Sticks and Stones (4 page)

Chapter Seven

At the end of the week the graffiti was still there. Tired of the porn star looks I was getting, I mostly watched my feet walk around school. That’s how I ran right into Carlos on Friday afternoon.

“Walking in your sleep?” he asked.

“I wish.”

He stopped laughing. “Ever been in a four-seater plane?”

“No.”

“My dad’s taking our plane out tomorrow. Want to come?”

“Wow! Sure. Could Sophie come too?” It wasn’t that I took Sophie everywhere with me. But with her mother gone this weekend, I knew she could use the lift.

Carlos shrugged. He walked home with me and came in for a bit. Mom fed him cookies and milk while she put him through the third degree. Popcorn laid his head on Carlos’s knee with a sigh. I could tell my mother and my dog really liked him. This was important, since he’d be taking me several thousand feet off the ground.

That night, Sophie’s mother went over to her father’s. Sophie was out too, and didn’t get in until 3 a.m. She had her own key, but Mom sleeps with her ear to the ground. In the middle of the night, their voices in the hall woke me up.

“I called your friend’s house — you
weren’t out with her like you said,” Mom said.

“You called her?” Sophie’s voice went high.

“It’s after three. Anything could’ve happened to you.”

“You don’t run my life. I can take care of myself.”

“I love you and I want you to be safe.”

It got quiet and I lay stiff on my bed. Then Sophie said, “My mom doesn’t care about me. Why do you?”

“Your mom cares. You’re easy to care about, Sophie. Real easy.”

“If my mom loved me, she wouldn’t be with that creep. She wouldn’t have me all worried and hurting like this!” Sophie yelled.

“You went over there, didn’t you?” Mom said.

My mouth fell open and I pulled the pillow over my face. Sophie was going to kill me.

Just like I thought, Sophie said, “Jujube told you?!”

I hung onto my pillow. Then Mom said, “Where else would you be? Your friend’s at home. Your boyfriend’s at college. Jujube didn’t have to tell me.”

Their voices went on for a while. I guess Mom calmed her down. When Sophie came into our room, she decided to let me live. All she’d done at her father’s place was stand close to the house and listen. She was waiting for the sounds of fighting, but hadn’t heard any.

At 8 a.m., I had to beat her awake with my pillow. “Get up, slug.”

“Get up?” Sophie groaned. “Why?”

The why showed up an hour later.

Carlos and his father drove up in a car that sounded like it’d lost several mufflers. I wondered if the plane was that bad off. Sophie got into the front seat with
Mr. Rojas. Carlos held the back door open for me. Suddenly, I couldn’t move. All I could think was
back seat baby
.

Everyone looked at me, waiting. Then Carlos spoke low, so no one else could hear. “Hey, no hands. Promise.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, climbing in.

“No prob.” He climbed in after me and glued himself to his side of the car. Mr. Rojas started the engine and we blasted out of the driveway.

“Ever been to heaven before?” Carlos yelled, grinning.

Why did this question make me nervous? I shook my head.

“It’s O.K. — you get to come back,” he said.

It was a warm March day, the snow almost gone. We stood on the tarmac, the breeze blowing the hair back from our faces. Carlos wore his jean jacket and a T-shirt as
usual. His grin came and went like quick thoughts, and his eyes seemed darker. He had Sophie laughing, forgetting about her mother. Then we saw Mr. Rojas taxi the plane toward us, the sun running off the wings. Something in Carlos seemed to almost lift him off the ground.

This guy is gorgeous
, I thought.

Mr. Rojas opened the passenger door. “Jujube — you get into the front seat with me.”

Carlos’s face went blank. Sophie punched him in the shoulder and said, “Stuck with me.”

It sure is noisy in a small plane. We began to taxi down the runway, the world going by more and more quickly. Then the plane lifted a little, rocked softly in the air, rose a little again. Trees were dropping away, the sky coming down to meet us. Down below, the city shrank to a toy town — there was downtown, the river, and my school. How could such a
tiny place hold so much trouble?

We were out of the city now, over brown fields with patches of snow. Mr. Rojas asked me, “Want to try the wheel?”

From the back seat came loud shrieks. Carlos shouted, “No, Dad, no!”

“Let me out of here!” howled Sophie.

The two of them went on dying with terror. Mr. Rojas grinned and pointed to a dial on the dashboard. “Keep your eyes on this. It tells you if you’re keeping the plane level.”

There were two steering wheels, one in front of me. I put both hands on mine.

“Dad — I haven’t written my will yet,” Carlos yelled.

So much for moral support. Mr. Rojas flipped the switch and I was flying the plane. I couldn’t believe it — it felt like I had the sky in my hands. Mr. Rojas pointed out the window. “That’s good, Jujube. Over there you can see Leduc.”

I had a cousin who lived in Leduc.
I looked for her house, but then the streets seemed to be getting bigger. I heard Mr. Rojas gasp. He grabbed his wheel and we came up out of a nosedive.

“Oops,” I said.

“Oops?!” screeched Sophie.

“We warned you, Dad,” Carlos said.

“Can I try again?” I asked.

“Maybe in a little while,” Mr. Rojas mumbled. He looked pale, so I decided not to bug him about it. One heart attack per day is enough for an adult. Kids handle five to ten, but you’ve got to go easy on adults.

We flew around for over an hour. Coming back, I saw our school again, underneath us. I took a deep breath and felt very light.
It’s that school that’s the problem, not me
, I thought. I wasn’t going to let it drag me down again.

Back on the ground, Sophie, Carlos, and I watched the plane taxi to the hangar. “O.K.?” asked Carlos. He was so close,
but not touching me. We stood looking at each other. Beside us, Sophie coughed.

“You started that project for English yet?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Not till the night before it’s due.”

“Want to work on it with me?”

“Sure. Got a topic?”

“I want to do it on graffiti,” I said.

“Wow,” Sophie said.

One eyebrow went up, but Carlos looked interested. “Any graffiti in particular?” he asked.

I laughed. “Very particular.”

He nodded. “How’re you going to get Old Dead Lips to go for it?”

“It’s supposed to be about ways we communicate,” I said. “Ways we pass ideas back and forth. The graffiti on that bathroom wall is sure passing ideas around about me. And I’ve got some ideas about that.”

“I bet you do,” Sophie grinned.

“Maybe I’ve got some too,” Carlos said.

Chapter Eight

Monday, Carlos and I took our cameras to school. I skipped gym again so we could work at the same time. He covered the guys’ bathrooms and I covered the girls’. Most of them were empty because classes were on. I stood at the first wall, the camera in my hand.

The wall was old. I could see it needed repairs. The words looked as if
they’d been there forever, almost a part of the brick itself.
SLUT
was the first word I took a picture of.
JUJUBE GELB IS A SLUT
. I focused carefully. The shutter whirred and clicked.

As I walked around those walls snapping pictures, something happened. It was as if, somewhere, I was stepping over an invisible line. As if I was finally saying to everyone, “You can’t make me take this anymore.” As if I had my life back and was I ever going to make it move.

For several days, Carlos and I went around downtown and the malls, snapping pictures of graffiti. Carlos had even gotten a shot of a guy writing on a bathroom wall.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“He’s in grade twelve. I don’t know his name,” Carlos said.

“Well, he knows mine,” I said. He was adding to a list of comments about my nightlife.

“He doesn’t know you,” Carlos
said. A warm feeling came and went in me, like a breath.

“You’re a good guy, y’know that, Carlos?”

Carlos went a little red. It seemed to take him a while to breathe again. I wanted to touch him. But I didn’t. Then he shrugged.

“I got a lot of hassle when my family first came to Canada. It was because I couldn’t speak English. I flunked grade three. The kids made fun of me, called me names. Most of the first English words I learned were the names they called me. I remember thinking English words were not friendly. So I guess I know what it can be like.”

After we got the prints developed, we sat down with Sophie. She was in grade twelve, so she knew the older girls. Between us, we figured out who owned the names on those walls. Then I went around
school, tracking the girls down. Some were pretty embarrassed. But most agreed to come to a meeting.

We held it in a back corner of the cafeteria at lunchtime. Sophie, Carlos, and I waited. Slowly, the table filled up with girls — maybe fifteen or so. Some looked tough, some were popular. There was one nerd. I could see other kids starting to watch us. There were guys out there who kept looking at us, then away, back again, away.
There’s only one way they could know why we were all together
, I thought.

When it looked like everyone had arrived, I put down my sandwich. I said, “Welcome to the first meeting of the Slut Club.”

Some of the girls jerked. Megan, the girl I’d talked to before, started to laugh.

“I don’t think it’s funny,” said a popular girl.

“Neither do I,” I said.

“Well, then why say it?” she asked.

“Because I’m not going to let that word bother me anymore. It belongs on a bathroom wall, not in my gut,” I explained.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” she said.

“The school says they can’t clean up the walls right now. They don’t have the money,” I told them.

“Yeah, right.” Megan rolled her eyes.

“That doesn’t mean
we
can’t do anything. Carlos and I are doing an English project on graffiti. We took pictures of the bathroom walls. We want your permission to show them.”

I passed the pictures around. As the girls looked at them, I watched their faces, the hurt in them. I let them look until they were finished and their eyes were back on me. I said, “In a way, I’m glad the school doesn’t have the money right now. Painting over those words would be like a Band-Aid — just covering it all up. You don’t change things by covering them up.”

“Yeah,” someone nodded.

“We’d like to use these pictures in our English project. But your names belong to you. We won’t use them if you don’t want us to,” I said.

“What’re you going to do?” Megan asked.

So I told them, with Carlos throwing in a few words. Some of the girls began to nod, some even smiled. Several backed out and left the meeting, but a couple offered to help. After we’d finished figuring it all out, Sophie took down everyone’s phone number. Carlos collected the pictures again.

Megan leaned across the table. Definitely loud enough for Carlos to hear, she grinned and asked, “Is he yours?”

Sophie giggled. I figured I was about as red as a human being could get. There was no way I was looking at Carlos to see how he was taking this.

Megan grinned again. “Oops
— sorry I asked.”

I looked at my hands and said, “He’s his.”

Then I glanced at him just as he looked at me. Our eyes bumped into each other and hung on.

“Ahhhh — they’re in love,” Megan sighed.

“Give us a break,” Carlos groaned.

“This meeting is over now. Please,” I added.

Chapter Nine

All weekend, Carlos and I worked at my house. We had to get our English project together for Monday. All weekend, we watched Sophie’s mother pack and leave. She was moving back in with her husband. Sophie was going to stay with us — Mom had made that very clear.

“You are my second daughter, Sophie,” Mom told her. Mom can be very
dramatic, but it’s great when she likes you.

Sophie didn’t talk to her mother all weekend. She didn’t help her pack. Arms around her legs, Sophie sat very still in front of the TV. Whenever I heard the “Star Trek” theme, I knew where Sophie was going — far, far away. Late Sunday afternoon, her mother dragged the last of her stuff to the front door. That was when Sophie finally moved from the TV. Her head came around and she stared at her mother. Then she gave a cry like a little kid.

“Mom!”

She jumped up and ran to her mother, throwing out her arms. Their bodies went tight around each other and they hugged for a long time. Then Sophie let her mother go and watched her walk to the car.

“I didn’t think she’d really do it,” she said softly.

I stood beside her in the doorway. “Maybe she’ll come back.”

“She thinks all the bad stuff with Dad is over now. All gone — just like that.” Sophie snapped her fingers.

“Too bad,” I whispered.

“He won’t go see a counselor. He won’t say he has a problem. They’re just going to pretend none of it happened, but I know he’ll do it again.” Sophie looked straight at me. “Like I pretended those rumors about me weren’t going around at school. Y’know, even if they went in now and painted those bathroom walls, the stories would still be going around. You’re doing the right thing with that project, Jujube.”

“Thanks,” I said. I sure hoped she was right.

Monday morning felt like a decision a long time in the making. English was our first class. As the other kids came in, Carlos and I set up the screen and the
slide projector. I didn’t look at Brent, but the whole time I knew where he was. Old Dead Lips sat down at the back.

Carlos ran the slide projector. I stood beside the screen talking about different kinds of graffiti. The lights were off and I couldn’t see much of anyone. First we showed graffiti from the railway tunnels and the bridges, downtown. There was laughter, whispers when kids saw something they recognized. The area around Brent kept pretty quiet. Old Dead Lips sat without comment, letting the dirty words go by.