Sons of Liberty

by Adele Griffin

  “You’re busted, Covergirl.” Rock opened the glass storm door, letting Liza slide into the living room on a current of freezing air. “Pretending to smoke air frost. That’s like what second-graders do.”

  “So? I’m practicing for if I win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. For the parties after. Who cares if you saw, peon.” Liza waved to Cliff and Brontie and their mother, who ranged around the kitchen table. “Morning, Mrs. Kindle. Morning, everyone. It’s wicked cold in here.” She moved closer to the front room’s tiny fireplace, crouching and stretching out her hands.

  “I can do them myself,” Brontie stated, pointing at Liza. “Only I’m allowed to do them.” She twisted the orange rag hair of her favorite doll, Wynona, tight in her fingers.

  “Huh?” Liza looked at Cliff, the family interpreter of Brontie’s leapfrogging brain.

  “Sneakers. You tried to tie Wynona’s sneaks the other day, remember? Bront’s still mad, since only she can touch Wynona. You’re kind of a protective mom, aren’tcha, Bront?” Cliff reached over and snipped Brontie’s chin between his fingers. She smiled, a full top-and-bottom-tooth smile that she reserved for Cliff alone. Only Cliff knew how to attach meanings to the associations that orbited like millions of bright and scattered stars inside Brontie’s four-year-old brain.

  “Oh, okay. Sure, Bront. I should have known. Nothing comes between you and Wynona.” Liza’s smile was met with Brontie’s more characteristic stare and silence. “You guys ready?”

  “Boys, lunches.” Their mother pointed to the counter. “And there’s soup in your thermoses, so you’ll need to buy milks at school. You have money?” Her question stood on the breathless edge of panic. In their mother’s world, little problems always raced to the edge of crises.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Even though Rock rarely had spare change, Cliff always socked away cash and usually lent it out.

  “You want me to pick up orange juice on the way home?” Cliff asked, zipping up his jacket. “Since we’re almost out, I noticed.”

  “That would be terrific.” Their mother’s smile opened her face. “Thanks, Cliffy sweetie. I have a list, actually. And here’s my bank card.”

  The list was long, too long. Rock watched, annoyed, as Cliff poked it and the bank card into his jacket pocket.

  “Mom, why don’tcha—” Cliff’s glare halted Rock’s question for only a second; then more loudly he repeated, “Mom, why don’tcha go down to the milk store yourself? You’re home all day.”

  “Stuff it, Rock. I’ll take care of it.” Cliff cuffed Rock hard in the back of the head.

  “No fighting, please. No fighting.” Rock felt the weight of his mother’s troubled eyes on him. “I can. I can get those things, Cliffy, if you want—”

  “I got it, Ma. Don’t worry, okay?”

  “Come on.” Liza stomped out of the house, banging the door behind her.

  Outside, the early morning was soft and dingy as a newspaper photograph. The sky and trees were gray, the lawns and roofs caped in white, and the snow-banked road of Linwood Drive was glossed icy black. Skipping ahead, a flame of lavender ski parka and pink jeans, Liza looked like an early visit from the Easter Bunny. When she got to the end of the drive, she dropped her book bag and flipped a perfect one-handed cartwheel.

  “Pretty good,” Cliff acknowledged.

  “Not bad,” Rock agreed, yet the thought of Liza’s raw hand hitting the freezing sharp teeth of the gravel drive made him shiver in appreciation. Liza Vincent sure was tough stuff. Tougher than most guys.

  Suddenly Liza focused on Rock like she’d just read his mind.

  “Now you go,” she said.

  “I don’t do stupid gym-nas-tics,” Rock said. “Gimme a break.”

  Liza’s greeny-brown eyes, the color of October as she herself had once described them, squinted in the corners as she grinned at him, and she lifted her hands to the back of her head, popping out a pink plastic barrette. She dipped her shaggy dark hair forward and swung her book bag over her shoulder, then back-sidled into Rock, nudging him hard and catching him off balance.

  “Cut it out.” He pushed her away and yawned absently.

  “You’d been wearing your glasses, you’d’ve seen me coming.”

  “Shut up, I don’t wear glasses. Just to read is when I wear them. Sometimes.”

  “You guys seem tired,” Liza stated flatly. “Get much sleep last night?” Her eyes betrayed her curiosity. Liza had a tricky way of tucking deeper meanings inside innocent questions.

  “Us?” Cliff answered for both of them. “Not me. Slept like a log.” Rock could hear Cliff’s unease with Liza’s question. Interrupted nights were a secret that the Kindles guarded safe from daytime.

  “I’m sure not tired,” Rock asserted, but a piece of him wanted to throw some doubt Liza’s way, make her wonder if they were hiding something from her. Rock was always having to swear to Cliff he’d never tell Liza about Interrupted nights, although Rock was never sure why, exactly. In Rock’s mind the Interrupted nights were kind of cool, like a special training program that Dad planned. They took guts, and Liza always appreciated things that took guts.

  “Well, my ma would say you could pack sweaters in the bags under your eyes,” Liza noted, but her gaze had strayed ahead to the snowball fight at the bus stop.

  It was a full-fury combat, with snowballs sling-shotting through the air, hinged on laughing shrieks and shouts from the teams standing on opposite sides of the road. At the sight of Liza and Cliff and Rock, both sides started yelling, “Cliff, Liza, Rock. Come over to our team! Our team, our team!”

  Rock and Liza broke off from Cliff. It was only fair. Cliff was biggest, and threw a perfect overhand pitch. He immediately dropped his book bag and began to lob diplomatically at any moving enemy target. All indifferent determination, that was Cliff.

  Rock didn’t play that way. He chose Mitchell Briggs, a soft-faced kid he’d hated since forever. A kid whose dad, according to Rock’s father, was always palming the Kindles off with the scrawniest cuts at B. B.’s Fishmart, then overcharging for them. Like one time last summer, when Rock had brought home lobsters as a surprise for his parents’ fifteenth wedding anniversary.

  “Call this a lobster?” His father had picked up the live lobster and shoved it under Rock’s nose. “Brian Briggs must think he can sniff out a fool from miles away. A sucker born every minute, but it’s a painful day when that fool turns out to be your own son. Don’t even tell me how much you paid for ’em. I don’t want to think about how Brian Briggs’s sitting there in the back of his store, counting his money and laughing himself into a fit.”

  He’d tossed the lobster in the fireplace. It smacked hard against the bricks before plopping to the hearth. Its rubber-banded claws dragged through the ashes, uselessly treading air currents. Brontie had promptly pitched a fit, yelling that the lobster needed a Band-Aid. Then their mother had started in, trying to get everyone to apologize, trying to make Brontie shut up, nervously working to smooth everything over. But their father had left, the station wagon loosing a spray of gravel from the driveway, as he’d retreated to Maguire’s Pub for dinner. What a mess, that night. Brontie crying in her room. Their mother, bundled up in a bedspread in the front room, staring blankly at the television screen. All because of that cheapskate Mr. Briggs.

  Now Mitchell Briggs would get it. Rock always got a weird kick out of getting back at Briggsie.

  Rock started easy on him, pitching soft-packed powder puffs that fell in a spray over Mitchell’s red ski jacket. He could see Mitchell nervously enjoying the battle at first, the blur of his chubby face breaking open into a jack-o’-lantern grin as he ducked and tossed back. His pudgy throwing arm was worse than Brontie’s. Rock crouched and prepared an iceball, squeezing it dense as coal between his cupped palms. Then he slid his glasses out of his jacket pocket and quickly stuck them on, to get a better aim.

  “Masterflex!” he shouted ominously, just to throw a little extra scare into Briggsie. He wound up an
d pitched in his best imitation of Roger Clemens, watching it whistle across the road. It stung a perfect bull’s-eye against Briggsie’s ear.

  “Aye-yoww!” Briggsie clapped his hands over the mark. His gaze flicked over Rock warily. “Come on, Rock. Come on, man. That hurt.”

  Liza laughed and gave Rock a mittened thumbs-up. “Nice one,” she said.

  “I’m out.” Briggsie backed away from the battle range, moving close to where some of the younger kids were playing a frantic hopping game. Wimp, Rock thought. Wicked wimpy, just like his dad.

  “Hey, check it out.” Liza’s voice was secretive at his side. She raised an eyebrow, one of her coolest tricks, and then her bare fingers uncurled to reveal a glittering chunk of black gravel. Deliberately, like a magician, she poked the piece of gravel into the snowball that was cradled in her other, mittened hand. “For Briggsie.” She grinned, rolling it into Rock’s palm. “The Det-o-nay-tor. Pack it tight, too. Turn it to ice. And keep your glasses on.”

  “Yeah, cool.” Rock flinched as a snowball grazed his shoulder. But the Detonator, now balanced carefully as a muffin in his open hand, gave him a stab of misgiving. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Briggsie squatting close to the safety zone of the little kids and still rubbing his ear. Probably wishing he could just go home and whine to his mother.

  “Do it.” Liza’s voice clipped his conscience. “That kid deserves it. Him and his fancy Sunfish.”

  Trust Liza to keep her grudge against Briggsie’s Sunfish. Rock dusted some loose snow off the ice-ball. She’d been so bent out of shape, Rock remembered, since she’d been nuts to sail all last summer, borrowing other people’s boats, baby-sitting like a maniac to pay for sailing lessons from Indio Whepple, who worked at the Sheffield Yacht Club and was one of the best skippers on the South Shore. And then to see Briggsie, fat and tan as a soft brown apple, bobbing around in the harbor in his shiny new birthday-present Sunfish, but too scared to take it out on the real water. The unfairness had just about killed Liza, it really had.

  Anyhow, making Briggsie cry was all part of the weekday morning. Regular as brushing your teeth.

  “Yo, Briggsie! Beware the Detonay-tor!” Rock steeled his eyes to watch the Detonator as it left his hand, plunging through the air to where it clocked its moony-faced target neat in the forehead. He allowed himself the moment’s satisfaction of watching Briggsie’s face crumple before he took off his glasses and stuffed them into his jacket pocket.

  “Hey—Rock—you scuz!” Briggsie yelled. Then, as he touched his fingers to his head, his mouth erupted in a horror-movie scream that stopped the game completely. Kids dropped their weapons and gaped at Briggsie. Rock squinted to see the bright shock of blood trickling from the torn skin just beneath Briggsie’s hairline.

  “Rock, you totally—” Cliff sprinted to Briggsie in a flash, tugging off his wool scarf, which he then began to wrap like a tourniquet around Briggsie’s forehead.

  “It’s all my fault!” Liza squealed happily, jumping up and down as kids began to lump around Briggsie and Cliff. “I did it, I invented the Detonator.”

  “Bus!” shouted one of the younger kids, pointing down the road.

  “Come on, Cliff.” Rock could barely believe it. “That was Mom who hand-made you that scarf.”

  “Stuff it why don’tcha, Rock.” Cliff lifted his eyes to glower at his brother before returning to his task.

  “He’s gonna need stitches, maybe,” someone advised. “He should go home.”

  “I don’t need to go home,” Briggsie sniffled. “I’m okay.” Rock was almost impressed. Maybe Briggsie wasn’t so much of a wimp after all.

  “Yeah, you don’t need to go home,” Liza agreed. “Sorry about that, Briggsie.”

  Rock stubbed the toe of his boot in a snowbank and said nothing.

  “You’re a dirty player.” A third-grader, Carleen Kirschner, flapped her scarf fringes at Rock as kids began shuffling into the bus line. “In the end, it’s always you who plays dirty.”

  Rock felt the muscles of his face go stiff under her frank gaze, and he turned to look down the road, observing the bus’s labored progress down Carpenter Drive.

  “I invented the Detonator, anyway,” Liza said loudly, to nobody in particular. “So it’s mostly my fault, actually.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be the one ends up in Mr. Faella’s office,” Rock grumbled.

  “Home away from home,” Liza said, and despite Briggsie’s whimpering and Cliff’s scowling and Carleen Kirschner’s needling words, the two of them started cracking up. Rock could sense how their laughter made other kids uneasy, so he laughed even harder, taking a strange comfort in the sound. Everyone just needs to loosen up, he thought, annoyed. It’s not like Briggsie had to be rushed to the hospital.

  The collar of Mr. Faella’s snowflake sweater was beginning to unravel. Rock knew that his wife had knitted it for him a couple years ago, when she was in the hospital getting her chemotherapy treatments—some way-too-personal information Rock had accidentally overheard from the secretaries’ gossip during one of his routine trips to office detention. Now Mrs. Faella was dead and her husband’s snowflake sweater was falling apart. Two crummy and depressing facts Rock wished weren’t permanently stored in his brain.

  He studied the principal’s desk objects. They’d become pretty familiar to him: the sparkling purple geode paperweight, the miniature plastic figurine of Fozzie Bear riding a skateboard, the glass block filled with colorful paperclips.

  Mr. Faella’s office, and it wasn’t even eight thirty.

  “I’m a prince, and I’m your pal,” Mr. Faella said every year to every class, squeaking the word principal onto the blackboard. “If you can’t remember anything all year, at least remember that.” It hadn’t made sense, though, because not only was Mr. Faella neither a prince nor any kid’s pal, but if you attached the two words you ended up with princepal, which wasn’t even the right spelling.

  Rock checked out Liza. Her face was still flushed pink from the outdoors and excitement. Crazy enough, but he knew she loved being in the principal’s office. Liza would rather be anywhere than in room 7A, Mrs. Zukoff’s seventh-grade class, practically flunking every subject. Liza’s life with Mrs. Zukoff was a long, scribbled road of Please see mes.

  On his other side, Cliff cleared his throat and exhaled a breath of anger through his nostrils. Rock squirmed in his chair, gently scraping it nearer to Liza. He hated sitting so close to the wasps’ nest of Cliff’s rage.

  “So, what do you think, Heathcliff?” Mr. Faella finally broke the silence that had fallen on the group immediately after his boring, wordy lecture about manners and decency and the honor codes of Sheffield Junior High.

  “ ’Scuse me?” Cliff straightened himself in his seat.

  “What I mean to say is, what do you think should happen to your brother? I’d asked you to join us because I feel that Rochester’s improvement might be expedited if we opened the doors on his behavioral problem, made it more a family affair. And I thought you might have some perspicacity.”

  “What about me?” Liza piped up. “I have the most perspirwhatever, since it was my idea, that rock. Brig—Mitchell, I mean, he even had to go to the nurse’s office. He might have a scar. And it was all my—”

  “Your idea, I know, Liza.”

  “Eliza Beth.” Liza leaned forward. “It’s Eliza Beth, my real name. Since you’re calling everyone …” She rippled her fingers at Rock and Cliff, but then her voice melted into silence at Mr. Faella’s frown.

  Mr. Faella closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, displacing his glasses. “Eliza Beth,” he repeated.

  “Mr. Faella, look, I gotta go.” Cliff shifted to the edge of the chair, hands gripped over his knees, poised but not quite daring to stand up. “I gotta catch that changeover bus to the high school. They said they’d wait for me specially. I don’t know what Rock’s supposed to do except for apologize. And maybe do some extra stuff, help around the school. I don
’t know.”

  “So first, you think, an apology?”

  “I dunno.”

  Rock felt the odd shift between the two: Mr. Faella’s reach for something, any little thing, that would help him understand Rock, and then the equally firm pull of Cliff’s unwillingness. Tug, tug, tug, went the silence. Mr. Faella finally rolled back his wheely chair and stood up. Even at full height, he was shorter than Liza.

  “Eliza Beth Vincent. Rochester Kindle.” He spoke slowly; their names in his mouth sounded rich, the black oil of their crime tasted in each syllable. “You will formally apologize to Mr. Briggs, and then you will both use your recesses all next week to help out the maintenance department. And yes, I will be calling your parents.”

  Cliff had already bolted out the door by the word “maintenance.” Mr. Faella twisted his wedding ring, staring hard at the empty space that had been Cliff, before leveling his gaze on Rock.

  “Your brother was no trouble at all to us, Rochester, in all his years here at Sheffield Elementary and Junior High. Remarkable soccer player, won the science fair two years in a row. It’s unfortunate that your own career here has been so problematic.” He glanced at the door again, as if half-hoping Cliff would return.

  “I’m a good soccer player, too,” Rock said. “I play on Scudder’s Pizza, in the intermediate league.”

  “You know that’s not my point.” Mr. Faella stretched his arms high over his head before pulling the fingers of both hands slowly through his velvety greased hair. He closed his eyes.

  “Go on, now. Both you kids. Go.”

  Rock and Liza moved aimlessly, meandering down the halls to their classrooms.

  “Hey, Liza, you didn’t have to go with me to Mr. F.’s office. Now you’re in all this stupid trouble, and I wouldn’t’ve said jack about the Deton—”

  “Don’t matter.” Liza turned and put her hand on 7A’s doorknob. “Timmy’s away working down in Mount Vernon till next week. And Ma won’t even remember to tell him, by Monday.” She opened the door. “So I’m home free. Scout’s honor.”

  Relief lapped the edges of Rock’s stomach. If Liza was home free, then it was no big deal.