“Well, would you look who it is,” he drawled, dropping the girl’s arm. “The new kid. I’ve heard about you.”
Ethan’s feet itched to sprint away, but he held his ground, gripping the bag tighter in his hand. The boy came closer and looked Ethan up and down. “Anyone ever tell you we don’t like your kind coming round here? Alex, look at this kid.” He beckoned to the other boy, who sauntered over with that predatory smile. Only the girl stood off to the side, staring pointedly away from Ethan, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Hey, blackie,” the blond boy jeered, leaning in toward Ethan’s face. “Why aren’t you saying anything, huh? You scared?”
Ethan swallowed but did not respond. “He’s terrified!” Alex shrieked, and rammed his shoulder into Ethan’s. Shocked, Ethan stumbled back, his heart beating relentlessly against the butterfly bones of his rib cage. He couldn’t respond now even if he wanted to; his anger had stunned him to silence.
When he didn’t react, the blond boy’s face seemed to catch on fire, his cheeks turning red and his eyes flashing. “Say something,” he ordered, shoving both of Ethan’s shoulders with the heels of his hands. “Come on!”
Ethan gritted his teeth. His free hand was a fist at his side, but he thought of Samuel Hill and took a deep breath. He couldn’t lose his cool. Especially not here.
“All right,” the blond said. “All right. Seems like you don’t care about anything, so I guess it won’t rattle your cage if I, say, do this.” His arm shot out, ripping the bag from its handles and out of Ethan’s grip.
“What do we have here?” He pulled out the Oreos as Alex looked on, snickering. “Babe, you want this?” He didn’t wait for the girl to respond before tossing the box over his shoulder. She had to dive forward to catch it before it hit the ground. Ethan glared at her, but she cradled the cookies to her chest with an almost helpless shrug.
Next, the boy’s hand found the potato chips, which he looked at for a long moment before dropping them unceremoniously to the ground and planting his boot in the center of the bag. It exploded, letting out a loud pop and sending shards of chips scattering across the dirt.
Ethan couldn’t help it as he cried out, “Hey!” and reached an arm uselessly toward the ground.
“He speaks!” the blond cried, pulling out the bottle of Coke and handing it to Alex. Alex somehow managed to remove the sealed cap with a gnash of his teeth. He spat it onto the ground and took a long swig.
Finally, the boy pulled out the comic and tossed the empty bag behind him. “Captain America, huh?” He nodded slowly. “Yeah, all right. I’ll take that.” He folded the comic down the middle and shoved it into his back pocket.
Fury clouded Ethan’s vision until the three kids were just a blur in front of him. He thought—wished—that molten lava might stream from his ears and pour down his shoulders and onto the road to consume his tormentors.
“Give that back,” he said, barely hearing his own voice.
“What’s that?” one of them taunted. “What do you want, blackie?”
“Give that back,” Ethan repeated, taking a step toward them. The boys, clearly unbothered, laughed.
“Give that back!” Alex taunted, the Coke sloshing onto his hand.
That was it—Ethan couldn’t let this slide. He made a fist so tight that his nails dug into his palm and pulled back his arm. It was then that a pair of tires squealed to a stop just a few feet from where Ethan stood. When the dust cleared, he saw Juniper Jones, her fiery head framed by the midmorning sun and a hard frown on her thin lips.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded, stepping off her bike and letting it fall to the ground. “Ethan?” She looked at him with his fist pulled back, then back at the others. “Noah O’Neil, what is this?”
“Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Juniper Jones,” the blond boy, Noah, replied. “Or should I say Starfish.”
Alex barked a laugh. The girl, still holding the Oreos, had backed up almost to the tree line.
Juniper crossed her arms over her chest, but her voice remained surprisingly calm. “Don’t be like that, Noah. Come on. Give Ethan back his stuff.”
“Hm.” Noah pretended to think for a moment, rubbing his chin theatrically. “I’m gonna go with . . . no. And of course you’re buddies with the Negro. You make a perfect pair: two people who shoulda never been born.”
Juniper blinked as though she’d been slapped. “Hey,” Ethan said roughly. “Keep the stuff. Whatever. I don’t need it. But get the hell away from us.”
Something in Ethan’s tone must have conveyed his seriousness, because Noah glanced at Alex and the girl. “Whatever,” he snapped. “They aren’t worth it anyway. See you around, blackie. And Starfish. Come on, Courtney.” He grabbed the girl roughly by the arm and seemed not to notice when she stumbled into his side. He pulled her after him as Alex trotted behind.
“And by the way,” Noah added, stopping inches away from Ethan. “I heard about why you were sent down here. What you did to that boy. And maybe up where you’re from folks just get a little mad, but down here we handle things differently.” He smiled darkly, making sure to graze Ethan’s shoulder with his own as he pushed past.
Ethan took in a shaky breath, only exhaling when Juniper said, “They’re gone.” Then he let his shoulders slump, letting himself feel not just anger but also the fear that pulsed beneath it. In Noah O’Neil’s eyes he hadn’t seen a shred of compassion. He felt cold thinking about what those boys might have tried if Juniper hadn’t pulled up just then.
Juniper approached him now, standing a few feet away with her hands wrung together, looking lost. When Ethan turned to her, she forced a wan smile.
“You okay, Ethan Charlie Harper?” she asked.
Ethan licked his lips and mumbled, “Yeah, I guess. Thanks.”
“Sure thing. And I’m sorry about them.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Those guys talk big, but really they’re just big dummies. They’re just saying what they hear other people say.”
“I don’t know.” Ethan shrugged. “Sure seems like they believed it.” To this Juniper said nothing. “Anyway, it’s good to see you,” he said, and meant it. “And not just ’cause you distracted those jerks.”
“Good to see you too,” she said. After a pause, she asked, “And hey, what was Noah saying just then? About why you were sent here? Guess you haven’t told me that yet.”
Ethan could hear the strain in her voice, lingering just behind her usual brightness. He couldn’t look at her.
“I got in a fight,” he said tightly. “With a boy at school. Broke his nose. My dad was real mad.”
Juniper laughed suddenly. “Is that all? Well, boys get into fights all the time. Noah’s been in his fair share.”
Ethan said nothing, remembering the feeling of Samuel Hill’s nose under his fist—and of his cruel words just moments before. The memory froze his tongue, and he could only nod. Juniper, unfazed, smiled brightly again.
“Well, anyway, don’t think I forgot about our adventure, Ethan Charlie Harper! Just you wait, I’ll fix everything. There’s a lot more to this town than Noah O’Neil, and I’ll prove it.” Her energy renewed, she lifted her bike from the ground and climbed onto the seat with a small grin, her skirt draping over the frame. “I have to go make lunch for my aunt, but I’ll see you soon, okay?”
She pedaled off in a cloud of dust, but somehow, it settled in her wake. Ethan watched her go, and just before she disappeared around the bend, he murmured, “See ya, Starfish.”
Then he took a deep breath and trudged on down the path toward home, leaving a pile of crushed potato chips in the dust behind him.
Six
Ethan had never liked NBC’s nightly newscast. John Cameron Swayze had a funny way of talking where he pursed his lips but never properly opened his mouth and ended up sounding incurably congested. He’d always sor
t of reminded Ethan of an unhappy fish. Back home, his family always watched See It Now on CBS, even though Edward R. Murrow’s ratings had been dropping since ’54. The Harper household was very anti-Swayze.
Uncle Robert, on the other hand, was NBC’s biggest fan. He reclined on the couch every evening with a pack of Camel cigarettes and smiled in self-satisfaction as the logo flashed on the screen and the white letters spelling out Camel News Caravan switched to John Cameron Swayze’s fishy face. Ethan and Aunt Cara would sit dutifully in the living room, each staring at different points on the wall and pretending to care about the monotonous news report as cigarette smoke strutted boisterously about the room and invaded their noses and eyes.
After dinner at the beginning of Ethan’s third week in Ellison, the three eased into their seats and watched the broadcast begin. The prerecorded intro came on as usual, reminding households across the nation to sit back, relax, and watch the news that had unfolded over the past day. Uncle Robert muttered the show’s tagline in time with the recording, a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth. He rearranged himself in his chair.
The image on the screen became one of Swayze leaning against his desk with a map of the world as his backdrop. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening to you,” he began in his nasally voice. Ethan suppressed a groan. “Controversy has risen in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, after a fifteen-year-old Negro schoolgirl from Hope Hull was arrested this afternoon on the Q7 bus route. The Negro girl refused to give up her seat for a white woman, becoming hostile when asked by the driver. This story is reported for us now by David Brinkley, NBC News, Montgomery.”
Ethan frowned, leaning forward in his seat as Brinkley, the other, less frequently aired anchor of Camel News Caravan, appeared on the screen. He opened with a short greeting, then the picture cut to a slightly blurry school photograph of a smiling, dark-skinned girl. Footage of Montgomery buses rolled across the screen, and Brinkley spoke.
“In Montgomery, colored passengers must sit at the back of the vehicle, leaving the front seats open for white passengers. Today, a child defied this law. When asked by the driver to relinquish her seat to a white woman who had just boarded, she refused, insisting that the woman could stand. Law enforcement was called to the scene, and the girl was taken into custody.”
Swayze returned, his lips pursed. “This incident follows in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case last year . . .”
Ethan had stopped listening, gripped by another image of the girl on the screen, this one of her in handcuffs. She was dwarfed by the heavyset white policeman as he pulled her toward the squad car, but her eyes were narrow, defiant. She stared directly into the camera with a resolve that seemed too expansive for her small frame.
Colored passengers must sit at the back of the vehicle. Brinkley’s words spiraled through Ethan’s mind. He thought of Arcadia, where no one would think twice about where he sat, and imagined a bus split cleanly in half by a color line. And Montgomery wasn’t far away—how easily could it have been him instead of this girl, his same age, with skin not so different from his own?
As Ethan gaped at the screen, Aunt Cara cleared her throat. “Robert,” she said, “maybe we could watch something else.”
At this, Ethan tuned back into the program just in time to see the Montgomery police chief appear on the screen. But before the officer could speak, Uncle Robert had pushed himself out of his seat and turned the dial to another channel. Now it was on CBS, where Murrow was conducting an interview with Groucho Marx. Usually, the Person to Person program was Ethan’s favorite; tonight, for once, he just wanted Swayze to come back on and tell him more.
“Uncle Robert,” he ventured, “would you change it back?”
“Quiet,” his uncle snapped. “I’m listening.” He stared at the set so hard that sweat broke out on his forehead. His cigarette laid forgotten in an ashtray on the coffee table.
The sky was falling.
At least, that’s how it sounded. Something was exploding outside Ethan’s window like a million tiny shards of broken glass crashing against the pavement. He rolled over in bed with a groan, pulling a pillow over his face.
“Go away!” he growled.
The thundering stopped for a moment, as if considering his command. When it started up again, it was accompanied by a wind-chime voice.
“Wake up, Ethan Charlie Harper! It’s Saturday morning, so I know you don’t have work. Our invincible summer isn’t gonna wait!”
Ethan opened one eye at a time and drew the pillow under his chin. He knew who would be standing outside his window, grinning a grin of lopsided pearly whites. Still, when he gathered the strength to turn over onto his side, the sight of Juniper Jones, her freckled nose pressed against the glass, gave him a start.
“Are you awake?” she asked, her voice muffled. “Come on, hurry!”
Squinting against the morning sunlight, Ethan stretched an arm toward the window. When he opened it, Juniper stuck her head through immediately. “Come on, Ethan! Come on, come on, come on!”
“Juniper, what are you doing outside my window at seven o’clock in the morning?”
She rolled her eyes. “I said I’d see you soon, remember? For our first adventure? So would you please hurry up?”
“Some warning would have been nice.” Ethan yawned. “I’m still in my pajamas, so can you cool it for a minute while I go get dressed?”
Juniper blew out an exaggerated sigh. “Fi-ine,” she grumbled, leaning dutifully against the windowsill.
Ethan ruffled through the closet for a T-shirt and a pair of jeans as Juniper began to sing to herself outside. He could still hear her—“Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-NAH!”—when he stepped into the pink-tiled bathroom and closed the door behind him. There, he dressed quickly and splashed water on his face, then stared into the mirror as he smoothed back his hair with one hand.
He was really doing this, it seemed—going on an adventure with Juniper Jones. He was skeptical, even a little suspicious, but at least on the surface she seemed to be friendly. If she was like the others in town, he doubted she could have hidden it so well.
When he figured he had left Juniper waiting long enough, Ethan returned to his room with his pajamas rolled under his arm. He opened the door slowly and nearly fell to the floor in surprise—Juniper Jones had climbed through his window and was now lying on his unmade bed as if she owned it, her nose buried in a recent issue of Adventure Comics.
“There you are!” she cried when he stepped inside, sitting up and tossing the comic onto the bedside table. “I was worried you’d drowned in the toilet.”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “Keep it down, wouldya? My aunt and uncle are still asleep, and I don’t think they’d be too cool with finding a girl in my bed.”
Juniper blinked innocently. “Why not?”
“Because—are you really—never mind.”
“O-kay, Ethan,” Juniper said, getting to her feet. Today, she had traded her usual skirt for a cuffed pair of jeans, and the colorful plaid print of her collared blouse matched the ribbon that was looped through her ponytail. As Ethan dropped his pajamas on the foot of his bed, she held out her hand.
“Come on, city boy,” she teased, tugging him toward the window. “I’m gonna show you just how great this town can be.”
Juniper had parked her baby-blue bike a little ways down a path behind Aunt Cara’s house that Ethan hadn’t even known existed. “There are forest paths all over town,” Juniper explained as they walked. “We’re outdoorsy folk, here in Ellison.”
Her bike was leaned against a tree, a picnic basket swinging from its handlebars. She righted it, then bit her lip and studied Ethan through squinted eyes.
“Well, seeing as you don’t have a bike, you can just stand on my pegs. The ride’s not too far.”
Ethan eyed the metal pegs skeptically. “Whe
re are we going, anyway?”
“The lake,” was all she said, her smile furtive.
Right. His dad had told him stories about growing up on the lake, swimming and fishing and boating in the summer months, and trying unsuccessfully to ice skate after the odd winter snowstorm, but since arriving in Ellison, no one had so much as mentioned it to him. He’d begun to wonder if it had just dried up years ago.
“This path loops around through the trees and ends up by the water,” Juniper was saying, mounting the bike and placing one foot against a pedal. “Come on, Ethan. Hop on.”
Frowning dubiously, Ethan stepped forward and placed one foot, then the other, on the pegs, wrapping his fingers gently around Juniper’s bony shoulders. The bike tilted a little bit.
“All right,” June said, a mischievous smile stretching across her face. “Let’s hightail it.”
She lifted her other foot to its pedal and took off down the road.
Ethan had intended to keep his grip light, but as Juniper took off at a breakneck pace, he found himself holding on for dear life. Hot air blew her hair into his face and brought tears to his eyes. When he looked up, the trees were bent into natural mosaics and he thought that he must not be in Ellison anymore. Juniper laughed that wind-chime laugh, and it brought up a carbonated happiness in his stomach until he was laughing too. The sound spewed out of him hesitantly at first, then grew until his entire body shook.
When Juniper screeched to a halt at the edge of the lake, Ethan tumbled from the bike and rolled, cackling, into the grass. Juniper stood over him, looking childishly pleased.
“Glad you’re having fun,” she said. “But you’ve got to get off the ground. That was only the beginning.”
Ethan climbed to his feet and brushed loose dirt from the seat of his pants, taking in the scene around him. The lake stretched out ahead of them in a bean-like shape, so large he could hardly see the other end. They were on a small beach, but the rest of the lake seemed to be surrounded by trees.
The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones Page 5
