“A what?” The raven brushes his wing on the ground, flinging brown dirt onto my shoe.
“A name. Something people call you.”
The raven twists his neck and looks up at me. “You mean like Don’t-Poop-on-That or Get-Away-from-My-Cat?”
“Exactly.” I think for a moment. I’ve never had a pet. Mom said they’d be too difficult to have to move all the time. This obnoxious raven is probably the closest I’ll ever get. “How about Cuervito?”
“Did you just insult me?”
“No. It’s Spanish for ‘little raven.’ How about I call you that?”
“What about Mr. Cuervito? Or Professor Cuervito?” The raven starts flapping his wings. “Wait … Evil Doctor Cuervito!”
“Yeah, I’m just gonna stick with Cuervito.”
The raven cranes his head at me. “Fine. And I’ll call you Don’t-Poop-on-Him.”
“Or Nestor.”
“Whatever.” Cuervito flaps his wings and soars off the ground. “Be careful in the woods. You might not want to sketch everything.”
I raise my eyebrow as Cuervito takes off over the trees and out of sight.
The woods behind Abuela’s house are filled with twisty live oak trees and sharp cacti. I look down to make sure I don’t impale my shin with spines, but I almost give myself a concussion from the winding tree branches. Good thing Abuela added plenty of sugar to my café con leche this morning.
The path curves up and down small hills, around cedar trees, and through mesquite bushes. It’s less hilly than where we lived in Colorado, but hillier than Kentucky. There are fewer trees than in Washington, which was full of tall pines, but more than in the rocky fields at Fort Hood. As I meander down a hill, my worn sneakers slide on the dirt, sending small rocks skittering down the path. I notice movement out of the corner of my eye.
A white-tailed deer stares at me as she munches some grass, her mouth chewing in circles as green sprouts hang from her lips. “Having a good breakfast?” I try to keep my voice soft so she knows I’m not a threat.
The deer pauses her meal and says, “Not particularly. I believe a squirrel peed on this patch.”
I chuckle. “Dude, that’s gross.”
The deer’s mouth falls open, and bits of half-chewed grass fall from her teeth.
I’m used to this reaction the first time an animal finds out I can understand it.
“Would you mind if I sketched you?” I ask, sliding my backpack off my shoulder and finding a crook between two tree roots to sit down. I’m not in a hurry to get to school. “You can keep eating your breakfast.”
“That would be all right,” the deer responds, bending her head down to rip another clump of grass from the dirt.
A small brown rabbit hops from behind the tree and nudges my arm with his twitching nose. “If I stay by you, will you keep it from getting me? You’ll keep me safe, right?”
“Um, sure, I guess,” I say, flipping through my sketchbook as the rabbit’s trembling body presses against my leg.
“I like that one,” the rabbit says, nodding at my drawing. His cotton-ball tail won’t stop shaking.
I look at the sketch on the page of a mountain goat perched high on a rock. His head cranes toward the sky as his mouth gapes open. “That’s from Colorado. Mom and Dad took me up Pikes Peak when my dad came back from Iraq. Did you know some mountain goats are scared of heights? This one screamed the whole time I sketched him.”
The rabbit thumps his foot on the ground.
I turn to a clean page, and a paper drops out of my sketchbook. I open it and smile. First-Day Challenge is written at the top in capital letters, with more exclamation points than humanly possible. Mom does this for all my first days of school. I scan the page and see Introduce yourself to your teachers: 20 points and Open your locker in less than a minute: 50 points. Mom says that if I treat my first days like a video game, they’ll be easier.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that you can’t respawn in real life if you die from eating mystery meat sauce in the cafeteria: thirty points.
I brush my hand over the page in my sketchbook and start drawing the general shape of the deer’s body, not bothering to create careful lines.
“Do you want me to give you more muscles? How about a huge set of wings?” I ask the deer, pausing my sketching. “I can pretty much draw you any way you want.”
The deer looks at me and blinks her large brown eyes. “I do believe I’m perfect just the way I am.”
“Wow, I think her ego is as big as her antlers,” the rabbit says, scratching behind his long ears.
“She doesn’t have antlers.”
“Oh, right.” The rabbit looks up at me. “If you concentrate on that drawing any harder, you’re going to bite through your lip.”
I smile, certain there’s a tooth mark on my lower lip. “Sorry. Just thinking about having to start school all over again. Trying to decide who I want to be this time.”
“Class clown?” the rabbit offers.
I shake my head. “Tried it. Gets exhausting after a while.”
“You seem halfway to slacker,” the deer says, raising her head. “How about that? You could forget your homework and sleep in all your classes.”
“Probably not.” I chuckle. “One phone call home to my mom and that would be over. Fast.”
I run through my options. When I was going to school near Fort Lewis in Washington, I decided I’d be an athlete. I played on the soccer team and wore a Seattle Seahawks hoodie to school every day. By the time people figured out I was terrible at soccer and had never watched a single football game at CenturyLink Field, Mom and I were already on our way to Fort Campbell. In Kentucky, I pretended I could speak only German. That didn’t last long, since I know only five words. Luckily, neither did our posting there.
“I suppose I could just be myself,” I tell the rabbit and the deer. “That would be original.”
“Dead man walking!” I hear a screech above and see Cuervito has returned to pester me.
“I thought you were too scared to fly through the woods?” I taunt him.
“I was just checking on you. Can’t let you miss your first day of school, can I?”
I sigh. “I’ve had plenty of first days of school. This is no big deal.”
“Oh, really?” Cuervito lands on my foot, which is stretched out on the ground. The rabbit snuggles behind my arm.
I flip my sketchbook shut. “The Army doesn’t exactly wait to move you until the school year is over. So we’ve moved a couple of times in the middle of the year. That means I’ve had nine first days of school. Today is number ten.”
“I don’t believe you.” Cuervito pecks at my shoelace.
I take a deep breath and hold out my hands. “I went to kindergarten and first grade at Fort Benning, Georgia,” I say, holding up two fingers. “Next was part of second grade at Fort Carson, Colorado.”
“That’s three first days,” the raven says.
“I’m not done. The rest of second grade and third grade was at Fort Lewis, Washington. Then fourth grade and part of fifth grade was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”
“Hoo-eee, we’re at seven first days.”
“I didn’t know ravens could count,” the deer taunts.
“The last month of fifth grade and the first two months of sixth grade were at Fort Hood, here in Texas.”
“Nine! We’ve got nine!”
I hold up ten fingers. “And now my first day in New Haven.”
“You’re making me tired, kid,” the deer says.
I nod, sliding my sketchbook into my backpack and tucking Dad’s compass into my pocket. I brush the dirt off the back of my jeans, and something bright pink next to a tree root catches my eye. There are two plastic tags with the numbers three and eight on them. I’m not sure what they are, but I shove them into my pocket, a souvenir from my first day in the woods.
The rabbit hops next to me as I walk down the path. “First day. That’s rough. Just make sur
e your shoes are tied and your zipper is zipped.”
I wave my hand, brushing off the rabbit’s comment, but quickly drop my eyes to check my jeans.
I’m good.
“No, no,” Cuervito cries overhead, sailing above us. “He’s gotta find the biggest, ugliest kid in school.”
“And?” the deer asks, following me.
“And punch him in the nose!” Cuervito spins and lands on the deer’s back. She kicks her hind legs, launching the raven back into the air.
“Don’t listen to him,” the deer says. “Just sit in the front row in every single class and raise your hand every time the teacher asks a question. Even if you have to lift yourself out of your seat to wave your hand around like crazy. Trust me.”
The animals in New Haven are trying to get me killed.
Cuervito dive-bombs the deer again in a blur of black feathers. “No, he needs to wait until the class is totally silent. Nobody talking. Everybody hardly breathing.” He flies upward and stretches his wings out, sailing in a circle above us.
I sigh. “And?”
“And let ’er rip!”
Groaning, I pick up the pace toward school, my animal entourage following me and offering advice guaranteed to get me a month of detention.
CHAPTER 3
SIXTH GRADE AT MY SIXTH SCHOOL. A maze of rusty lockers, creaking doors, and ceiling tiles stained with muddy brown splotches.
Luckily, most schools in the United States look exactly the same. You think they’re prisons until you notice the swings and jungle gym behind the plain, brown brick building with small windows.
The faded sign outside New Haven Middle School declares HOME OF THE FIGHTING ARMADILLOS. The only fighting I’ve ever seen an armadillo do is against a truck on the highway.
And they usually don’t win.
Despite my confidence, I soon realize the classrooms in New Haven Middle School must’ve been numbered with a confetti cannon. My first-period class, English, is supposed to be in room 17, but walking down the hall, I pass room 11, room 3, and room 19.
In that order.
I try to remember the map the school secretary gave me, now folded in my back pocket. I don’t want to take it out. I might as well get on the school’s PA system and announce, “New kid lost and wandering the halls!”
The faces rushing past me are all busy talking and laughing as they head to class. No one seems to notice me. At all my other schools, at least one kid always took me under their wing the first day. When I started second grade at Fort Lewis in Washington, Jacob Kilmer spent all morning showing me the activity centers in the classroom and telling me wild stories about the art, music, and PE teachers. Eventually, he got tired of my questions and pretended I was invisible. It was just as well, because I learned a day later that Jacob had come to Fort Lewis just a week before me—so everything he’d told me was wrong.
I finally find my English class by accident, but my nervous bladder tells me to look for the boys’ bathroom instead. There’s a slight chance I was too confident last night, snoring away under my freshly unpacked blanket, cardboard boxes still forcing the bedsprings to poke my ribs through the mattress.
In English, math, and history, the teachers make me stand in front of the room and introduce myself. I briefly consider pulling the fire alarm instead. At least Mom will be proud I earned some points.
My introductions are greeted with half-hearted waves and mumbles from kids slumped over in their desks. I probably could’ve announced I was Mr. Whet Faartz and ridden a llama to school without anyone noticing.
After lunch, I sit in my science class, amusing myself while the teacher rambles on about how to calculate density. I sketch Cuervito in my notebook, trying to get the right shade of black for his eyes. A shade of black that says, “I have made it my brief life’s mission to annoy the new kid as much as possible.”
Apparently, I’m concentrating more on my drawing than on dividing mass by volume. Now my science teacher, Miss Humala, is standing over my desk, craning her long neck. She stretches her jaw and sticks out her lips. Her long red nails twitch as if she wants to snatch my drawing and crumple it into a tiny ball.
“Mr., uh…” She pauses, searching her brain for my name. “Mr. Lopez. You really do need to pay attention. Focus, please.”
She snaps her fingers and walks back to the front of the room.
I go back to my drawing but look up periodically to check that Miss Humala isn’t about to assault me with her spit to get my attention. I’m sitting in the last row, so it’s easy to keep an eye on everything. When I walked into class after lunch, I scanned the room and chose a seat in the back, like always. I figured I was doing the teacher a favor. This way, she won’t have a gaping seat in the middle of the room when I leave again.
“Oh, look, we have an artist in class,” I hear a voice say behind me. “Just don’t pet me or pick me up or feed me leftover Tater Tots from the cafeteria, please.”
I turn and see a large cage in the corner of the room. Peeking out from a blue fabric hammock strung between two corners of the cage is a small gray chinchilla.
“You won’t have to worry about me, buddy. I won’t be here long,” I whisper.
“You can understand me? Well, just don’t go talking to any animal, of course. Especially animals you don’t know,” the chinchilla says, her tiny claws gripping the edge of the hammock as her large black eyes peek over the fabric.
Between the attempts by the raven, the deer, and the rabbit to give me advice on my first day of school, I’m fine not talking to any other animals, thank you very much.
Miss Humala drones on about MOVED, her acronym for finding density. I already know Mass Over Volume Equals Density because my science teacher at Fort Hood covered it last month. This happens to me a lot. Either I already learned what the teacher is covering or the class is five chapters ahead of where I left off at my old school.
I draw a thought bubble above Cuervito in my notebook, and he thinks, “Moved … again. MOVED … again.” The formula might as well be Mudándome Otra Vez Es un Desastre. Not that moving again is always a complete disaster. It’s more like a tornado you know is going to make a direct hit at least every two years, uprooting and flinging you to an entirely new place against your will.
So, you know, a disaster.
I notice the kid next to me, his eyelids drooping as his pencil rolls out of his hand and across his desk. He’s oblivious to the three green peas resting in his curly black hair. I hear a chuckle and a snort to my right and notice a freckled boy with a shaved head. He has four peas lined up on his desk, out of Miss Humala’s sight and ready to flick at the sleeping kid.
You meet a lot of kids when you go to so many different schools. But no matter the school, the groups are the same. There’s always the nose-pickers. The hyperventilating hand-raisers. The PE Olympians.
Evidently, New Haven Middle School has the pea-flickers.
I noticed this vegetable flinger when I walked into class because he had on camo pants and a patch from the Third Corps based out of Fort Hood sewn on his backpack. I started to sit by him, thinking I’d found another military kid, but then I realized that his blue tiger-stripe camo was from the Air Force and that on his backpack was a blue patch with a large red 1 on it for the First Marine Division. No one in their right mind would mix Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps. He probably got all of it at a military-surplus store.
The only thing more annoying than actually being a military kid is people who pretend to be military. Dad says being a soldier is a lot more than having a gun and wearing camo. He always shakes his head at men who “play soldier.”
Having been the new kid five times, I’ve suffered my share of bullies and goons. I kick the sleeping boy’s desk, and he straightens up, yawning and wiping his eyes. He looks at me through half-closed eyes, and I brush my fingers through my hair to alert him to the vegetable accessories in his hair.
He shakes his head, and the peas fall to the ground.
I notice the pea-flicker scowl at me as I shrug my shoulders. The half-awake boy mumbles, “Thanks,” and rests his chin on his hand. Miss Humala recites “mass over volume equals density” over and over, and his eyelids start to droop again.
From the front of the classroom, Miss Humala claps, her long red nails looking like bloody talons. “All right. Pair up and practice finding density with your partner.”
I groan. A new kid’s absolute favorite thing: finding a partner on the first day. Maybe Miss Humala should just go ahead and spit on me. I scan the classroom. The pea-flicker is definitely out; he’s still scowling at me, his freckles fiery red meteors across his face. A girl is sitting in front of me, but she’s hunched over her paper, tears dripping down onto the equations. I don’t think I should bother her. Everyone else in class seems to have paired up faster than drooling high schoolers at prom.
I drum my ink-stained fingers on my desk, expecting to complete the problems by myself. Then I feel a nudge on my arm, and the drowsy boy nods at the board, asking, “You wanna?”
I shrug. We look at the six problems on the board. The kids around us scribble on their papers and argue with their partners over the right answers.
The boy takes a deep breath and says, “Whaddya get?”
I don’t want to show off, but I don’t need pencil and paper to figure out the problems. “Thirty-two, fifty-five point two five, and fifty-four,” I say, answering the first three questions.
The boy stretches his arms above his head and twirls his pencil in his long fingers. “Twenty-seven, seventy-two, and sixteen point five,” he says, answering the second set and smirking.
I chuckle.
He leans toward my desk and looks at my sketchbook. “Wow, that’s really good.”
I want to tell him that I drew it from real life. And ask him if all the ravens in New Haven are this obnoxious, but I’ve already got being the new kid going against me. I don’t need to make myself sound any weirder.
“Thanks,” I reply. I add extra feathers to the legs of the raven on my page.
“New, huh?” the boy asks. “I’m Talib.”
The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez Page 2
