Feathers (3 page)

We had everything we needed on this side—huge supermarkets like Bohack when you have to do the big family shop once a week, tiny old Tanks store when you were last-minute desperate for something like high-priced milk. We had the Price School, where I went—Mama said we could make-believe it was named for Leontyne Price, the black opera singer, but it’s really named for Major Price, the white mayor from a long time ago—and the Daffodil School, where Sean went. The Daffodil School’s for kids who don’t learn like other kids. Like Sean. He can’t hear, so you have to use sign language with him. He can talk a little bit, but most people don’t understand what he’s saying. I guess that’s because you have to listen real hard and most people don’t want to spend a lot of energy on listening to people. Across the highway, there’s another school like Sean’s called Starship Academy. Mama said even if we lived on that side of the highway, she’d cross it every day to come to the Daffodil School because there was no way on God’s green earth she’d send Sean to a school that sounded like it was for people from outer space. There’s a regular school over there called Eastbay. You always saw cars on the highway that said MY CHILD’S AN HONOR STUDENT AT EASTBAY, which was basically another way of saying I LIVE ON THE WHITE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY. Price had those bumper stickers too. Samantha had gotten a couple of them, and once she even gave me one, but Daddy said maybe we should wait until I actually
was
an honor student before he put it on his bumper.

On our side of the highway we also have a library. Mama calls the library “the day care center” because most of the kids in there are waiting for their parents to get home from work. There’s a real day care center called Little Sprouts and one for kids with things different about them called Special Little Sprouts. Both of them got flowers and little hands painted on the windows, and some days, if it was raining or just real cloudy, I walked by and saw those flowers and those tiny little painted hands and it filled me with such an emptiness. Some days, it felt like the times when I got to make handprints and flowers and stuff just slipped away from me before I even got a chance to figure out how much fun being a little kid was. Seems the minute I turned around, I was already more than eleven years old.

Some days, eleven felt like a whole long lifetime. All heavy like that.

If somebody did build that bridge, Sean,
I said,
who do you think would be the first to cross it? Somebody from that side? Or somebody from our side?

I’d cross it,
Sean said.
I don’t mind being the first.

And then what?

I don’t know.
Sean shrugged and kept staring out the window, his eyes getting that faraway look. His hands quiet on the sill.

4

On the second day after the Jesus Boy got to our school, Trevor was absent and Rayray said it was because he broke his arm. Then everybody wanted to know how, crowding around Rayray to be the first ones to get the information.

“He missed the fence,” Rayray said. “He was tryna jump from the big swings to this high fence that’s like three feet away and he wasn’t swinging high enough. I
told
that jive turkey before he even jumped that he needed to be swinging higher than that because even a fool knows you gotta get some height to fly over to the fence! When his mama was taking him to the emergency room, she said, ‘If your arm isn’t broken,
I’m
gonna break it because I told you about jumping out of those swings like that.’ ”

Everybody laughed, but it was hard for me not to imagine Trevor falling through the air—how scared he must have been, reaching and grabbing at nothing. I turned and looked at Samantha. She was shaking her head but maybe she was thinking the same thing.

In the summertime, Trevor’s skin turned the prettiest copper brown. Once, when he was standing next to me at the park, I saw his bare arms up close, just hanging all quiet along his sides—and the skin, the way it had so many beautiful colors in it, the way it looked all golden somehow, stopped me. I stared at his arms and saw the Trevor that was maybe inside of the Evil Trevor—just a regular boy with beautiful skin. I saw that, even though he was mean all the time, the sun still stopped and colored him and warmed him—like it did to everybody else.

When I got to my desk, I looked up and saw the Jesus Boy looking at me. I couldn’t tell what his face was trying to say—it was just blank and open and strange. I cut my eyes at him and opened my notebook even though I didn’t have to yet.

Maribel’s seat was right behind mine.

“That Jesus Boy is always
looking
at you,” she whispered.

“Only way you’d know is if you’re always looking at
him,
” I whispered back. I felt her poke me in the back, but ignored it.

I wrote my name at the top of the page. Beneath it, I wrote the date. Beneath that, I drew a picture of a kid on a swing. Kids said it felt like flying to jump through the air, catch onto that fence, then let yourself climb down. They said something about being up that high let you see all over the place in a way that felt different than looking at the world from a window. I thought back to the day before when me and Sean were talking about those bridges he wanted built. Seems kids on this side of the highway were always trying to figure out ways to fly and run and cross over things and . . . get free or something.

Maribel was wearing a green sweater with THE CASEY SCHOOL written across the front in white letters. The sweater was too small and there were tiny lint balls on it. Everybody always seemed to be thinking about some other place.

I snuck another look at the Boy. He was still staring at me. I stuck out my tongue at him and turned to a clean page.

Ms. Johnson came in, took attendance and then she said, “Did everyone get a chance to personally introduce themselves to . . .” And then she said the new boy’s name again—like she’d done the day before.

But I don’t remember it now because the minute she called it, he stood up and said, “Everybody calls me Jesus, Ms. Johnson.” Some of the kids laughed. Most of us just looked at him.

Ms. Johnson looked around at all of us and all of us found other stuff besides her to look at.

“I like Jesus,” the boy said and sat back down.

I don’t know if he meant he liked Jesus the person or Jesus the name, but I guess Ms. Johnson thought it was Jesus the name because she said, “Okay . . . Jesus.” Her face just stayed calm so we couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“There’s only two things wrong with that,” Rayray said. He was sitting way in the back of the classroom and everybody turned around real fast to look at him. For a minute, the only sound was chair legs scraping against the floor.

“What’s that?” Ms. Johnson said. She was frowning now. Ms. Johnson’s a good teacher in a lot of ways. She laughs and I like teachers who laugh. And once a week she brings some kinda snack for us all—like doughnuts or mini candy bars or cinnamon graham crackers or really sweet cherries. And she always seems to bring the snacks on a day when I’m the hungriest, which is usually a day when school lunch is the worst—like on goulash day when they pour this stewy stuff that has things like green peppers and eggplant in it all over perfectly good rice and completely ruin it. Whenever they have that, I ask if I could just have the rice and Miss Costa always says
No
like it’s against some kind of school-lunch law to serve goulash and rice separately. So on those days I’m really hungry and that’s usually when Ms. Johnson decides to pull out her snacks.

The other nice thing about Ms. Johnson is she wants you to understand stuff. I mean, she doesn’t just teach us and if we don’t get it, she keeps on moving. She really cares about us understanding things and she’ll take a real long time explaining something until she’s sure everybody’s got it. Sometimes that’s a little bit boring if you already understand it and she’s still explaining it. But that doesn’t happen with me because I’m usually the last one to get it. The things I don’t understand the most are science, math, grammar and geography. I understand independent reading and journal time and I understand the story part of writing but not things like diagramming a sentence or semicolons. Anyway, that’s why when Rayray said what he said, Ms. Johnson stopped taking attendance to ask him about it. She wanted herself and all of us to understand.

“What are the two things wrong with it, Rayray?” And that’s another thing I like about Ms. Johnson—Rayray’s name is really Raymond Raysen, but he decided he wanted everyone to call him Rayray. When he told Ms. Johnson that, she jumped right into calling him the name he wanted. Everybody calls me Frannie and so does Ms. Johnson, but even if I would’ve said, “Call me Floyjoy McCoy from now on, Ms. Johnson,” my name would be Floyjoy McCoy. I guess it’s strange that nobody ever calls me by my first name—Abigail or even Abby. I guess it’s because Sean can almost say Frannie—it sounds kind of crooked, like somebody saying it underwater, but we know what he’s saying. And maybe that’s why it stuck—because of him.

Rayray leaned back in his chair. He was wearing this big shirt that said BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL with a black hand making a Black Power fist underneath the words. The shirt was too big for Rayray. He’s real skinny, so when he wears big clothes, mostly you see the clothes, not Rayray. He slouched down in his seat and just about disappeared into that big shirt.

“Well, first of all,” he said, “Jesus wasn’t a boy, he was like God’s son but not a man either—like a
Thing
-type person. Like a spirit guy.”

Ms. Johnson and the rest of us just looked at him.

“And second of all, he wasn’t white. He was like spirit-colored or something.”

“What’s spirit-colored?” his friend Chris asked. “I never heard of no spirit color.”

I could see Rayray’s little head inside his big shirt. He was frowning. “Like the color of air, brother-man. You know, like no color.”

“When those cats put nails in him, he bled, though,” somebody else said. “What color was his blood?”

Rayray shrugged. “Right on, my brother-man, I feel what you’re saying. Blood is red no matter who it’s coming out of. But that ain’t where I’m going, you see? That kid ain’t Jesus is all
I’m
saying.”

“Say, brother,” the kid said, which was jive talk for
I agree with you.

Say, brother,
I signed underneath my desk, then looked down at my hands. I had a pockmark on the center of each palm left over from the time I had the chicken pox. The marks were small and reddish brown. Sometimes when I was thinking about something real hard, they started itching. Maybe in another world, somebody would’ve thought they were nail holes, I don’t know.

Mama lost one baby before I was born. Her name was Lila and she died when she was a month old. Something about her lungs. Something about her blood. We don’t talk about her much. But there are pictures. Sometimes Mama kisses my palms and calls me God’s gift.

I wondered what the inside of the Jesus Boy’s hands looked like. I wondered if his mama kissed them and called him silly names. Of course when I looked up, he was staring at me again. Old Big Eyes.

“He’s not saying he’s Jesus-Jesus, right?” Rayray asked. “He’s saying that’s—like some nickname. I know this Spanish guy named Jesus but it’s pronounced the Spanish way—not like the real guy. This kid ain’t saying he’s the real guy, right? I mean, how’s he gonna be God’s son and be in Ms. Johnson’s class? No offense, Ms. Johnson, but even if that Jesus Boy was spirit-colored, he wouldn’t be coming to Price. If he was really God’s son, he’d probably go to a private school.”

“Like where?” Maribel said. “The Casey School closed. There’s not any private schools on this side of the highway. If there was one, I’d be going to it.”

“Or like Catholic school,” somebody else said. “Someplace with some religion, right?”

I saw Ms. Johnson smile a little bit. “I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying about himself, everyone, are you?”

Ms. Johnson and everybody else looked at the Jesus Boy. He didn’t move or shake his head or anything, just sat there, staring off.

“Are
you
?” Rayray asked him. “You aren’t saying you’re like God’s son, are you?”

“I don’t think it matters,” Ms. Johnson said. “What matters is—”

“Aren’t we all God’s children?” Samantha said quietly. She looked around the room, taking us all in. “Each of you,” she said, “is a true child of God.” She turned to the Jesus Boy. “Maybe some are truer than others.”

Rayray just looked at her and shrugged. “Jesus don’t belong in this room is all I’m saying. And that cat’s saying he’s Je—” He stopped talking and stared at the Jesus Boy and frowned. Then we all looked at him.

He had his hands on his desk and was looking down at them. I saw a tear fall onto his pale hand and then another one, but he wiped them away real quick.

I heard myself saying, “He’s crying, Ms. Johnson. The Jesus Boy is crying.”

“Dag,” Rayray said. “I didn’t mean to make him cry. I swear, Ms. Johnson. I wasn’t trying to be mean. I was just saying—”

“I’m not
crying,
” Jesus Boy said real fast, shooting me a look that was so evil, I couldn’t believe it came from his face.

“Are you all right?” Ms. Johnson said, her hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah. I’m okay,” the Jesus Boy said, his voice soft again, so soft that maybe some of the kids didn’t hear him.

“I lived on the other side of the highway already,” the Jesus Boy said softly. He kept looking down at his hands, like he was talking to them, like he was talking to himself. “We . . . my family didn’t belong there.” He looked up and around at each one of us. It felt like everything stopped. There weren’t tears in his eyes, but they were sad. “My daddy said it would be better here,” he said, almost whispering it. “He said people would be . . . he said people would be . . . you know, nice to me.” He looked down at his hands again. After a minute, he put his head down on his desk and sighed.