The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky Page 2

  At Ms. Dillbeck’s house, I notice that her front porch has weathered so many rainstorms, the boards sag in the middle and curl up at both ends. I think that old porch looks like it’s smiling.

  I’m glad that silly monster of a storm didn’t hurt any of the other homes in my neighborhood, either. Because now that I think about it, pretty much every house in Serendipity Place is perfect. Even the names of the streets. Who couldn’t be happy living like Gus and I do, on the corner of Sunshine and Lucky? And one block away, Weird Harold Bradshaw and his dad live in the house Harold’s dad grew up in, on Joy Boulevard. Gus and I are so close to Joy, our backyard actually butts up against Harold’s, so that we share a fence and a forsythia bush that’s planted right smack on the dividing line.

  When Old Glory shimmies to a stop, I stare at the enormous gardens Weird Harold and his dad have grown right in their front yard. Late summer squash and bush beans and watermelons and tomatoes are fat and swollen from the sun. Beetle traps buzz and giant rain barrels sit at the ends of the gutters on both sides of the house.

  Mr. Bradshaw walks Harold to the truck, smiling all the way—probably because Harold is grilling him again about the gardens. He seems to love how Harold has streamlined their vegetable growing.

  “Remember to put my fertilizer on the tomatoes today,” he tells his dad. “And with that storm last night, there’s no need to water the squash we just planted. . . .”

  Weird Harold Bradshaw is super-smart. Scary smart. He’s always outdoing everyone at science fairs (last year, he invented a brand-new fertilizer that he and his dad now use on their gardens), and winning spelling bees and history trivia contests. He watches the news because he wants to, not because his dad makes him, and he reads the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes, he uses words so long, I think I could jog around the block and back before he gets finished pronouncing them.

  When the teachers at our new school get wind of him today, they’ll all gasp and huddle close together, their voices quick and excited.

  Now, though, Harold climbs into the cab, smooshing Irma Jean and me closer together. And Mr. Bradshaw puts his palms against the driver’s side door of Old Glory, nodding a thank-you at Gus for driving Harold to school.

  “You know, Auggie,” Mr. Bradshaw confesses as his eyes land on me, “you look more and more like your mom every time I see you. One of these days, I’ll tell you about all the good times your mom and I had when we were kids. When you’re old enough to hear those stories, anyway,” he adds, tucking his long gray hair behind his ears as he dissolves into a wheezy laugh.

  I smile, act like I’m looking forward to it, but I actually stopped waiting for a story about my mom from Mr. Bradshaw long ago. He’s been telling me for years that they were great friends, but he always suddenly has something he’s late for when I ask him for any details. I’m pretty sure they didn’t share so much as a stick of gum.

  I slap the dash. “Come on, Gus,” I say. “Dickerson’s waiting.”

  • • • 4 • • •

  As soon as Old Glory turns into the Dickerson Elementary drive—a long paved tongue that’s as jammed, this morning, as a five-lane highway—I see the satin-shiny red hair that’s been part of my life since the first grade. Lexie. She’s up at the end of the drive, next to the building. Waiting for me.

  “Better go, Little Sister,” Gus says with a wink. “Catch up with your friend. I’ll get out of this jam somehow.” He shakes his head at the crazy jumbled-up mess of cars ahead.

  Irma Jean and Weird Harold climb out right along with me. I’ve barely even taken the first step toward Lexie when Harold grabs hold of my arm.

  Looking at him, I finally realize Weird Harold’s really worked up about something, so much so that his Hawaiian print shirt is buttoned wrong. His glasses have greasy smears across both lenses. I’m not really sure how he can see through them. His blond hair sticks out crazily from a yellow baseball cap, which says AS SEEN ON TV and sits at a crooked slant on his head.

  “Dad told me not to mention it—and I didn’t want to say anything in front of Gus. But did you see this story?” Weird Harold asks, pressing a torn-off strip of newspaper into my hand.

  The newspaper is blurred with Harold’s sweat. Whatever the story’s about, I’m sure Harold’s going to believe it’s a plot to ruin the world. Which is exactly why Harold got the “weird” stuck in front of his name. Sure, he’s smart—smart enough to convince me he could have whipped Einstein at Jeopardy!—but Weird Harold, as everybody’s been calling him straight to his face for the better part of the past two years, has a tendency to believe that nothing is as it seems. He was convinced that our old principal at Montgomery was keeping a file on him, monitoring the books he checked out in the school library. And he swears that the Fill ’N Sip two blocks away from his house overcharges him for his ICEEs because, as he puts it, “I’m a kid. Nobody listens to kids.”

  Gus calls him a conspiracy junkie.

  I glance down at the headline. The blurry bold print says something about licensing bicycles. I shrug. I’m so focused on meeting up with Lexie and hurrying inside Dickerson that I don’t really think I have the patience for one of Harold’s theories.

  “We have to pay for the licenses, Auggie,” he insists. When he talks, his crooked teeth remind me of a picket fence that’s been hit by a tornado.

  Irma Jean widens her eyes, points her index finger to the side of her head, and makes tiny circles. Weird Harold is cuckoo.

  “That’s discrimination against kids,” Harold says. “It’s going to take a month of my allowance to pay for my license. And who rides bikes? Huh? Kids, that’s who. Discrimination. Against. Kids.”

  “Your dad rides a bike,” I say, shrugging again. He does, too—even to work every day.

  “Listen to me, Aug. Dad’s the exception. They’re coming after kids,” Harold says. “They are. I mean—what’s next?”

  We giggle, me and Irma Jean, and even though it doesn’t quite sound like the laughter I’ve always made with Lexie—the musical laughter that only happens between two best friends—it’s still nice. We break into a jog, straight for the front doors, where Lexie stands.

  “Hey!” Harold shouts. “Wait!”

  “Lexie!” I call, racing toward her, my nearly empty backpack flopping against my backside. Even from a distance, I can tell she’s wearing a French braid that starts high on the right side of her forehead and swoops down across the back of her head, swirling up again toward her left ear. That braid looks like a giant horseshoe, with the ends pointed up to hold all the luck in. She’s twisted the ends of her braid into a perfect bun on the left side of her face, and her bangs lay across her forehead in one swooping, thick, beautiful curl.

  I can’t wait to tell her how amazing it all looks. But when I catch up to her, I realize she’s already talking to someone else—a pretty girl our age who looks all dressed up, even in a pair of jeans and a white top.

  “I’m Victoria,” the girl says as she tosses her hair over her shoulder. As perfect and silky as it lays down her back, I’m sure that Victoria gets it straightened in a beauty parlor.

  “Victoria Cole,” the girl presses.

  “Auggie Jones,” I say, realizing she was waiting for me to introduce myself.

  “Auggie?” she repeats, to make sure she got it right. She looks over my shoulder, toward the jumble of cars in the drive. “Who brought you?”

  “Grampa Gus.”

  “Gus?” she repeats.

  “They’re both named August,” Lexie volunteers. “Their name got shortened down differently.”

  I sneak a glance at her, realizing what a goofy smile Lexie has on her face.

  “That’s—sweet,” Victoria finally manages, in a way that sounds like she doesn’t really believe it’s sweet at all.

  I guess it’s not the prettiest name for a girl, Auggie. But that’s what happens when your mom’s wild. She gives you a man’s name—August—and she shortens it down, cuts it with a pair
of scissors so that it’s stubby and awkward, like a haircut done by somebody’s five-year-old sister.

  “What’s your middle name? Mine’s Elizabeth.” She rolls her eyes like it’s the worst name in the whole world.

  “Walter,” I say.

  “Come on. Really.”

  “Walter,” I say again.

  “Walter,” Victoria repeats, flicking her long hair behind her other shoulder.

  “Her mom named her after her grampa,” Lexie jumps in. “First and middle names.”

  “But Walter?” Victoria looks at me like baby snakes have hatched inside my head, and they’re all crawling out my nose and ears.

  Lexie snickers.

  I feel my whole body run cold. Lexie snickered?

  My mouth feels loose, like I can’t get a tight enough grip on any word to say it out loud. As I look at Victoria, my life story rings inside my head like an out-of-tune mandolin. I don’t want it to sound bad, the story. I don’t want Victoria to think that Mom named me after Gus because she knew that he wouldn’t give up on a little innocent baby with his own name. Or that Mom probably didn’t even look close enough to know if I was a boy or girl, anyway. Just slapped a name on me and hightailed it out of town, like the wild woman that everyone always says she was.

  It crosses my mind that maybe I could make it sound kind of glamorous. That I could tell her I was left on my grampa’s doorstep, like in some fairy tale.

  I glance over at Lexie. Why isn’t she sticking up for me?

  “Bet you’re glad you don’t have to go to that crummy old Montgomery anymore,” Victoria says, wrinkling her nose. “My dad’s on the school board, and he said that it would have taken a fortune to fix it up right. All leaky and cracked.”

  The way she talks stings—sure, I know that the school board decided to save money by shutting down Montgomery, where Irma Jean and Harold and Lexie and I all went to school last year. Instead of fixing up the pieces that had worn out on the oldest school in town, the school board redrew district lines and sent some Montgomery students to Eastwood Elementary, some to Rutherford Elementary, and all of Serendipity Place and part of Lexie’s neighborhood (which is a block north of mine) to Dickerson. But the way Victoria crinkles her nose, you’d think Montgomery was infested with rats and roaches, ready to fall in any minute.

  “What’s your grampa do for a living?” Victoria asks, looking past my shoulder again. I follow her squint, realize she’s staring right at Old Glory.

  My thoughts start flipping back and forth, like fingers searching the pages of a textbook for a decent answer. A way to spin what Gus does into something that sounds far more impressive than it is. I’m not quite sure why I feel this way, though. I’ve never felt like I had to polish up what Gus does. I’ve always thought it was pretty amazing all on its own.

  “He’s a trash hauler,” Lexie blurts. It’s true, but somehow, her words kick me in the gut.

  “A trash hauler?” Victoria whispers, eyeing me sadly. The way she looks at me makes my skin feel itchy.

  I think about the shed behind our house, the one that holds Gus’s dusty old torches. When Mom was my age, Gus was a welder. It’s always seemed like a wonderful job to me, Gus with his enormous fiery torch, fusing the whole world together.

  But I have a feeling Victoria wouldn’t be impressed by welding, either.

  “He works for himself,” I say, the way Gus always does. I don’t mention the part about him now being too old to weld all day. “Gus goes out to people’s houses and he fills up the bed of his truck with the things that don’t quite suit them anymore.” Sweat drips from underneath my arms as I ramble on. “He picks up old water heaters and worn-out couches and broken-down stoves and busted-up tables. Last year, he even saved up enough to buy a winch. That way, he was able to pull rusted cars out of rivers where they got abandoned.”

  Victoria’s eyes swell, like she could cry any minute. “You guys get by on that?” She puts her hand to her chest like she thinks someone will have to adopt me and Gus before Christmas, because it’s the only way we’ll get our stockings filled with nice new things that smell like department stores and plastic wrappers.

  “He gets security checks,” I say, because these words are powerful in our house. But I can tell, from Victoria’s blank stare, that this idea is really as big of a mystery to her as it is to me. Victoria’s dad is surely a doctor or lawyer or somebody’s boss.

  “Aren’t you cold in that?” Victoria asks, eyeing my sundress. “You do have fall clothes, don’t you?”

  I flinch. She doesn’t think I have fall clothes? I look to Lexie, but she’s too busy smiling up at Victoria to notice that the new girl’s words have punched me in the face.

  “There goes my dad,” Victoria blurts, waving good-bye to a man in a glistening black car. “He’s a member of city council, and this morning, he said he’s making me a junior member of—”

  “Wait,” Weird Harold butts in. “Did you say the city council? A junior member? I’ve got to talk to you about these licensing fees,” he says, pushing the newspaper strip into Victoria’s face.

  Victoria’s eyes grow large as Harold rattles on, getting so worked up, his glasses flop down to the end of his nose.

  “This is wrong,” he insists. “The next thing you know, the council is going to make kids get licenses, like dogs. They’ll make us put chips in our necks so they can keep track of us twenty-four/seven!”

  Victoria cocks her head to the side and laughs. Her laughter has such sharp edges, I get the feeling that just by laughing, Victoria’s making fun of him. And it hurts me—because I get the feeling that by making fun of Harold, she’s making fun of me, too.

  • • • 5 • • •

  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, i
t 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.

  • • • 6 • • •

  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.