The windows looked out onto the back porch.
“What? No!” Ware cried. “It’s a porch. It doesn’t have any walls!” This was true if by walls you meant places you could lean against or tape up a poster. Places you couldn’t see through. Instead, there were windows all the way around: glass on the living room side, clouded plastic on the other three. “It’s not a room if it doesn’t have walls!”
His mother folded her arms. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it all planned out. There’s plenty of room for your bed and your bureau.”
“No walls,” he moaned.
“It’s not forever, Ware,” his mother said more kindly. “We’ll hang some curtains.”
“Athletes train under difficult conditions,” his father added weakly. “It makes them stronger.”
“We know it’s been a disappointing summer,” his mother said. “But don’t forget, we owe you something nice when it’s over.”
On that, his parents fled the living room together, as if they’d set a secret timer.
Ware stood alone, realizing with belated shock that he could have argued for hours and all the arguments would be on his side, but none would have worked. He’d lost his room, and he hadn’t even gotten a sibling out of the deal.
He pushed open the porch door to see just how bad his life was about to get. Even at nine at night, the summer light lit up every corner of the little space.
He peered outside. Through the hazy plastic, the backyard seemed to be smoking lazily. The shed was a charcoal smudge.
He looked closer. The shed, which they would own in a couple of weeks, had only a single tiny window.
It was an extremely private space. It had a door. He could put a lock on that door.
His parents had promised him something in exchange for his disappointing summer. Well, now he knew what he wanted.
Sixty-One
The next day, Ware lay under the queen palms, filming a pair of hawks flying overhead.
For all of third grade, you couldn’t go out to recess without some kid asking you which superpower you’d choose: fly or be invisible.
“Invisible,” Ware always chose.
“Oh, right,” the kid would reply. “So you could spy on people. Cool.” Which had shocked him every time. No, he’d never want to spy on people. He just thought it would be nice sometimes to be left alone.
This reminded him of the no-privacy porch he was about to move into.
He put the camera down and rolled onto his side. Jolene was patting some new dandelions into place. The walkway was lined with flowers now, gold splashes bright as coins.
“Flight or invisibility?” he called over to her.
Jolene sat back and put down her trowel. This was something he liked about her—she thought about questions for a while before answering. “Flight,” she decided after a minute, then went to back to her transplanting.
Ware got up and sat beside her. “They look like miniature sunflowers.”
Which reminded him of something he’d meant to share with Jolene for a while. Something that would make her laugh, the way she had with Mrs. Stavros.
“That day in the Grotto Bar? You missed it. It was really funny. A woman was sleeping in a booth. Her hair was a perfect circle of yellow, but black in the center. Like a sunflower. That’s what I nicknamed her: Sunflower. Get it?”
Instead of laughing, Jolene grew still again. She laced her fingers across her chest and turned to face the Grotto Bar.
Ware tried again. “Or maybe like a halo. A golden halo that was rotten in the middle.”
Jolene didn’t move.
Ware offered the best detail, his last shot. “I think she was drunk.”
Jolene got up. She balled up her fists and walked out of the lot.
And Ware felt as if he’d finally gotten his wish—he was invisible. It wasn’t so great after all.
Sixty-Two
Every day after Ashley left, Ware and Jolene jumped into the moat. They swam around where it was deep enough and plowed races where it was shallow. Good luck to any mosquito eggs trying to hatch.
Ware always prepared himself to be reborn when he was in the water, in case a thing like that could surprise you. He never let any hopefulness flicker across his expression, of course.
The water was cool, but the midday, midsummer, mid-Florida sun was too much, even for SPF eighty, hypoallergenic, apply every four hours.
Ware sneaked a sheet out of the laundry basket at home, raided the art closet, and made a banner to string up over the water behind the church.
“What’s that in the center?” Jolene asked.
“Coat of arms. It tells people who you are. Mine’s a movie camera.”
“What’s this?” Jolene pointed to the other thing he’d drawn, tiny and in the corner. The thing he’d hoped she wouldn’t notice.
“Lizard,” he admitted. “That’s who I am, too.”
Jolene came back the next day with her own sheet. On it, she drew an actual coat with actual arms. The arms were wielding a trowel and a rake, which she sparkled up with a whole jar of glitter. “That’s who I am.”
Ware pointed to the smaller drawing in the corner.
“Papaya plant. That’s who I am, too,” she answered.
And Ware saw that she was right. She was feathery and brave at the same time.
Big Deal had said there was a lot he didn’t know about Jolene. She said it was never wrong to ask. When a shower popped up after they’d hung the banners, he decided to try Under the Table.
“So . . . how come you live with an aunt?” he asked after the candles were lit.
Jolene’s eyes narrowed. Ware could practically see the arrow tips pointing out, but he didn’t take cover. “I want to know.”
Jolene looked down at her knees. She blew out her bangs. “Okay. But it’s nothing, get it? When I was five, my mother put me in the car. There were a lot of suitcases, so I thought we were going on a trip. But we just went around the corner to my aunt’s apartment. My mother took me up the stairs along with my suitcase. When my aunt opened the door, my mother dropped my hand and they had a big fight. She said, ‘I can’t go to Nashville with this.’ Walter says I looked like I didn’t know what was going on.”
“Walter says?”
“He heard the fight and came up.”
In the soft drumming of the rain, Ware imagined Jolene as a little girl, holding her mother’s hand, all ready for a big trip, and then holding air. It reminded him of the hand-taking episode of their first meeting.
He thought of that hand taking a lot.
Mostly, he wondered how the hand holding had felt to her. He wondered if she ever thought of it at all. He wondered if she’d like someone to hold her hand again.
He edged his right hand out until it almost touched her left. Extra information. I didn’t hate it when you took my hand, he practiced in his head until it didn’t sound pathetic.
“Oh, good,” Jolene said, just as he opened his mouth. “It’s stopped raining.”
Sixty-Three
Ware sat at the back doorway, his camera trained on his feet. As he swirled them in the moat water, they seemed to grow longer and bonier, then to slither like fish, and then to lose their toes entirely.
He put down the camera. Open your eyes. Be a realist, Jolene had said. She always made it sound as if the real world was solid and reliable, the same for everyone. But for him, it seemed more like his feet underwater. The real world could distort itself. Mess around.
Take his report, for example. The hours had flown by when he was working on it. Then, waiting to get it back, they’d crept along. Seeing the A on the cover, he’d thought the classroom walls seemed to glow, and walking home, gravity loosened its grip.
He looked up. Or take clouds. Scientifically, they were formations of water droplets or ice crystals. But wouldn’t three different people looking at them see three different things—a dragon; the promise of rain for papayas; a warning not to take someone’s hand?
He looked down. Or take . . .
Ware saw something odd. His leg, above his left knee, was swollen. Had he hit his thigh and not noticed it?
He looked at his other thigh. It had the same firm swelling above the knee. He flexed his legs and laughed out loud.
Muscles!
He flexed his arms. Muscles there, too.
He lifted his shirt. His internal flotation device had deflated.
Of course. In the last few weeks, he could carry a cinder block in each hand without panting. His mother looked at him strangely each night and asked if he was eating enough. Maybe the lot hadn’t changed him inside yet, but it had changed him outside. And the outside was part of the inside.
It was a start.
Ware lay back onto the hot foundation. Who was he kidding? It wasn’t a start.
These were the best days he could remember. And the happier he grew, the guiltier he felt, because it was his old self having such a good time. In spite of being in the do-over moat every day, his new self hadn’t shown up yet.
It was halfway through August. He needed to try harder.
As soon as Jolene took off that afternoon, he jumped into the water. This time, he would do it right.
“Make me a new person,” he said, out loud this time. “Make me a normal kid!” he shouted. He remembered how stirring choir practice had sounded and added a “Hallelujah!” for good measure. Then he fell backward.
He held himself underwater and counted off a full minute. He stayed down until his chest hurt. He couldn’t tell if this was his new self being born or only his lungs burning from not enough air.
He burst up sputtering and felt the eyes on him before he’d opened his own.
Jolene stood staring from the hedge. She held up her garbage bag. “I forgot this.”
Ware froze. Had she heard?
Maybe she hadn’t heard.
Of course she had heard.
Jolene put down the bag. Her shoulders rose and fell as if she was sighing over a decision she’d made. She walked down to the moat wall, swung her legs over, and dropped in.
Ware could only watch miserably as she waded up right beside him, probably to deliver a scathing lecture up close about how ridiculous he was.
But he was wrong.
“You can’t do it by yourself,” she said. “You need someone else to do the dunking.”
She cupped his neck with one hand and placed the other between his shoulder blades. “Lean back,” she said. “I’ll dunk you. But don’t ask to be normal. You’re already better than that.”
Sixty-Four
The bar was empty. Walter looked up from a book and smiled and said, “Hot one out there,” which made Ware’s heart slow down and his stomach unclench.
But Walter looked worried, too. “Where’s Sprout?”
“Sprout? Oh, right. She’s with Mrs. Stavros.”
Walter seemed relieved. “The usual?”
Ware nodded—he had a usual now—and took a stool.
Walter set a fresh ginger ale in front of him. He garnished it with a slice of orange that looked tiny in his giant hand. “So, how you doing, pal?” he asked, just as Ware had hoped he would.
Ware took a deep drink and then a deep breath. “Doin’ okay, Walter, thanks. But I got this problem.”
Walter slid the ChipNutz down the line. Ware shook a handful into his mouth, but only because they were so delicious. He already knew what his problem was. The Knights’ Code, number four, demanded: Thou shalt always speak the truth. But Ware had not been speaking the truth to his family. Not just about Rec, but about big stuff, like letting them think he was getting normal.
He crunched the ChipNutz thoughtfully. Once again, it helped him clarify his problem.
The clarification was a surprise.
“Walter, I’ve been lying,” he said, “to myself.”
“Hoo, boy,” Walter said. “Tell me about it.”
And Ware did. “Do you ever want to start over, Walter? Like . . . be born again?”
Walter rubbed his neck. “Lord, no. Getting here the one time was hard enough.”
“Me either. But all summer I’ve been telling myself I do. That I want to turn into someone else. But that’s not what I want at all.”
Walter nodded sympathetically as he polished the already polished bar top.
“What I really want is for it to be okay that I’m not someone else.”
Walter put the cloth down and stared at Ware hard. “Jolene tells me you’re her friend. Being a friend seems like a good place to start with being okay with who you are. Are you her friend, Ware?”
Ware nodded. That’s what he was now.
“That’s good. So am I. She comes in here, I can watch over her. But when she’s out there”—he waved toward the door—“I lose her.”
Walter still looked very big, but somehow he also looked small, too. The real world, messing around.
“She’s okay with Mrs. Stavros. She feeds her.”
“I know that. But she’s still pretty alone out there.”
“Because she doesn’t have her parents.”
Walter shook his head. “Leaving a little girl on a doorstep like a bag of trash. If I had found that woman . . .”
“You tried?”
“We both did, her aunt and I.”
Ware stiffened. “Her aunt helped?”
Walter seemed to read his thoughts. “She was different then. When the church was here. Every Sunday, a fresh start. Tried, anyway. She wasn’t always like she is now.”
“Everything was something else before,” Ware said. “Especially people.”
“I guess that’s true. Anyway, Jolene has me and Mrs. Stavros. It’d be good if someone else had her back.”
Ware sat up so fast his stool swiveled. Here, in this unlikeliest of places, he was being called into service.
He raised his chin, thrust out his chest, and answered boldly. “I’ve got her back.” It was all he could do not to add “My liege lord!” and drop to one knee.
Walter nodded. “You look like someone who means what he says.” He leaned forward. “You know, a good watering hole like this brings out people’s stories. I’ve been wondering about you. You got a story, Ware?”
Ware shook his head with regret. “No, I don’t have a story.”
“Ah, well, you will, pal. Believe me.”
Sixty-Five
Ware put his shovel down to say the very difficult thing. “School starts next Wednesday.”
Jolene kicked at some dirt. “For me, too.”
Ashley nodded. “Me three.”
They stood calculating in silence for a moment.
“Eight days,” Ware said.
“Eight days,” both girls agreed.
Jolene looked over at the tallest papayas, clustered up with small, hard fruits.
“I have a plan, Jolene,” Ware said, hoping his voice didn’t shake.
It was a lie, he suddenly saw clearly.
He didn’t have a plan. He had five and a half minutes of film and a Magic Fairness Land fantasy. Even if a thousand kids coughed up their allowances, he wouldn’t have enough to buy this place. Ten thousand kids.
“Uh-huh.” Jolene got up and left for the Greek Market without looking at him. And Ware was grateful for that. He couldn’t bear it if he saw himself reflected right now.
Ashley stayed on that afternoon to pick up any litter that could get stuck in a bird’s digestive tract, and when Jolene returned after only an hour at the market, they all trudged to the garden to get digging on the newest trench again. Knowing that the work might be futile made it seem tragic, but noble too.
In the middle of the digging, Ware’s alarm went off.
“I just heard a warbler,” Ashley said, searching the sky. “That’s weird. They don’t migrate this early.”
“Oh, no. Sorry,” Ware said. “That’s my alarm. I have to go soon.”
Ashley looked disappointed, as if she’d really wanted to see a warbler.
“All this stuff you’re doing. I hope it helps you,” Ware said generously.
“What are you talking about?”
He glanced over at Jolene, then asked Ashley, “This is for a school project, right? Or to help you get into college?”
“Um . . . no?”
“Then why?”
Ashley planted her spade, walked into the star-shaped shade of a queen palm, and settled herself down.
Ware followed and dropped into the next star of shade.
Jolene stayed where she was. But Ware noticed she cocked an ear up the slope.
“I used to live in Canada?” Ashley began. “We rode a long way to school on the bus, all these empty roads at dawn. One day, the bus had to stop because there were geese all over the road. Highway crews were shoveling them off. With actual shovels. Their legs were broken. Some of them were struggling to fly away, but you could see their legs hanging down all bent and wrong.”
Jolene shot a glare up the rise, as though she suspected Ashley had broken all those goose legs herself.
“We found out afterward. It had rained. In the early-morning light, the wet highway looked like a river to the geese. They tried to land on it, and . . .”
Ashley closed her eyes. “I broke my arm once. Bones are sharp.” She stopped and rubbed her right arm, holding it close to her chest. “There must have been two hundred geese, every one with at least one broken bone. All that hurt. How could you measure it?”
Ware didn’t answer. Because how could you?
“I decided it wouldn’t happen again. Not on my watch. That’s why.”
Ware looked down at Jolene. He was tempted to say, See? You were wrong. She just cares about those cranes. But he didn’t. Because he saw that Jolene had already gotten that news and it had about flattened her.
The spade dropped from her hands. She hung her head and Ware saw her take some slow, shaky breaths. Then she walked over to Ashley’s shade star and knelt.
“At the end of the night, Walter empties the ChipNutz bowls,” she said. “I was thinking, maybe I could save those leftovers for the birds here. I was thinking.”
Here in the Real World Page 13
