Operation Yes (7 page)

At the airport, Gari's mom pressed an ancient-looking, dark green plastic army figure into Gari's hand.

“I want you to have this,” she said.

Gari nodded. She didn't trust any of the words that were rising up in her throat. She felt like if she said any of them, she would start throwing up and not be able to stop.

“My commander gave this to me the day I left the Army for the civilian world,” her mom said. “She told me I didn't have to put in my papers, and that I could always come back.”

She wrapped Gari's fingers around the army figure and squeezed her hand. “At the time, I couldn't give everything to the Army and to a baby too, so I chose you. Now, maybe I can give something that I couldn't give then. Do you understand?”

Gari didn't dare look at the battered figure. She didn't want to cry in front of all these people. She shoved it into her pocket.

“All the time,” her mom said.

Gari couldn't say anything, not even the response her mom was waiting for.

So she allowed her mom to hug her so hard that her chest hurt. She allowed the attendant at the airline desk to use her
camera to take a picture of her and her mom, arms around each other as if nothing were happening. She allowed her feet to walk her body onto the airplane and the plane to lift her off the ground.

I know I have to leave. I know you have to go too. But I'm coming back. So are you. Mom, we have to have a Plan B.

Bo tried to explain to Gari what a waste of time Miss Loupe's class was.

“There's this stupid Taped Space, and she'll try to get you all interested in it,” he began, but Gari groaned.

“It's four o'clock in the morning,” she said, leaning her head against the car window. “In Seattle, it's four o'clock in the morning.”

She didn't even bother looking out the window as they drove slowly out of base housing toward the main gate. All the houses looked exactly alike anyway. Gari closed her eyes and stroked Indy's fur. Bo's dog was the only part of North Carolina that she liked. The dog, which was snuggled on her lap in the front seat, let out a whimper of support and licked her face.

Normally, her aunt had told her, she and Bo would be walking to school, along with most of the kids who lived on the base.

“But I'll drive you today so we can take care of your paperwork.”

Ugh. Walking. That probably meant getting up even earlier. Yesterday, Aunt Donna and Uncle Phil had let her stay home
since her flight had gotten in late the night before, and she hadn't adjusted to East Coast time. She'd wanted to stay home this morning too, because who starts school on a Friday? But Aunt Donna had sent Indy into Gari's bedroom. The dog had jumped up onto her bed and licked her neck until she had had to struggle out from under the covers. She had splashed some water on her face and then sat in the kitchen staring at a glass of orange juice instead of drinking it. Beside the glass was the house key Uncle Phil had given her. The key was attached to a bright red nylon strip of stiff cloth that had bold white letters on it:
REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT
.

“Bo has one,” he'd said. “We all do. It makes the key hard to lose.” He had smiled, but all Gari could think was how much his voice sounded like her mom's. And her mom wasn't there.

In the car, Gari opened one eye and glanced at herself in the little mirror on the sunshade. Brown curls sticking out every which way, red cat-eye glasses, and her old but comfy jeans with a plain green T-shirt. She still had crease marks on her cheeks from the pillow.

Bo was going on about how the Taped Space (whatever that was) was only good for DYING in and then if she ever wondered if a crack would open up and swallow her, and she squeezed her one eye shut again and put her head deep into Indy's fur.

“Bo,” his mom said, “what on earth are you talking about? You're supposed to be welcoming Gari, not scaring her to death.” She said to Gari, “Don't worry. I've called the counselor and they're expecting us this morning. Everything will be fine.”

“Can you tell the counselor I want to take Japanese?” Gari asked, lifting her mouth away from Indy's sleek coat. “Everybody at Seattle Junior Academy is taking that this year.”

“Yeah, and tell him I want to drop out,” Bo said.

Bo's mom gave him a piercing look in the rearview mirror as she turned on her blinker and approached the school.

Indy shifted in Gari's lap, her hind paws digging into Gari's jeans as she pressed her front paws against the window. Despite herself, Gari opened her eyes and looked at Young Oaks.

That old hodgepodge of brick buildings? There were hardly any windows! There was nothing “young” about it.

They parked in a spot between an oversized van with a bumper sticker that read
JET NOISE: THE SOUND OF FREEDOM
and a pink VW Bug with a yellow ribbon tied to its antenna. There were larger, and more faded, yellow ribbons tied around the huge twin oak trees at the school's entrance.

Indy tried to get out of the car when Gari did, but Mrs. Whaley pulled her back in.

“You wait here, good dog.” She stuffed a jump rope and a book called
Great Games!
into the glove compartment before rolling the window down a crack and locking the door. “Don't eat anything.”

Gari wished she could stay in the car too. Or the glove compartment. It didn't matter, as long as she could sleep.

As they walked into the school, Bo narrated in a television announcer's voice, “On your left, the oldest flagpole in America! To your right, the Young Oaks mascot, the rarely seen Rusted Bear. As we enter the building —”

“Bo, stop it,” his mom warned. “Go to class. Gari will be there in a little bit.”

But she wasn't. The counselor needed the original, not faxed, document giving Colonel and Mrs. Whaley legal guardianship of Gari. Her school in Seattle hadn't sent any records, so how could she be placed in the right classroom, especially after the school year had already begun? And where were Gari's proof of vaccination and her school physical?

By the time Mrs. Whaley had rushed home to retrieve Gari's forgotten medical records (and put Indy in the backyard), promised to have the original guardianship document sent directly to the school, and gotten confirmation from Principal Heard that Gari was supposed to be (as promised) in the same class as her cousin, it was mid-morning. Mrs. Whaley was going to be late to her job teaching P.E. at another school.

“Miss Loupe's room is down that hallway there,” she told Gari. “Bo can show you around once you see him.”

Great. Now she would enter the classroom in the middle of a lesson, and everyone would turn and stare at her. And then they would expect her to say something about who she was, and where she was from, and why she was there, and … Gari's throat went dry just thinking about it. Why couldn't she be at SeaJA, where she and Tandi had planned to march in together and nobody would expect her to stand up in front of anyone?

But when Gari finally arrived in Room 208, it was empty. Bo hadn't told anyone to wait for her. There was an odd rectangle of masking tape on the floor at the front of the classroom — what had Bo been saying about the tape? That someone
died
in it?
What was a couch doing in a classroom? It looked like a refugee from a furniture clearance sale, and it smelled like … pretzels? Bagel chips? What was that odor?

Gari dropped her book bag on the floor and flopped onto the ugly couch. The cushions were deep and soft. She curled her body into a ball and tucked her head against one of the fringed throw pillows.

If someone comes, I'll … I'll …

She was awakened by squeals. A boy was poking her in the head.

“I'm Tony,” he was saying. “Who are you?”

“Is she my Reading Buddy? I don't want
her
!” some other kid said.

Gari stared up at them from her horizontal viewpoint, adjusting her glasses from where they had slipped off her face. These kids were much younger than she was, maybe six … maybe seven years old?

“What grade am I in?” she said. She struggled to sit up from the squishy cushions.

A strange-looking teacher was clapping his freckled hands.

“Mr. Nix's class, Mr. Nix's class! Pay attention! There has been a miscommunication. Our Reading Buddies are not here. We shall go tell Miss Candy and see if she —”

His words were cut off by the wailing sound of an alarm. Gari covered her ears.

OO-GAH! OO-GAH! OO-GAH!

“Fire drill, class, fire drill,” Mr. Nix announced. “Make two parallel lines.”

The students formed one solid clump at the door.

Mr. Nix shook his head in dismay and tried to divide them into two nonintersecting lines.

“The Forest of Foggy Thinking,” Mr. Nix was muttering, “how quickly it sprouts!”

The fire alarm kept blaring.
OO-GAH! OO-GAH! OO-GAH!

Finally, Mr. Nix commanded: “First graders! Move out!” and they streamed through the door.

“You too, young lady,” he said to Gari, who was still on the couch. “No one stays in the building during a fire drill. Page twenty-one!”

Page twenty-one? Of what? Is he using a code so the first graders don't panic?

She found herself standing outside, in a bare spot next to a dilapidated jungle gym, surrounded by giddy first graders. They hopped up and down while Mr. Nix tried to show them the correct fire drill formation by pointing out parallel limbs on a nearby pine tree.

“THAT is how straight your lines should be!”

“I fell out of a tree,” said a boy. “I have a scab.”

“A bird!” said a bouncing girl. “I see a bird! I'd like to BE a bird!”

“We're not discussing birds,” said Mr. Nix. “Or falling out of trees. I'm simply pointing out that —”

“Mr. Nix, do you have any scabs?” said the boy who had poked Gari in the head.

“No, I —”

“Or tattoos? My sister says her teacher has a bird tattooed on her —”

Two jets roared overhead, drowning out all sound. A few of the kids whooped as they flew over. Gari winced.

Why did they let them fly over the school? They were so loud!

The jets left two tails of exhaust in the sky.

“Do you see that?” Mr. Nix said. “Parallel lines!”

When they were allowed back in the building, Mr. Nix instructed Gari to go to the office and report that she had been found without a hall pass in an empty classroom.

“On page thirty-two,” Mr. Nix said, “it clearly states: ‘Every student should remain with his or her class unless given written permission to be elsewhere.'”

Oh, yes. Clearly. Now if someone would tell me which book …

But she didn't want to risk a lecture on Foggy Forests, so she silently headed for the office, not to turn herself in, but to put into place another plan: calling Aunt Donna's cell phone and begging to go home. It was a decent plan, but not well executed. She took a left turn at the third water fountain instead of a right and ended up in the cafeteria.

A woman in a neat white polo shirt was peering at a crack in the side of the cash register. Underneath her hairnet were rows of wavy gray curls. She was holding a bottle of gold nail polish.

“Can't fix it,” she was saying to no one in particular. “Might as well make it look pretty.” She dabbed the gold polish delicately into the fissure.

When she noticed Gari, she tilted her head. Her tiny cross earrings bobbled. “Oh, I thought Melissa was helping today.”

Gari had no idea who Melissa was, but the lady was now gesturing toward a stack of printed lunch menus.

“Would you be a dear and take those around to the classrooms, please?”

Gari would've protested this request, but there was a leftover cinnamon roll from breakfast on top of the menus, and she hadn't eaten anything since last night. Her stomach was starting to hurt.
It's breakfast time in Seattle anyway,
she thought.

Plus, she'd remembered one thing: She didn't have her aunt's cell phone number. On to the next plan: Deliver the menus and see if she could stumble upon Bo and the rest of her class. They had to be somewhere in the school … and Bo would know his mom's number….

Gari delivered the paper-clipped stacks of menus to each classroom, finding her way around the school by fits and starts. The old building looked like it had been added on to several times without any thought to straight, orderly hallways. The ceilings dipped in the middle, and the cinder block walls were rubbed smooth at the corners where thousands of fingers had brushed them.

“Have you seen Miss Loupe's class?” she asked each teacher as she handed them the menus. “They weren't in Room 208.”

Nobody seemed to have any idea where they might be. Several of the teachers were too busy to even hear her question, and most of them thought she was there to pick up a document
for the principal. Teacher after teacher kept handing her thick, stapled packets.

The bathroom in the kindergarten hall STINKS!
one document said on the first page.
It smells so bad we had to block it off and not use it at all. Then I have to walk my class EVEN FARTHER down the hall!

The railing on my chalkboard has been broken for FIVE years,
another one read.
And I need more small desks!

CRACKS!
was written on one in large black letters.
I'm not counting them all, but come and see my ceiling for yourself!

One frazzled kindergarten teacher apologized to Gari for not having the document ready. “That alarm makes me crazy. Once it starts going off, it won't stop. Some kid figured that out last year, and —” She broke off and asked Gari, please, would she roll this audiovisual cart back to the library, and then come back in about an hour?

The library! The first graders had said something about “Reading Buddies.” Maybe the librarian knew where Miss Loupe's class was. Gari stacked the growing pile of papers on the middle shelf of the cart and wheeled it down the hall in search of the library. She rolled past the bathroom that
STINKS!
She could smell it even when the door was shut. She rolled faster.

When she found the library, the place was a lot noisier than she had expected. There was a large sign at the entrance that read
CASTLE UNDER CONSTRUCTION: PLEASE EXCUSE OUR MESS
. A power saw buzzed at the rear of the room over the sound of steady hammering.

“You must be a new student,” said a woman in a smock covered with paint splotches. “I'm the librarian, Miss Candy. And yes, I
do
believe in candy.”

She held out a dish of butterscotch drops in one hand while pulling the checkout card for the cart with the other. Gari shook her head. The cinnamon roll in her stomach had made it feel worse, not better.

Miss Candy's eyes flicked from the teacher's name on the card to Gari's face. “But you're not in kindergarten! Whose room are you in?”

“Miss Loupe's,” Gari said. “But —”

“Oh, they were here with Mr. Nix's class!” Miss Candy pushed the cart into the storage room. “We had to start late, because Mr. Nix got mixed up, but once they got here, Miss Loupe's class did a marvelous job! Miss Loupe taught everyone how to turn a book into a script, and then they all performed
Pinkerton, Behave!
I don't think I've laughed so hard since school started!”