Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

The next morning, I had breakfast with my parents. Mom made French toast, my favorite.

“I want you to call me at work today.” Mom poured a small circle of syrup at the side of her French toast. “No forgetting like you did on Wednesday, or I’ll send you to Gladys’s.”

“Now, there’s a serious threat.” Dad’s eyes smiled, even though his mouth was busy chewing sausage.

“If I don’t hear from you by noon, I’ll be calling Mrs. Jones to make sure you’re all right.”

I’d have to find a phone, even though I didn’t know exactly where I’d be. Somewhere in Milton. Tracking down my long-gone grandpa.

“Okay.” I kept my chin down. I don’t really believe in mental telepathy because it’s not scientific, but I couldn’t be too careful. I had this feeling that if Mom looked into my eyes she’d be able to tell where I planned to go today. I covered every square millimeter of my French toast with syrup.

“I heard what happened after Tae Kwon Do last night,” Dad said. “With the little boy.” He piled his French toast and cut it all at once so he could get four bites in one.

I shrugged. “He was just a curious kid,” I said.

“You should know something about that.” Dad shoved the toast tower into his mouth.

Mom spoke. “You know, sweetie, there are plenty of ways we do match, even if we’re not the same color.” She pushed her hair behind her ear. “We’ve both got freckles on our noses, for one,” she said. “And green eyes…”

“And you’ve got the same great smile,” Dad said with his mouth still full. Sometimes Dad forgets his own rules. He reached out and put his arm next to mine. “We’re not exactly the same color, either, are we?” he asked.

“Black people come in all shades,” I said, remembering Gladys’s words.

“That’s true,” Dad said, pulling back his arm, “and the world
is
going to see you as black.” He stabbed another stack of French toast bites. “You know how I feel about that.”

Dad was always saying how I needed to learn to control my actions and most of all my anger, because people look at black boys more suspiciously than they look at others. I think he started me in Tae Kwon Do so I would learn how to stay cool under pressure. Tae Kwon Do warriors don’t let anything throw them off.

He also told me that black boys get stopped by police more and are questioned more roughly, and that’s why he became a policeman. So he could help change the system.

I don’t understand totally. I’ve never seen people look at me more suspiciously. And I’ve never been stopped by any police. But what Dad says makes me wonder.

“You can also see yourself as biracial if you want,” Mom said.

Black. Biracial.
I guessed it was important to have a label, but I was still just Brendan Buckley.

I took my last bite. “Can I go to Khalfani’s now?”

Mom glanced at Dad. “I can give you a ride,” Dad said.

“I want to ride my bike.”

“I won’t argue with that,” he said. “Gotta be in shape for your purple belt exam, right?”

“Sure,” I said, but my mind had already left the room. I had a new question to write down, but this one didn’t give me the Jitters. This question sat heavy in my gut like a big twisted knot that I had to figure out how to untie. Or maybe that was the French toast.

I went to my room and pulled out my
Book of Big Questions.
I turned to the first section. “What am I?” I wrote. “Black? Biracial? Am I white, too?”

I shoved my question notebook into my backpack. I grabbed the
Official Rock Collectors’ Field Guide
I’d checked out at the library the day before and looked at more of the pictures. I had gotten a stack of books on rocks and minerals so I could read up on the subject—because I was interested, but also in case I saw Ed DeBose again. If I knew some things about rocks, maybe he’d be impressed and want to hear what else I knew.

I put the field guide in my pack, said goodbye to Mom and Dad and took off.

Riding my bike to Khalfani’s, I went over the plan in my head. I had the bus numbers and times memorized. I knew where we needed to transfer and where to get off.

I pedaled slowly, my back and face heating up under the sun. I noticed how much around me was made of rock, just like one of the library books had said. The sidewalk, street, walls, driveways and a lot of stuff in houses and roofs—they wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for rocks and minerals. I crossed the stone footbridge at Olympic View Park, the water flowing over rocks in the creek bed below.

All the reading I’d done and pictures I’d seen the night before had given me more Big Questions. Like what made diamond the hardest mineral in the world? And how was it possible to pound an ounce of gold thin enough to cover a football field? And what made minerals come in so many different colors?

The field guide showed pictures of dozens of minerals. One had thin, needlelike, bright pink crystals and looked like a sea urchin. Another had orange-red, pointy, clumped crystals like flames that had turned to glistening rock. And there was one with blue crystals the color of Mom’s toilet bowl cleaner, covered with copper-orange dust. I liked the polished chunk of hematite best. It looked like a silvery-black alien brain.

Different colors…just like people. I remembered again the little boy from the night before: “Why don’t they match?”

Why different colors? Grampa Clem had once said that God made people different colors to test us—and we’d been failing ever since.

I stopped my bike at the railroad tracks and picked up a piece of solid black rock from between the ties. Basalt. I’d read about it in one of the library books. It was an igneous rock formed from magma that seeped up through cracks in the ground and got hard. Magma was underground lava. I shoved the rock in my front pocket.

When I got to Khalfani’s, he told his stepmom we were going to the park, and we rode away on our bikes. This was all part of the plan. We would stash the bikes in some bushes near the bus stop and pick them up on the way back.

There weren’t many people on the bus—just a lady with her baby, a teenage boy and a few old people. I zipped my metro pass into my pack.

“Go to the back,” Khalfani said from behind me.

I chose a seat about halfway down. “This is good,” I said. I slid in, but Khalfani had to be difficult. He dropped into a seat three rows farther back on the other side.

I didn’t care. Between Gladys and Grampa Clem, I’ve learned all the tricks of having a successful bus ride. Like don’t sit near the front, because that’s where the people with lots of bags sit and you always end up with stuff in your lap or spilled drink on your shoes. And don’t sit in the rear, because you get all the fumes.

Besides that, Grampa Clem told me, black people used to have to sit in the back of buses because they were seen as second-class citizens, but then they fought back and did this thing called a boycott, and so now black people can sit anywhere they want to on a bus.

So the middle—that was the place to be.

After we made our transfer, I knew it wouldn’t be long. My legs were starting to feel jumpy, like if I didn’t run up and down the aisle, they were going to do it for me.

This time, Khalfani sat in the seat in front of me. He pointed out the window. A sign on a post read
WELCOME TO MILTON, POPULATION
6,025.

The bus turned at an intersection with an Albertson’s grocery store and a Dairy Queen on the corner.

I reached up and grabbed the cord to ring the buzzer. Grampa Clem let me pull the cord, but Gladys always tried to beat me to it. I moved into the aisle. The bus lurched as the driver pulled up to the curb, and I almost fell into an old white man’s lap. He glared.

“Sorry,” I said.

As we walked down the street, I kept thinking about the man on the bus and how he had looked at me. What if Ed DeBose was actually a mean man? My intestines started to feel bubbly, like hot magma moving around below my stomach.

Did Ed DeBose really not want to have anything to do with my family? If that was true, what would he do when I showed up at his house?

I pushed the questions out of my mind and tried to remember what he looked like. His face had been pink, his hair orangish white, like calcite. Mostly I remembered his hands and how they had been straightening those little boxes of rocks. And he had been friendly. He had invited me to his club meeting.

But that was before Gladys showed up. She had known who he was. Had he figured out who we were? Thinking about talking to him put a lump in my throat the size of a piece of coal.

We passed Mr. Sudsy Car Wash, Surprise Lake Middle School and a skate park where boys in knit caps and no shirts zoomed back and forth on their skateboards. On a peak a few blocks away, a water tower rose up above everything else.

“You got the map?” I asked.

Khalfani pulled it out of his back pocket. This was also part of the plan. He had printed it at his house, just to be safe.

“He lives on Emerald Street,” I said. “That’s a mineral. Also known as beryl.”

“Way ahead of you.” He held up the paper. He’d highlighted the route with a yellow marker. “Don’t forget who’s the lieutenant here.”

“Whatever you say.” The sidewalks had disappeared. We walked along a gravel shoulder. The houses sat back from the road, with flowers growing in rectangles of dirt, and large grassy yards. They looked like one-story LEGO houses.

We hit Emerald Street. “Right,” Khalfani ordered.

“Yes, sir.” A car with a loose muffler came up behind us and my palms got sweaty as I wondered if it was Ed DeBose. Part of me hoped he wouldn’t be home. The car rattled past. The driver was a lady with a big hairdo. I wiped my hands on my pants.

“Here it is,” Khalfani said.

And there it was: 1425 Emerald Street. I stopped and stared. We stood in the street in plain sight, like two deer waiting to get shot.

The house was half one thing, half another—white siding above and brick below. It looked heavy on the bottom. Bright green turf, like on an artificial football field, covered the porch and the steps leading to the door. An American flag fluttered on a pole sticking out from the front of the house.

The roses stood straight—like if they got out of line, they’d lose their recess. The grass looked like Dad’s hair after a trip to the barber, short and perfectly trimmed around the edges, which reminded me that I needed a haircut. My hair was getting bushy. If Grampa Clem had still been here, he’d have taken me to his barber.

Looking at this yard, this house, with everything perfect and in its place, I wanted to turn and run. This was a house I should have been to many times already, a yard I should have played in. Inside lived a man I should know. A man who if he didn’t exist, I wouldn’t exist.

A truck sat in the driveway to the left. It was the color of limes, sparkly clean, except the hood, which was dull green, like the olives Grampa Clem put in his tuna salad. A shell, like a camper, covered the back. The truck looked like a little house on wheels.

“What are we waiting for?” Khalfani asked.

“He’s probably not home,” I said.

“There’s a truck here.”

“It might not be his.” The license plate said GEMXPRT.
Gem expert.
That sure sounded like the license plate of a rock club president. Maybe Khalfani hadn’t noticed.

He nudged me toward the driveway.

I walked up between the truck and the yard. A white wooden fence stood beyond the truck. I was about to touch the olive-green hood when I saw a
NO TRESPASSING
sign on the gate. I pulled my hand back.

Khalfani pushed past me and strolled to the foot of the steps.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Ringing the doorbell. You’re too slow.”

“Wait.” I walked into the yard and stood in front of the rosebushes. I stretched my neck to look through the large living room window. The curtains were sort of see-through, like fog, but I couldn’t tell if anyone was home. I needed to think of something to say.

Hi, I’m Brendan Buckley, your grandson.
I couldn’t just say it like that, could I?

Good afternoon, I’m Brendan, Katherine’s son.
No. Too formal.

Hey, Gramps, what’s up?
Too Khalfani.

Hello, sir. I’m Brendan, and I think we might be related.
That sounded okay. I’d go with that.

“You want him to catch you spying on him?” Khalfani leaned on the black iron railing near the stairs.

“All right, all right.” I tiptoed past him, up the steps, and stood in front of the door. Khal ran his hand across the bars of the railing, making a pinging noise. “Shhh.” I put my finger to my lips.

My hand felt sweaty and shaky as I reached for the doorbell. A sticker on the screen door said
NO SOLICITING
. The lump in my throat grew to the size of a meteorite.

At the sound of the chime, a dog came bounding from somewhere inside. I jumped. My heart pounded so hard, I thought if I looked down, I’d see my shirt moving.

The animal barked and scratched at the door.

“I hope your grandpa’s nicer than his dog,” Khalfani said.