Free Verse (10 page)

I watch Mikey sit quietly on his porch. I wonder how long his grounding will go on.

I write:

Porch.

Worn boards.

Sit, wait, pace—

lonely, pointless time-wasting.

Creak.

I write:

Caboose.

Too late,

people pile flowers,

sweet and lonely, there.

Heartbreak.

I write:

Box,

secret, dangerous,

taped loosely closed,

falls open and hurts.

Mistake.

I hum my mother's favorite song and I write:

Birds,

feather-quiet,

slice between maples,

calm despite the branches.

Bravery.

•   •   •

Monday, I sneak my cinquains onto Miss Jacks's desk. Thursday is too far away, and the poetry is burning a hole in my pocket.

She sneaks them back onto my desk before the last bell. The bird poem is circled in red.

Oh!
she has written in the margin.
Oh, please enter this one, Sasha.

We're sitting at the table, me and Mikey. He is still grounded and is not supposed to be here.

“One of you needs to grease the pan,” Phyllis says.

“We do that for pizza, too?” I ask.

“You don't want your pizza to stick any more than you want your muffins to.”

Mikey doesn't move, so I grease the pan, since I know how now.

“Mikey, how are you with a can opener?” Phyllis slides him the can of sauce. He tries three times to get the can opener to hook onto the top of the can correctly. He slides the unopened can at me and takes the pan to finish greasing. I open the sauce. Phyllis has put herself in charge of rolling out the dough, since, as she puts it, we
are determined not to keep our hands clean. I've been to the sink three times already to wash, at her demand.

“Y'all are some of the gloomiest pizza bakers I ever laid eyes on,” Phyllis says to fill the silence.

“I'm sure we'll be more cheerful once the pizza comes out of the oven,” I reason.

Once the pizza comes out of the oven, Mikey and I gloomily sit on the front porch, picking off the toppings. Mikey has chosen pepperoni, pepperoni, and more pepperoni, and that seems to be the only part he wants to eat. Mine is mostly cheese with some mushrooms and tomatoes. I eat the mushrooms plain so I can taste them best.

“So what happened?” I ask. I know he knows I'm asking how much trouble he got in for the window.

“I have to see Mr. Powell again. And Shirley, she's real mad. She doesn't like when I act . . .” He wiggles back and forth till he can reach his toes down to the dirt. “She's just mad.”

“
My
Mr. Powell?” I've got a mouthful of mushrooms, and I forget to swallow them.

“Gross. Chew your food. I don't know. He's really old and he wears blazers.”

“That's
my
Mr. Powell. I didn't know you saw him, too.”

He picks at his pepperoni and shrugs with one shoulder.

I make up a cinquain about Mr. Powell and read it aloud:

“Counselor.

Tweed frown.

Always talking down.

Boring, boring, boring, boring.

Cured.”

Mikey smiles for maybe the first time since the lid came off the box last week.

•   •   •

Hubert calls me over for a job in the evening. I'm glad, because GUI-tars at the pawnshop have been selling. Two this week. Something about the spring in the air and the warmth of the sun. People want to sit outside and sing so they have an excuse to sit outside or an excuse to sing.

This time Hubert works alongside me. He says it's because it's a big job and he has to do the organizing, but I know it's really because he doesn't want me to read anything else. We go back to the outbuilding, which is still cluttered high with boxes of things. Hubert hands me a trash bag.

“Anything that's wet, toss.” I look from the trash bag to the window. It drizzled all night, and dampness has seeped in around the edges of the trash bag Hubert tacked up over the window. The papers we didn't get around to boxing sit in squishy clumps on the shelves.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It was my son, not you.”

“I was the grown-up,” I say, and Hubert smiles a little.

“I'm all the way growed,” he confides, “and most of the time I can't tell what Mikey's about to do, either.”

“He doesn't mean any . . . he doesn't mean nothing by it.”

Hubert takes boxes off a shelf. Without a word, he empties my dustpan of glass into a box and puts the box in the trash bag. He hands me the dustpan.

“He didn't like what he seen,” I tell Hubert.

Hubert dusts off the top of a box and moves it to another shelf. “I didn't like what he seen, neither.”

•   •   •

Mikey doesn't sleep. He sits at his window and stares at the yard. And I don't sleep. I sit on the opposite side of the glass. Mikey's just a little kid. I don't know how somebody his size could possibly hold all the things I know we're both feeling. I'm afraid if I walk away from the window, when I come back, Mikey won't be there anymore. I don't know where I think he's going to go. I just know that he and I are a lot alike, and that sometimes, when I'm feeling too many things to stand, I run.

When we can't stand sitting still anymore, I take Mikey to Town Center. We sit on a bench. We look at scattered flowers that are getting brown from sun and black from rain.

It's a beautiful night. The only lights are right here
in Town Center, and there are only two of those, one at each end. Still, the sky isn't completely dark. There's enough moonlight to see where the sky ends and the mountains begin. I can hear wind off in the trees, so thick it sounds like running water. I take a deep breath in and smell the wet mud and new leaves of spring.

We don't talk. Mikey and I have a hard enough time talking to each other on a good day. But there are words filling me up, and I need to get rid of them somehow. I sneak loose paper from my backpack. I write:

Sad things do happen,

even to little cousins

who ought to be safe.

I write:

This town shrinks and shrinks.

Moms like to sneak out at night

and never come back.

I write:

We were all born here,

but we don't have to die here.

There is a whole world.

I write:

I like the wind, though,

singing like it's been sad, but

things are better now.

•   •   •

I remember the way I felt the night I swore off poetry—the way the words bubbling up through my heart felt overwhelming, like maybe I could drown in them. Tonight, the words are welcome. I remember being unable to speak after Michael died. I remember not being able to find the words even to describe my own thoughts. It was the reason I kept losing chunks of time and waking up to realize what I'd broken, like the streetlight in Cary Fork, or Phyllis's GUI-tar. Whatever else poetry may do—make me remember, make me think about things—it gives me back the words that I can't always find.

•   •   •

“What did I do?” I ask Mr. Powell the following week. I don't like the sound of a conference, but that's what he's saying we have to have. The more I have to visit Mr. Powell, the more convinced I am that I really do have “friggin' issues.” Nobody else in my class sees him, not that I know of. Nobody in poetry club, either. The only other people I know who see him are the kid with no socks and Mikey. And Mikey has “friggin' issues.”

“You didn't do anything, Sasha. I'd just like to check in with your foster mother. I haven't met her yet.”

“If this is about the rope . . . ,” I venture. I figure he must have heard by now that I got in trouble in gym class for scaling a rope and refusing to come down.

Mr. Powell's mustache moves back and forth slightly. “Yes, I did hear about that.”

“Miss Jacks says to write, you have to think about perspective. The top of the rope was a different perspective from the bottom. Also, Anthony was at the bottom, and sometimes Anthony . . .”

“Mr. Tucker pushes your buttons.”

“Only in the halls. Not . . .” I wonder whether telling Mr. Powell that Anthony goes to poetry club is the same as telling classmates. I decide to be safe and not say anything, which makes two of us; Mr. Powell seems to be waiting for me, and I have no idea what he wants.

“You didn't tell me about poetry club,” he prompts at last.

“We learn new forms. There's this contest I might enter. You can win a scholarship.”

“That's a great opportunity.”

“I wouldn't win. But I might enter.”

“Why couldn't you win? Miss Jacks says you're quite talented.”

I think about the counselor poem I wrote for Mikey. I
giggle. But this makes me think about Mikey, and I stop smiling. Something about Mikey makes me uneasy lately. Something that feels like worry.

“Sasha?”

I don't care for the way Mr. Powell makes me talk. He asks questions and then he waits and waits to see what spills out. I don't remember what I tell him. Something about cinquains, I guess.

•   •   •

By the time the conference rolls around, I've made myself so nervous about it that I can't even write poetry. This is a problem, since I have a contest to prepare for.

Mr. Powell is always telling me to set goals. Michael always said the same thing. Well, my goal has become winning a poetry scholarship. Since I know now I won't be able to save enough in the suitcase for college—look how long it's taken me just to save half enough for a GUI-tar—I'm going to have to come up with a different plan for leaving.

At the conference, Phyllis smiles and nods and looks serious and is polite. She asks good questions. She doesn't make me feel like I'm in trouble.

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Powell asks me if I'll run an errand for him. I know he can't possibly need twenty-five copies of a leaflet about the PSAT at five in the evening and that he's just trying to get me out of the room, but I like using the copy machine, so I agree.
After I stack the warm copies on top of the machine, I wander around the office. I'm never here after hours, and it's strange to look at the fish swimming in their tank and think about how they live here all the time. One hundred percent of the day, this is where the fish are. They swim in circles. They bump into the little plastic trees and road signs and volcanoes. They eat flakes that you probably don't have to grease the pan to cook. They peek out at kids coming and going, in trouble.

When Phyllis comes out of Mr. Powell's office, she doesn't let me go back in. She tells me we have to hurry if we want to be home in time to fix something hot for dinner. “What did he tell you?” I ask in the car.

“He used a lot of big words,” Phyllis says. A few miles later, she adds, “Nothing, Sasha. He didn't tell me nothing.”

We roll on for a minute, quiet. Phyllis's car makes soft little rumbles, comfortable like only older engines sound.

“I wish it
was
me that broke the window,” I say.

“Mr. Powell mentioned that,” she tells me. I'm surprised. I don't remember intending to tell Mr. Powell about that. It must have slipped loose when I was thinking about Mikey.

“Why do you wish that?” Phyllis asks. She doesn't sound like she's judging, only curious.

“Because Mikey's only little,” I say. “He should get to be normal and grow up normal and go to college.”

Phyllis laughs. “I don't know if you've been to a college,
girlie, but it ain't exactly teeming with normal people.” She laughs again. “Never mind. Mikey'll be fine, Sash. He'll get to go to college, and so will you, if that's what you want.”

“It is.” I feel like my brother is sitting right next to me. I can almost smell him, a mix of sweat and smoke and cologne. “I want me and Mikey both to get to leave.” For reasons I don't completely understand, it's becoming important to me that if I get out, Mikey does, too.

“Hmm.”

We drive on in silence for a minute before I think to ask, “Why did you never leave?”

She glances at me. “Caboose?”

“Yeah.”

“What makes you think I never left?”

My head whips around. “You did?”

“On my nineteenth birthday. Me and Heath Christian drove for days. We took turns sleeping in the passenger seat. We got lost probably half a dozen times and kept ending up in weird parts of Ohio, but we finally got going. When we were both awake, we couldn't stop pointing out all the things was different over that way.”

“Which way was that?”

“We drove west. We were hell-bent on California, but long about western Missouri, the weather started looking a lot nicer outside the car than in it. He found a job doing
truck maintenance for a big rig outfit, and I found out I was expecting Miles.”

I watch the headlights reflect off the white line that disappears and reappears along the crumbling edge of the road. “Why'd you come back?”

“Heath Christian didn't turn out to be quite the man I thought he was,” she said, “and I found out I was expecting Sam. I needed help, and my family was here.”

“Do you still have family here?”

“Sure I do,” she says. “An aunt and a cousin. Mostly the others are with your brother, but they're still
here
. I can visit them up on the mountain. I can feel their presence.” She readjusts her grip on the steering wheel and makes a couple of small noises before she finds any more words. “This is where I choose to be, Sasha. My people are here.”

I try to imagine how it feels to
choose
Caboose. As long as I can remember, I've never considered that it was a choice. Michael wanted to escape so badly that his plan always felt like my own. Even now, as comfortable as I've started to feel with Phyllis, something in me still burns to escape. Sometimes, when I get frustrated at school or scared about things, I imagine running away again. I could take the money in the suitcase and use it to buy nice clothes that make me look older. I could get a job—maybe not something official, maybe just odd jobs like I'm doing now, but it would be enough to buy food, enough to
survive until I'm grown and can get one of those scholarships or college loans that Michael was always shoving me toward.

My plan isn't that simple anymore. I still want to follow Michael's wishes and leave the state. But now I'd want to take Mikey with me. He's a Michael Harless, too, even if he has another name before it. He's like another chance for Michael to get away. He should grow up someplace without secret papers in boxes. He should grow up someplace safe.

“If I left, I'd miss your songs,” I blurt out. I glance sideways at Phyllis. “And egg salad.”

“I'd like it if you didn't leave again,” Phyllis says. “I've chased you down enough, sweet girl.”