Max starts gathering up trash and empty cider cups when William says, “One more thing.” He goes into their room, then comes out holding a brown paper bag. He sits on the arm of the couch, next to Max.
“Your book is perfect,” he tells her. “I’ve been thinking about heroes ever since you told me about Eddie’s WWCCD bracelet. Our country’s in such a bad place right now—so many leaders spewing out hate and fear that the people who admire them decide it’s okay to shoot up synagogues, and churches, and mosques...” He shakes his head slowly. “So, I’ve been thinking a lot about people like the ones in this book. Leaders who help us do the hard work to make our country better...so...”
He takes something from the bag, looks at it carefully. “Here,” he says, taking Max’s hand and slipping a colorful woven bracelet onto her wrist.
“It’s beautiful,” Max says. “All shades of blue from the lightest to the darkest, all woven together! I love it.”
“Look closely.”
She studies the bracelet for a moment, then smiles. “WWDHD.”
“Good choice?” William asks.
“Perfect. Dolores Huerta’s one of my all-time major heroes, always standing up for women and for poor people.”
“Tara, the high school girl at the job over in Alhambra, makes these bracelets that she sells at craft fairs and on Etsy. Usually they’re just colorful designs, but I commissioned her to do some special bracelets for us.”
He hands a bracelet to Imani. It’s thicker than Max’s, full of pinks and reds and purples. He leans down to help her fasten it. “See, you’ve got a hero from make-believe,” he says, reading the letters WWAOAD to her. “What Would Anna of Arendelle Do?”
Then he twists the bracelet so the other side is on top. “WWMOD. What would Michelle Obama do?” Imani twists it back so the WWAOAD side shows.
“Okay, so say something happens at school,” he says. “Like maybe you see a kid take another kid’s lunch money from their desk. And you know it’s not right, but you don’t want to be a snitch. Now your bracelet will remind you to think about what Anna of Arendelle would do. Or what would Michele Obama do? And it might help you figure out what you should do.”
“What would they do?”
“I don’t know for sure,” William says. “That’s for you to think about.”
William turns to me. “I know you already have a bracelet, but I thought you might like a less clunky update.”
He hands me a bracelet in light tans and greys, WWCCD spelled out in deep brown, or...in Baronial Brown, with a background of Buckwheat Flour and Sail Cloth. I slip the bracelet on my wrist. “Cool.”
William looks at me like he’s trying to figure out if I mean it.
“Really. It’s cool. Thanks.”
“What about you?” Max says.
William slips a dark colored bracelet, Midnight Black, Indigo Blue, and Virtuoso Purple, over his left wrist.
“And?” Max asks.
“Well...you know, WWMLKD.”
THE DAY AFTER OUR LATE Christmas Eve, after Max and William and Imani leave for lunch and a movie, I text Rosie to come over. She says she’s got too much to do to finish some college application. I call her. “I thought you applied already,” I say.
“I put in an early decision application to UOF, but I need to have back-up applications for second tier choices.”
“Second tier?”
“Yeah, for if I don’t get my first choice. Really though, there’s UOF as my first choice and all the rest would be like my thousandth choices. No place else has the kind of music therapy program I want.”
“You’ll get in,” I tell her. “With your grades and test scores, and all of the extra-curricular stuff you do? Plus, you’re beautiful. Did you send a picture?”
Rosie laughs. “The thing is, I don’t have an instrument. I only sing. It would be better if I played the piano, or guitar, or something. But I know I can help a lot of kids with music therapy. I for sure want to help kids.”
“I’ve got a present for you,” I say, using the singsong-y voice I use when I’m trying to get Imani all interested in some surprise.
“What is it?”
“You have to come see,” I singsong-y say.
“I’ve got to get the rest of these applications out of the way.”
More sing-song. “You’re gonna like it.”
“Well...” She laughs, says she has something for me, too. She can’t stay long but, yeah, a break from the applications would probably be good.
It’s around two when Rosie comes in, carrying a package wrapped in shiny red paper, tied with a fancy silver bow. I hold out my little package to her.
“You first,” she tells me, then takes my hand and draws it closer to get a better look. “Cool bracelet.”
“William gave it to me. He gave one to Imani and Max, too...” I tell her what the letters stand for.
“Hmmm, if I had a bracelet, I wonder whose initials I’d want on it?”
“Come on. Open your present,” I say.
She sits, staring at my bracelet.
“Rosie...”
“I know!” she says, all smiles. “Beyoncé! WWBD!”
“Beyoncé?”
“Yeah! She helps a lot of people, especially girls and women, and she does it through music!”
“Really?”
“You know. Her songs make you think about stuff, and they stay with you. And she makes about a zillion dollars off of every album, and she gives a lot of it to places that help girls become leaders, and she speaks out for gender equality and against police brutality and...”
“Would you PLEASE open your gift??”
She laughs. “After you,” she says, handing me her package. Now it’s her turn to use the singsong-y voice. “Please? Pretty please??”
So, I open her package. Inside is a small box of those kiddie candies that are shaped like hearts, and a CD of the last choir concert. I check the list of songs and performers, happy to see that Rosie’s solo is on the CD.
“I didn’t have much money, and I didn’t...”
“This is perfect!” I tell her. “Whenever I’m missing you, I can hear your voice.”
And then, finally, she opens my gift to her. She loves the locket. I mean she seriously loves the locket. Teary-eyed loves it the way Max loved her cashmere sweater.
It’s the first time we’ve been alone since before I got beat up. The first time we’ve had a real kiss, not one of those quick, made for public viewing, pecks. I pull Rosie closer, move over to make room beside me. She starts to scoot in, then pulls back. “I’m afraid I’ll break you,” she says.
“No. You’ll put me back together,” I tell her, again pulling her toward me.
This time she wedges in beside me, her body close against mine. She’s warm and soft next to me, her hand stroking my face.
“I’ve missed being close to you so much,” I tell her. I slip my hand under her blouse. She moves in closer, her thigh pushing against what wants to be pushed against.
I’m not like one of those locker room guys who talks about how they’ve done all of this sexy stuff with some girl. I’ll just say we didn’t do the full Tilly, but close enough to feel hella good. Rosie, too. I like that Rosie feels hella good, too.
Later in the evening, while Imani is giving me a scene-by-scene description of “Despicable Me #3,” Max comes to sit beside me on the couch. Imani is talking on and on about Gru and Dru, and some diamond-powered robot, and a kidnapping, and and and... It’s a welcome shift from “Frozen,” but I’m mostly spacing out when I feel the warmth of Max’s hand on mine. I look over at her and see tears welling in her eyes.
“Max...”
She shakes her head and turns her face into my shoulder.
“Max?? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t help thinking about how you could be dead now!”
“I think about that, too, sometimes—how much I’d miss if I didn’t get to live my life.”
�
��You’re not even listening!” Imani yells at me. “I’m not going to tell you how it ends!” she says, stomping off to her room.
Max and I both laugh. She wipes her face on my shirt. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she tells me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d choose the sweetness of life,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “I hope I’m never put to that test,” she says.
We sit for a while, quiet, then Max says, “I don’t understand why anyone in this world would want to hurt you, Eddie. How can that be?”
“I guess not everyone likes me as much as you do.”
I hear a text ding and reach for my phone. It’s Rosie. Max gives me a motherly pat on the leg, then goes back to Imani’s room.
Rosie: who made your bracelet
Me: someone william knows
Rosie: phone?
Me: don’t know
Rosie: find out?
Me: k
I go out to the garage where William’s shifting paint supplies, getting ready for tomorrow’s job. He won’t give out customer’s phone numbers, says it’s important to respect their privacy. But he looks through his account book and gives me the bracelet maker’s email.
Two days later, Rosie has a WWBD bracelet, and Brianna has WWJD, like the kind I wanted when I was a little kid. By the end of the week, Cameron has WWLRD. That’s for some drummer that he says is the best. Brent has WWCMD, for Christopher McCandless, that Into the Wild guy he’s been talking about so much lately. That’s how tense things are at Brent’s house now that he’s refusing to be bribed into getting a calculus tutor or to sign up for math camp. He keeps telling his dad, “A deal is a deal.” I guess that’s not going over so well.
The Tuesday before school starts up again, everyone’s parents or guardians, or whoever, get one of those mass emails from the school—from Hockney, to be exact. It’s a reminder that Hamilton High is a hate-free zone, that all students are welcome, whatever their race, religion, gender, ability, or country of origin. He asks that families remind their children that every single person is worthy of respect whether or not we agree with them. Students who deface school property with hate signs or symbols, who participate in hate speech, or promote hatred in any other way, will be immediately suspended, followed by expulsion.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Too Soon
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay home a few more days?” Max says, as she pulls up in front of the school. “Get a bit stronger?”
“I’m good,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”
“You’re sure Rosie can bring you home after school?”
“Max...”
“Okay. I know. I just...”
“I know. You worry. Stop it. Go down to Nunamakers and get an ice cream cone.” We both laugh, knowing I’m talking about a lot more than ice cream.
My face is still bruised, but Max says no one will notice. I guess my skin’s dark enough that the bruises have reached the color of blend. I still walk with a limp, but I’m down to only one pain pill at bedtime, so at least I can stay awake in class during the day. If I want to.
Miss May does one of those cartoon doubletakes when I show up before zero period. It’s a quick double-take, though, and then she’s all, “Great to see you—so glad you’re back—the tables are a mess, the cupboards are a mess—hard to get along without you!”
“Thanks,” I say, starting on the daily routine, tables first, then putting whatever May has for us today at each place.
“What’s with the cap, Eddie? No caps.”
“Hockney said it’d be okay, as long as it’s an HH baseball cap,” I tell her.
She looks doubtful. I take my cap off and bend my head to show her the hairless strip in the middle of my head and the still stapled-up gash.
She turns away. “Okay, okay! Put the cap back on.” Once I’ve covered my stitched-up bald head, she asks, “Are you all right? I heard you were hurt pretty bad.”
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
“I missed you.”
I focus on straightening the tables in the front of the room.
The class is all quiet as I pass out notebooks and today’s reading. Like people can’t talk and get a good look at me at the same time? A couple of the girls look at me like “poor Eddie.” I hate that!
I scoot into my desk next to Phong and half-listen as May talks about choosing our favorite writing for the next WriteLight collection.
Phong leans close and whispers, “You look like shit.”
I laugh, thinking “You look like shit” is a lot better than “poor Eddie.”
“Who’s that?” I say, pointing to the WWKTTD on Phong’s wrist. I guess that girl who makes the bracelets must be getting rich by now because a lot of people are wearing them.
“You know. KT Tatara, that Asian comedian guy?”
“Wait. Asians can be comedians?”
Phong pulls back his hand as if to smack me, then drops it. “There’s no safe place to hit you, is there?” He looks me over again. “It was probably those Patriot guys.”
“Don’t know.”
“Probably though.”
I shrug, finding the lines of the poem that Naomi just read, counting down to the place I’ll read when it’s my turn. “I would show you/the invisible tokens/of sorrow and joy.” It’s good that Miss May always reads the whole poem when we finish reading around because everybody mostly only concentrates on their own lines when we do the read out loud thing.
I wonder if it’s a coincidence, or if May chose the poem with me in mind. “Scars” for today’s writing prompt. Ours or someone else’s? Internal or external? I’ve got a lot to choose from. There’s the scar down the middle of my right hand from the surgery back when I was four years old. The surgery that was supposed to give my hand greater flexibility and range of motion. But didn’t. Max says there was only one, highly questionable, advantage that came from that surgery, and it wasn’t a better working hand.
The pain pills made me sick, and sometimes after the surgery, I’d wake in the middle of the night, screaming in pain. And the only thing that could distract me were Mario’s farts. So, Mario became an expert fart master. He was in 7th grade back when he was on regular fart-duty. With so much practice, he soon became the fart hero of Palm Avenue School. He’s twenty-five now, and he says the fart-hero designation doesn’t carry as much weight as it once did. He says Francie shows no respect for this highly developed skill. Sometimes, though, when it’s just the two of us, and we’re outside somewhere, Mario lets loose with his favorite long, rhythmic, melodic release of gas. And, like always, or almost always, I bust out laughing. He likes to wait until I’ve taken a gulp of soda, so he can get that soda-snort from me, too, but it’s harder for him to find perfect fart conditions now that he’s grown up and I’m almost grown up.
I said I almost always bust out laughing, because there was a time, back when I was nine, when I stopped laughing at Mario’s farts. That’s what tipped him that there was something seriously wrong in my life. And when I started laughing at farts again, he knew I was going to be okay. Max says that if the surgeon had told her, no, the surgery wouldn’t make my hand better, but it would turn Mario into a fart king, well, she could have saved me a lot of pain and saved herself a lot of much needed money.
That old hand scar’s not the scar I’ll write about today, though. Maybe I’ll write about the scar that runs from the top of my forehead past the crown of my skull. That’s a “doozie.” That’s Dr. G.’s word, not mine. He says it remains to be seen whether or not hair will grow back in the strip. Rosie says she’ll love me with or without a full head of hair, but I for sure don’t want to have this reverse mohawk thing for the rest of my life. Max says it will be distinctive, but what with my stub of a hand, I don’t need any more weird distinctions.
So, what scar to write about? Maybe the scar of betrayal by a once-trusted adult? Nah. The hand scar, the hairless head scar, the h
eart scar...Does Simba have a scar? I’m not sure. It doesn’t have to be real...
Imani, also known as the pest,
Has a scar left by Simba, in jest.
A scratch thin as his whisker,
No blood, not even a blister,
But the pest cried bloody murder.
Even the neighbors heard her,
Neosporin and band-aids
Lessened her tirades,
Consoled with ice cream and kisses...
...to be continued. Bad last line, and I want to get something in there about rewarding Simba with tuna, or fish? Fish would be easier to rhyme.
Phong and I make our way through the jammed-up halls toward Earth Science.
“I heard you didn’t tell the cops who beat you up.”
“I don’t know who beat me up.”
“Would you tell if you knew?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what I’m asking is would you tell if you did?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I’d tell or not.”
“But...”
“Could we talk about something else? Like the weather, or something?
“Hmmm. Was it raining that night you got beat up?”
By the end of third period, I’m totally done in. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising ‘cause all I’ve been doing for the past two weeks is walking from William’s recliner to the kitchen and back, watching “Parks and Recreation,” thinking I could be dead, dozing, walking from the recliner to the bathroom and back...You get the idea.
I drag myself to the lunch court and flop down at the table across from Brent, who is in agreement with Phong’s earlier assessment. “You look like shit.”
“I feel like shit,” I tell him.
Cameron puts his tray on the table and sits next to Brent. I look into my lunch carrier, take out the bottle of water, then zip it up again. Nothing looks good.
“I heard the cops were here again this morning, grueling those Patriot guys about beating you up,” he says.
“Where’d you hear that?” Brent asks.
“You know. Monica. She’s an aide in the office. She knows stuff. She says they brought five of those guys in and had them wait outside Hockney’s office. Then they called them in, one at a time. Everyone knows they did it.”
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