Miss Farida loves vanilla-smelling candles which flicker against the sleeping couch. I place my sandals beside the spill of shoes and slippers strewn across the plastic mat in the hallway to her room. I see the Sesame Street stickers propped near the electric piano, tangled in a hoop of dreaming dust, and the pedals, wrapped in a layer of fine metal. Miss Farida takes my stack of weary books that whimper as she turns to “Stepping Stones.” My delicate hands look like tiny mice skittering across the keys. I play to a beat from the metronome fast as a hummingbird’s heartbeat, slow as a whale’s. Miss Farida takes a pencil from her hair and writes in my notebook. “Tonight you will write a song about New Year’s.” I pick up my denim bag and dump my books into it. Already, I begin to hear the notes of endless possibilities for my composition: The orchestra of 10,000 fuchsia fireworks exploding in the air, the symphony of sparklers, the dropping ball of melody, the score of the night, filled with new beginnings. Tae Kathleen Keller, 8Waipahu, Hawaii
January/February 2003
Jenny
The new girl stood over by the jungle gym, not climbing or talking to the other girls, but just standing there, peering into a brown lunch bag. She pulled something out of it, but I couldn’t see what it was from the distance. Matt, a skinny boy with round glasses, was talking about a scary show he had watched on television. “I wasn’t scared,” Matt boasted. “I thought it was stupid.” We all looked in awe at Matt, and told him of our own bravery stories. Still, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the new girl. She was now examining the object taken from the bag earlier. The new girl had come to our class at the beginning of the week, and Miss Emily, our kindergarten teacher, had introduced her, but I couldn’t remember her name. My curiosity got the better of me, and I walked over to the girl. I was too shy to say anything, however, so we just stood there, looking at each other. Finally, the new girl held out her hand, holding out the thing she had taken from her lunch bag, offering it to me. It was a pear. A red one. “Thanks,” I said, softly. I took the pear from her, and the girl giggled. “I’m Jenny.” “I’m Jason,” I said, and a little pear juice dribbled down my chin. I took the pear from her, and the girl giggled. I’m Jenny” “That’s funny,” said Jenny, giggling again. “Our names both start with ‘juh’.” Then, both of us broke into unexplainable fits of laughter, and whenever one of us began to calm down, the other one would continue to giggle. This would result in even more laughter, making it harder for either of us to stop. “Class!” Miss Emily called from outside the school door. “Time to come back inside!” Jenny and I swallowed our laughter, and separated into our groups, me with the boys, and Jenny with the girls. However, even in our different groups, we smiled at each other before naptime. * * * “I’m going to Jenny’s! I’m going to Jenny’s!” Thank goodness my seatbelt was tightly fastened; I was practically bouncing off the walls of my family’s minivan. My mother, up in the front seat, was begging me to keep calm. “We’re almost there,” she told me. But I didn’t listen, because I was going over to Jenny’s house. “I have lots of fun stuff to do,” Jenny had told me earlier that week. “Legos, roller skates, and . . .” Jenny’s eyes grew wide “. . . Barbies.” I had frowned. “Barbies? I don’t like Barbies. They’re for girls.” Jenny shrugged, not seeming hurt in the least. “That’s OK. There’s my dog, Max, and . . .” Our van pulled up in front of a nice, brick house with a colorful flower garden in the front. It was a small house, but it fit so well with my imagination’s former version of the house. On the porch, in the front of the house, there was a porch swing and on the swing sat a young girl. “Jenny!” I ran out to greet my friend. “Hi, Jason!” Jenny smiled, then waved at my mom, who was walking up the walk. A friendly-looking woman came out of the front door of the house, and smiled at me. “Hello, Jason. I’m Mrs. Weber, Jenny’s mom.” “Hi,” I said, growing shy. Our mothers began talking to each other about very motherly things, so Jenny took my hand and led me inside. “You can meet Max now.” We played all afternoon. We played with Legos, built castles in her sandbox, and played hide-and-seek. Once we got exhausted from playing, we went back to the kitchen, where our mothers were now talking at the counter. Jenny’s mom smiled at us when we walked in. “My cookies are almost out of the oven.” Jenny squealed with delight. “Mom makes the best cookies!” The timer rang, and Jenny and I greedily ate the chewy chocolate-chip cookies. “Mmmm!” I exclaimed. There were several more visits at Jenny’s, and I enjoyed every second I spent there. Then the inevitable teasing began. “Hey, Jason, is Jenny your girlfriend?” the boys would say. “Stay away from Jason, he’s got cooties, too!” That’s when I stopped playing with Jenny. Without me, Jenny was friendless. She had given me her friendship, and had trusted me, but, even in kindergarten, I had my reputation to look after. I often saw Jenny sitting on a swing, alone, swaying a little, but not attempting to go over the top of the swing set, like she used to. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and when that happened, I would quickly look away. * * * I was skateboarding to school that day. It was my first day of the eighth grade, and I had spiked my hair just for the occasion. One girl I passed obviously didn’t care how she looked on the first day of school. She was wearing an ugly brown sweater, and her long, brown hair was wet. I snickered as she tripped over her untied shoelaces. At lunch, after I was reunited with my old friends, our conversations got off the subject of how we spent our summer vacations, but on the other people in the school. “Who’s that?” I asked, motioning toward the girl I had seen on my way to school. Alex turned around to look at her. She was eating a sandwich at an empty table. “That’s Jennifer Weber,” he said. “Her dad gets transferred a lot. She was here, back in the old days.” Alex chuckled. “She’s really weird and depressed and stuff,” Matt said. They kept talking about Jennifer’s abnormality, but my mind was elsewhere. Jennifer Weber. Jennifer Weber. Jenny Weber. Jenny. A picture of a red pear and chocolate-chip cookie came into my mind. Then an image of a little girl, sitting alone on a swing. This image stayed a long time in
A Real American
A Real American by Richard Easton; Clarion Books: New York, 2002; $15 This is the heartfelt story of two young boys becoming friends under some very adverse conditions. Nathan McClelland is a Pennsylvania farm boy whose neighbors have moved out, sold out to the coal company. He is lonely, with all of his friends gone, and his wish of a friend comes true with Arturo Tozzi, a young miner boy in the first wave of immigrants, the only child of the lot. Arturo wishes to see Nathan’s animals, and have a friend in his new country. Nathan wishes to mold Arturo like his old and now gone friends Ben and Pete, and first tries to teach Arturo how to read. However, he acts too uppity, and Arturo shuns reading, wanting to be “a friend, not a student,” or inferior. When Nathan’s old friends, Ben and Pete, come back to visit, they accuse Arturo of being a foreigner, and Nathan tries to tell them that he is who he isn’t, a boy named Arthur who’s just like them. Arturo runs away, saying that he is who he is, Arturo Tozzi. Nathan, eating humble pie, decides to help Arturo, and assists in hindering troopers to convince Ernesto, Arturo’s firebrand brother, to give up the strike. In this act of faith, Nathan and Arturo’s friendship is restored, and they go on as friends. However, did Nathan and Arturo really resolve their friendship? If Arturo can’t read, he can’t communicate as well with Nathan as he could if he could read. The friendship is less powerful when Arturo and Nathan can’t communicate in ways other than a pidgin English. It’s like a Russian and an Egyptian trying to talk through Russian. The Egyptian can’t use a full mastery of Russian, so the two don’t know each other as well, and the bond is less potent. In the book, Nathan rebels against tradition to become friends with Arturo; his father expects him to stick only with the people and things he knows best. (Arturo’s father supports the friendship, for the good it could do his son.) In the book Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickam, Jr., a young boy defies his own West Virginia coal mining town’s tradition of becoming a high-school football star, and going on to work in the local mine. He decides to become a rocket scientist, under the heavy hindrance of his father, a head miner who doesn’t believe in rockets until the very end, when the boy wins the National Science Fair, like Nathan’s father who didn’t believe Arturo could be a good friend until he helped Nathan stop the strike. It was surprising that miners had to buy their own tools, blasting powder, and extra timber to hold up the mine. This may account for the destitution of conditions in the mine, with no protection from the poisonous gases inside, and not enough timber to support cave-ins, and the poverty of the miners themselves, living in company-built shacks, and with barely enough food bought with credit from the company store to feed a family. This penury is illustrated in Growing up in Coal Country, listed in the back of the book by the author as reference, which gives a detailed account of the day-to-day lives of Pennsylvania coal miners. But, if Nathan wasn’t lonely, if his friends Ben and Pete were still living right next door, and hadn’t sold, would there still have been a friendship? That’s doubtful, because the only reason Nathan agreed to be Arturo’s friend was because he was lonely for Ben and Pete. Likewise, if Arturo had been in the second wave of miners, when they brought their kids, and Nathan was lonely, then Arturo wouldn’t need Nathan, though Nathan would need him. It’s sad that the only beginning fuel for this friendship came through the needs of Nathan and Arturo for a friend. If one of their needs had been fulfilled, there wouldn’t have been a friendship. Trent Kim, 10Athens, Georgia
