Operation Yes (12 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, allowing a pause for dramatic effect, “prepare for a startling demonstration of the F-15E's power, stealth, and speed….”

 

In the cafeteria, Mrs. Purdy jerked open the door to the loading dock behind the lunchroom and hurled broken pieces of cookies and corn muffins into the Dumpster. Then she stood in the fresh air, pinching her two tiny cross earrings between her fingers and trying to breathe slowly. When she noticed the lone jet streaking toward the school, she automatically shifted her hands to cover her eardrums. About fifty feet away, in the deepening grass, was a loupe, but she couldn't see it.

 

Mr. Nix was hurrying back from the supply room with a can of blue spray paint. Far down the hallway, in his classroom, a TV screen filled with the image of blood-soaked couch cushions. Thirty-two first graders screamed. Mr. Nix was too far away; he didn't hear it.

 

Miss Candy sat on the floor of her dark storage closet, the shelves swaying around her. How was she going to explain to Mrs. Heard how all the missing assessments had turned into a pile of tattered and smudged paper in
her
library? What would she say to the teachers who had done the paperwork twice? She popped a butterscotch drop into her mouth. She could barely taste it.

 

BOOM!
The demo jet screamed over Mrs. Purdy, then Mr. Nix, and then Miss Candy, all in a microsecond, before it streaked over Mrs. Heard's office, rattling her three tiny squares of windowpane and shaking clouds of dust from the ceiling tiles.

Gari dove to the floor at the blast of noise. Her head hit the edge of Mrs. Heard's desk, knocking her glasses off her face. At first, she went numb. Then Bo, followed by Trey, Rick, Sanjay, Zac, Allison, Melissa, Aimee, and Martina, laughed. Gari felt every bit of that.

 

Miles away, Miss Loupe held Nachos tightly in the living room of her parents' house. They all waited together.

 

And way, way on the other side of the world, the men of Operational Detachment Alpha 510 were searching for a missing member of their team. They couldn't find anything at all.

Bo's dad didn't speak for a full minute after they'd come inside the house. When he'd gotten Mrs. Heard's phone call to pick them up, he'd been at a meeting with the mayor of Reform, discussing last-minute details for security at the air show. He was still in his uniform, the dark blue pants and the light blue shirt that he wore when he wasn't flying. His command pilot wings and name tag were pinned above his pocket. His silver-trimmed blue flight cap was on the kitchen counter beside his car keys.

Bo stared at the long, red
REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT
tag on his dad's tangle of keys. He listened to the clock above the stove tick from mark to mark. Gari was sitting at one of the tall counter chairs, a bag of ice pressed to her eye. Bo wished he'd asked for ice for his foot, where Gari had stomped on it.

“The girls' table started it,” Bo finally said.

His dad held up a hand. “This is not about who started what. This is about why the two of you can't get along at school.”

Indy, who was lying on the linoleum near her food dish, got up and slunk from the room.

“I thought it would be a good idea for Gari to be in the same class as you. I thought you would show her the ropes. I thought
you would be the one person who would welcome her and make her feel at home here.”

His dad paused before he thumped a stiff forefinger against the counter.

“You've already lost sight of the good thing I gave you to think about. But this is bigger than that. I'm telling you now that if there is one more incident like this, one more time when I hear of this kind of foolishness … one of you is leaving that classroom. And it won't be Gari.”

“I don't care,” said Gari. “I don't care which class I'm in.”

“You've had way too much disruption already,” said Bo's dad. “I won't move you. But Bo might do better in a classroom with more … structure.”

“What?” said Bo. “What's that mean?”

“It means that I've heard complaints about Miss Loupe from the School Commission. It means that I've given her the benefit of the doubt, and I've hoped that you could handle yourself with such a young, inexperienced teacher. But maybe I was wrong.”

“But she wasn't even there!” said Bo. “She's gone! Marc's gone! We have a stupid substitute who doesn't even —”

“It doesn't matter who's here and who's gone. I expect you to know what the right thing to do is and DO IT.”

Bo's words broke out of the place where he'd tried to shut them in. “It does matter who's here! What if
you
aren't here? Mom said you might be leaving! She said they could send you to Afghanistan!”

Gari looked up and took the bag of ice away from her eye.

His dad sighed and leaned forward on the counter. He lowered his voice. “I might. I'll tell you as soon as I know something for sure.”

“But you
want
to go! You want to say yes!” said Bo. “How come you always get to say YES, and I always have to say NO?”

He pulled his house key out of his pocket and ripped off the
REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT
tag. He threw it on the counter. Gari jumped as it slid past her elbow.

“Fine. Who cares where I live? Who cares what I want to do? Who cares if the only thing that gets REMOVED is
me
?”

Mrs. Purdy was arguing with herself as she drove. She was on her way to the base air show, with a VIP ticket given to her by Colonel Whaley. The invitation had been hand delivered to her by Bo and Gari, along with their written apology for the food fight. Even though she had to drive by Young Oaks, she was not going in to the school. Why would she? It was Saturday. Today, she was invited to the guests-only lunch in the colonel's tent, catered by Hog Heaven. Today, she had a padded front-row seat for the Thunderbird show. Today, she hoped someone, somewhere, would get good news.

Yet she found herself slowing at the entrance to the school.

She shuddered at the memory of all those cornbread muffin crumbs, which were the same color as the yellowed linoleum floor. That spreading ocean of chocolate milk! And then yesterday, as she closed up for the day, she had tripped over a spinning roll of masking tape and nearly broken her foot.

She knew where it had come from. It had escaped from that horrible junk pile in her otherwise immaculate and well-ordered lunchroom. But why had she picked it up, and why was it still in her purse now, and why couldn't she stop thinking about it?

Mrs. Purdy and the roll of tape swerved into the school's parking lot and pulled up behind the cafeteria's loading dock.

 

At the air show, Bo plunged his hand into a tall plastic tub lined with a black garbage bag and filled with cubes of ice and dozens of cans of soda. Freezing water dripped from the cans as he handed them to a woman who struggled to keep two curly-headed kids seated in a double stroller.

“Two grapes, one orange,” he said. “Six dollars.”

He rubbed his knuckles against his shirt. They were bright red from the cold, and his fingers were going numb. He had known they would be pulling duty of some sort after the food fight, but this didn't seem fair. The line for drinks was getting longer every time he looked up, and worst of all, the booth his dad had assigned to him and Gari faced the rear of the flight line, as far away from show center as you could get. They could hear the announcer booming out introductions to the acts, but they couldn't see a thing.

Every other year, every other air show, he'd stood next to his dad and watched every single act, from start to finish.

“Come on, Gari. I'll be right back, I promise! I have to see the Flying Farmer. All you have to do is cover for me for a few minutes.”

She ignored him, smiling sweetly at the next customer.

“Can I help
you
?” she said, emphasizing the word
you
, which clearly meant she wasn't going to help
him.

Maybe she didn't understand.

“He looks like an old hick from the sticks,” he said, eyeing the
line and scooping out sodas as fast as he could. “You know, with torn overalls and a beat-up straw hat? He hobbles up to the plane with a cane and climbs in. Then, all of a sudden, WHOOSH! He ‘accidentally' makes the plane
take off
!”

Bo put a can of soda through a burst of unexpected speed.

“He's zooming everywhere, pretending he doesn't know how to fly!”

He propelled the can into an out-of-control loop and a wild dive.

“The announcer is yelling at him to ‘LAND! LAND!' but he can't, and he flips upside down and —”

Gari snatched the can from him and said to the man in front of their booth, “I'm sorry. He'll get you another soda that's not …
traumatized.
”

Bo scooped out another soda and tried again.

“What if I trade you for time to see something else? Like the jet-powered outhouse? It shoots flames out the top!”

Gari collected two dollars for the soda. She thanked the customer warmly. She said nothing to Bo.

“Okay, I get that you're mad,” he said. “But I have to see the Flying Farmer! And you have to take a turn with these freezing drinks. Look at my hands!”

“Yeah?” Gari said, turning on him and changing tactics. “Well, look at my forehead! Isn't it hilarious? Doesn't it make you want to
laugh
?”

A large purple bruise had spread above her glasses, from where her nose met her right eyebrow and up into her hairline.
There was an angry dent in the center where she had hit it on the corner of Mrs. Heard's desk.

“I didn't do that,” Bo protested. “You did. It probably won't leave a scar. Not like what you gave me.”

Gari gave him an incredulous look. “There's nothing wrong with your foot. I just stomped on it. A little.”

Bo ignored the next customer in line and lifted his pant leg. “No, I'm talking about — Don't you remember giving me
this
?”

Gari stared at his hook-shaped scar.

“There was a big muddy lake with broken pine trees sticking out everywhere,” she said slowly, remembering. “We were swimming, and then you said … you said there were giant, bloodthirsty,
girl-eating
lake sharks!” She pushed her glasses onto her nose and winced when they bumped her bruise. “I thought you meant it!”

“You grabbed that tree branch and sent me to the hospital!”

“I didn't know it had a fishing hook stuck in it! You were chomping your teeth and coming at me with one eye turned sideways! You were terrifying!”

“I was?” Bo felt strangely happy.

“Excuse me,” said a woman wearing a floppy hat and carrying a red, white, and blue purse. “Can I get my drink? Sometime today?”

Bo wrapped a clean plastic grocery bag around his stinging hand and stuck it into the ice to get her a cherry soda.

“What were you doing with those toys at school anyway?”

“They aren't toys,” Gari said. “They're pieces of
art.
But now, thanks to you and your whole stupid lunch table, they're officially ‘weapons,' and Mrs. Heard has them locked up in her desk drawer!”

 

Mrs. Purdy entered the back of the cafeteria with her key. She opened her purse. The roll of tape lay there, nestled between her sunglasses and two tightly capped bottles of nail polish.

She sat down at one of the long tables, which smelled pleasantly of the lemon-scented ammonia with which she'd doused it. She tore off several small sections of the wide tape and pressed them lightly to the table. Uncapping one of the bottles of nail polish, she painted a single swipe of fluorescent color on half of the torn pieces. Then she recapped the bottle and screwed off the top of the second vial. She dipped the tiny brush into the glittery polish and gave each of the remaining blank pieces of tape a bold swipe of this contrasting color. Mrs. Purdy peeled each strip of tape from the table, and alternating colors as she went, carefully applied each piece to the back of one of the chairs surrounding the tables where Miss Loupe's class usually sat. That should do it!

 

Over the loudspeaker, the announcer broke into a yell of mock horror:

“Mr. Farmer, can you hear me? Sir! Sir! Turn the plane around! NO, NO! Not that way! SLOW DOWN! DO NOT TAKE OFF! DO NOT …”

Bo wiped his wet hands on his jeans. He had to see the Flying Farmer. Even if he couldn't stand next to his dad, they would at least be looking at the same sky.

He wiggled his stiff fingers into his back pocket and pulled out a green army figure.

“Mrs. Heard doesn't have this one.”

“Where did you …?” Gari squeezed her eyelids together briefly. “I mean, how did you …?”

“OH, MY GOODNESS, FOLKS! HE'S IN THE AIR!” the announcer cried. “WATCH OUT FOR YOUR HATS! HOLD ON TO YOUR BABIES!”

“It's the one that started the fight,” said Bo. “I picked it up off our table. But I still don't understand why you —”

Gari took it from his hand. The plastic figure was wearing a helmet, but no gun. Instead, it was carrying a medical kit.

“Five grape sodas and one diet, please,” said a man, waving a twenty-dollar bill.

Gari pushed the army figure into her pocket. She reached around Bo into the tub of sodas. “Go,” she told him.

Bo hesitated. He suddenly felt strange about leaving Gari to run the booth by herself. “Are you sure you can —”

Gari set three cans of soda on the ledge behind the counter, topped them with two more, and balanced the last one on the apex of her pyramid. She lifted the whole stack in one motion up over the booth's edge and into the customer's outstretched hands, plucking the twenty-dollar bill out of his grasp with the crook of one finger on the return.

As she swiftly counted back his change, the man nodded his approval. “You're as good as them gals at Hog Heaven!” He tipped her two dollars.

“Thanks, but it isn't heaven for hogs,” Gari said to his back as he left the booth. She looked at Bo. “Why are you still here? Go see your stupid Flaming Farmer!”

Bo opened his mouth to correct her, and then closed it carefully. The announcer was saying in a voice of exaggerated calm: “Mr. Farmer. Mr. Farmer. We're going to talk you down. Can you hear me? MR. FARMER!”

Bo ran toward show center.

 

Mrs. Purdy smiled at her handiwork, which graced the circle of chairs surrounding each table. Girls would sit in the seats marked with neon pink, and boys would sit between them, in the ones marked with sparkly blue. They would all be responsible for making sure their mutual table was immaculate when they cleared their trays. She plunked the roll of sticky tape down in the middle of one of the tables. It would be ideal for picking up every last crumb from the floor.

All she had to do now was straighten the cover over that stack of junk — my goodness, half that ugly couch was visible! — and she could be off to the air show. How had the blanket slipped down?

But when she tugged at the corner of the woolen cloth, something under it moved. Mrs. Purdy froze. She had seen a rat in her lunchroom once, exactly six years and forty-eight days ago.
She wound her purse strap tighter about her wrist and peeled back the blanket.

An orange cat peered up at her.

“Nachos!” said a voice.

Mrs. Purdy turned to see Miss Loupe, who rushed past her and scooped up the cat from the couch. Miss Loupe's usually spiky hair was flat against her head. She had curved, dark half-moons under her eyes. She wore a gray sweatshirt that read
AIR FORCE
across the chest, and baggy gray pants that were many sizes too big for her.

“I'm sorry. I brought him to school with me,” she said. “I didn't think anyone would be here, and then he got away, and I …” Her voice faded.

Mrs. Purdy, who was fighting the urge to shove Nachos and his thousands of puffy, shedding cat hairs out the back door, instead reached over and patted Miss Loupe's arm.

“Honey, honey, it's okay. When did you get back? Is there news?”

Miss Loupe sank down onto the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch and put Nachos on her lap. Her skin was blotchy around the edges of her cheeks. “Yes, there is.”

She put one hand to her neck as if to hold on to something, but there was nothing there. She tightened her fist and kept going.

“They found Marc,” she said.

Mrs. Purdy let out her breath louder than she meant to.

“He's alive,” Miss Loupe said quickly. “But he — I don't know if I can — they won't —”

Miss Loupe looked past Mrs. Purdy to where a roll of tape was lying on a lunch table. Why was her tape in here? Why were there bits of tape on the backs of those chairs? She struggled to focus. She pulled Nachos up from her lap and squeezed him against her chest. He stretched out his bone-white front claws in protest. She tried again.

“He keeps calling for the rest of his team, and they …”

Miss Loupe fixed her eyes on the glossy enamel American flag that Mrs. Purdy had pinned to her stiffly pressed white collar.

“I shouldn't have left the Air Force. I shouldn't be a teacher,” she said. “My dad was right. I shouldn't be safe, not when …”

Nachos didn't move as tears ran into his deep fur.

Mrs. Purdy set down her purse and wrapped her arms around Miss Loupe, puffy cat and all.

 

Hours and hours later, after the air show was over, and the military police had directed hundreds of souvenir-laden cars in slow-moving lines off the base, and the vendors had broken down their striped cloth tents, and the trash bags filled with sticky soda cans and torn foil burger wrappers had been carted away, and the planes had been secured, and the reporter for the
Reform Chronicle
submitted her article that estimated attendance at “up to 30,000 eager spectators,” the final sweep of the flight line began.

Gari and Bo stayed for this too, because Colonel Whaley felt that a bit more Progress could be achieved with this last bit of Work.

“Mrs. Purdy would
love
to see us doing this,” Bo said to Gari as they inched along, staring down at the ground. “I wonder why she didn't show up. She must still be mad.”

They wore rubber gloves and held plastic bags. Their mission, along with the hundreds of troops standing shoulder to shoulder with them, was to inspect two miles of runway and two miles of taxiway for anything that could cause Foreign Object Damage.

“FOD,” said Gari. “Sounds like a bad lunch.”

Together, they found bits of metal, lots of twisted plastic straws, and a dead mouse. Gari found a bright red metal bolt.

“Oh, man, can I have that?” Airman Peters said. “I'll trade you a pack of gum for it. Slightly squished, but unopened.” He offered the gum to her.

“No way,” Airman Kresge said, plucking the bolt from Gari's hand. “I need it more than you do.”

“The organizers place a few objects out here on purpose,” explained Peters, still eyeing Gari's find. “To make us look carefully. If you find one, you get —”

He lurched for the red bolt, but Kresge closed his fist around it.

“A day off from work,” he said. He grinned, placed the free pass into the shirt pocket of his fatigues, and buttoned it.