Donut Days (7 page)

Just then, two kids with donut boxes on their heads raced within inches of the Angelfire Witnesses’ camp, their bare legs flashing. “Donut monster will get you!” cried one of the kids, while the other squealed—a sound that melted away as the kids ran on.

Oblivious to the interruption, Anita continued. “Bear doesn’t always use big words, but every word he uses, he uses right.”

Bear laughed, his voice rumbling over the campfire and out into the campground. “Thanks for the compliment,” he said. “I think.”

Anita flicked a stick into the fire. “Aw, now, that
was
most certainly a compliment. Cuz you know what they say, don’t you?”

“What?” I asked.

“It’s not the size of the word, it’s how you use it.”

The Harley gang broke into whooping hysterics that seemed to reverberate in the cool night. I giggled so hard, I almost lost my hot dog.

After a few moments, Anita wiped her eyes. “How about you just finish that story of yours now, Bear? I think we got the laughing fits out of our system.” Nodding, Bear started up again.

“My family lived in Detroit until 1967, when the riots broke out,” he said. He explained that their apartment building caught fire, and that some people started firing bullets at the firemen who were trying to put out the flames, since the firefighters were white. “My father tried to stop them from shooting,” said Bear, “but it was hopeless. Some of the people started asking why my father was sticking up for ‘the establishment.’ He was white, and that’s all they saw. They didn’t care that our family had lived in that neighborhood for years. In an instant, an angry mob had turned on us. We had to jump in our car and drive away as people threw bricks and rocks at us. One cracked our windshield so badly that my dad, who was driving, had to slink low in his seat just to see.”

After that, Bear said, his family moved to Chicago.

“My mother’s sister, my aunt Bonnie, had lived there for years and she took care of us. At least until we could figure out what to do next. Which we did. My father and mother both found work in a slaughterhouse. It wasn’t a facile existence, but it was enough until I left home at age sixteen.”

Wasn’t a facile existence.
I imagined there were other ways to describe what happened when both your parents worked in a slaughterhouse, but Bear was ever polite.

“What did you do when you left?” I asked.

Bear smiled at me. “I joined a motorcycle gang.”

I could say at that point that I might have done the exact same thing if I’d lived through such an experience. I’d never heard of the Detroit riots before, which was embarrassing, but Anita was right: that kind of stuff didn’t make it into the Birch Lake curriculum. We learned about William the Conqueror in AP history, not the Motor City.

Even so, I forced myself to sit up a little straighter and swallow the last of my hot dog, which went down like cement. I smiled, even though I was certain I had bun stuck in my teeth.

“Thank you all so much for your time—” I began.

“Naaaw, you’re not leaving already,” said Tex-maybe-Rex—the one without the facial hair.

“Really. I should go. I appreciate the hot dog and your time. You’ve been very kind.” I didn’t mean to bail so quickly, but I figured I had what I needed if I was going to write about them for my
Press
story. Plus, my meeting with Jake was right around the corner.

Bear put his hand on my shoulder. It felt like the weight of a small cow. I half expected to hear mooing. “Please come back anytime,” he said. I realized then I still didn’t know what—or why—he was knitting. “When we see you again,” he continued, “we’ll turn the tables. You can tell us your life’s story—and why you’re at the camp.”

I looked him square in the eye and thought,
Brother, that’s a story you don’t want to know
.

U
nder cover of darkness, I started for the Java Nile café. I knew I’d be early for my meeting with Jake, but that was okay. I could sip a mocha while I thought about my
Press
story. Could the Angelfire Witnesses really be it? Could such a ragtag group help me win the scholarship?

I tried out some headlines in my head:
Three-Hundred-Pound Man Uses Words Well. Gang Cooks Hot Dogs, Shares Stories.
They were so awful, I wanted to coat my brain with Wite-Out.

My writing teacher, Mrs. Sloan—who also supervised us at the
Chieftain
after school—always said the best stories were the ones that combined character and obstacles. I had thought it would be easier than it actually was to spot both characters and obstacles at the Crispy Dream camp, but not so much. Still, Mrs. Sloan was also the one who said I had “great potential” as a journalist, and if she were at the camp now, she’d probably peer at me over her red reading glasses and tell me to tough it out, suck it up, and make the story work. That’s pretty much what she’d said after my first story as associate editor of the
Chieftain
had run and I’d been upset by my parents’ reactions.

I’d been assigned a story on Birch Lake’s new biology hon ors class, where some of the kids were able to do high-level science experiments after school, like injecting mice with viruses and watching how their DNA changed. I’d done a slew of interviews to cover the story, talking to everyone from the kids doing the work to the teachers in charge of the curriculum, all the way up to the superintendent.

When I’d brought the paper home to show the story to my parents, my dad, who read it first, cleared his throat about five times before he said anything. His fingers drummed out an uneven beat on the table. Eventually he raised his head and said he was disappointed that I’d write about evolution and paint it in such a favorable light.

“Evolution?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“The article says it right here,” my dad said, tapping the paper. “Students are studying
evolutionary biology
. Isn’t that just another name for manufacturing connections between humans and apes?”

Here we go again
, I thought. “You’re missing the point,” I said defensively. “In this case, most of the students are looking at how viruses work—how they change under different conditions. That’s what the mice are for. No one’s studying Neanderthals or Lucy or anything.”

But my dad wasn’t swayed. I’d written the “e-word” and hadn’t condemned it, and that was enough to make him think the article was on par with the trash at the supermarket checkout aisle.

The next day, when I’d explained the situation to Mrs. Sloan, she’d coolly reminded me that
any
article I wrote would probably make
someone
mad. “And then you know you’re doing a good job, because you know you crafted your words in such a way that they were powerful enough to make someone
feel
something. And that’s a good thing.”

Then, without skipping a beat, she told me to pull myself together and handed me my next assignment. Just like that. Which was probably just as well, since the truth was I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather do instead. Journalism was about the facts—about things that could be verified, cited, proven. When there was so much in the world that was made up, and so many people who based their ideas off of speculation and conjecture, I wanted to be part of a world that didn’t operate that way. I wanted to spend my time in a field where the facts were on my side.

So I stuck with it, and wound up storing all my copies of the
Chieftain
under my bed, only showing my mom or dad grudgingly if they asked to see what I was working on. The upside is that I was able to fill my brain with facts (the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France; Fuller Field is the oldest baseball diamond in the United States; Brazil produces one third of the world’s coffee . . .) and I also became a better writer, which is why I believed I really had a shot at the
Paul Bunyan Press
scholarship.

Maybe my article can be about the process of writing an article,
I thought. It could be an experimental, arty piece. Like those movies about making movies.

Except that was dumb.

But what else could I do? What could I possibly say about born-again bikers? Because who ever
heard
of such a thing? Though I’d listened to enough preaching in my life to know anyone could be saved—even murderers and thieves and certainly bikers if they really wanted to be.

“Saved” is what you call believing that Jesus was the son of God and that He died for your sins. I personally was saved when I was eleven years old, and these days, even though I still considered myself saved, what I didn’t do so much anymore was pray.

Ever since the baptism, it had been really hard for me to have conversations with God, since obviously God wasn’t going to just dole out religious experiences so I wouldn’t be such a pariah at church. Though I couldn’t say that was enough to make me stop talking to God
entirely
. I sometimes swore at him, and other times I stuck my middle finger in the air and extended it as far as I could toward heaven. Because what a liar God had turned out to be. There was the scripture about not being confused, which I still totally was, and somewhere in the Old Testament, I know God had said, “Call onto me and I will answer thee.” I had been calling like a telemarketer—asking for tongues, a vision, or a heavenly experience—but instead of answering my prayers, God sent a nut into the water at my baptism. Some great Almighty One indeed.

I ground my teeth together as I reached for the door of the Java Nile café. I wandered over to the front counter and loved the menu at first glance. It offered, among other items, Camel Coffee (black coffee with a shot of caramel), Mummy Wraps (organic sandwiches wrapped in grape leaves), Nectar of the Gods (fresh-squeezed orange juice), Cleopatra
au lait
(coffee with hot milk), and Grave Robbers (triple espresso shots).

“I’ll have a white mocha—I mean, white Anubis,” I said to the pierced barista behind the counter. He nodded and started the espresso machine hissing.

When I had my drink and was situated at a table, I pulled open my notebook and stared at it.
Emma Goiner,
I wrote at the top, just so I could put something on the paper.
Emma Goiner,
I wrote again. I tried not to think about how sometimes kids at school deliberately mispronounced my last name—which was French, like “gone-yay”—and instead called me “goiter.”
Emma Goiner
. I scratched out a line underneath it, then wrote
Characteristics
.

Loner,
I wrote, pressing down hard on the paper, picturing Nat and Molly at the camp without me.

I clicked and unclicked my pen, thinking about the last conversation I’d had with Jake before tonight. I’d dialed his cell after school on the Monday of my fight with Nat and Molly so I could be the first one to tell him about what happened. Although Nat and I had been able to patch together a truce over the phone—both of us agreeing halfheartedly to try and stick up for each other now and again—Molly and I hadn’t even
tried
to talk. I certainly wasn’t going to apologize to her, and I knew she’d never apologize to me either, since obviously she believed she had nothing to apologize
for
. So it was an impasse, and neither of us was going to budge.

After two rings Jake had picked up. “Hey, you,” he said, and I could hear a smile in his voice right away. “What’s going on?”

I took a deep breath and told him all about the fight from start to finish—including the part where I said his dad was full of crap. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” I said, trying to smooth things out, “and I wasn’t trying to make Molly mad on purpose, but I just don’t believe your dad’s prophecy is real.”

Jake cleared his throat. “Okay.”

I almost dropped the phone. “Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Really?” I asked. “I mean, that’s great, but why is it okay?” My hand gripped the phone harder, since the only answer I could think of was the nauseating idea that Jake didn’t want to be friends with me anymore.

“I can’t tell you right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s something else I have to tell you first.”

Uh-oh. What could be bigger than us talking about how I’d dissed his sister and his dad? “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Fire away.” Then there was a silence so deep, I thought I’d lost my signal. “Hello?”

“Yeah,” said Jake, “I’m here.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, sitting upright, now totally panicked.

“Emma, I have something to tell you.”

“I
know
. You said that already.”

“It’s serious.”

“
Okay
. What is it?”

“Emma,” Jake said, pausing briefly, “I’m in love with you.”

I
jumped about ten feet when two people behind me burst into laughter. Their sharp cackles were loud enough to make my head hurt. I glanced at the clock on the wall: 1:20 A.M. Jake was twenty minutes late.

What if he wasn’t going to show? Not that I could blame him if he stood me up. I mean, he’d told me he loved me, and what had I done? I’d freaked. I’d gone all socially retarded on him and said “um” about sixty times before hanging up. And then when he’d tried to call me back, I hadn’t answered.

Just then my cell phone buzzed. I took it out and saw it was my dad. I flipped it open.

“Dad, what’s happening? Where are you?”

“Your mother and I are home. We just got in and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Yeah, I’m fine, but whoa. You guys are just getting home now? What in the world happened at the church tonight?”

“I don’t . . .” He stumbled a bit. “It’s—it’s a lot.”

I paused. “Well, can you tell me about it?”

I could hear him take a deep breath on the other end. “Mr. O’Connor called an emergency board meeting after the service. He’s asking the board to decide, sometime this weekend, whether or not your mom should be allowed to preach.”