No One Will Ever Find Out

by EA Young

  ***

  “Did you ever start that English paper?” I asked Tanya, who was sitting on a lawn chair in Altezas’ backyard.

  She curved her eyebrows. “We have to do a paper?”

  “Don’t you remember? Last Thursday we had to begin looking up stuff to write a composition. It’s got to be about something that’s important to us and we have to explain why it’s important. It’s due the first week in June?”

  “Oh, that.” She waved her hand like it wasn’t of concern to her and leaned farther back in the chair.

  Behind her, the backyard slanted upwards, stopping at a little hill covered with bushes and rocks. Square slats of wood layered a wide primitive staircase down to the back of the house. A brown wooden fence surrounded the yard. Neighbors’ trees spread their branches over the Alteza yard, giving the corners shade.

  With a branch, I dug a small tunnel in the soil for a centipede to crawl through. Instead he went around it. He was lucky. He didn’t have to face Sister Bernadette with a composition on some weird topic like I did.

  “I hate English,” I said. “I think I hate math more.” I thought a moment. “Nah, I hate English.” I tossed the stick into the bushes.

  Music suddenly blasted throughout Courtney’s entire house, scaring away the birds from the shady trees. A few minutes later Courtney came out hugging a box of pretzels. “Want some?” she hollered over the din.

  We each grabbed a handful. I was right in the middle of one when suddenly there was silence.

  “You have this on for the people next door too?” Mr. Alteza’s voice traveled all the way down from the second-floor window.

  “I’m getting dressed,” Adrian replied.

  “Well, keep it down.”

  “He really messed up this time,” Courtney predicted, stretching out on another lawn chair.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Adrian,” she said. She shoved the pretzel in her mouth, and then she looked over at their kitchen screen door. “Come,” she instructed us. “Papi’s in there explaining the whole thing now.”

  We followed Courtney alongside the house, ducking under the row of her mother’s tall plants, and squatted beneath the kitchen window to listen.

  “. . . a complete disaster,” we heard Mr. Alteza say, and then the refrigerator door slammed shut. “He gets to this intersection and asks me, ‘Okay Dad, what do I do at this light?’ and I said to him, ‘What is it telling you to do?’ and he said, ‘One’s telling me to turn right; another one is telling me to stop; another is telling me to turn left . . . no wait . . . it’s telling them to turn . . . no wait,’ and that’s when I told him to pull over to the curb and get out of my car.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Did you really think he was ready to handle the road so soon?” Mrs. Alteza asked.

  “I don’t trust that boy to handle a bike . . . .” Mr. Alteza’s voice faded, as if he was going into another room.

  I leaned against the side of the house. No wonder Mr. Alteza had both hands gripping the dashboard.

  “So when does he take the road test?” Tanya asked, as we crawled away from the window.

  “I don’t know,” Courtney replied. “Papi let Adrian practice today because there aren’t that many cars on the road on Sundays. But he’s going to need a lot more practice.” She closed the box of pretzels. “He didn’t want Mami to know how he goofed up again, but my parents tell each other everything.”

  I stopped licking the salt off my pretzel and grasped the key holder tighter. I wondered if my parents told each other everything. Well, at least they’d never find out about my keys.

  “Let’s watch some movies,” Tanya suggested, brushing crumbs off her skirt.

  “We’ll bring the tapes over to your house and watch them on your set,” Courtney told me. “Everybody’s going out so I’m staying with you guys.”

  “Adrian too?” Tanya asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s got a date. Papi’s dropping him off and then treating Mami to dinner and a show.”

  “So I guess that means he’s not driving?” Tanya teased, cracking her last pretzel.

  Out the corner of my eye and through the screen door, I saw Adrian coming down the stairs. He had on a black suit and a thin tie. His pointy black shoes shined. He waved at us.

  “Look at him,” Courtney said. “Thinks he’s cute.”

  He strutted down the steps while arranging his tie and almost tripped over the landing’s mat.

  Then Mr. Alteza, in a dark gray suit, rushed out the door jiggling the car keys. “Let’s go,” he told Adrian, who was still gazing into the hall mirror.

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked Courtney.

  “Probably waiting in the car,” she said on our way to their den. She picked out a few VCR tapes from their wall unit, and then we went over to my house.

  That night after supper, I headed upstairs to my room. I stared at all the school supplies sprawled across my desk and started to shove everything into my book bag. I placed the books that I didn’t need any more on the floor beside my desk along with all the old notes I had written down for the year. Then I noticed how cluttered my floor looked.

  I kicked off my shoes and tossed them inside my bedroom closet. Most of my winter shoes were on the closet floor instead of on the shoe rack hanging on the door. I picked up my shoes and rubber boots and placed them on the rack. That cleared a large space of the closet floor.

  I looked at my brown summer sandals and started to smile. It wouldn’t be long before I would be wearing them out to our favorite seafood restaurants, on the beach, or at a picnic. It only took that one hot-weather activity to officially start my summer, and wearing the sandals would really set the mood. Then I could forget all about the teachers, who would still be sitting behind classroom desks all day and probably wondering what fun was in store for their students.

  I picked up the sandals and brushed off grains of sand left over from the previous summer. I placed them neatly back on the floor and turned around. Eying my books beside the desk, I stopped smiling. I didn’t want to look at them all summer; I would have rather looked at my sandals. Hey wait a minute, they could trade places. I picked up the sandals and placed them beside my desk. Then I carried the schoolbooks and all my old homework over to my closet and set them on the floor in the corner where I wouldn’t have to look at them. I piled them all in one stack to leave some space for my backpack, and then I shut the door.

  Boy, it really feels like summer is coming now.

  I walked over to my desk, picked up my assignment pad, and flipped it open to see what was due Monday. I had to multiply and divide 10 sets of three-digit numbers. I had to read a chapter on electrical energy and answer questions. I had to locate, underline, and label direct and indirect objects in 8 sentences.

  I sighed at the window. How could I get all this work done in one night?

  I pulled out my social studies test from last Wednesday. I had gotten a D. Sister Bernadette gave me extra credit work to bring my grade up, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet. I didn’t think one D would show on my report card anyway.

  I looked at the extra credit assignment: “Describe in full detail a series of events that led to the American Revolution.” I glimpsed at my closet door where my social studies notes were now buried. Did she want all the series of events that led to the American Revolution? That sounded like a two-paged written report. Would the extra credit really make that much of a difference on my grade?

  I was thinking about if and how to tackle the assignment when Pop stuck his head in the door. “Did you go over all your homework?”

  No response.

  “Go over your homework,” he ordered.

  I parked myself at the desk as he shut the door. I gazed out the window, up at the full moon, and took a deep breath of the night air.

  I had heard how the moon affected people and the earth in the strangest way. Pop had talked about it when he moved my desk in fro
nt of the window. He had said that the moon and strange behavior had something to do with my schoolwork, but I hadn’t been able to figure out what he meant.

  The sky was filled with twinkling stars, but they were not as bright as the moon; its glow was so strong that I could see thin clouds stretched across it like two silver linings.

  I looked across our narrow alley at Courtney’s bedroom window and saw her sitting on the edge of her bed painting her toenails. Her foot was on top of a paper towel to keep the polish from staining her bedspread.

  Well, at least I wasn’t by myself.