Gleaming antique cars occupied the main thoroughfare, and a western trio of middle-aged white dudes strummed guitars in the gazebo. Joey’s stride was long and purposeful.
“What’s our story?” I asked, hurrying to catch up. “Forty percent off electronics?”
Joey gestured toward a long vintage vehicle with formidable tail fins. “That’s a 1959 Cadillac limo.” Then he pointed to a short, pasty teenage guy with noticeable acne, wearing a backward ball cap. “That’s Elijah Krueger. He’s a junior at East Hannesburg.”
I didn’t recognize the face, but we must’ve passed in the halls.
“He and his grandfather restored the car,” Joey went on. “We’re talking hundreds of hours of cleaning, rebuilding, installing, painting, polishing. A fair chunk of retirement savings. You ask the questions. I’ll shoot the footage.”
Questions. “Give me a minute, okay?” I situated myself on a cobalt-blue metal bench, its design mimicking butterfly wings. Then I retrieved a notepad and pen from my purse.
I wrote: who, what, when, where, how, and why. The whole thing felt much more real than when I’d talked to the janitor at school. I started writing down a question. Crossed it out.
Joey sat next to me, his backpack at his feet. The tripod to one side. The side of his thigh pressed against the side of my thigh. “Watch.”
A trim, bearded man in his sixties gave Elijah an icecream cone.
Joey said, “That’s the grandfather, George.”
A young couple with a bright-red balloon tied to their stroller stopped for a closer look at the fancy silver car, and George began pointing out its features.
“Elijah’s grandparents first met in San Diego,” Joey continued. “His grandmother died last year, two days before Christmas. Heart attack.”
How horrible. Grieving would’ve been hard enough without “Joy to the World” blasting through the air and passersby wishing the family a happy holiday.
I resolved to move up my weekly calls to my own grandmas and grandpas to that very night. I’d be sure to e-mail them new photos of me and Hughie, too.
“Over winter break, Elijah’s hoping to take the limo and road-trip with his granddad to San Diego to scatter his grandmother’s ashes,” Joey said. “His parents aren’t keen on him and George splitting the driving.”
Newly licensed driver. California highways. My parents would’ve been skittish, too.
“They’ve already given me start-to-finish pics of the whole restoration process — I can edit those in later. But we still need conversational video of Elijah and George with the car.”
Joey gently elbowed me. “I bet they’ll open up more if you’re the one asking the questions.”
Flattering, but the story was practically finished. I saw zero reason why Joey couldn’t have handled the rest by himself. Had he invited me as an excuse to spend time together? Or . . . ?
“You’re training me, aren’t you?”
“And Emily and Alexis.” Joey stood, hoisting the tripod. “Karishma will handle Daniel and Nick.”
I gaped at him. “Karishma’s the big-boss editor. You’re not in charge of —”
“I’m the other person on staff who knows what he’s doing. She’s counting on me, and I don’t believe in half-assed work. When we’re teaming up, I can’t waste energy babysitting you. When you’re on your own, I can’t have you doing a shitty job for my school newspaper.”
His school newspaper?
The longing yet peppy lyrics of “If I Only Had a Heart” led me to Hughie. His skinny elbows resting on his skinny knees, he’d retreated to the wood-shingle roof on the gentle slope between our bedroom windows. Night insects — crickets, katydids?— droned backup vocals.
I leaned out. “You can sing!” Given that he’d spent his whole life mouthing the “Happy Birthday” song and the words over his hymnals, who knew?
“You’re biased.” My brother was stargazing through binoculars. “Yvhiketv cvyace tos.”
“Of course I’m biased.” Not that Hughie would be signing with a major recording label any time soon, but he could caress the notes, evoke the feels. “Does this mean . . . ?”
“Yes!” Hughie exclaimed. “We’re finally having auditions tomorrow after school.” It was early September, a week after they’d originally been scheduled. “Mrs. Q refused to back down. She says she’s the faculty director, and she’s in charge of the musical — period.”
I was thrilled to hear that was settled. The show would go on.
I joined him on the roof, mindful of my footing. “How’s life in the theater?”
“Everyone’s so funny.” Hughie lowered the binoculars. “Huge personalities.”
Before the showbiz bug bit, my brother had been all outer space, all the time. We used to visit NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston twice a year, and there’s an eight-by-ten signed glossy of Chickasaw astronaut John B. Herrington hanging in Hughie’s bedroom.
He added, “You should hear this one senior, though. Garrett — Garrett Ferguson. He’s all ‘You’re a freshman. You’re supposed to be low man on the totem pole.’ He didn’t say it mean, but he meant what he said.”
Sounded mean to me. “What set him off?”
“The old director — before Mrs. Q — had talked about putting on Grease this fall but then he decided to retire. Garrett had figured on landing the lead role of Danny Zuko. Plus he says the best parts in The Wizard of Oz are for girls.”
We lived near the top of the hill to the south side of the curve of our fourteen-house cul-de-sac. I gazed across Emerald Hills subdivision at the arched streetlights illuminating new-construction homes in one of four floor plans, each painted in one of four neutral color combinations. There’s no such thing as neutral when it comes to people.
“This Garrett guy,” I began, “I take it he’s your competition for the Tin Man?”
Hughie nodded, adding, “Wait until Chelsea lands Dorothy. And she will. You should check out her videos online.”
As my brother gushed, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket to do as he’d suggested. Hughie hadn’t been exaggerating. Chelsea was a pretty Black girl with a powerhouse voice, a professional singing voice. I hadn’t known her name, but I recognized her from school.
“You really like her,” I observed. “I can tell by the way you’ve been going on.”
Hughie got quiet. I should’ve said “admire.” She’s a senior. He’s a freshman. He didn’t have a shot, but crushes don’t care about reality. Still, I hadn’t meant to embarrass him.
“Like you and Joey,” Hughie finally replied. “You talk about him all the time.”
“I do not,” I insisted. At my brother’s teasing smile, I added, “It’s only that Joey thinks he knows everything, and he doesn’t listen to anybody except maybe Karishma. And if he’s going to spend all semester lording last year’s state awards over the rest of us, I —”
Hughie handed me his binoculars. Hard to see much, what with the light pollution, but my brother’s voice lit up the stars. “You do realize that you’ve just proven my point?”
At 11:12 p.m., I texted Shelby from my bedroom and her face popped up on my screen.
“Do you talk about Joey Kairouz all the time?” She laughed. “No, you just talk about how he’s not afraid to share his feelings and likes old farts and veterans and social outcasts and sappy love stories and drives a crappy Jeep, and, oh yeah, you spent an entire evening at the pub trying to guess his middle name — I’m still going with Almanzo.”
Joey and I have something else in common, too. How rare we are at our school, in this suburb, at least when it comes to heritage. So far as I knew, Hughie and I were the only Native students. Joey’s Lebanese on his dad’s side. He might well be the only Arab American.
We didn’t fit the majority profile. We didn’t fit the minority profile.
The school district counted us as Other.
I didn’t want to get into all that with Shelby, though. “I said ‘elders,�
� not ‘old farts.’ I did not call his Jeep crappy. Aren’t we social outcasts? Death before Almanzo, and . . . when I was trying to pitch my bullying story, I heard him saying ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ ”
Shelby was cracking up. “Blah, blah, blah. Lou, he’s posturing. You can handle him on the Hive. You can handle him off the Hive. God knows you’ve dated worse.”
She was right. Hughie was right. “I do talk about Joey all the time.”
I slid back beneath my puffy sky-blue comforter. “I like him.”
A freshly microwaved pillow radiated heat into my neck and shoulders as my feet soaked in a copper basin of warm, sea-salted water and Legally Blonde played on the overhead screens. It was September 10, aka my eighteenth birthday, and Shelby was treating us with the help of a 60-percent-off Internet coupon. “This place is hilarious,” I said. “Thank you.”
Likewise positioned, she was holding up bottles of bright turquoise and shimmery lavender polish, trying to decide. “To think you doubted me.”
I’d never thought of myself as a nail-salon person, but my best friend might’ve managed to convert me. The pedicurists raised our feet in turn from the basins and dried them with fluffy white towels. I’d never felt so decadent.
“Let me get this straight,” Shelby began. “You gave your family a present for your birthday?” She adjusted her neck pillow. “I don’t think you understand how the system works.”
Little did she know, I’d slipped a eucalyptus bath bomb for Shelby to the checkout clerk.
“You can’t argue with the birthday girl.” I showed her pics on my phone of the newest members of my family. “They’re dachshunds. Bilbo and Frodo.”
“Weiner dogs!” Shelby exclaimed. We chatted about the puppies and nibbled blue M&M’s as the pedicurists trimmed, buffed, painted, and told us about their own pets.
While our toenails were drying (hers Amethyst Mist, mine Desert Taupe), Shelby asked, “Have you been mad at me?”
At my blank expression, she added, “The only time I see you is at lunch in the cafeteria or at the Grub Pub while I’m waitressing and you’re studying.”
She also gave me rides to school and we texted, but . . . “You’re always working.”
“I always need money,” Shelby replied. It was a circular argument. With her jam-packed schedule, it was up to me to make time when she was available.
“Can you think of, say, two or three other seniors who work?” I asked. “Or not just seniors. Anybody at our school.” Students with jobs never got featured in the Hive like the arts, sports, academic, or Stu-Co types.
Shelby gingerly slipped on her flip-flops. “Sure, but why?”
“Story idea,” I said. “Shelby Keller, you’re newsworthy.”
Mr. McCloud is white, balding, about ten years from retirement, and one of those solid, heavyset guys who became a teacher so he could make a living as a coach, by which I mean, that’s what he told us on the first day of class. (He heads up Cross-Country in the fall, Track and Field in the spring.) But he also has a passion for politics.
There had been no moment of silence that morning like at my school in Texas (in fact, we’d had a pep rally), but Mr. McCloud did lecture on 9/11. September 11, 2001.
“Imagine being a passenger on Flight 93,” Mr. McCloud said. “Al Qaeda terrorists have hijacked and crashed commercial jets — two into the Twin Towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Would you fight back? Even if it meant crashing into that field in western Pennsylvania?”
The teacher wrote NEARLY 3,000 DEAD on the chalkboard and circled it.
“What are the values that define our country?”
His gaze weighed the room. “What does the word patriot mean to you?”
I thought of Daddy, how he’d served in the army in Iraq. After he was discharged, a dental-school classmate invited him to join her practice in nearby Olathe. He was still adjusting to civilian life, family life. I remembered Joey saying that his father had served in the air force. Of the people in our class, were we the only two from military families?
“As a generation, you’re about to inherit a nation, a world, plagued by terrorism and bigotry,” Mr. McCloud said. “Here in the States, we’ve seen a rise in Islamophobia, loathsome political discourse, and hate crimes directed at Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and immigrants, especially refugees. What are you going to do about it?”
“Easy,” replied Brandon Delaney, the vice principal’s son. “We nuke the hell out of the entire Middle East. Turn it into a parking lot.” He held out his hands as if to say ta-da. “Kill every last one of those fuc — terrorists. Problem solved.”
“While also killing millions of innocent people?” Karishma asked. She’s one of the few brown students at school. I appreciated her speaking up. I wondered what her religion was.
“Better them than us.” Brandon’s tone suggested that he meant better you than us.
Suddenly hyperaware of his Lebanese heritage, I glanced at Joey. Two rows to my right, one seat up. He’d clenched his jaw and fisted his hands on his desk.
I couldn’t help thinking of how I’d felt on those few occasions when Native history came up in a class. Or didn’t when it should’ve.
Frustrated, nauseated. Torn between wanting to talk back and wanting to disappear.
Mr. McCloud moved to stand directly in front of Brandon. “Have you put any thought into white Christian-American terrorism?”
“No,” Brandon replied. “Because that’s not a thing. You hear the word terrorism and what always comes next is a Muslim name.” Other kids were nodding.
“The Klan’s not a thing?” Joey countered. It was the first time he’d ever spoken in class. “The KKK is a white Christian-American terrorist group.”
He’d taken his time enunciating those last five words.
“And there’s what happened in Oklahoma City,” I put in. April 19, 1995. The Murrah Federal Building, a truck bomb: 168 lives lost, including 19 kids.
I’d visited the memorial with my family the previous summer.
“What about Oklahoma City?” Brandon wanted to know.
Mr. McCloud rested his knuckles on Brandon’s desktop. “Show me your phone.”
“I wasn’t using it,” he protested.
“Didn’t ask if you were,” the teacher replied.
With a sigh, Brandon fished the phone out of his jeans pocket. “Now what?”
“Do a search,” Mr. McCloud said. “Read up on the Oklahoma City bombers. Count their Kansas ties, and then decide whether you deserve to get nuked for their act of terrorism.”
Callbacks for the musical were posted outside the auditorium doors that day after school. At my locker, I had my phone in my hand when Hughie’s text came in.
Four pizza emojis! (His personal choice for expressing joy.)
He’d be reading again for the role of the Tin Man.
Third quarter, the Harvesters led the Honeybees 14 – 12. Instead of celebrating with the Theater crowd, Hughie had joined me in soaking up the Friday night lights on the old Hannesburg side of the stadium.
East Hannesburg and old Hannesburg were separate, neighboring towns with schools in the same district. East Hannesburg was new, pricier, generic. Old Hannesburg was heavy on historical charm. Its official name was simply “Hannesburg,” but people tended to refer to it as “old Hannesburg” or “old town.” Or at least my fellow students at EHHS did.
One of Hughie’s Indian Camp buddies, a Leech Lake Band Ojibwe named Dmitri Headbird, was the Harvesters’ placekicker.
“I still can’t believe it.” Hughie couldn’t stop talking about the musical. “Can y’all believe it? I might actually get a part.”
My phone pinged. Joey. He’d texted Did you defect?
Filming from the sidelines, he must’ve caught sight of me in the bleachers.
On the time-out, Joey directed his lens toward East Hannesburg Varsity Cheer.
From the other side of the field, I couldn’t hear the H
oneybees squad, but I recognized their moves from pep rallies: “S-T!” Clap, clap! “I-N-G!” Clap, clap, clap! “Sting! The! Harvesters!” Clap!
Back on the field, the quarterback’s arm arched. I watched Joey shoot the release and swivel to capture the ball’s flight. He zeroed in on the receiver’s home jersey — touchdown!
The old-town fans, tasting victory, roared to their feet.
Meanwhile, Hughie and Queenie Washington — she’s a Black Seminole — had been discussing his audition. She shared that she’d been named after Queen Latifah, and they’d bonded over the magnificence of Queen Latifah as the Wizard in The Wiz Live!
I waved at my cousin, Cassidy Rain Berghoff (technically, she’s my second cousin), and Dmitri’s twin, Marie, who were climbing the stairs with soft drinks, a bag of popcorn, and what in the Midwest passes for nachos.
I accepted a Diet Coke from Rain and held out my phone to her. “What. Should. I. Say?”
My cousin handed Queenie the nachos and bent to read.
Rain said, “Invite him to meet up with us for pizza.”
On the field below, Dmitri positioned himself to kick for the extra point.
Joey didn’t meet up with us for pizza. He didn’t even bother to reply.
That night, Hughie stayed at the Headbirds’ trailer with Dmitri and, across town, I drifted off in my sleeping bag on Rain’s bedroom floor.
A tired creak of the old farm-style house awakened me not long after four a.m.
Marie was snoring softly. Queenie had curled on her side, and my cousin had left the room with her black Labrador retriever.
I grabbed my phone, which had been recharging on Rain’s hope chest, and checked messages. In the wee hours, Joey had finally texted Busy editing b-roll.
Workaholic. I wiggled out of the padded bag and made my way down the ivy-stenciled hallway, past the Trail of Tears painting and the nursery.
Rain’s mama died eight years ago, and her daddy is stationed in Guam. So she lives with her big brother, Fynn; his new wife, Natalie; and their toddler, Aiyana. (It doesn’t hurt that her grampa and step-gramma Berghoff live just around the block.)
Hearts Unbroken Page 5
