The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky (3 page)

Right off the bat, our teacher, Ms. Byron, flitters around the classroom in a halfway-panicked way, like a hummingbird that's beginning to think it'll never find its way out of a garage. She chews on chalky stomach pills, so that when she announces, “Please stand for the first Pledge of the year,” she looks like she's licked an entire blackboard clean.

As I stand, my eyes rove out across the classroom. Dickerson has that new construction smell of paint and plaster and wood, and our classroom has a marker board instead of a chalkboard and fancy plastic desks and even a projector that's actually hooked to a computer on Ms. Byron's desk. What really gets me, though, is the coatrack. It's crammed with backpacks branded with designer names. And lunch boxes—brand-new plastic lunch boxes, not like the brown paper bags that Irma Jean, Weird Harold, Lexie, and I have brought with us.

I glance through the window at the playground, which is filled with swings and monkey bars that don't have a single scuff mark. And it's dotted with the tiniest little trees you ever saw. Nothing more than saplings, really. It's all pretty, I think. Even the skinny saplings. There's a kind of gentle, fragile sweetness about a baby tree, same as there is for a puppy or a fuzzy yellow chick. But something's missing. I can't quite figure out what, yet. But it makes me start to miss Montgomery, in a way I never thought I would.

After the Pledge, Ms. Byron tells us to grab a partner. “Any partner,” she says. “Hurry, hurry,” she shouts, her nervousness spewing out everywhere. “For our getting-to-know-you first-day assignment!”

Before I can turn to whisper at Lexie, her chair screeches on the floor—away from me. I feel like the whole world has tilted in that moment. Lexie's desktop thunks against Victoria's. Inside my chest, my heart makes a sound like a piece of paper being torn in half.

When I finally look up, away from Lexie's red horseshoe-shaped braid, I see Irma Jean pointing from her chest to mine.

I nod, trying to pretend that getting Irma Jean for a partner isn't a disappointment. She's a nice girl, Irma Jean. And she can sew like nobody's business. But we've never been best friends. It happens that way, most times. The people who live right next door never seem as interesting as the ones who live a mile away.

As we scoot our desks together, it gets hard to breathe. All the reasons for missing my old school keep piling higher, faster. I decide right then to only miss three things. If I just let myself miss three, I tell myself, maybe it won't sting so bad:

1. I miss the way the old wooden seats were all worn shiny, like they'd been given extra coats of varnish. But it wasn't some coat of glop on those seats. It was that they'd had so many kids sliding in and out of them, to recess and lunch and gym class. We'd buffed those seats with our backsides.

Every Monday morning, as we said the Pledge of Allegiance, I'd look down at the glossy wood of my desk chair and imagine the faces of everyone who sat there before me. Generations and decades of them—even Grampa Gus himself. So many of them, if you piled our yearbooks on top of each other, they'd stretch all the way to heaven.

2. The playground trees. Those trees were so big, any one of them could have made an umbrella for the giant in
Jack and the Beanstalk
.

3. Lunchtime. I loved the way that everybody used to bring brown bags filled with last night's supper stuck between two pieces of bread. Whatever was left—green beans or a pork chop or tuna casserole. Tastes of home smashed right between two pieces of white.

By the time the final bell of the day rings, it becomes pretty clear that Ms. Byron hasn't just been hit with a case of first-day nerves. She's naturally nervous, the same way some people have naturally curly hair or are natural-born swimmers.

She races outside with all of us, flittering about as she tries to help usher her new students toward their parents' cars, waving at the parents in a flurry of afternoon introductions.

Harold, Irma Jean, Lexie, and I cluster together on the sidewalk. At the far end of the front drive, I see her: Old Glory. My face breaks into a smile, because I think,
Here's Gus and here's Old Glory, and look, she's even got a new car attached to the back of her now, an old Toyota, all bashed in on one side. We're going to take it straight to McGunn's, and we'll turn that banged-up, wrecked car into money. Into a piece of metal that's only as thick as a triple-cheeseburger. Finally, a little slice of something fantastic.

Harold sees the Toyota and he starts cheering, “McGunn's!”

I smile because Harold, the smartest kid in our class, sees how incredible Gus's job is. And I think that surely, with all of us—Harold and me and Lexie and Irma Jean—screaming and carrying on, Victoria will realize she ought to be impressed, too.

Instead, Lexie takes a step away from us. She calls, “See you tomorrow, Auggie!”

“Wait,” I say. “You're not coming to McGunn's?”

“Victoria's giving me a ride!” she shouts.

The two of them race toward Victoria's fancy car, while I stand there in a dress that doesn't look like fall; with Weird Harold, who sees crazy conspiracies even when there aren't any; and with the girl who lives next door, who sews her own clothes out of hand-me-downs.

Victoria swings open the back passengers' door of her father's car, and her mouth droops as she points toward the end of the drive. Toward Old Glory, dragging an awful, terrible-looking car. Other new classmates follow, their mouths drooping at the rusted, wrecked pile of garbage that Gus is dragging up the drive.

Right then, Old Glory looks about a hundred years older than the cars at Dickerson—she's shaped differently, with her fat fenders, and she growls and clanks louder than all the rest of the cars put together. I cringe at the sight of the winch and the job box propped across the bed and the word
salvage
on the door.

At that moment, as I stare at Victoria, her skin seems the same shade as imported chocolates. When I look down at my legs, beneath the hem of my sundress, my skin looks like ordinary old mud.

No—not ordinary. I was ordinary at Montgomery. At Dickerson, I'm the girl from the poor neighborhood who doesn't have fancy new clothes, and who lives with her grampa the trash hauler.

Old Glory honks to get my attention. Gus calls out, “So how was the first day?”

I don't want to show any hurt feelings in front of him, so I smile wide, like I'm trying to show off a trip to the dentist.

When Gus sees that smile, he cocks his head to the side and sighs. “Come on—climb in,” he tells me. “I've got something I need to show you.”

As Old Glory slows down a few blocks away, I realize last night's storm sank its monstrous teeth into the Hopewell Community Church. Our church looks like a piece of white angel food cake with a giant bite taken out of it. The steeple hangs, broken. Shattered stained glass from the enormous windows glitters across the parking lot.

My stomach feels yanked—the same way those trees around Hopewell must have felt when their roots were pulled right out of the ground. Crisscrossing power lines are draped like useless, broken rope across nearby car roofs.

“Went to Sunday School there when I was a boy,” Gus mutters. “Got married there. Baptized your own mother there. Had your grandmother's funeral there.”

Tiny groups cluster on the sidewalk, staring at what's left of our little white church. Women are huddling close, blowing into Kleenexes. They rub each other's shoulders and shake their heads.

I watch how everyone stands back from the old church—like it's a dead body or something. A dead body with a white sheet draped across it. The only one who's close to the church is the minister.

Even from a distance, I can make out the black canvas and white leather toes of his high-tops—the shoes he always wears because his name is stamped right there on the ankle: Chuck Taylor. Chuck says he also wears them because they're like the strings people tie on pinkie fingers to remind themselves of something. And what the Reverend Charles V. Taylor (Chuck for short) wants to remember most are the back alleys his feet used to linger in when he was a real troublemaker. He says remembering those times makes him a better minister.

Gus always tells me it happens that way sometimes. The wildest kids can grow into the straightest and narrowest adults.

Even though Chuck is wearing his same old shoes, there's nothing usual about the scene at all. He stands in front of the crooked front door, shaking his head and rubbing his chin like he knows he needs to go in, if only he could get up enough courage to do it.

I know exactly how he feels as I sit in worn-down Old Glory, with an awful wrecked car attached to her, on our way to a junkyard filled with trash, and with a whole year at Dickerson stretched out before me.

Courage, I think as I stare at Chuck, can sometimes be like when you're dying for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but there's only a skiff of peanut butter left on the side of the jar, and no matter how much you scrape, you begin to wonder if you'll ever get enough on your knife to cover an entire slice of bread.

The first Saturday after school starts, Lexie and I circle our bicycles in and out of each other on the sidewalk below the old billboard that can be seen high against the sky almost anywhere you plant your feet in Willow Grove. Our wishing spot, that's what we've always called it.

The old ad for the dress shop is faded now, ripped in places. A giant black sticker with
AVAILABLE
and a phone number covers a big section in the middle. But I can still see the face of the woman on the billboard, still see that she has her head thrown back, her mouth open like she's in the middle of laughing. Like whoever took that picture caught her in some joyous moment. And I can still see that she's beautiful.

I know that the woman on the billboard is my mother. Gus has told me so, a hundred different times. Gus, and everybody else in Willow Grove. It was my mom's special-something: she was beautiful.

Shining brighter than any star
. That's what everyone always says about my mom, that she's off somewhere incredible, like California, shining brighter than any stars out there—the ones twinkling in the sky or on the silver screen.

Which is why her picture has always felt like the most natural place for me and Lexie to put our wishes.

“What're you going to wish?” I ask Lexie. “I'm going to wish that we could all go back to Montgomery.”

“What for?” she asks, her nose crinkled.

“Don't you miss it?” I ask. “I wish I could open my eyes and find out that a desk with my name across the front of it has been waiting for me there, all this time.”

Lexie shrugs, rustling the waves of her hair that she's letting spill across her shoulders today. “I don't miss it so much. If we hadn't gone to Dickerson, we never would have met Victoria.”

I nod, pretend that I've been glad to share Lexie, but I have to admit, the past week has felt a little crowded because of Victoria. She's always around—at lunch, during recess. And even though I try to find things about her to like, there's something about her—I can't quite put my finger on it yet—but for some reason, she reminds me more of a parent than a kid. Maybe it's the way her shirts are always ironed and color-coordinated with her socks, or the way she never has any Band-Aids on her knees. Or maybe it's the way she's always sitting in class with her feet crossed and her chin in one hand, all prim and proper.

“I have to go,” Lexie says.

“Where?”

“I have this thing I'm doing with Victoria,” she says.

When my face falls, she explains, “I'd invite you, but it's kind of a two-person thing.”

“Oh,” is all I can manage.

And like that, she lifts her backside from the seat, standing up to get more leverage. She peddles extra-quick, down the street, out of sight.

I grab a notebook from the metal basket on the back of my bike. “Dear Mom,” I scribble, because I sometimes write letters to her—even in my head when I have something to say and no paper around.

Today, I feel ready to ask her to come back. Because she's glamorous, that's what everybody says. So glamorous, anyone could tell just by looking at her that she'd spent years floating around on one of those inflatable mats in a movie star's swimming pool, sipping big drinks full of umbrellas, smiling her enormous smile.

I'm still sitting on the curb, staring at my unfinished letter, when a pair of black-and-white high-tops stops on the sidewalk in front of me.

When I turn my eyes up, they land on the face of the Reverend Charles V. Taylor.

“Hello, Auggie,” he says, seeming honestly happy to see me.

“Reverend,” I say, forcing a smile and nodding once.

“I thought you and I were on a first-name basis,” Chuck complains.

I have to admit, it really is a pretty formal thing to call a minister. Most other churches around call their ministers “pastor” or “brother.” But I always figured it kind of showed how much we all respect Chuck—even if he does always wear sneakers to church.

He tilts his head, says, “I don't think I've ever seen you at the wishing spot without Lexie.”

I hug my notebook to my chest, as though I can cover the wound inside my heart. What I really wish is that friendship didn't have to be so slippery, so hard to keep hold of.

Chuck squints at me a good long while, like he's thinking something over, as Mom's billboard looms behind his shoulder. He follows my gaze, up toward her old picture. “She was my best friend, you know. And I sure do miss her, now that she's gone.”

“Seems like there's one person who does the leaving, and one person who does the missing,” I blurt.

He lets the tiniest hint of a grin crack into the side of his face. “I never did tell you about the snake, did I?”

I shake my head no.

Chuck's grin grows like a flower blooming on fast-forward. “Then I'll tell you as I walk you home.”