Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  “When some kids are bad in white families,” my ma said, sighing, “their mas and dads say they’ll dump them off among the wild Indians and let them find their own way home.”

  “The wild Indians? We’re their punishment? You’re making this up,” I said. They were both sharp, and poking fun at each other is absolutely the way of life on the reservation, but my ma’s expression told me they were serious and not just busting my chops.

  “White guys on the lacrosse team told me after we got to know each other,” Zach said.

  “And none of you thought to tell me all of last year, even though you knew no one talked to me? What am I supposed to do?” All this time, I thought I had been the problem, not my address.

  “Well, everyone else from here usually gets placed with a couple other Indians,” Zach said. “That’s who they hang out with until high school.”

  “Maybe you’ll get to know some of the other singers better this year,” my ma suggested. “Like this guy you just mentioned. This air force kid.”

  “You’re in chorus?” Zach said, laughing. “The dorkiest activity. No other options?”

  “No,” my ma said.

  “Not exactly true,” I said when she went back to the kitchen to grab something. “In fifth, I scored high on those music tests, so I could have joined either chorus or band. That letter said I’d be a good trombone player.”

  “With your stubby arms? No way,” Zach said.

  “Didn’t matter anyway. At Heavenly Music, a student-model trombone was three hundred dollars.”

  “Reservation translation: exactly one hundred dollars more than Ma’s entire monthly income,” Zach added, as if I didn’t know that.

  “Yup. That salesman said they had rentals or rent-to-owns,” I said, remembering the salesman trying to cut a deal with my ma, while I looked at my own broke welfare face, distorted into a long horsey portrait in the trombone’s gleaming brass, still playing my part in the dog and pony show. “But just like you said, that kind of money, even a rental price, wasn’t going to work for us. So I turned us around and walked us out the door.”

  “Down to the budget again?” Zach said when I’d finished. “Glad my ass is out of here.”

  “Watch your language when you’re home,” our ma said, returning.

  “My home is a single-wide trailer with one bedroom and a sweet Dodge Challenger in the driveway,” he said, then looked at me. “Maybe you could fail some classes and get bumped down to the regular sections. Not the dummies, necessarily, just the average ones.”

  “Don’t you even think of it,” Ma said. “Your name is going to be associated with section three for your entire time in junior high, and don’t you forget it. Get any homework?”

  “Not on the first day,” I said, then thought aloud, “Does anyone here know where Guam is?”

  “Geography homework?” she asked.

  “No, just curious. The kid I met today, the one who talked to me, moved here from Guam, and I have no idea where that even is. He said the South Pacific, but I thought that was only a lame musical we sang songs from in chorus. I didn’t know it was a real place.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Albert said, speaking for the first time. “He’s a base kid, isn’t it? Your base might be in the middle of a bunch of different kinds of people—I mean real different, like from Japan kind of different—but all you see are other soldiers, and all the kids see are the kids of other soldiers. Kind of like living on a reservation.”

  “Yeah,” Zach added, “a reservation with running water.”

  Though Artie had warned George about going near Summer Barnes, there was no way of avoiding her once she noticed you. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you how to dress?” she asked me on the first Friday back as we all headed out to our buses. She generally wore outfits out of the Sunday paper’s back-to-school fashions advertisements, and often criticized someone else’s lack of style so we could see how she was on the cutting edge.

  “Well, anytime your dad wants to take me shopping for clothes on his dime, you just let me know,” I said.

  “It’s not about what you can afford,” she said, as only someone who can afford things would say. “Someone should have taught you how to dress with what you’ve got. Okay, I’ll take pity on you this once.” She glanced at George, then said to me, “Use this kid as your model.”

  “I’m nobody’s model,” George said.

  “You are today,” she said, and then turned back to me. “Unbutton the top button of your shirt. Really, it should be the top two, but whatever, even one will help. Only nerds wear their shirts with the top one buttoned.”

  “Your dad wears his that way,” I offered.

  “Because he’s wearing a tie, stupid. At home? No tie. And you can be sure he keeps the top two unbuttoned. You’re double nerdy if you want to make that comparison. And somehow you got it all backward. You’re always leaving your shirttails out and doing the top tight. Take my advice, please. I don’t want to see this look for another whole year.” She stomped away.

  “So, Summer’s a friend of yours?” George said to me.

  “Listen, George, I want to catch the bus,” Artie said. “You coming?”

  “Go on ahead,” George said.

  I took in the way George was dressed, the way Artie was dressed as he fled, and then my reflection in the classroom door’s window. No one had, in fact, ever made the observation Summer just had, and I hadn’t noticed it either. But as every other kid assigned to our hallway walked out past me, I recognized the truth—top buttons of the shirt open, tails tucked in.

  “Can you hang on to these for a second?” I asked George, handing my books off when the last kids had cleared through. I quickly tucked my shirt in, trying to smooth its wrinkles. When it was clear my efforts were hopeless, I unbuttoned the top two shirt buttons. “Better?”

  “Why do you care what she thinks?” George said.

  “It’s not that. It’s just, well, look at you,” I said. His shirt had been ironed, with creases at the arms. His jeans met his sneakers exactly where they should—not flood pants, and not cuffed like mine generally were because they had belonged to someone else first. “Well?”

  “Yeah, you look fine. Here, take your books.” We trotted down the front hall, passing Summer, who was waiting out in front of her dad’s office. She smirked, seeing that I had taken her advice.

  “Thank you so much for saving me from making a fool of myself,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, proud of her community service.

  “Not sure how you got into seven-three with that impairment you have, though,” I added.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “The inability to detect sarcasm?” I said, and followed George out of the building.

  George frowned at me as we walked.

  “What?” I said to him, pretending I didn’t know.

  “That was as bad as what she did,” he said. “Do you really want to be like her?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said, having dealt with Summer for an entire year already.

  “Look, I don’t know you, really, and you make your own choices, but me? I don’t do things to make life harder on myself. Trouble’s going to find you often enough without you seeking it out. Like that, look over there.”

  In a group nearby, a small kid bent over to tie his shoe, and a bigger kid stepped up behind him, grabbed the exposed waistband of his briefs in both fists, and yanked him a wedgie tight enough to lift him off the concrete. The smaller kid stumbled, stood, and reached behind to free his shorts. When he whirled around and saw who it was, he just laughed it off and walked away, never turning his back.

  “And what lesson do you want me to learn from that?” I said. “Make sure I wear my undershorts lower than my jeans?”

  “Well, that small kid was asking for it. You don’t bend over like that in a crowd this size and not expect someone to give you a snuggie, but—”

  “A ‘snuggie’?
Wedgie, man. You know, like wedged up your—”

  “Got it. Usually takes me a little while to learn the ‘Local Customs,’ as our military moving pamphlets call it.”

  “ ‘Snuggie’ sounds too nice,” I said.

  “Either way, you never expose yourself like that—setting yourself up to be attacked, and giving that person a reason to want to do it—unless you want it to happen. Kind of like what you’re doing with Summer, rubbing her the wrong way. Anyway, I better get going.” With that, we said good-bye, and I headed back to the reservation decompression chamber, aka our bus.

  As we pulled out, I thought about what George had said. I didn’t want to admit it, but he was probably right. I just wanted to be able to say something back to someone who’d been giving me grief. Power and size can’t always win, can they? Either way, pushy or not, I liked that George had nothing to gain by his comments, other than being of help to a friend. It was a first for me.

  The next Monday, one of our other early September rituals kicked in. Fire drills should be a surprise, but our school lives were so rigid that even our fake emergencies were predictable. We never had fire drills in January. September, on the other hand, was prime drill season. So right on schedule during Monday’s end-of-the-day announcements, the familiar siren started squeezing out from the intercom speaker, like the squeal of a robot cat.

  On the lawn, I saw the Wedgie King and his victim again. The King was circling, waiting for a perfect opportunity for round two, but his victim countermoved with each new turn, always pretending he wasn’t. They kept doing their slow dance until the all clear rang and we went back into the building.

  The next morning, after the pledge, Mr. Barnes came on the intercom and cleared his throat. Summer improved her posture, as if he could see us in our classroom.

  “Good morning,” he growled, in a voice that insisted there was, in fact, nothing good about it. “Now, yesterday, we had the first fire drill of the school year.” He paused, sighing before the microphone, sounding like a storm building in the winter. “I would be lying if I said I was a happy man at this moment. The lollygagging you young ladies and gentlemen engaged in suggested you do not understand the meaning of the phrase ‘fire drill.’ When you hear the alarm, you are supposed to act as if an actual fire is occurring somewhere in the building. Your performance was pathetic, as if a bunch of slugs were commanded to run a footrace.”

  I imagined he’d heard this line somewhere else and borrowed it for use with us. His voice rose with each new sentence. “From this point on, we’re going to have daily fire drills until you get it right. Perhaps I could have the scent of burning flesh pumped into the vent systems in your classroom so you’ll remember why we’re doing this. If we have to keep going into December, so be it. I do not want you to disappoint me,” he said, taking the fire drill more personally than any reasonable person should. “You’ll thank me later.”

  “What’s up with your crazy dad?” I asked Summer as the bell rang and we shuffled out.

  “For your information,” she said, entirely unembarrassed, “my dad is a volunteer fireman, which I’m sure no one in your family is brave enough to be.”

  On cue, all of Summer’s friends clucked their disapproval of my insensitivity, as if I could have possibly known this fact before that moment.

  “Didn’t you learn anything from last week?” George said when we got to our lockers.

  “And are you forgetting the principal is her father?” Artie added. “That Mr. Barnes and Summer Barnes are the same Barnes family?”

  “Vice principal,” I said. “Let’s not distribute power unwarranted,” I added, imitating our social studies teacher, who went on and on about the Wonders of the American Government System, somehow just skipping over the fact that Benjamin Franklin was partly inspired by the Indian form of government, Tuscaroras being one nation of the larger Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Most Indians I knew, no matter how much they didn’t care about history, knew Franklin had said something like: If these savages can make it work, how hard can it be for us to master?

  Artie and George didn’t laugh. “Remember government class?” Artie said. “Vice principal is pretty much the same thing. If the principal is in a plane crash or something, that’s it. Summer’s dad is principal.”

  “I think you’re confusing principal with president,” I said.

  “As far as you’re concerned, you should think that too,” George said. “Remember, Barnes is the vice principal in charge of paddling.”

  “Hey,” I said to him, “why are you on my butt? I’ve known you less than a week, but you keep trying to rescue me from myself. Remember, I’ve already been here a year.”

  “And how’s that been going?” George said. “Seems like aside from Artie here, and Summer’s tutorials, there aren’t a ton of people waiting in line to talk to you.”

  Another valid point, but he was getting kind of free with his suggestions, and it sometimes felt as if, on the giving-unasked-for-advice dial, there weren’t too many clicks between Summer’s and George’s kinds of help. I also didn’t particularly like being constantly reminded of all my faults.

  “Sorry,” he added. “That came out harder than I meant it.”

  “Truth is, I probably could use some of your ‘Local Customs’ pamphlets myself,” I said.

  “What’s he talking about?” Artie asked.

  “Private joke,” George said, and smiled at me.

  I smiled back. I don’t think I could have told him how awesome a moment that was without sounding like a total dork, but I had never had a private joke with anyone before.

  Text and illustrations copyright © 2018 by Eric Gansworth

  All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and the LANTERN LOGO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-338-14354-6

  First edition, June 2018

  Jacket art © 2018 by Neil Swaab

  Jacket design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN: 978-1-338-14355-3

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