Jumped In (10 page)

“Yeah. No. Yeah, I mean.” The truth is, Ginny and Bill gave me one for my birthday last year, but after a while of carrying it around and having it never ring and me never calling anyone, I started leaving it at home.

“If we're going to be meeting up and doing this thing, we need to be in touch, so…”

“I've got one. But I left it at home.”

“You got to carry the thing around, otherwise why bother, right?”

I give him my number. He dials it and waits for the message to pick up. My message is embarrassing. I remember rerecording it a million times and never being satisfied. I can hear my muffled voice against Luis's ear. He doesn't react to how stupid it is, though. He snaps his phone shut and just like that, I've got a gangbanger's digits locked in.

“There it is. You've got my number, and I'll be calling yours, so don't forget to carry that celly, yo!”

We say good-bye, with plans to meet tomorrow morning.

I say good-bye to Leticia. She tells me I'm welcome anytime.

 

MUST BE NICE

O
N THE WALK HOME
, I think about what it'd be like to have a mom there for you. To razz you about your life. To give you a hard time. To cook you burgers. To be there. If not every night, then some nights. And on nights when she's not there, you still know she's thinking about your dreams.

 

HELLO, SAM

I
GET HOME AND GO STRAIGHT TO BED
.

But I can't sleep.

I don't know.… This stupid funk has been weighing me down for a while, so hanging out and writing some silly lines with Luis is the most fun I've had in a long time.

I'm awake in bed, staring into the shadows. Thinking about how I used to do this. I used to write stuff. I used to write lyrics in my notebook all the time.

Why did I stop?

I want the morning to come so we can get back at it.

I try to lock my eyelids and count some sheep.

I'm too amped up.

So I slip out of bed and walk into the living room and find myself standing outside Gilbert's cage. I watch him for a while. Watch him breathing, his black beak buried in his feathers as his little chest goes up and down with each breath.

Without thinking, I lean into the cage … and I start talking to Gilbert. I whisper, “Hello, Sam. Hello, Sam. Hello, Sam.” In the friendliest voice I can manage.

Over and over.

Hello, Sam
.
Hello, Sam
.

It's worth a shot.

Over and over, until I can't stay awake.

 

WAFFLES

I
T'S
S
ATURDAY
. I got my phone in my pocket and I'm running for the door, trying to slip out like always.

But Ginny's standing at the stove.

In my way.

She's got one hand on a hip, a spatula waving in the other. Her bluish-white hair wrapped in pink curlers to match her pink sweatsuit.

She's damned perky at seven in the morning.

“Waffles?”

The knee-jerk
no
is about to hit my lips. Then I think about eating dinner with Luis and his mom. And I can't say no to Ginny.

So I sit.

In a second, she's got a hot waffle on my plate. The waffle is great but Ginny's smiling and bouncing around in her squeaky tennis shoes, asking all these questions about my new
friend
.

“It's just a project for school,” I say. “No big deal.”

That gets her even more excited.

“A project? Really? That's wonderful, Samuel! Tell me all about it!”

I can't stand all the
positivity
, so I bolt. I jump up and set my dish in the sink. “Thanks for the waffle.”

I head out. But I don't get anywhere.

I gotta go back inside.

I gotta not be an ass.

I poke my head in. Ginny says, “You back for lunch?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We put in a good five seconds of work and now I'm starving. You got a sandwich?”

“I got a knuckle sandwich, sonny.”

“No thanks. How about another waffle?”

“There you're in luck.”

I grab my dish out of the sink and by the time I'm sitting at the table, Ginny's got another waffle ready to go. She takes a seat and I ask her the question.

“What did you and Grandpa Bill do at Boeing?”

“Where did that come from?”

“Just curious, I guess.”

“And did you want to know if I was single when I started out on the assembly line?”

“What?”

“Because I was. And I was a real looker back then.”

“Okay, but what did you do?”

“I would let these couple of curls dangle down below the bill of my hardhat, and your grandfather, a strapping young buck working the crane, would see me walk in every day. He could view the whole factory from up on his perch. He kept an eye on me for months before he had the guts to ask me out for lunch. But he did it. He finally asked me out.”

After a while, she explains that she used to check welds and rivets where the sections of the airplane's body—the
fuselage
—came together. It was her job to make sure that the welders didn't miss any spots and the riveters didn't screw up any rivets. Bill was the one moving those massive fuselage parts around the factory so folks could put them together. That was pretty much what they did for about forty years of their working lives. That and apparently flirt enough to make everyone in the Renton Boeing plant sick to their stomachs.

“I gotta get going now. Thanks.”

“No problem. Thanks for the chat.”

 

SUN BREAK

I
START MY HIKE UP THE HILL TOWARD
P
AC
H
IGHWAY
 …
in the sun.

Where the hell did that come from?

Halfway to the top, I stop and turn around. I look west, down into Puget Sound and over to Vashon Island. The view is an intense mix of colors. The dark blue water. Vashon Island's midnight green trees. And the whitest, puffy clouds. Winter in the Northwest. I don't know if it's worth all the days of depressing rain and gray for the few unbelievable hours a month that look like this.

But it might be.

I get greedy. I think about what I might see from the top of the hill. My heart starts pumping hard—in a good way. I rotate myself toward Pac Highway. I huff and I puff, sucking in chunks of air, hiking up as fast as I can, thinking this might be the most perfect morning ever.

It is. The mountain's out.

Mount Rainier.

Crystal clear.

The white snow popping the massive volcano's outline out of a bright blue sky.

This place is amazing.

 

MAKING SURE IT DOESN'T SUCK

I
GET TO
L
UIS'S
. He says his mom's got to work all weekend, so she won't be interrupting.

I figure we're mostly done writing the poem. Luis looks tired, but he's way hyped, like he stayed up all night thinking about it. “We don't have much time, Sam. We have to make sure this doesn't suck. We don't wanna look like idiots.”

“Okay.”

“We can't just be rhyming to rhyme. We gotta be
saying something
.”

“Okay.”

So we talk more about what we have to say, what we want our classmates and Cassidy to understand about us. And we end up laughing our way through the day. By the time it's over, we've thrown out what we had and we've got a whole new poem with a superhero theme.

I don't know if it's
great
. But I think it's pretty cool.

We huddle at the kitchen table and silently read what we have. Luis reads it out loud a couple more times. He seems happy with it.

“Are we done?” I ask.

Luis studies it. “Hard to say.”

He gets up from the kitchen table and heads to his room with page in hand.

I follow.

He walks over to his closet door, opens it and disappears inside. Blankets and dirty clothes fly into the room. There's a clunk of stuff being shifted. In a second, he walks out holding a black-gray machine. It's a huge old-fashioned typewriter. It looks like something from a hundred years ago.

“Where'd you get that?”

“My grandpa died and left it to my mom. She never uses it, so she gave it to me.”

“Do you use it?”

“Not much.”

Luis grabs a piece of paper from the closet and puts it in the typewriter. He cranks the knob and the paper scoots into place.

“You got a laptop?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Luis says. “In my mom's room. She lets me use it whenever I want.”

“Why don't we use that?”

“I can't explain it.” He points at the typewriter. “You just gotta hit a key.”

He waits for me, so I do it.
Thwack.
An
i
snaps onto the paper.

“Feel that
pop
?” Luis asks.

“Yeah.”

“Pretty cool, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever feel a computer do that?”

“No.”

“That's why we're using the typewriter.”

He pokes the machine one finger at a time, searches for the next letter, then pokes again. He squints, concentrating on the searching and poking.

The only sound is the metal arms of the typewriter smacking the letters of our poem onto the paper.

I go use the bathroom.

Come back and watch Luis type for a while.

Get another root beer.

Return to more typing.

Finish the root beer.

Go to the living room and watch Pat and Vanna. Then Alex Trebek all the way to Final Jeopardy.

I head back to Luis's room and wait until finally—
finally
—he whips the paper out of the machine. And studies it.

“Check this out,” he says handing me a page. “Does it look done?”

I don't know what the hell
done
would look like. But I check it out and tell him it looks pretty cool.

“Really? You think it's done?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“I think so too. I think it's done … for now.”

 

BOUNCE

W
E'RE FINISHED FOR THE DAY
. I put my jacket on to go.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I thought we were done.”

“Done
writing
. Now we got to be able to speak the thing backwards and forwards. If we aren't one hundred percent confident, it's gonna blow. No matter how good the poem is.”

I take my jacket off.

We start reading the poem out loud together. It's hard.

But I try my best. I stumble along.

Suddenly Luis waves his hands in the air and shouts, “Stop. Hold the phone! This is
slam
poetry
,
Sam. This ain't old folks' theater.” He smiles and says, “You're gonna put a guy to sleep with that kind of slop. Those words gotta
BOUNCE
, man! We gotta mean what we say and say it like we mean it. We gotta be rock stars! MCs, busting a funky flow with these lines. You dig?”

I do not dig. And I don't know whether to laugh or to run.

I look at Luis, and it's clear he wants me to do this.

So I decide to laugh.

And to try.

“I dig,” I say. “I'll bounce.”

We practice reading the poem until it's time for me to go home for real.

Luis makes me promise I'll work on the bouncing.

I promise.

He says, “Good.” Then he grabs a pen and napkin off the kitchen table and starts making a little calendar.

“What's that for?”

“When slackers are feeling fine, that's when they sit on their useless asses and stop working. And, yes, I'm talking about you.”

The calendar is thirteen boxes, one for each day until the March 8 slam. In each box, he writes the hours I'll be coming over to his place to work and the hours I need to practice alone at home.

“Who's the real Luis?” I ask him. “The tough guy I see at school? Or the royal dork scheduling my poetry practice on a dirty napkin?”

He's immediately serious. “Whattaya mean?”

“I mean, uh, you just seem really different than at school.”

“How do I seem at school?” he says, sounding pissed.

“Nothing. Forget what I said.”

“How do I seem, Sam? At school?”

“You seem … kinda tough—”

“Tough
and
…”

“And, uh—you know—not like … like a guy who would work on a project like this.”

“Okay. Let me get this straight.” He grips his hand tight on my shoulder and glares like he did when I stared at his scar. “What I'm hearing from you, Sam, is you don't think Mexicans can write poems or do schoolwork. Do I have that right?”

“No, Luis! That's not what I meant! What I meant was—”

I stop myself before I tell him,
You seem like a cold-blooded gangster at school.

Then he points at me and shouts, “Ha!”

What the hell?

He holds his fist to his mouth, laughing. “Got you, Sam. I got you.”

I force myself to smile with him.

“You shoulda seen your eyes,” he says. “You were like—” He does a crazy imitation of me looking scared as hell.

“You got me, Luis. You totally got me.”

He gives me the napkin and a pat on the back. “You're cool, Sam. See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

I take off, wondering what just happened.