My Name Is Not Easy (42 page)

M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

sort of step, like he was trying to remember how to walk.

And before I could even think about what I was doing, I dropped my duffl

e and started running toward him, sobbing

and sobbing until there weren’t any tears left inside me. Luke was crying, too, only you wouldn’t have hardly been able to tell it. He just stood there, as rooted as a tree, tears running down his cheeks like they’d always been there. Like he’d been born in tears. Th

en he wiped his face with the sleeve of

his shirt, grabbed my duffl

e, and we walked into the school

together.

We didn’t try to make our steps match, but they did match, perfectly. When we reached the door and I turned around to look back at the bus, I realized that all the others were just standing there, watching us. Most of the girls were crying, too, and Sister Mary Kate held her hand to her chest.

Th

at big bus just sat there behind us all, shiny as shit.

“Damn bus,” I muttered.

It was the fi rst time in my life I ever swore out loud.

Luke took me to his secret place, his and Bunna’s, and he made a big deal about how nobody was supposed to know about it, so I never told him that I already knew. I’d seen the two of them sneaking off and had followed them to see if I could get some ammunition to use against Bunna. I’d gotten so sick of Bunna teasing me, calling me Snowbird—I got my ammunition, too, all right. It came in the form of Bunna’s toy gun, hidden in a box in their secret hideout. Bunna was too
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e
big to play with toy guns, and when I started calling him Roy Rogers, he quit calling me Snowbird. Th

at’s how ten-year-olds

deal with stuff . Right before they turn into teenagers and learn how to kiss instead.

Sister Mary Kate kept telling us that God had called Bunna home early for a special reason. So when Luke took me to their secret hideout, I asked him about it.

“Do you believe that God called Bunna home for a special reason?”

“No,” Luke said.

Th

ere was no way I could hide how bad it made me feel to hear him say that.

“I believe like Iñupiaqs believe,” he said real quick, watching me.

I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I’d start crying all over again.

“After a person dies, you gotta name a baby after them,”

he said. “Th

e baby is the spirit of that person coming back.

Th

at’s how you bring them back alive. With the name.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“With Bunna? You believe it with Bunna?” I had to know.

Luke stared out at the river like he never even heard me.

His face was hard and dark and still, like a stone in the bottom of a moving river.

“I never seen it yet with Bunna, but that’s how it works,”

he said fi nally. “People say that, you know? Th

ey tell us how

we’re just like the ones we’re named for. Like me. My
aaka
says
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M Y N A M E I S N O T E A S Y

I walk the same way the one I was named after used to walk.

Exact same way.”

I looked at him, trying to imagine something about his walk a person might identify as someone else’s. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “Guess I don’t have that kind of name.”

Luke smiled all of a sudden. “Yeah, but you know what they say about snowbirds, right?”

“You aren’t supposed to mess with them?” I gave Luke a don’t-mess-with-me kind of look.

Aaka Mae used to chase after boys who tried to hunt snowbirds, chase them with a broom, and if you were one of those boys you better hope she didn’t catch you.

“Th

e old women call them God’s messengers,” Luke said.

I smiled then, because this idea made me happy. But Luke wasn’t looking at me. He was thinking hard about something else, something serious.

“I never eat
uunaalik
for a long time,” he said fi nally.

I didn’t know what
uunaalik
was and couldn’t fi gure what eating it had to do with snowbirds. Or with Bunna. But I didn’t say anything. I just looked up at the birch leaves and watched the way they fl ickered in the sunlight.

“Th

at’s whale meat and blubber, cooked,” Luke said.

“
Uunaalik
—the only time we get to eat it is right after they catch a whale. After they freeze the
maktak,
they can’t cook it that way anymore.”

He was fi ddling with Bunna’s toy gun, and I knew better than to say anything. I didn’t have a clue why he wanted to talk about cooked blubber all of a sudden, but with Luke you
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H E ’ S M Y B R O T H E R / C h i c k i e
just have to wait sometimes. He’ll explain things, eventually.

Th

at’s how he is.

“I haven’t been home for spring whaling in nearly three years,” he said at last. “When it comes to whaling, I’m only about 11 years old. Th

at’s how old I was last time I tasted

uunaalik
.”

He sat there, just playing with that little tin gun, pulling the trigger back and forth so hard, it seemed like he was about to break it. Like he didn’t even notice what he was doing.

When he fi nally let go of the trigger, the gun made a sharp little clicking sound.

“Th

e snowbirds come in the spring, right before whaling, so when you see the fi rst snowbird, you know right away the whales are coming. Th

at’s why they call them God’s messen-

gers,” he said.

Th

e way he said the word
messengers
made it sound serious, but I looked up at him, smiling, because a funny idea had just popped into my head.

“Th

ree whole years,” I said, “and all you get here is a girl named Snowbird who can’t even fl y.”

Luke tossed Bunna’s gun back into the box and laughed for real, which I don’t think he’d done in a long time.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Could be worse.

Could be a lot worse.”

I looked at Luke, and a strange thought came into my head:
he’s my brother now.
And it didn’t have anything to do with Bunna, either. Th

at was the strange part. Maybe nobody

else would have understood it—him with pitch-black hair and
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