I gaze at my hands, at my bitten-off fingernails. I don’t think Dad told her about my latest tantrum and my punishment. She hasn’t asked why my computer suddenly appeared in the living room.
I can’t go away all summer, or my friends will forget me. Veg will make the videos again, which means he won’t get to ride and no one will want to watch us.
That’s right. Us. I belong to this group. I’m the invisible one behind the screen.
I saw Veg’s videos. Antonio’s right. He doesn’t hold the camera steady, so the track bounces up and down along with the riders. He doesn’t put any music in the background either. You have to use the right music to make people feel how scary and thrilling it is to fly through the air or crash to the ground and flop like a rag doll.
People really do like the wipeouts best. The one of Antonio falling off the bridge into the creek, which I put with the music of Rage Against the Machine, was still leading in hits the night I crashed and flopped by not convincing Mami to let me stay. I have no idea how “Hanging Chad” is doing. If he asks me, I have nothing to tell him.
Rogue wouldn’t let Mystique and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants snatch her back once she’d joined the X-Men. Maybe my X-Men can come up with a way to keep me from having to leave. But that means I have to tell them the truth first—and hope they’ll be on my side.
CHAPTER 19
AFTER MS. LATIMER DRIVES OFF, I GO TO THE BACKYARD AND pretend I’m playing in the cypress trees next to the bayou where Rogue used to play before her mother left. Now that it’s the middle of May, the oak tree’s leaves have finally burst from their buds, making a canopy of green that nearly blocks out the sun. Like the trees of Cajun country. Like the posters on my bedroom wall.
I hear the afternoon bus’s squealing brakes, and a little later Brandon comes out of his house with his box of wrestlers. “Have you seen my brother?” he asks.
“No. Is his bike there?”
Brandon crosses the street, peers into the garage, then disappears from my view. I guess he’s checking inside the garage, blocked by his family’s van in the driveway.
He skips across the street to the park, where I wait for him. “No bike. But his school stuff is there.”
“He must have gone riding. Ever seen his tricks?”
“Yeah. They’re the best.” Brandon flashes his missing-teeth smile. “He says he’s gonna teach me when I’m bigger.”
Brandon and I play wrestlers in the park. From time to time he glances toward Washington Avenue, and around five thirty, women’s voices from his backyard interrupt our tag team match. I don’t see anyone because the garage is in the way. A green station wagon is parked on the street in front of the house. The quieter voice sounds scratchy like Mrs. Mac’s, but I miss many of the words. The other person’s words I make out.
We have a lease, hear? A lease. Take us to court for this mess—which we’re cleaning up—and we’ll take you to court for the car accident. Say you were drunk and paid us to cover it up …
I squeeze the wrestler tight, as if The Rock could keep me from running across the street to defend Mrs. Mac. She wasn’t drunk that night. She gave me a book and tried to help me.
You have no right to sell the house right out from under us.
Mrs. Mac is selling her house?
Chad rounds the corner on his BMX bike and rides toward us with his front wheel spinning in the air, at the level of his face. He wears no helmet. Antonio gave him an old helmet, but he always leaves it at the track, underneath a jump where several of the kids leave theirs.
His brakes squeal. “Wassup, Bran-my-man?” He holds out his palm for Brandon to slap. When Brandon slaps it, Chad laughs and says, “Harder. Put some muscle into it.”
Brandon winds his arm behind him and slams his little palm against Chad’s.
Chad laughs again. “There you go.” He musses his little brother’s hair. Then he cocks his head toward the voices. “What’s going on?”
Brandon shrugs.
“I’m here. You can go in now,” Chad tells him. But Brandon shakes his head. When Chad speaks again, his voice is low and shaky. “No one messed with you?”
“Nuh-uh,” Brandon mumbles. “But there were too many bags, so—”
Chad cuts him off. “I’ll take care of it.”
He pushes his bike across the street. A skinny woman who must be Mrs. Elliott pops out from behind the garage. “Where the hell have you been?” she screams. “That old lady’s gonna kick us out because of the mess you left!”
Brandon’s lip trembles, and he lowers his eyes to his tag team battle. He makes the Miz action figure pound in Kristal’s head while John Cena jumps on her feet, pushing them deeper into the mud.
I glance back to the scene across the street. Chad’s mother grabs a handful of his T-shirt and drags him inside. I don’t see Mrs. Mac.
“Chad gonna get a whuppin’,” Brandon says softly.
“Because of … the bags?” What bags, I wonder. Could they be moving again? Is Mrs. Mac kicking them out?
“’Cause he’s late. He’s always late.”
“He should get to ride his bike.” It’s the only good thing in his life. He said it himself. He’d even risk a whuppin’ to ride.
Which is more than I’d do for my videos. Or to stay here with my friends this summer.
I hear someone call my name. It’s not Brandon, with his click-clack of wrestlers hitting each other and occasional “Bam” and “Pow” under his breath.
I twist around. Mrs. Mac sits on the concrete platform at the other end of the park. She lifts her head from her hands and says, “Come here, Kiara.”
I tell Brandon to stay where he is, and I go to her. I take a seat on the bench a few feet away, pull my knees to my chest, and wrap my arms around my legs. “What is it, Mrs. Mac?” I ask. I wonder if she’s upset because of the way Mrs. Elliott yelled at her.
Mrs. Mac lets out a long sigh. “I wanted to let you know. I’m moving to Philadelphia next week.” She tells me she’s going to live in what’s called shared housing, but it sounds like a commune of old people. They grow their own food, cook and eat together, don’t drive, and live in a way that sustains the environment. It sounds kind of cool, like someplace I’d want to live if I got old and turned into a bad driver. “Will you tell your dad?” she says.
I check my wristwatch. “He’ll be home in less than an hour.”
“My sister needs her car back. And …” Mrs. Mac clears her throat. “Your dad and I aren’t on the best of terms right now.”
I think of my dismantled computer. “Yeah, he and I aren’t either.” I run my fingernail along the cement platform. “What did you do?”
“Be a buttinsky.” She winks at me.
“What’s a buttinsky?” I repeat the word in my mind because it sounds so funny. Butt-in-skee.
“Someone who meddles in other people’s business. People don’t seem to like it much.”
Suddenly I feel hot all over, my mouth so parched I can’t swallow. I guess Dad didn’t like her telling him that I have the same thing that Temple Grandin does. He still thinks I’m just immature and miss my mother and can’t control my temper.
I don’t want Mrs. Mac to feel like it’s her fault when she tried to help me, so I say, “Dad’s been having problems. Because of Mami leaving.”
“I know.” Mrs. Mac pats my knee. I twist away.
“I told her she should come back.” A loose strand of hair tickles my nose. I try to blow it to the side. “But she and Dad are making me go to Montreal for the summer.”
“You should spend time with your mother.” Mrs. Mac pushes the hair from my face. “Yasmín misses you.”
“No, she doesn’t. She left without me.” My mind returns to my brothers’ conversation. “Maybe she got tired of me acting up all the time.”
“That’s not the reason. Her job was only supposed to be for a few months.”
I cut in. “Which turned into another few months.”
“And you were still in school.”
“I’m not in school now.” But Mami doesn’t know that! Dad didn’t tell her because if he did, she’d really hate me.
I swallow, and it feels like bits of glass in my throat.
“You still have the tutor, don’t you?”
My gaze drops to my sneakers. “For two more weeks. I don’t want to go.”
“Your mother wants to see you. She said when I talked to her—”
“When did you talk to her?” Does Mami know everything, thanks to Mrs. Mac’s being a buttinsky?
“Oh, I don’t remember, dear. Sometime before the accident.” Mrs. Mac reaches out her hand, and this time I scoot back before she can touch me. I don’t like her taking Mami’s side.
“Why were you and Mrs. Elliott arguing?” I ask to change the subject.
“Have you seen my backyard?”
“Not in a while.” I remember the honeysuckle that Mrs. Mac used to grow there, its sweet smell, and how she used to wear its flowers in her hair. Once when my parents went away for a concert tour, she made me a crown of honeysuckle and let me put on one of her dresses, and she and Mr. Mac called me their nature princess. After Mr. Mac died, the bushes turned brown, and so did the rest of their garden. Then she moved out and Chad’s family moved in.
“You should see it.” Mrs. Mac points toward her house. The one she’s leaving forever and maybe even selling. “I asked her to clean it up. That’s when she started screaming at me.”
“It’s not you. She’s mean to everyone.” I press my lips together. Just like I can’t tell Dad, I can’t snitch about the drugs to Mrs. Mac because she’s a buttinsky, and the Elliotts and the people they work for may even track her all the way to Philadelphia, where a bunch of old hippies would be no match for a drug gang.
“I’m going to miss you, dear Kiara.”
I blink a few times. Dirt in my eye. “I’m going to miss you too.”
“Things have been hard for both of us,” Mrs. Mac says. “I wish there was more I could have done.”
“You gave me that book. About the lady like me who has a talent for understanding animals.” I survey the park, the sun setting pink and purple overhead, Brandon playing in the pile of dirt in the opposite corner where the sandbox used to be. A squirrel skitters across a branch of the oak tree and stops above us. I stare at his fluffy white underbelly and his tiny paws touching his nose, as if he’s praying.
Mrs. Mac holds her arms outstretched. When I don’t move, she says, “Can I get a good-bye hug, dear?”
“Sure.” Slowly, I embrace her.
“Sometimes it takes time to find your place,” Mrs. Mac says, not letting me go. “But you’re a special person, and I know you’ll do great things.”
“Special?” Like the special classes they may put me in?
Or the special powers that the X-Men have?
I rest my head on Mrs. Mac’s shoulder, feel her damp crinkly blouse against my eyelids. “Special is good,” she says. “You may not understand it now, but one day you will. And then”—she lowers her arms and kisses the top of my head—“the world will be a better place because of you.”
“Like that lady in the book?” I can’t tell her I haven’t read a word since the day I first met Brandon in the park. The torn dust jacket still marks the place in chapter three where I quit.
“Yes. Like Temple Grandin. But whatever you do, it will be something all your own.”
Now I have to finish the book to find out what she did so I don’t try to do the same thing.
I give Mrs. Mac a weak wave as she walks toward her borrowed car, filled with the last of her boxes. Her words echo: The world will be a better place because of me?
I figure out the equation in my mind.
In one column: Five music videos with over a thousand hits total. Five bike videos with nearly five thousand hits total. I guess if people watched, the videos made them happy.
In the other column: One knocked-out tooth. At least it was a baby tooth. One ruined birthday cake. A lot of pulled-out hair. One bloody nose and sweater. One busted friendship between a buttinsky and a dad who won’t face the truth.
One worn-out and angry mother.
One broken family.
CHAPTER 20
I WAKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING AND CAN’T GET BACK to sleep. I think of Mrs. Mac leaving and what she said about me doing great things and the world being a better place because of me. If so, I need to start putting more things in my good column.
But what?
Around nine, I hear the Elliotts’ van coughing to life and driving away. The sounds of the Elliotts leaving give me an idea. Now that they’re gone, I can sneak into the backyard and clean it up. Then Mrs. Mac’s yard won’t be a mess, and Chad and Brandon won’t get in any more trouble with their mom.
Saturday is Dad’s day off—his one day to sleep in—and I slip downstairs without waking him. Remembering the bottle of muriatic acid I found under the porch steps, I grab a pair of work gloves, a bandanna, and an armful of black garbage bags from the basement.
I squeeze through the hole in the fence and cross the park. As soon as I step onto the curb on the Elliotts’ side of Cherry Street, I hear rustling. And Chad’s and Brandon’s voices.
I press myself against the house, where they can’t see me. I thought the whole family had left together, but I was wrong.
Chad’s voice drifts toward me. “Get under the back stairs where you stuffed the trash bags. Mom and Dad said we better have this cleaned up by the time they get back, or else …”
So their parents left them alone? And they don’t have much time to clean up whatever mess Mrs. Mac saw.
I’ve tied the bandanna around my neck to keep from inhaling any chemical fumes, and now I tug it over my mouth and nose. Several garbage bags slide from my grasp. I leave them at the corner of the house and creep forward.
When I see their yard, I gasp. I wasn’t prepared for so much trash—everywhere are sooty two-liter soda bottles like the ones Antonio caught us with, bottles of Drano, and piles of random garbage.
And most of Mrs. Mac’s garden is dead.
The two boys, their blond hair shiny in the morning sunlight, stand next to the rusted metal stairs to the basement. Brandon gets onto his hands and knees beside the stairs, where there’s a space large enough for a cat to crawl into, but not a boy in kindergarten. He sticks both arms in, then his head, and tries to wriggle his shoulders inside.
He’s going to get stuck, I think.
But he doesn’t. After a while, he inches himself out of the hole, holding a roll of empty bags. Dirt streaks his face and covers his hair and skinny arms.
He didn’t have to do that. I brought bags. But it’s too late.
Chad carries a bag to a toxic pile and starts filling it. “So you didn’t clean up any of this yesterday when Mom told you to?” he asks Brandon.
“I was waiting for you.” No wonder Brandon kept asking me if I knew where his brother had gone. Brandon continues. “I started, but it was too hard. I hid the rest of the bags under the stairs till you got back.”
I remember Brandon telling me why Chad got in trouble with his mother: ’Cause he’s late. He’s always late. And I told Brandon that Chad should be able to ride his bike.
Still, there’s no way Brandon could have cleaned up this whole mess by himself.
And who dumped this garbage in the yard in the first place? Not Chad and Brandon, but parents who didn’t care about them or Mrs. Mac’s yard.
I can’t let Chad and Brandon do this all by themselves and with nothing to protect them from the chemicals. I step into the yard. Chad and Brandon face the other direction and my feet don’t make any noise on the damp ground, so they don’t notice me at first.
Then Brandon calls out, “Hey, look, there’s Kiara!” He runs toward me and wraps his grubby hands around my legs. “You look like a cowboy!”
“You shouldn’t be cleaning up this stuff without glove
s.” I take off my gloves and wave them above Brandon’s head.
“Can’t hear you,” Brandon says, and I realize I didn’t remove the bandanna covering my mouth.
I drop the gloves, untie the blue cloth with its white curlicue pattern, and tie it around Brandon’s neck. “There. Now you’re the cowboy.” I pat his dust-caked hair.
“Yay! I’m a cowboy!” Brandon runs to his brother and pretends to shoot him, both thumbs up and index fingers outstretched. “Bang, bang, you’re dead.”
Bang. You dead. I wait for Gambit to respond with his famous line. Instead, Chad lifts the bag to his shoulder like a skinny blond Santa Claus. “Get out of here, Kiara. This is none of your business,” he says. I wonder what kind of trouble he got into for riding his bike at the BMX track rather than helping Brandon with the nasty garbage.
I inch backward. “I can bring you gloves too, Chad. And help you guys clean up.”
“We don’t need you,” Chad says. “Go.”
Why don’t you care about getting poisoned? Before I leave, I pick my gloves off the ground and slide them over Brandon’s little hands. Then I pull up the bandanna to cover his nose and mouth. His hands and face are dirty but soft and unmarred—not hard like his brother’s. Chad snorts and goes back to picking up trash bare-handed, the black bag dragging across the dirt and weeds.
I started out the morning ready to put more things in my good column. But Chad doesn’t want me here.
Maybe I should only do things that I want to do. Forget about making the world a better place, at least for now. I want to make videos at the bike track and stay in town with all the new friends I’ve made.
On the way back to my house, I decide three more things. One: If Chad can take a huge risk to do the thing he most wants to do, so can I. Two: I don’t have to tell Antonio the truth about why my computer got taken away. I can tell him I spent too much time on the videos and quit doing my homework. That’s a much cooler reason for getting into trouble than what I really did. And three: I don’t have to tell Dad the truth about anything.
Rogue Page 10
