Emmy Laybourne - Monument 14

Astrid was just lit up with beauty: shining blond ringlets, June sky–blue eyes, slightly furrowed brow, always biting back a smile, champion diver on the swim team. Olympic level.

Hell, Astrid was Olympic level in every possible way.

And I wasn’t. I was one of those guys who had stayed short too long. Everyone else sprang up in seventh and eighth grade but I just stayed kid-size through those years—the Brayden-hair-gel years. Then, last summer, I’d grown, like, six inches or something. My mom delighted in my absurd growth spell, buying me new clothes basically every other week. My bones ached at night and my joints creaked sometimes, like a senior citizen’s.

I’d entered the school year with some hope, actually, that now I was of average—even above-average—height, I might rejoin society at an, um, higher level. I know it’s crass to talk about popularity outright, but remember, I’d had a thing for Astrid for a long, long time. I wanted to be near her and working my way into her circle of friends seemed the only way.

I thought my height might do the trick. Sure I was skinny as a rail, but still, my inventory of looks had improved: green eyes—good asset. Ash-colored hair—okay. Height—no longer a problem. Build—needed major improvement. Glasses—a drag, but contacts gave me chronic conjunctivitis, which looked a lot worse than glasses, and I couldn’t get Lasik until I stopped growing, so that was out for a while. Teeth and skin—fair. Clothes—sort of a wreck but getting better.

I thought I had a chance but the sum total of our communication to date were the two words she’d said to me on the bus: Help me .

And I hadn’t.

We all went back inside and Astrid got the Pizza Shack oven going and turned on the slushie maker.

Josie was still sitting in a booth, wrapped in her space blanket. I headed toward the soda dispensers to get her a drink, but I saw that she already had two Gatorades and a water on the tabletop in front of her.

The slushie maker was too high up for the little kids to reach, so after watching them jumping up to try to reach the handles in a cute but utterly futile way, I went over and offered to make each kid whatever kind of slushie they wanted.

They cheered.

They had never known you could combine the flavors, so they were impressed with the layered slushies I made for them.

“This is the best slushie I ever had!” gushed a towheaded first grader named Max. He had a preposterous cowlick in the back of his head that made his hair stand up like a little blond fan.

“I had a lot of slushies in my life ’cause my dad’s a long-distance trucker and he’s always takin’ me on the road,” Max continued. “I probly had slushies in every state of America. One time my dad took me out of school for a week and he almost took me into Mexico but then my mom called him and said he’d better haul me back on up to Monument before she called the cops on him!”

I liked Max. I like a kid who holds nothing back.

One kid was Latino. I put him at about first grade, maybe kindergarten. He was chubby and jolly looking.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

He just smiled at me. He had two big holes where his top front teeth should have been.

“ Cómo se llama? Your name?”

He said something that sounded all the world to me like, “You listen.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“You listen,” he said, nodding.

“Okay, I listen.”

“No, no,” he said.

“His name is You-list-ease,” said Max, trying to help. “He’s in first grade with me.”

“You-list-ease?” I repeated.

The Mexican kid said his name again.

And suddenly I got it. “Ulysses! His name is Ulysses!”

The Spanish pronunciation, let me tell you, sounds a lot different than the English.

Ulysses was now grinning like he’d won the lottery.

“Ulysses! Ulysses!”

A tiny, hardscrabble victory for him and me: Now I knew his name.

Chloe was the third grader who had been whining when Mrs. Wooly said she was going for help. Chloe was chubby and tan and very energetic. I made her a blue-and-red-striped slushie, like she wanted. However, it was not good enough for her.

“The stripes are too thick!” she complained. “I want it like a raccoon tail.”

But it turns out it’s really hard to make a slushie with thin stripes, as I discovered after five or six tries.

I handed Chloe my very best effort.

“Not like a raccoon’s tail,” she remarked. She shook her head sadly, as if she were a teacher and I hopeless student.

“This is as ‘raccoon tail’ as I can do,” I said.

“All right.” She sighed. “If it’s your best work.”

Chloe, I had already decided, was a piece of work.

The McKinley twins were our neighbors, actually. Alex and I sometimes shoveled their driveway for their mom, who I guess was a single mother.

She paid twenty dollars, which was okay money.

The twins were a boy and a girl both with red hair and freckles. They had the kind of back-to-back freckles that overlap so they hardly had any other kind of skin, just a bit of white peeping through the thick be-freckling.

At five years old, they were the youngest kids, and they were the smallest by far. Their mom was small herself, and the kids were just tiny. Perfectly formed but, like, knee high. Neither of them spoke much, but I guess Caroline talked a little more than Henry. They were just completely adorable, to use a word that is most often used by girls and maiden aunts.

I did not really save the best for last because Batiste, the lone second grader, was a real handful. He looked vaguely Asian and had glossy black hair that was cut very close to his head, like a brush.

For one thing, Batiste was from a very religious family, so he considered himself the authority on sinning. I had already overheard him reprimand Brayden for cursing (“Taking the Lord’s name in vain is a sin!”), tattle on Chloe for pushing Ulysses (“Shoving is a sin!”), and inform the other little kids that not saying grace before eating was a sin (“Before we eat, God wants us sinners to give thanks!”).

He was always watching everyone, waiting for them to screw up, so he could point it out. A real charming quality, I tell you. I guess being a little self-important know-it-all was not considered a sin by his people.

The other two kids from the grammar school bus were my brother, Alex, and Sahalia.

Sahalia was advanced, for an eighth grader. She had a very cutting-edge idea of fashion. Even I, someone who had worn sweatsuits and only sweatsuits to school until seventh grade, can identify someone with style when I see one. On the day this all went down, she was wearing tight jeans held together up one side with safety pins and a leather vest of some kind over a tank top. She also had a leather jacket—a big one, much too big for her, lined with red-checkered material. She was three years younger but far, far cooler than me.

Many people were cooler than me. I didn’t hold it against her.

It looked like she’d gotten into the makeup section. I swear when we first arrived at the store, she didn’t have any on. But now her eyes were lined with black and she had on very red lip gloss.

She was kneeling up on the booth seat next to where Brayden and Jake were eating. She was sort of watching them eat and trying to be a part of their group at the same time. It was a sort of a sideways approach to being included in a clique. You get near them, and hope they’ll invite you in.

No such doing for Sahalia.

Brayden looked up at her and said, “We’re trying to talk. Do you mind?”

Sahalia slipped away and went to hang out near Astrid. She walked like she didn’t care. Like it was her plan to go to the counter all along. I had to admire her slouch.