We sat at a round wooden table. I held out my essay and braced myself as he read, waiting for him to shake his head and say, “Tsk-tsk.” I could tell he was speed-reading by the way his eyes darted across the paper. “Ha,” he said at one point. I just sat on my hands, feeling all kinds of nervous.
Then he passed back the paper. “This sounds like a really fabulous trip.”
“Thanks?” I laid the essay on the table and used the side of my hand to iron out the wrinkles.
“Oh, we won’t need that anymore,” Mr. Hall said.
“We won’t?” Wow, it was that bad?
“No.” He reached over for a blank piece of printer paper, laid it down horizontally, and drew a line across the middle. “Tell me about your trip again, from beginning to end.”
What? But I did. As I talked, he wrote. He filled out a timeline with basic events.
“Okay, now this is what we call the front story. The main events. But let’s figure out the best order in which to tell this amazing story of yours.”
Huh. It had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to stay in chronological order. We reordered the parts of my trip, starting with the most interesting moment (when we ran out of gas on the highway in the middle of a rainstorm in Tennessee) and filled in the timeline from there.
The bell rang, and man, I wished I’d had a double block so we could keep working. I wanted to hug Mr. Hall, but that would probably have been weird. I rushed to my next class, making a mental note to take Mr. Hall’s seminar my senior year.
28
Because the assembly had been scheduled for the Wednesday before winter break—to “finish the year right” the principal had said—the Saturday before, Brianna and I met up at the Boston Public Library to do more research. I dragged Jade with me. We sat in the back by the space heater, sneak-sipping AriZona iced teas because the librarians were mad strict.
While we hunted for more quotes, Biodu and Marquis and—yeah!—Rayshawn and some of the other guys looked up images of walls throughout history at Biodu’s house. We shared them all on one Google Doc. I found a really cool book called This Bridge Called My Back—maybe my next miniature would be a bridge!—and even though we were supposed to be looking for material for the METCO presentation, I copied down a few quotes for myself, too. They gave me an idea for a poem.
The guys were finding tons of stuff. There were lots of other major walls in history—who knew? Greece’s wall along the Turkish border, Hungary’s wall along the Serbian border, and, of course, the Great Wall of China. I tried not to think of Dad, whether he was studying some wall right now, trying to figure out how to scale it. There’d been no news in three and a half weeks. Mom was now in permanent freak-out mode, like, back to sorting socks and underwear by color. She set up the spices in alphabetical order! And yelled at Christopher when he put back the cinnamon after the coriander! And why wouldn’t she be losing it? At least I had school to distract me. Dustin. But Mom? She didn’t even get that housekeeping job.
“You all here?” Jade asked. I must have been staring off into space.
“Yeah.”
She pursed her lips, didn’t believe me. But she also knew when not to push.
“Yo, Lili,” Brianna said. “I found another great quote.”
“Awesome. Add it to the Google Doc.”
I went back to reading. Jeez! “Did you all know that the US-Mexico border cuts some communities like, in half? So they have to have their papers with them all the time if they just want to, say, go to the grocery store across town? Does that even make sense?”
“Hmm,” Brianna said as she was cutting and pasting; I wasn’t sure if she was responding to me or it.
“And, not for nothing,” I went on, “but when the US government built a wall between San Diego and Tijuana, people just found other ways to cross into the US.”
Brianna closed her laptop. Jade put down her charcoal pencil. She’d been shading in the Afro of a girl speaking into a microphone in her sketchbook.
“And get this.” I couldn’t stop. “At one point the government spent twelve billion dollars on constructing some kind of fancy lighting to detect people crossing the border. That’s insane! Can you imagine if they’d used that money to, like, build better schools in Central America or Mexico instead?”
At this point Brianna and Jade were grinning at me like proud parents.
“What!”
Jade laughed. “You’re really into this project, Lili. That’s whatsup.”
“Right?” Brianna added. Then she looked conspiratorially at Jade. “Yo. So you should lead the presentation, then.”
“What! Me? Hell, no. Thanks, but no thanks.”
Jade and Brianna raised their eyebrows at each other. I had a feeling this conversation was going to crop up again.
Just as we were packing up—the library was about to close for some special event for staff—a lady with hot-pink spiked hair came up to us.
“Hello, ladies,” she said. “I’m Miss Amber. I’d like to invite you to a creative writing class we’re having around the corner.”
“A what?” Jade blurted out. I couldn’t help it, that made me laugh. Brianna too.
The lady didn’t flinch. She smiled all bright and just charged on. “A creative writing class. It’s at a place called 826. Here.” She handed us some orange flyers. “It starts in half an hour. I’d love to see you there.”
I glanced at the flyer to be polite. “Hmm. How much does it cost?” I asked. Jade nodded in that knowing-best-friend way.
“It’s free!” Miss Amber said, all happy.
“Thanks, but I can’t go,” Brianna said. “My dad is picking me up in ten minutes, and he said if I’m not outside and ready, he’ll leave me here. And he would, too!”
We started laughing again. I hoped Miss Amber didn’t think we were being mad rude. Then Jade said, “Liliana will go.”
“Jade!” I yelped.
“Yeah, she’ll go right after we finish up here. Thank you.” Jade took a few more flyers. Miss Amber was now smiling like a crazy lady.
“Great! I’ll see you in a bit, then. Liliana, right?”
“Right.”
She smiled and walked over to some kids who were watching YouTube on the desktop computers.
“Jade!” I growled, giving her a kick under the table. “Thanks a lot. Now I have to go to this thing.” I shook the flyer.
Brianna shook her head. “You don’t have to do nothin’. You don’t know that lady.”
Jade sucked her teeth. “Liliana. Don’t even be like that. You know you love to write. And that English teacher has been doggin’ you—so go see what’s up! For real. Just go.”
“Fine. If you go with me.” I crossed my arms, calling her bluff.
“Fine,” she mocked. “If you go with me.” She called mine. Done.
* * *
Jade did go with me, as in, she walked me to the front entrance of the building, coats on because the wind was picking up, but then she left to go meet up with Ernesto. I actually didn’t mind. Inside 826 (a strange name for a writing center, right?) one of the walls was painted dark orange, and there were like ten ceiling-high bookshelves. I sat down at one of six wide wooden tables. About eight other people, all ages, were scattered among the tables. In the middle of each sat a thick stack of plain white paper and a glass jar full of pencils and—yes!—gel pens in all kinds of colors. Cool. Some adults wearing these long green lab coats were in the back, tutors I figured, Miss Amber among them. I guess they did some wacky stuff here at 826, like, on purpose. I picked out a bright purple pencil, already sharpened.