Operation Yes (8 page)

“But where are they now? Are they back in Room 208?” Gari looked around the storage room. It was piled with videos and books with sticky notes attached to them. There was a giant reference book about castles and several rolled-up posters.

“No, they were going to lunch. But some of them will be back here later, because they have to put the couch behind the castle wall.”

“Oh,” Gari said. She wondered how many couches were in this school. And why was one going behind a wall?

Miss Candy looked hard at Gari's face. “I heard Bo's cousin
was coming to stay with him. Is that you? Your mom's deployed —”

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

“Frog and Toad!”
Miss Candy said. “Not again!” She motioned Gari out of the storage room and called to the two young men who were working at the back of the library. “Airman Peters, Airman Kresge! I'm sorry, I know you've only got a few hours to volunteer, but we have to quit and go outside.”

She hurriedly locked the storage room door, picked up her purse from behind the checkout desk, and stuffed a handful of butterscotch drops into the pocket of her smock.

“Want me to see if I can fix it?” said one of the men. He had on a black T-shirt and camo pants.

“Dude, don't do it. You know these kids love getting out of class,” the other airman said.

The alarm suddenly stopped, and Gari was surprised when Miss Candy and the two airmen kept going toward the exit door at the back of the library.

“It's taking a breath,” said Miss Candy. “Wait and see.”

“Miss Candy,” Gari said, looking hurriedly at the books as she passed by them, “does the library have anything about Iraq?”

They emerged from the back of the school into the hot, sticky air.

“We do have some general books on the Middle East, with sections about Iraq. Maybe a bit on Islamic art in a reference book too. We don't have much.”

“Art? Do you have a lot of —”

A woman in a brown suit was bearing down on them. She was large and solid, like Gari's mom's lumbering Subaru.

“Principal Heard,” Miss Candy greeted her.

Gari's stomach jumped and then swirled around and around.

“There you are,” said Mrs. Heard. “Miss Loupe sent word that a lamb was on the lam. But I knew I could corral you.” She took Gari by the arm and led her to a group of students flowing out of the double doors.

“Miss Loupe,” she called. “I've found her!”

That tiny person is my teacher?
thought Gari as they approached.
Look at her hair!

“Do you prefer to be called Gari or Garrison?” Miss Loupe was saying. “Bo didn't tell us.”

Gari looked down the line for Bo. There he was, or at least the back of his head. He was deliberately looking away from her.

Gari swallowed and started to answer.

OO-GAH! OO-GAH! OO-GAH!
The alarm kicked off again.

Principal Heard said to Miss Loupe, “Go ahead and take your class back inside. I'm calling off this fire drill because our alarm is obviously malfunctioning.” She looked hard at Bo, who was intent upon flattening the dandelions around him with the heel of his shoe.

The class began filing back into the building, and Gari slipped into line beside Bo. There wasn't much choice, since she didn't know anyone else.

“I need your mom's cell number,” she said. “Now.”

Bo kept walking. He was focused on the back of the girl in front of them, a girl whose long hair swung from side to side as
she picked her way through the grass, avoiding dirt patches. She was covering her ears with cupped hands.

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

Gari pushed her glasses hard against her nose. Her stomach felt as if the alarm were pulsing inside it.

“Bo, I want to go home!”

“Me too,” he said.

“But you'll miss improv!” said a girl behind them.

Bo shrugged and didn't answer her.

“What's improv?” said Gari. “Can't I miss that?”

“No. You have to say ‘yes, and —'” He kicked at a patch of dandelion weeds, sending fluff into the air. “Even if you don't want to.”

Gari stopped dead outside the double metal doors. “Okay, then: Yes, and — I feel terrible and I want to go home.”

OO-GAH! OO
— The alarm stopped once more. The girl in front of them uncovered her ears.

“Fine,” said Bo. “Try jumping out a window. That works.”

Gari shoved her hand into her pocket. Her fingers tightened around the little green army figure she had stowed away, and she did what her mom always did when she was serious about a request. She used Bo's full name.

“Just give me the number, Bogart!”

“Bogart?” said the girl. She paused at the door and turned around. “BOGART?” she said even louder. She giggled.

“What's your problem?” said Gari. “I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Bog —”

Bo poked her, hard, in the stomach. “Shut
up
!”

All the pain in Gari's stomach expanded, like a balloon filling with a rush of helium.
OO-GAH! OO-GAH! OO-GAH!
The alarm kicked back in, and Gari threw up, in a continuous wave, on the oh-so-cute navy-blue shoes of the girl who had giggled.

“She barfed on my shoes!” the girl shrieked, as loudly as the alarm. “What's-Her-Name barfed on my new shoes!”

Bo looked up from the cinnamon-colored liquid swirling over Allison's shoes. Miss Loupe was standing inside the door, holding it ajar for the class. She'd seen everything.

That wasn't what I …

Maybe she would …

Then he noticed that she was looking at something behind him. A large brown-suited arm reached past him.

“Allison, that's enough. Your shoes can be cleaned up,” said Mrs. Heard, handing her a fistful of tissues. “Hold these over your mouth,” she continued, giving a wad to Gari, “but you'd better get to the nurse.” She pinched Bo's shoulder. “
You
can come with me.”

They were supposed to go to Hog Heaven that night. They didn't.

For one thing, Gari said that even though she felt a little better, she couldn't go because she was a vegetarian.

“If I were a hog,” she said to Bo, “that's not what I'd call heaven: my guts, chopped on a bun!”

Mrs. Whaley made her a hummus sandwich, which Gari didn't eat either.

But the main reason they didn't go to Hog Heaven was because Bo wasn't finished wiping each windowsill clear of the stiff flies and curled wasps that died in the groove between the screen and window glass during the hot fall weather. He battled the hard specks of gnats spotting the transom with a rag and torrents of cleaning spray. He ran one rag-circled finger around the edges of the screen, soaking dirt and crushed bug parts up for transport to the trash bag he trailed from window to window. Indy kept poking her nose into each frame as he worked.

He couldn't explain to his dad why he'd made Gari throw up. He hadn't planned to. He hadn't meant to.

“It was her
first day
,” his dad had said. “Her mom is halfway around the world
serving her country.
She's your cousin, as good as your
sister.
”

Bo hadn't said a word. He felt like he did when the sky turned not black but puke green before a storm. That had happened twice this past spring, before a tornado warning had gone off for the entire base. The good things he did — like helping Sanjay when he couldn't think of a line in the Taped Space, or this morning, letting Indy curl up in Gari's lap instead of his on the way to school — all that faded fast. He wished he could be like the Flying Farmer and have all his mistakes come out right in the end. His dad hadn't mentioned the stunt pilot, but Bo knew. Their deal was … well … out the window.

Meanwhile, Gari tried to drink a little ginger ale at the kitchen counter and paged through the local papers that Aunt Donna had stacked to recycle. Not much exciting in the
Reform Chronicle.
A barbecue cook-off. A wreck with no injuries near the base gate. A two-page guide to football games. No protests against this stupid war … of course not, not in a base town. Only a splashy story about a squadron homecoming.

In a small insert, there was more base news and ads for a fall sale at the Base Exchange store. The only interesting thing was the “Security Forces Blotter.” Gari read about a shoplifting incident at a base snack bar, “a minor de pen dent” being banned from housing for vandalism, and a fight at a club, which resulted in a charge of “insubordination.” She wondered if the Security Forces reported trouble outside the base too, like at the school. If so, Bo's name should be in there in big letters.

When Bo was done with the de-bugging, he went to the master bedroom, where his dad was working. Colonel Whaley had moved his desk against one wall, squeezed stacks of paper underneath it, and piled books on either side. Bo held up the nearly empty spray bottle and the crusty rag. His dad, phone pressed to one ear, nodded.

Bo threw the rag into the laundry basket on top of the washer and put the bottle away on the shelf above. He wanted to go to Trey's house. He wanted to slam golf balls onto a chunk of concrete and watch them shoot into the air, over and over. But his mom … she had WORK for him too.

She held out three ropes with bright blue handles. “Would you and Gari help me try out a jump rope game? I need to practice before I teach my first graders on Monday.”

Bo knew what his mom was trying to do. So did Gari. She said no, that her stomach couldn't take any more jumping. She set down her glass of ginger ale and went into her room and shut the door. He could hear her talking on her cell phone,
blah, blah, blah
to her friend back in Seattle.
Blah, blah,
you wouldn't believe how
blah blah.
But he had to take the jump ropes from his mom.

His mom's WORK — even though she called it just talking — was worse than his dad's.

“Jump on one foot,” said his mom.

She had backed both cars out of the garage, so they could jump in there and avoid the mosquitoes that came with the darkening sky. One wall was stacked with cardboard boxes, each labeled with its contents. Stuff they had chosen not to unpack here,
stuff his mom was saving for her “forever house,” stuff from when he was a baby, which his mom couldn't bear to throw away.

“Now the other foot.”

He did. Their ropes slapped against the concrete floor. The overhead light made a circle of brightness around them.

“Both feet!

“Now, side to side, knees together like you've got to pee!”

He stepped on the rope and it thudded to a stop.

“You can't say that, Mom. Not to first graders.”

“Why not?” She stopped jumping.

“Because some of them
will.
”

Her laughter filled the garage. She nearly knocked over his dad's golf clubs and Indy's travel crate when she put out a hand to steady herself.

“Bo.
Really.
” She took the jump rope and halfheartedly tried to lasso him with it. He dodged her throw.

“Mom, do you want to move next summer?”

“No, not especially. I like my job. I like the people here. But I like seeing new places too. I vote for Paris!”

“There isn't a base there. We don't speak French.”

“I know. But ever since I saw Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
, I've wanted to go there. So I could say: ‘We'll always have Paris.'”

He'd seen the ancient black-and-white movie his mom was talking about. He didn't like it. His mom always cried when the plane took off, even though there was way too much fog for a plane to take off in real life. He didn't think his dad liked the
movie either. But they both sat there with his mom on her birthday this past year and survived it.

“You don't like being called Bogart, do you?” she said. “Miss Loupe said you seemed upset because —”

“I'm fine. Really,” he said. “I can deal with it.”
As long as you don't TALK about it.

His mom bunched up her jump rope, folding it back and forth, back and forth. Her motion made shadows on the wall of boxes behind her. Each box had a red stamp-sized moving sticker on it with a number. Some boxes had more than one sticker, each color layered over the next, where a box had been saved and moved more than once.

How did his mom do it? Start over and over, each time they moved? Didn't she mind being ripped up?

He changed the subject. “Where
are
we going next summer, Mom? Doesn't Dad have any idea?”

“Of course. Otherwise, we might have worried more about Gari coming here to live with us.”

What? What did that mean? Bo realized that Aunt Paula wouldn't be back until September, so when they moved next summer, Gari would have to move with them. Did she know that? What had his parents talked about after they had said yes?

“Dad might be offered command of a wing in Afghanistan,” his mom said. “It would be a remote assignment, for a year.”

The dead center of Bo's chest tightened. Afghanistan? That was as dangerous as where Gari's mom was. He thought of the tan flight suit in the glass case at the library.

“But …” Bo couldn't think of a way to talk about that case with his mom. “But … what about us? Where would we go?”

Mrs. Heard allowed students to place a sticker on the map of the United States in the front hallway of Young Oaks when they moved. Bo had hoped his sticker would be in Hawaii or Florida, where he could go to the beach, or Colorado, where he could learn to ski. Where did you go if the Air Force didn't tell you where you had to go?

“We might stay here.”

“In this house?”

“The next commander gets this house. We would find a place to rent off base. I could keep working at my job. Gari wouldn't have to uproot again, and she could stay with us through the summer and early fall until her mom gets back. You could start middle school here. Would you want to do that?”

Bo didn't know. He could be in the Ugly Couch Players, but … did he want to stay here if it meant his dad left? Somewhere in those boxes on the wall was a lumpy, one-eyed, stuffed bear wearing a flight suit. He had been three when his dad had gone to the Middle East for the first time, and he hadn't understood any of it, but he had carried that bear until it stunk and the flight suit had torn and he had fed it jelly beans at Easter, which stained its mouth orange.

“Nothing's settled,” said his mom. “Maybe he won't have to go. Maybe we'll get another stateside assignment. We'll have to wait and see.”

She straightened her jump rope. “Ready to try it again?”

After they came back inside, damp from jumping in the humid air, Bo sat at the kitchen counter and ate sliced sweet pickles from the jar. His dad came in and stole three.

“You know,” said his dad, eating his pickles one at a time, “you don't
always
have to do the first thing that comes into your head. You can set your own course. Write out what you can do to make Gari feel at home, if you have to. But I don't want a repeat of today.”

“No, sir,” said Bo.

His mom passed through. “I checked on Gari. She's fine. I'm taking a shower,” she said. “Don't let Indy track in mud if you let her out.” She opened a drawer and handed them each a fork. “We have clean utensils.”

After she left, they passed the jar back and forth, fishing out pickles with their fingers.

“I'm giving you a second chance,” said his dad. “A mulligan. So think hard about your choices for the next two weeks, okay? The Flying Farmer would really like to meet his biggest fan.”

What? Their deal wasn't off? Why?

He started to ask, then stopped. He knew.

Afghanistan.

It must be happening. Why else would his dad have gone soft? It felt weird, like the boundaries of his world had shifted. He was seeing into his dad's head, which had never happened before.

They took two straws and drank the pickle liquid with giant
slurps, in a stomach-churning race to the bottom. They wiped their hands on their shirts and put the forks in the dishwasher as if they had used them.

He could stay. He could stay and be in the Ugly Couch Players. Why did that feel so bad?