Joey’s mom did all the talking. “Hello. We’re the parents of Joey Byrd. He’s in the fourth grade,” she said in a rehearsed kind of way. His dad nodded.
Searching the table for their name tags, I spotted the one for Joey’s mom first. She was called Denise. An ordinary name, right?
But his dad was called Nibor—a name I’d never heard before.
“That’s an interesting name. Like ‘neighbor,’ ” I commented, just to be friendly.
“Yes,” Joey’s dad replied without smiling. He didn’t share any more details about it, and I felt kind of embarrassed for saying something.
The other unusual thing I noticed about Joey’s parents was the fact that they didn’t put on their name tags right away, like most parents do. Joey’s dad carefully folded his tag in half, creasing it with a fingernail. Then he shoved it into his shirt pocket. Joey’s mom tucked hers into the front of her purse.
Why did they hide them? I wondered. Were they ashamed of Joey—or of being his parents? Or were they like Joey—did they prefer being unknown and invisible too?
I couldn’t imagine my parents acting the same way. Not in a million years. My parents had the opposite problem—they were always saying too much about me in public. My dad would tell perfect strangers how I was a straight-A student, or how I’d been in the newspaper for something. My mom had a button with my picture and the words “Marshallville Honor Student” emblazoned across it. It was pretty embarrassing. She wore it everywhere.
“Is there a schedule for tonight?” Joey’s mom asked, glancing uncertainly at all the stacks of paperwork on the table.
“Sure.” As I handed her one of the printed schedules and pointed out the parts that related to the fourth grade, Joey’s dad kind of wandered off by himself. I couldn’t really tell what he was doing, but I could see him standing at the end of the registration table.
Once I finished explaining the schedule, Joey’s mom motioned impatiently at him. “Come on, Nibor. We’ve got to get going before all the seats are taken.”
After they left, I noticed that Joey’s dad had arranged most of the pens on the registration table into five letters. They spelled out the word “ROBIN.”
It took me a minute to get it. Then, I cracked up. Nibor (Robin) Byrd. It was pretty clever actually. Was it his dad’s real name? Who knows…but I was definitely starting to see where Joey got his creativity from.
When I shared the story with Veena the next day, both of us laughed about it.
That same week, she managed to get a better glimpse of the gold disk that Joey wore around his neck all the time. “I just happened to be standing next to him in the office yesterday, so I got a really good look at it. I’m pretty sure it’s a compass, not a watch,” she said. “It had arrows and letters on it.”
We decided maybe Joey used it for mapping his designs.
For most of the week we did okay at keeping quiet about Joey. However, Mr. Mac nearly gave us a heart attack when he asked about him in front of the whole group on Friday.
We were having our usual Buddy Bench meeting. A bag of Oreos was slowly making its way around the table when he suddenly turned to me. “So what’s up with our fourth-grade daydreamer these days, April? Any new revelations about Joey Byrd?”
Veena gave an audible gasp, and her hand froze inside the Oreo bag. The two Rs looked at her oddly. Somehow I managed to answer, “No, everything’s fine. He seems okay.” Then I shoved an Oreo into my mouth to keep from having to reveal anything else.
“We spend a lot of time making friendship bracelets with the girls,” Veena added quickly.
“Gosh, we hate those stupid things,” Rochelle said, snorting. “The third graders are making them too. It drives us crazy. ‘Tie this for me.’ ‘Thread this for me,’ ” she mimicked.
Veena had a couple of the colorful bracelets on her wrist. She quietly slid her hand off the table and into her lap. Mr. Mac, as usual, didn’t catch on. He started describing all the fads he’d seen in school over the years—slime, fidget spinners, wheelie shoes—and the topic of Joey was (thankfully) forgotten.
Fortunately, Joey seemed oblivious to us.
He’d made his usual spirals and circles and wandering squiggles that week, except for one recess when he drew what we thought was an owl—although we weren’t sure why.
Mr. Ulysses took a picture of it from the rooftop.
It is almost impossible to surprise an owl. It can turn its head 270 degrees in either direction—even though it prefers not to. It has three eyelids. One is see-through.
Joey didn’t need to turn his head 270 degrees, or look through his eyelids, to know he was being watched by the sixth-grade girl with the notebook and the new girl from another country. Everywhere he went, he could feel their prickling gaze on his back.
Joey made the owl for two reasons. First, to show the girls that he was watching them. Second, to show the girls that they couldn’t surprise him.
But then—surprisingly—they did.
“There are other people like him!”
Although it was a Monday—a day she didn’t work—Veena showed up at the Buddy Bench at the start of recess.
I turned toward her, only half hearing what she said at first. I had the hood of my coat pulled up because it was windy and absolutely freezing outside. “Why the heck are you out here?” I asked, looking at Veena like she was nuts. “You aren’t even supposed to be working today.”
The fifth grader was wearing a thin grape-colored hoodie and striped leggings. The wind whipped her dark hair around. Sitting down next to me, she bounced her striped knees up and down to keep warm.
“I know, but I had to show you what I found this weekend!” Her voice stayed on warp speed. Pulling a phone out of her pocket, she flicked through it.
“Look!” Trembling from the cold or excitement (or both), she held the screen toward me.
I leaned closer. “What am I looking at?”
“The field,” she replied impatiently.
On the screen, there was a picture of a green field. I held the phone closer. The photo rotated and shifted. I turned the phone to get the image back.
Finally I saw what Veena was talking about: a precise, perfect spiral in the middle of a field of green stalks.
“Wow. That’s really cool,” I said. “It’s a corn maze just like Joey’s designs.”
“No.” Veena shook her head emphatically. “It’s not a maze. They are called ‘crop circles.’ It is a type of secret artwork. And not every design is a circle. I found a lot more examples.”
She swiped through more pictures showing me outlines of giant white horses, elaborate labyrinths, intricate stars, bizarre geometric patterns, interlocking ring designs—and lots of spirals and circles. Some were in fields. Others were carved into hillsides. A few had been made on wide, sandy beaches.
I was pretty amazed. “How did you find all these pictures?”
Veena smiled. “Last night I was thinking about Joey’s spirals and wondering if there were other people around the world who make big designs too. So, just for fun, I searched ‘giant circle makers’ on my phone, since that is what Joey does a lot of the time. And all of these photos came up.” Veena’s voice rose excitedly. “I couldn’t believe it.”
I tried not to look impressed, but I have to admit that I was. (And okay—I was also kind of jealous that she had thought of this idea before I did.)
“Crop circle designs are quite mysterious—that’s what I learned,” she continued. “According to what I read, they usually appear in the middle of the night. Often no one knows how they were made. Or who made them. Or why they appear in certain places and not others. Like in England near Stonehenge—they are seen quite often there.”
“Stonehenge and Michigan?” I joked.
Without stopping for a breath, Veena kept chatt
ering. “And the crops in the fields are always carefully flattened, not cut—so it isn’t possible that a machine is making them. Some scientists think it might be a magnetic vortex, like a tornado, that creates some of them because people often experience a dizzy or tingling feeling near the designs.”
Squinting skeptically, I held up the horse picture on Veena’s phone again. “A magnetic vortex made this horse?”
“Maybe not.” Veena smiled and shrugged. “Other people believe the designs are made by secret societies of artists called circle makers who pass down their skills and tools from generation to generation. But no one really knows for sure. It’s a mystery.” Her eyes shifted toward Joey.
At that moment, he was weaving slowly around the swing sets. Although the temperature was in the thirties, his coat was unzipped and he wasn’t wearing any socks. I could see about two inches of his bone-white ankles sticking out below his pant legs.
“Do you think he might want to see my pictures too?” Veena asked. “Or maybe he knows about the circle makers already?”
“I guess we could try.” I rubbed my cold nose, still feeling slightly envious of her discovery.
Getting up, we walked across the arctic tundra of the playground. You could tell that Joey sensed our approach. His footsteps sped up. He turned in the opposite direction and veered toward the jungle gym to avoid us.
“You try talking to him first,” Veena whispered.
“Hey, Joey,” I called out when we got close enough.
The boy’s eyes glanced suspiciously over his shoulder at us. I stepped over one of his lines, not wanting to mess up anything.
“Hey, we wanted to show you some cool pictures Veena found on her phone. They reminded us of the tracings you make sometimes. Do you want to see them?”
Joey’s brown eyes stared at my face for a second or two, and I had the distinct feeling that he was trying to decide if he could trust what I was saying.
“Okay,” he said suddenly, and the air around us exhaled.
Scuffing toward us, he held out his hand. “Let me see them.”
“Here, I can show the pictures to you,” Veena tried to insist. I could tell she was nervous about handing over her phone. It looked pretty new.
“Just give it to me,” Joey said impatiently, still reaching.
Although Joey’s hands weren’t super clean, Veena finally gave up arguing. She handed over her nice phone. I think both of us held our breaths—not sure what would happen next—as Joey took it.
It felt like a long couple of minutes as Joey stared silently at the screen, but I’m sure it was only a few seconds. Once he realized what was on it, I swear you could literally see his eyes widen with amazement.
Without asking Veena for permission, he began swiping through more of the pictures she’d found, holding the phone just inches from his eyes. He almost seemed to be memorizing each picture. You could see a whole panorama of emotions—wonder, curiosity, surprise, fascination—flickering across his face.
Veena and I stayed quiet, stamping our feet up and down to keep warm, until Joey finally looked up again.
“Where are these?” were the first words he said to us.
“You mean where can you see them?” Veena asked.
Joey nodded.
“Well, I think a lot of them are in places like England, not here,” she stammered. “But I believe they have been found in many other countries too.”
“I definitely want to go to England then,” Joey replied in a distant voice, as if he was already heading across the Atlantic in his mind.
“Actually, I don’t think you can see them there right now,” I attempted to explain. “A lot of them were created in fields, you know, so they aren’t really permanent. They’re like your tracings. They weren’t made to last a long time. That’s why people took pictures of them.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to see them,” Joey stubbornly insisted, setting his mouth in a firm line. “I want to meet other people who make spirals of sadness too.”
“Spirals of sadness?” Veena and I repeated together, our voices tripping over one another.
Joey flicked through the pictures and held up the spiral in the green field. “This.”
“Why do you call them spirals of sadness?” Veena’s eyes darted nervously toward me. I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was: Were we asking him too many questions? Could we keep him talking to us?
Joey gave an audible sigh, as if we were as dumb as rocks.
“Because”—he started to walk in a tight coil, dragging his left sneaker through the dirt—“you think of something sad and you start walking. Then you think of more sad things and you walk. And you just keep walking and thinking of sad things.” He kept walking, making a larger spiral in front of us. “Until the sad things finally go away.”
A thick lump rose in my throat.
I didn’t dare look over at Veena, because I knew she was probably feeling the exact same way. It was impossible not to remember all the spirals Mr. Ulysses had in his desk drawer. I’ve got a ton of his spiral photos, the janitor had told us. Then there were the ones Joey had put in my Advice Box the year before. Plus the spiral he’d left this year—the one I’d thought was an exploding solar system.
In other words, most of Joey’s art was sadness. Which was really sad to think about.
“I’m not lying. It works.” Joey glared at the two of us, as if he thought we were mocking him somehow.
“No. We believe you,” I finally managed to say. “But we seriously had no idea what your spirals meant. If we had known how you were feeling and how upset you were, we would have tried to do something to help you out.”
Next to me, Veena nodded.
Joey crossed his arms as if he was about to have a complete meltdown. A glaze of tears shone in his eyes. “I’m not lying. It works,” he repeated, looking more frustrated with us. Clearly, we weren’t getting through to him.
“Honestly, we believe you,” I repeated. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Then you try it.” Joey ducked his head down and continued his spiral walk. “You try it and see.”
It is not easy to walk in a perfect spiral while thinking about sad things. It may sound simple, but it isn’t.
First off, I couldn’t stop worrying about the sixth graders in the cafeteria. Were they watching me walk in circles and laughing hysterically? Second, I couldn’t seem to coordinate my eyes and my feet to make evenly spaced lines in the dirt. The more I walked, the more my spiral looked like a deformed egg.
Out of the corner of my eye, I checked how Veena was doing.
She was about ten feet away from me, scuffing her left shoe through the wood chips. Her flimsy ballet flat barely left a mark, but she stubbornly kept going. Since her face was concealed by her purple hoodie, I couldn’t see her expression. Was she thinking about her old life in India? I wondered. Was she lonely here? Did she feel like a stranger in Marshallville? In America? Had she wanted to come here?
Although I often imagined how great it would be to move somewhere else and be someone totally different, was that true? Would I want to be like Veena and leave everything behind?
To be honest, I started running out of sad things to think about in my own life after about five minutes.
Once I’d gotten past losing Julie as a friend…and not having made another friend yet…and always feeling like an outsider in sixth grade…and my brother being in his own world and ignoring me these days…and our older cat, Patches, having to be put to sleep last year, which was terrible…I couldn’t come up with much else….
So I started thinking about bigger problems from the outside world, like war, terrorism, violence, school shootings, global warming, animals going extinct, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods—and it became pretty clear that the outside world has a lot
more sadness than my own life. Which kind of puts things in perspective, you know?
Weirdly, the longer I walked, the calmer I felt. And colder.
Calmer, but colder.
Once I decided my lopsided spiral was finished, I told Joey how his idea really seemed to work. “I liked it a lot,” I said. “Would you mind if I wrote about it in my advice column someday? I think it could help other kids.”
He replied with a vague shrug. “I guess. But your spiral is crooked,” he added, pointing at mine. “And nobody can see yours,” he said to Veena.
Hers resembled the faint imprint of a fossil shell.
“At least it’s better than mine,” I joked, and Veena smiled.
Truthfully, our spirals didn’t really matter. What was more important was the fact that Joey Byrd was finally opening up and talking to us.
Talking.
Of course, the recess bell rang before we could ask him any more questions. Without another word, Joey took off for the back doors of the school, leaving us standing next to our spirals of sadness.
My nose was running from the cold. Veena’s teeth were chattering. Still, it felt like we’d taken a major step forward. We’d started to figure out more about Joey Byrd.
Unfortunately, just as I’d feared—other people had noticed us (and Joey) too.
On Wednesday, a small bunch of the bracelet-making girls strolled toward us. Recess had been indoors on Tuesday because of rain, so this was our first day outside since making the spirals with Joey. The weather was still cold and damp. Just by the expressions on the girls’ faces, I could tell something was up.
“Watch out. Here comes some big drama,” I whispered to Veena, who was so bundled up against the cold, I don’t think she heard a word.
“What?” she said, pushing down the hood of her coat.
I waved my hand. “Never mind.”
Things Seen from Above Page 8
