On the last day of school, he flew from the building like a bird released from its cage.
JUNE 2004
With his new board, Robert’s confidence surged and he got good, fast. He rode wave after wave straight to the shore, coasting in on bursts of salty spray. He stayed in the water until his skin puckered and his nails were tinged blue. He tanned until he was caramel. He wore his donated rash guard daily; on rainy days Deb would snatch it up and wash away the sea smell. Gradually, he inched his ratty towel closer to where the high school kids made camp. The guys were all lean muscle, with pounds and inches over Robert. They guzzled foaming beers between waves, water dripping from their sleek wet suits. The waves seemed to be bigger over here, smashing against the starfish-dotted rocks that hulked close by. The tide sucked more insistently at his feet. Dungeness crabs occasionally scuttled by on their forbidding claws, hiding in the eel grass.
He paddled out and tried to catch a swell. The board slid out from under his feet and careened to the beach. He sputtered through a mouthful of salt water and scrambled after it. His wet hair and limbs flung droplets on a trio of tanning girls, who shrieked and clutched at their towels.
“Sorry!” Robert shouted over his shoulder. He retrieved his board just in time to see the older guys glide in. He kicked the sand and bounded back into the water.
He decided he’d match them wave for wave.
One evening, when the sun had melted to a red sliver, one of the high school guys strolled over, holding a tattered piece of paper. Robert had ridden in his last wave and started toweling off Hulk. Deb had complained that her car stank like wet dog.
“You’re getting pretty good,” the older guy said.
“Thanks,” Robert mumbled. He toed the sand, studied the grains.
“There’s a contest here in a few weeks,” he continued. His blue wet suit gleamed. He looked like a costumed superhero. “Competition won’t be that bad in the kiddie division. Hell, you might be the only entrant.”
The yellow paper was creased into quarters and spattered with salt water. Yannatok’s only surf contest had six divisions and a cash prize for each.
“Keep it.” He shook water from his ear. “I’m entered already.”
Robert folded the flyer back up and trotted to the parking lot to wait for his mother. He shivered in his T-shirt and tugged his towel around his shoulders as the temperature dropped. He handed the flyer to Deb as soon as she pulled up.
“Fifty dollars?” Deb’s brow wrinkled at the entry fee. “I mean, Robert, you probably won’t win any money.”
“I don’t want to win any money,” Robert said. But why did he want to do it, then? If the point wasn’t winning, what was? He couldn’t explain; he just knew that crumpled paper had been his ticket to something bigger than a surf competition, and if his mother wouldn’t sign him up, it’d be just one more place other kids could go that he never would. Kids who’d flown on real planes, taken real vacations. Kids who crossed that bridge and left Yannatok more than once a year. Kids who didn’t have to beg for the money to keep doing something they were good at.
His mother left the flyer folded up in the car’s cup holder. Robert grabbed it on his way into the trailer and marched into the living room. Deb was shaking her foot out of one boot while balancing on the other, a hand pressed to the small of her back.
Robert held up the flyer. “Did you even read it?”
“Enough, Robert.” Deb flopped onto the couch and trained the remote on the TV. “Please. You’re giving me a migraine.”
Robert stood in front of the television. He imagined he could feel the remote’s rays hitting his chest and crashing to the floor, like arrows hitting armor. “Mom, is it really that much money? What if I did win it? Wouldn’t that be an investment?” He was pleased with the maturity of his argument.
“How much does gas cost? How much does food cost? How much does dog food cost?” Deb said pointedly. Then she shooed him away from the TV. “You have no idea. Get away from the television.”
“How much do cigarettes cost?”
Deb flung a pointed finger toward the door. “Get your smart mouth out of this room before I kick you out.”
Robert stomped to the computer and tugged his headset over his ears so roughly that the skinny plastic band snapped. He flung it to the floor and stormed to the kitchen, pulling open drawer after drawer in a fruitless hunt for tape.
“We don’t even have any tape!” he screamed over Law & Order’s credits.
He played the simulator without his headphones and crashed over and over, like invisible walls were keeping even his avatar from escaping. He scrolled down the simulator’s destination menu. New York. Los Angeles. Paris. Rome. Tokyo. Each sounded as unlikely as landing the plane on the moon. As far-fetched as a beach house, a Disney vacation, or a college education.
Before he went to bed, he tucked the flyer into her purse, next to her cigarettes.
* * *
Soon, the days shortened and the water grew icier and Robert stopped going to the beach. He stayed inside and played with his flight simulator instead. He crashed the planes over and over again, flying too fast and rocketing into mountains and trees and the air control tower. He’d watch the dashboard burst into flames and reload the program.
Lyrics from “Ballad of the Lollipop Kid”
Written by Ellis Atkins, music by Gull Trouble, 2010
Verse 1:
Robert Kelley
Was tired of treadin’ water.
Robert Kelley
Was tired of standin’ still.
The keys were there
So he took to the air,
Now he’s waving at us below.
Chorus:
Look up in the sky!
It’s a bird, it’s a plane!
It’s Robert Kelley!
The kid can’t be contained!
Look up in the sky!
It’s a bird, it’s a plane!
It’s Robert Kelley!
The kid must be insane!
Verse 2:
He didn’t care
About latitude and altitude.
He didn’t care
About the cops in hot pursuit.
Robert Kelley has nine lives,
But once he’s caught, he’s screwed.
Bridge: (drumroll, horns clatter and fade)
We represent the Lollipop Kid!
The Lollipop Kid!
The Lollipop Kid!
And in the name of the Lollipop Kiiiiiiiiiiddddd!
Chorus:
Look up in the sky!
It’s a bird, it’s a plane!
It’s Robert Kelley!
The kid can’t be contained!
Look up in the sky!
It’s a bird, it’s a plane!
It’s Robert Kelley!
The kid must be insane!
SEPTEMBER 2005
School. Was. So. Slow.
Eighth grade was a torture that began at 7:15 when the bus belched its way to the trailer park, chugging down the road and slumping in front of his mailbox. Robert climbed aboard and the bus plodded on, past the Sunoco and the kayak rental place, the marina, and Shipley’s Market. Orange globes strung on the high-voltage lines like gaudy Christmas ornaments marked off the miles and warned away low-flying planes.
Classes ended—any class, every class—and Robert careened down the corridor, pinballed around his classmates, lingering in the hall between bells for as long as he could. Each room was a box that he couldn’t wait to spring from. He slapped the lockers, loving the hollow metallic banging. He fist-bumped Joey Kovach. Sometimes they pretended to fight. Robert had taught Joey a great trick. Joey would aim at his face with an open palm, a faux strike across the cheek, and at the last second, Robert would raise his own hand to his face, as if shielding it from Joey’s blow. Their palms would hit, the sound of a slap, and Robert would fall backward, sometimes sprawling on the floor, cupping his jaw. He’d wait for gasps or the chants of �
��Fight! Fight! Fight!” before leaping up and high-fiving Kovach.
Joey never wanted to switch roles and end up on the floor, though.
Then Robert would burst into his next classroom, plop down in his seat, and unleash a tornado of pencil-smeared papers, a crumpled-worksheet tsunami. His stubby pencils and leaky pens rolled across the tiles, and he bounded out from behind his desk to retrieve them.
Study hall was the worst part of Robert’s day. He traipsed back to Mr. Wharton’s homeroom with marching orders to start homework or read a book, which he never had. He couldn’t even go to the library to get one. The librarian had banned him for running through the stacks. Sometimes Wharton tried to make him read the dictionary.
When he got really bored, he tore chunks off his eraser and flung them at his classmates. Then he’d pivot and examine the bulletin board over his shoulder. You got the wrong guy.
He knew that his teachers sent him on “errands” just to get rid of him. Once, Ms. Conrad had given him a note to deliver to the office, a folded slip of notebook paper. He strutted down the hall, flashing his yellow hall pass like he was backstage at a rock show. A few doors away from the social studies classroom, Robert had gingerly opened it, only to find a penciled smiley face and Thanks for five minutes of quiet!
He tapped his pencils, clicked his pens, and jiggled his knee, like an earthquake trembled under only his desk. And that was when he was actually trying to listen.
“Ten!” he called out in English class, his hand fluttering over his head.
“Metaphor!” he yelled in algebra.
The class laughed the first few times.
He scribbled down his homework, and the paper ended up buried in an avalanche of worksheets, cascading out of his locker. He patted down his jeans for a phantom writing utensil and then borrowed one from the teacher and by his next class it had disappeared, vaporized, vanished.
* * *
The school psychologist insisted Robert call him by his first name and gave out half-melted lollipops each time he met with a student. Barry’s office was plastered with posters of gleaming Harleys. He sat behind his desk with a copy of Robert’s most recent grades.
“So.” Barry punctuated the lone syllable with a drumroll on his desk. “Lot of Ds and Fs here.” He sighed. “How do you end up with a D in art?”
Robert knew how. His locker was a graveyard of unfinished art projects: a Sunny Delight–stained charcoal sketch of Hulk he’d tried to finish at lunch, a watercolor of the beach he’d smudged and smeared, the hardened lump of a handleless clay pot. Whatever Robert touched seemed to smudge or tear or crack.
He shrugged. Barry was sitting directly under one of his motorcycle posters, so that the handlebars sprouted from his head.
“Would a tutor help?” Barry asked. “We have a free tutoring program.”
“For art?”
“For everything.”
“Barry, I don’t want a tutor,” Robert said.
“Anything going on at home?”
Robert shook his head.
“Well, the situation is that if you don’t pull these up, you’re going to end up in summer school at best, repeating eighth grade at worst. You don’t want that, right?” Barry wrote something down. “I’m going to go ahead and give your mom a call, and I’m thinking we’ll get her okay to have you in for some testing. See if we can get a handle on just what’s going on here.”
His schoolwork was so easy that Robert couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He nodded. Summer school? They might as well lock him in jail. He had to ace whatever tests Barry was going to give him. Robert pointed at the gleaming motorcycle. “Do you have one of those?”
Barry shook his head.
He met with Barry a week later for the testing. It was supposed to take two hours, but Robert was finished in forty-five minutes. Barry kept telling him to slow down, focus, concentrate, but Robert was sure he crushed it. If he could only keep it together for the rest of the year, he’d dodge summer school, no problem.
JANUARY 2006
His pediatrician, a middle-aged guy Robert had seen since he was a baby, prescribed him extended-release Adderall after Robert’s flaming disaster of a first-quarter report card and Barry’s dismal findings. While Robert’s IQ was well above average—“in the gifted range,” Barry had reported—his reading comprehension level was equivalent to a fourth grader’s. His math computation skills were two years below grade level.
“Gaps,” Barry had told Robert, “that seem to represent a lack of attention, not a lack of ability.”
These results, coupled with his teachers’ evaluations, compiling Robert’s every fidget, every blown assignment, every detention, had Dr. Rishni reaching for the prescription pad within minutes.
They were supposed to schedule a follow-up appointment with a child psychiatrist, who could monitor Robert’s symptoms and medication dosage. The business card disappeared in the depths of Deb’s purse.
The pills were round and baby blue, and they slid easily down his throat. He gulped them down without water, though his mother covered her eyes and told him not to. His knees ceased their hyperactive jig. He could sit still, could read for fifteen minutes at a time. He remembered more of what people said. He passed eighth grade, and at home his digital aviation abilities improved dramatically. His takeoffs smoothed out and his landings steadied, and he thought about the fighter pilots who’d jetted over Iraq. With his newfound concentration, could Robert make it in the air force?
His surfboard stayed in Deb’s car.
First Deb started taking away the bottle on the weekends, once ninth grade started and Robert returned to school as pale as the digital clouds he’d spent all summer navigating through. “You’re a kid. It’s not natural for you to be on pills all the time.” She tapped the bottle against her palm. “Go outside, for Christ’s sake.”
So he would ricochet around on the weekends, chasing Hulk, not doing his chores or his homework, and his mother would yell at him like always.
When Christmas break rolled around, Deb decided he wouldn’t take them that whole week either. He ate a dozen candy canes in one sitting, crunching them between his teeth while his mother cringed. He woke up with tight hamstrings, and eventually realized the soreness was the result of his knees’ constant tremor.
For his fourteenth Christmas, Robert’s mother bought him a computer joystick and a startlingly realistic flight simulator with graphics much sharper than those in the free program he’d downloaded; the scenarios took torque and slipstream into account. The controls mirrored a commercial jet’s. The program was his only gift, but it was a good one. For his mom, Robert had smoothed out his beach watercolor from art class, finished it up with some muddled but usable Crayola paints, puddled and forgotten in a drawer, and signed his name with a flourish.
Robert played his new simulator standing up, letting the room grow dark around him as day faded to night. He soared past the pyramids, looped around the Leaning Tower of Pisa, zoomed over Niagara Falls.
“You want to go to the stables?” Deb asked once. Her thick, high boots clomped across the trailer. In three days he’d return to school, for the long slog until spring break. “There’s a horse you can try out.”
Robert barely looked up. He pulled up on the throttle and the digital runway narrowed. “Nah.”
She never asked again.
The vacation ended and he still didn’t resume taking the Adderall. His mother rumpled his hair and kissed the top of his head. “That’s not you on that medicine. I want my son.”
Really, Robert hadn’t minded the way the pills made him feel. He didn’t feel woozy or slow, like when he had to take Benadryl. Before long, he was a walking crash site again, spreading a debris field of lost assignments, tattered textbooks, and unsigned detention slips.
“I think Robert’s off his medication,” said Mira Wohl, a red-haired girl in his homeroom, one day in January. He’d been at the front of the room while the teacher was in the hall
talking to the principal, showing off his break-dancing skills. He had, in fact, been trying to impress Mira, and knowing next to nothing about girls, assumed her eye roll meant she was properly awed.
“Didn’t work on me,” he said, and winked.
Interview with Mira Wohl, Willamette University cafeteria, October 2, 2010
From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story
“I mean, honestly, we all thought he was annoying. He was the kid behind you bouncing his feet on your seat, dropping his pencil six million times, trying to look off your paper. Asking you for the homework every homeroom. Teachers would assign partners for labs or projects, and if you got him, you knew you were stuck doing all the work. And you felt bad for him, too, because sometimes he would try, but you knew if you turned in what he did you’d get a shit grade, so you just did it yourself.
“But, seriously, he had to be some kind of secret genius. Teaching himself to fly a plane. It’s not like that’s easy. And lots of geniuses get shit grades. Look at Einstein.
“And now everybody says he had to have an accomplice, a friend, who was feeding him, helping him cover his tracks, putting him up at night. Somebody who taught him to fly in the first place, took him up in their own plane. But everyone knows he barely had any friends. And forget about a girlfriend! That’s hilarious! He was just Clyde, no Bonnie.
“I mean, we had no idea he was gonna turn around and do what he did. I don’t think he did either.”
JULY 2009
Deb decided to get her real estate license; she was hoping to supplement her dispatcher salary by getting in on vacation home sales.
“Laura Roth’s a Realtor,” she said, referring to one of her horse pals. “Look at all she’s got.”
Robert had been to the Roths’ a few years ago, for Amber Roth’s birthday party. Deb, Laura, and a few other moms had hung out in the kitchen, picking at a fruit tray and listening to the kids splashing around in the pool. Robert had fun, even though he knew he’d only been invited because his mom and Amber’s were friends. And he thought it was kind of weird that he could see the ocean from the cement around the pool. The chlorine burned his eyes, and he’d wondered why they didn’t just hop into the salty waves.
Flight Risk Page 4
