for a piece of paper).

  I wrote: No Tigers stuff. Likes pizza. Can’t read or write?

  Then a watermelon Jolly Rancher suddenly ricocheted off the top of my head and onto the bus floor.

  Wonderful. The barrage from the back was starting.

  I slouched lower and tried to stay out of the line of fire for the rest of the ride.

  Of course, my mom guessed right away that I had a new project. She took one look at my ink-covered palm while we were making dinner and said half-jokingly, “What? Did your school run out of paper again today?”

  “I didn’t want to forget something.”

  Smiling and shaking her head, my mom stirred a pan of taco rice on the stove.

  I knew I was often a mystery to my mom. Not in a bad way—we were just polar opposites of each other in a lot of ways. I’d inherited her eye color (hazel brown) and her habit of being obsessively organized, but that was about it.

  When she was in school, my mom was into sports much more than academics. She played varsity volleyball and ran track. Unlike me, she also had tons of friends—most of whom she still kept in touch with on Facebook. She was kind of a Facebook addict.

  She also had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist—so it was pretty impossible to miss. It was a row of Chinese characters in blurry green ink. She got it when she went on a road trip out west with some of her girlfriends in college. “We were just being crazy,” she said. “I think it says Peace and Harmony. At least that’s what the tattoo guy told me.”

  I knew a lot of people had tattoos these days, so it was no big deal, but for some reason it embarrassed me—especially since my mom didn’t know what it said. She was a physical therapist in town, and I always wondered if her patients noticed it and thought it was strange.

  Julie Vanderbrook used to bring up my mom’s tattoo a lot. I think she knew it bugged me. Once she brought it up at a sleepover and everybody (except me) ended up drawing fake characters on their arms for fun.

  My dad had no tattoos.

  He was a systems analyst for Kellogg’s—which was data and spreadsheets basically. But he loved sports as much as my mom. H
e coached a Little League team in town called the Little Growlers. Although he was busy with work and coaching on the weekends, we always played chess together on Sunday nights after dinner. We called it our D&D Time (Dad and Daughter Time), and it was one of my favorite parts of the week. Sometimes my mom “advised” one of our sides, depending on who was winning or losing.

  Probably the biggest disappointment to my parents was the fact that my brother and I had zero interest in anything athletic. Luke played music 24/7. He’d taught himself to play keyboard, drums, and guitar.

  I was interested in just about everything else: Weather forecasting. Egyptian pyramids. Mammoths. The migration routes of whales. The Lost City of Atlantis. The Titanic disaster. Silent movies. Autism in fourth graders. You name it—I would literally read everything I could find on a topic until I was a mini-expert in it.

  I remember how I went through a phase in third grade where I was absolutely obsessed with studying the wild plants the Native Americans and the pioneers used for food and medicine. I kept a little notebook with drawings of the most common ones. I tried to spot them when we were walking around outside. And yes, I’ll admit that I even made my family eat a wild plant once.

  Actually, it wasn’t that dangerous. Or wild.

  My mom and I were coming back from the grocery store one afternoon when I spotted some cattails—which are among the top twenty edible wild plants—growing beside the road. I convinced my mom to go back later so we could collect some of the brown tops. They are called catkins. (I loved that name.)

  Of course, things didn’t go exactly as planned. The ground was like a swamp, and our shoes got totally soaked collecting the cattails. (Mine were nearly sucked into the mud.)

  Then we brought the catkins home and tried to collect the pollen by shaking them into a plastic bag. Supposedly, you could mix the pollen with pancake batter to make—yes—cattail pancakes.

  I don’t know what we did wrong, but all we got was a little yellow-brown fluff. (Maybe the catkins weren’t quite ready.) We mixed it into the pancakes anyway.