Operation Yes (5 page)

She pulled some cushions off the Ugly, Ugly Couch onto the floor.

“Try it here first,” said Miss Loupe. “For a guaranteed soft landing.”

Bo tried it, diving backward into the cushions, making them skid in two directions.

“Not like you've been launched from a cannon,” said Miss Loupe. “A
controlled
landing.”

Bo tried it again, more slowly. THUD! Still wrong.

He closed his eyes and replayed Miss Loupe's fall in his head in slow motion. There was the SMASH! when she was punched. Like glass breaking in a window. There was the stumble backward. OOF! Then there was … YES! He saw it! Her knees folded, her arms went limp, her neck was loose, but there right in the middle of her body was the engine, like the power that held up the jets as they hovered above the runway before touching down.

Or the way Taps seemed to hang in the air.

Or the way he felt at the top of a bounce on his pogo stick.

Weightless. Powerful.

He crumpled, each part of his body almost rolling down onto the cushions: First the side of his ankles touched, then his bent knees, the edge of his butt, his right arm, then the back of both shoulders as he flattened out and sank to the floor. SWOOSH! The cushions stayed in place this time.

Miss Loupe nodded. “Now somersaults.”

“What?” Surely she knew that Mrs. Heard had suspended him for somersaulting last year.

“Somersaults,” said Miss Loupe. “I can't show you anything else unless you do.”

Bo hopped up. He looked at the clock. “Can't you show me at least one fight move?”

Miss Loupe's hand made tight circles in the air. “Show me.”

Bo did. He somersaulted three times. No problems there.

Miss Loupe looked at the clock then too. “Something short,” she said. She moved so they both stood at one end of the
cushions on the floor. “This is something I showed Marc the first time he visited me in L.A., when I was in drama school. Surprised the heck out of him that I could do it! The choreography goes: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Or: one … two. One, two … THREE!”

“Like counting in jody calls?” Bo guessed.

“Not exactly. Choreography involves instructions for your body, not your voice.” She looked directly at him, her gaze steady. “One,” she said. “Slow. We make eye contact. That ensures both of us are ready to begin, so no one gets hurt.”

Usually, Bo avoided a teacher's direct stare. He lifted his eyebrows and widened his eyes to signal that he was, indeed, making contact. If he were doing this with Trey, he would have rolled his eyes back in his head and Trey would've snorted.

“Two,” she said. “Again, slow. Pull your fist back.”

Bo balled his hand and drew it back. “Like this?”

“Make it bigger,” Miss Loupe coached. “You want the audience to see the motion.”

Bo exaggerated his windup, sweeping his arm slowly back into the air.

“Next part,” said Miss Loupe. “This is quick! One: You swing; I block at the same time.”

He swung, and she stopped his fist with her hand.

“Good,” she said. She swiftly bent one knee and grabbed Bo's leg near his ankle. “Two. Gotcha!”

She looked up at him. “Now THREE! The big, slow finale! Over you go.”

“What?”

“Drop over my back and somersault onto the cushions,” said Miss Loupe. “As you go, I'll throw my hand up like I'm flipping you by your leg.”

Bo eyed the cushions, which were lined up behind her like a bumpy runway.

She straightened up. “It's easier with momentum,” she said. “Let's try it from the top.”

One. They made eye contact.

Two. He made a big show of pulling back his arm.

One. He punched. She blocked.

Two. She reached for his leg and …

“GO!” she said.

Whomp!
He flipped right over her and onto the cushions in a puff of green fuzz. He threw out his arms as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him.

“THREE!” said Bo. “I was leading then, right?” He flopped over onto his stomach and then scrambled to his feet, ready to go at it again.

“Right,” said Miss Loupe. “To the audience, it looks like I'm flipping you, but you did the work.” She smiled. “You also did the tango.” She shuffled her feet in a rhythm: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.

Bo laughed. Like he would ever be caught doing
that.

Miss Loupe made direct eye contact with him once more. “You have to promise me you won't do this at recess or anywhere else in school,” she said. “Only here, with supervision.”

How had she known what his recess plans were?

“You can trust me,” said Bo.

They tucked the cushions back onto the Ugly, Ugly Couch. He'd have to show Trey the flipping part at home after school. But maybe this afternoon, when Miss Loupe put on her stage shoes, he could take the lead again.

Gari's mom had to get new uniforms and new boots. None of her old ones from the attic fit. Even if they had, they weren't the right color anymore. The Army had switched from a black and dark green print to a digitized camouflage of sandy brown, gray, and light green. Gari thought it looked like the washed-out blur they put over someone's face on TV when they didn't want you to be able to identify them. That was the point of camouflage, she supposed, to stay hidden, but why did it have to be so ugly?

Gari's mom wore her uniform when the two of them went into the front office of Seattle Junior Academy and explained their situation. They asked for Gari's application fee back.

Gari remembered what she'd written on her application:

I like math and English, but my best talent is probably art. One day, I want my art to make big statements, about things that matter. I want to get started on these plans right away at Seattle Junior Academy.

She hadn't mentioned that she didn't know how to do that yet, exactly. She had lots of ideas, but so far, the only “big” thing she'd tried to plan was Tandi's campaign. And now, that might never happen.

The secretary said the application fee was nonrefundable, but maybe, in this case … well, she'd have to check. She apologized. “We don't have any other parents in the military.” At least, she didn't think so.

Next, they went to see a lawyer about guardianship papers. He made multiple copies of everything.

Gari sat in a nearby chair and poked her straw around the bottom chunks of ice in the tall cup of orange soda her mom had bought for her.

Then he asked about their finances. More copies. He asked about their house. Their car. More copies.

Gari fiddled with the straw wrapper, making a loop with one long end and one short. Then she folded it, by wrapping the strips back and forth around each other, into a tiny, flat, five-pointed shape. She used her fingernail to push a dent in each side, lifting the edges and shaping it into a 3-D star. There was a store near Seattle Junior Academy that sold colorful strips of paper in plastic tubes, just for making these stars. But a straw wrapper worked.

I need hundreds of these for Tandi's campaign. We can make a trail of them, from the front door to the lunchroom. When everyone gets to the cafeteria, we'll dim the lights, the posters will glow, and we'll wow them all.

Could Tandi carry that off without her? She doubted it. Tandi thought you told people what to do, like vote for you, and they did it. But it was harder than that. You had to see something in your head before you could make it happen. It didn't even matter if what you saw or what you made didn't last, like the glowy
lights or the paper stars; it was how people thought about it, and you, afterward that counted.

She dropped the star into the few drops of soda in the bottom of her paper cup. It transformed instantly into a bit of mushy paper. But she had already gotten what she needed from that one star. She would tell Tandi, and they would start folding paper stars tonight. She wasn't giving up. Not yet.

If only she could see a plan in her head that would make her mom change her mind. What if she could think of something to tell this lawyer, something horrible she'd done that would make it impossible for her mom to leave her?

No, that would make her mom mad. Gari hadn't done anything horrible anyway. Only imagined the entire U.S. Army computer system crashing and losing every record that her mom even existed. Only shot a dirty look at that recruiter in the mall. Only flipped through that book in the library about diseases, trying to come up with one she could fake.

She heard the lawyer asking about a will. Lots and lots of signing and copies followed that.

After they left the lawyer's office, they drove home. It was strange to be out with her mom in the middle of the day during the week. Her mom worked from an office inside their house, supervising her home health-care business, but she was usually too swamped with calls and paperwork and client referrals to go out much during the day, unless it was to meet a new patient or follow up on a complaint. What was going to happen to the nurses who worked for her? Would she have any clients left when she got back?

“Mom, you won't actually be
in
the war, will you?” said Gari. She and her mom had watched old World War II movies last year around Veterans Day. She knew this war was nothing like that. On the TV and in the newspaper, it was all about ambushes and roadside bombs and rocket attacks. And who was the enemy? Didn't they look just like the Iraqi people her mom would be helping?

Her mom pulled into their driveway. “Everywhere in Iraq is a war zone, at least on paper. I'll get hazardous-duty pay.” She unbuckled her seat belt, but she stayed in the car with Gari. “But no, I'll be on a secure American base, away from most of the violence, taking care of wounded soldiers and airmen, and probably some injured Iraqis too. We're the first stop, and then critical patients are flown back to the States for long-term rehab.” She picked up the folder of legal paperwork. “I'll be safe.”

Gari wasn't so sure. In the newspaper that morning, she'd seen a picture of an antiwar rally downtown. The people holding signs in the photograph had fake blood streaked on their faces. They had poured buckets of red paint on the sidewalk. And some of them were lying down in the street, their arms and legs as stiff as if they were dead.

A war was a war, wasn't it? And her mom would be right in it.

Room 208 began another week of school. Pledge. Announcements. Homework collected. Melissa began a schedule of who had had a turn in the Taped Space and who had not. Allison debuted a new pair of navy-blue shoes with tiny heels. Bo asked what they would be doing at the end of the day. Miss Loupe said, as always, “Wait and see.” They had just opened their math books when the librarian stopped by.

“Green Eggs and Ham!”
she swore in mock astonishment at the sight of the Ugly, Ugly Couch. There was a touch of sawdust in her loosely curled hair, which was barely contained by a striped scarf, and a splotch of gray paint on the light brown skin above her left elbow.

“Sorry to bother you,” Miss Candy said, still staring at the couch, “but do you still want your students to be Reading Buddies for a first-grade class?”

“Of course,” Miss Loupe replied.

“Good. I've got you paired with Mr. Nix. I was going to wait until next month, but he's breathing down my neck!”

She stroked the arm of the Ugly, Ugly Couch.

“I guess you're using this?” she said. “It would look great
tucked under the Reading Castle I'm building. Have you seen it? I could cover this with some purple fabric and …”

“Sorry, I have further plans for it,” Miss Loupe said. “But we'll be glad to invite our Buddies to come read on it one day.”

“Good,” Miss Candy said. “They'll like that. I'm starting a book club, if any of you want to join. Details will be in the next issue of
The Candy-Gram
!”

She popped out the door. Then she stuck her head back in.

“Have you started your report yet?” she said to Miss Loupe.

Miss Loupe shook her head. She patted the large stack of paper. “My class is going to help me this week.”

Miss Candy nodded and left. After the door closed behind her, Miss Loupe put down her math book and reached into her desk drawer. She brought out another picture frame.

“Remember how I told you that I dropped out of the Academy? Well, that makes me the only person in my family not in the military.”

As she talked, she let them pass the second frame around the room.

“My older sister flies C-130s for the Air Force. She's stationed in Japan. My younger brother is in his third year at the Air Force Academy. And as I told you, Marc joined the Army Special Forces. He's been in Afghanistan, near Kandahar, for several months now.”

As each member of Room 208 held the frame, they could see that it held a handwritten quote on lined notebook paper. They could also see that there was a long crack in the glass, from edge to edge.

The words said:

 

There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

 

“It's from a song,” Miss Loupe explained. “One of Marc's favorites. He sent this to me after I left the Academy and moved to California. He says the glass wasn't cracked when he mailed it, but I think it was.” She smiled. “He also swears he didn't let my cat, Nachos, eat a whole bottle of salsa during the Super Bowl, but that stain on the couch says he did.”

The frame had made it to the back row, where Trey was studying it.

“But why?” asked Allison. “Why did he send it?”

“I guess you could say that my dropping out of the Academy caused a crack in my family,” said Miss Loupe. “Mostly with my dad. I didn't want that to happen, but it did. Marc was trying to tell me that cracks are painful, but they can bring good things too.”

Allison looked at Marc's picture on Miss Loupe's desk.
Cute
and
nice,
she thought.

Miss Loupe drew a flat, teardrop-shaped brass object from the neck of her canary-yellow shirt. It was attached to a slender chain.

“Marc also sent me this. Does anyone know what it is?” No one said anything. “My name, Loupe, is a French word that means ‘imperfect gem.' This —”

She pressed her fingernail into a notch on the teardrop, causing
a glass oval to swing out from inside the brass casing on a tiny hinge.

“This is also a loupe. ‘Loupe, with a little l,' Marc calls it. It's a special magnifying glass for detecting imperfections.”

She walked back to Bo, who had just taken the frame from Trey. She placed the lens in front of his eye. “Look at Marc's note. What do you see?”

Bo hesitated. “Black lines?”

“Yes, that's the pen ink. What else?”

“String? Or hair or something …”

“Those are the tiny fibers that hold the paper together. An expert could tell you from those fibers exactly where the paper was made. Isn't it amazing how much information you can get from something so ordinary?”

She took the frame from Bo and walked back to the front. “What other writing could we look at?”

Zac offered the last issue of
The Candy-Gram
, the one with his review in it.

“Dots!” he said when Miss Loupe placed her loupe over his words.

“Yes, because computer printers, unlike felt pens, shoot out hundreds of tiny jets of ink.”

“Like when they do tattoos on TV,” Rick said. “Can we look at yours with the loupe?”

“I don't think that will be necessary,” Miss Loupe said, closing the lens. “But the point is that nothing is ordinary if you examine it closely. And the things that make someone imperfect are also the things that make them who they are. That's one thing I learned
at drama school: how to use small things to make an audience see me in a new way.”

She sat down on the couch, crossed her legs, and held her back stiff and her hands folded in her lap.

“Am I a proper young lady who is meeting her future in-laws for the first time?”

She flipped to lie on her back with one hand over her belly. “Or an old woman who has eaten too much pie?”

She curled up on one arm and licked her paws. “Or a very spoiled cat?

“It's all in how I make you look at me, isn't it?”

She got up from the couch and pulled a large box from behind her desk. She pushed it into the middle of the Taped Space.

“Marc asked for little toys and school or health supplies that he and his buddies can give to the kids in Afghanistan. If you want to help, you can drop your ordinary things into this box. I promise you those kids need a new way of seeing us.” She placed a pack of lined paper and a package of felt-tipped pens into the box. “This is what I'm sending.”

She smiled. “And while you're looking at things in a new way, if you notice a crack, would you please let me know for the report? You may borrow my loupe if you like.”

She placed the framed quote next to Marc's picture, and they returned to the math lesson, but just like that, the class started finding cracks everywhere.

Allison noticed a crack while checking her hair in the mirror in the girls' bathroom. Why did that crack have to be in the
middle, where it divided her face into two parts? It made her feel like when her dad fought with her mom over who got to see her when. She brought in two sets of hair ribbons for the box.

Martina found the same crack, but she liked it. What if everybody could see both halves of her, Filipino and white, instead of one or the other, all the time? She smiled at herself in the mirror and stared at the place where her two mouths came together. She brought in some toothpaste.

Dillon thought about the three huge moving crates his family had shipped out to Germany. Hundreds of his LEGOs were squeezed in there, along with his mom's green-and-white china, his dad's half-rebuilt motorcycle, and his sister's piles of comics. What if the boat delivering the crates developed a crack? He took his ruler and rubbed at the groove in the side of his desk, making it millimeters deeper. He brought in a large bottle of glue.

Trey drew a map of Afghanistan based on the one in his social studies book. When he got home, he crumpled up the paper and stuffed it into a glass of iced tea that his mom had left on the counter. After it dried, he carefully opened the map and admired the yellowed “old” cracks in his authentic-looking document. He thought about next spring, when his dad would deploy again to the Middle East. He brought in a set of colored pencils.

Melissa politely pointed out a crack in the lunchroom cash register to Mrs. Purdy, the cafeteria manager.

“Do you see this crack here, ma'am?” she asked. “It might affect your work.”

Mrs. Purdy's hot-pink fingernails stopped tapping the register's keys. She peered at the crack, which ran all the way up the side
of the dull gray machine. “Oh, honey, don't fret about that. This machine's older than Jesus.”

She tucked back a tight gray curl that had escaped from her hairnet, smiled warmly at Melissa, and resumed ringing up her lunch. Afterward, though, she ran her hand over the side of the register and frowned.

Melissa brought in several packages of crackers. As she carefully tucked them into the box, she wondered if Marc would get her joke.

Shaunelle found a crack in the back of her favorite bookcase that weekend when her family left the TLF and settled into their three-bedroom base house. She smiled as she covered the crack with her collection of mysteries. She didn't have to share a room with her sisters anymore, so no one would tell on her if she stayed up all night reading. She could invite Aimee and Martina over. Without Allison. She brought in a mini-flashlight with batteries.

Bo wasn't sure how great cracks were. Or mistakes. He had a golf ball he had found near the driving range that was stamped on one side with a picture of an F-15E. On the other side were the words

 

There are no mulligans in combat

 

Which meant, basically, “Don't mess up, or you'll die.”

Bo knew there was one dad who hadn't come back from his deployment. His flight suit was displayed in a glass case on the bottom floor of the base education building, surrounded
by original nose art from World War II planes, photographs of Vietnam-era generals, and old drawings of the base from the 1940s. Bo always walked quickly by that case when he entered the building, on his way to the library, which was in the back of the ground floor. But he knew that it was a light tan flight suit, the color of a Middle Eastern desert, so that meant the death had been recent, not Vietnam or one of the world wars.

He asked Miss Loupe one more question about cracks on Friday afternoon, moving up to her desk while Trey was still gathering his things.

“How do you know if a crack is good or bad?”

Miss Loupe leaned toward him. “You don't always know. But the first step is finding them.”

Bo tried one more time.

“Does your dad still think you made a mistake about the Academy?” he asked.

Miss Loupe was surprised. She looked unsure how to respond.

“He must,” she finally answered. “He hasn't spoken to me since.”

 

That weekend, Bo's dad offered him a ride out to the flight line, to meet some jets coming back from a deployment.

He liked riding in his dad's official car, a blue sedan with a white top (so everyone could see the command car coming) and an ever-squawking radio (so his dad could stay on top of flight operations) and a battered thermos of strong coffee (which his dad took everywhere) on the floor of the front seat. The thermos
rolled and bumped against Bo's feet as they turned onto the road to the flight line.

When they reached the red lines on the concrete that marked the secured area, his dad stopped and the two of them got out to inspect the car's tires. Anything, even a tiny rock, that stuck in the treads could get dropped on a runway and sucked down a jet engine.

“Why are there cracks in tires, anyway?” asked Bo. “Why don't they make them smooth?”

“You wouldn't be able to keep the car on the road, for one thing,” his dad said. “The treads help create friction between the tire and the road.”

Bo flicked a chunk of gravel out of one deep groove. He'd just saved the Air Force millions of dollars in damage! Millions! They should pay him to do this.

They climbed back in the car.

“What about the planes? Do they look for cracks in them?”

“All the time, in the engine shop. One undetected crack can mean a lost jet and two dead crewmen.”

“What happens if you make a mistake while flying?”

“We train
not
to make mistakes,” said his dad.

“But if you do?”

“We use the ejection seat,” said his dad. “We train how to use that correctly too.”

“What if
that
has a crack in it?” said Bo.

“Better hope you've been living right,” said his dad. “But that's not going to happen.” He was driving slowly down the side of the runway. “Are you worried about something?”

Bo blinked. Was he?

“I'm proud of how you've managed to keep your nose clean at school so far.”

“Well,” said Bo. “It's actually … better. Miss Loupe is kind of crazy and she lets us get on her couch and play games and —”

His dad looked sideways at him. “What happened to math and reading and all that?”

“Oh, that stuff's still there.”

“Hmmm,” said his dad. “Well, in any case, I don't think Gari will want to hear about mistakes and cracks when she gets here. Plenty of cracks in her life already, if you know what I mean.”

Not really. When Gari got here, if she hung out with the pack of girls in his class and left him alone, she'd be fine.

“Besides that, I don't believe in thinking too much about mistakes. If you do, then that's the only thing in your head. When I fly, I think about what I want to do right, not what I'm trying
not
to do wrong. Same thing when I play golf. I think about where I want the ball to go, not about the sand trap.”

He slowed the car and looked at Bo.

“So, here's what you can be thinking about: If you can keep doing the right thing at school, I've arranged for you to meet the Flying Farmer at the air show.”