• • • 6 • • •

By the time the final bell of the day rings, it becomes pretty clear that Ms. Byron hasn’t just been hit with a case of first-day nerves. She’s naturally nervous, the same way some people have naturally curly hair or are natural-born swimmers.

She races outside with all of us, flittering about as she tries to help usher her new students toward their parents’ cars, waving at the parents in a flurry of afternoon introductions.

Harold, Irma Jean, Lexie, and I cluster together on the sidewalk. At the far end of the front drive, I see her: Old Glory. My face breaks into a smile, because I think, Here’s Gus and here’s Old Glory, and look, she’s even got a new car attached to the back of her now, an old Toyota, all bashed in on one side. We’re going to take it straight to McGunn’s, and we’ll turn that banged-up, wrecked car into money. Into a piece of metal that’s only as thick as a triple-cheeseburger. Finally, a little slice of something fantastic.

Harold sees the Toyota and he starts cheering, “McGunn’s!”

I smile because Harold, the smartest kid in our class, sees how incredible Gus’s job is. And I think that surely, with all of us—Harold and me and Lexie and Irma Jean—screaming and carrying on, Victoria will realize she ought to be impressed, too.

Instead, Lexie takes a step away from us. She calls, “See you tomorrow, Auggie!”

“Wait,” I say. “You’re not coming to McGunn’s?”

“Victoria’s giving me a ride!” she shouts.

The two of them race toward Victoria’s fancy car, while I stand there in a dress that doesn’t look like fall; with Weird Harold, who sees crazy conspiracies even when there aren’t any; and with the girl who lives next door, who sews her own clothes out of hand-me-downs.

Victoria swings open the back passengers’ door of her father’s car, and her mouth droops as she points toward the end of the drive. Toward Old Glory, dragging an awful, terrible-looking car. Other new classmates follow, their mouths drooping at the rusted, wrecked pile of garbage that Gus is dragging up the drive.

Right then, Old Glory looks about a hundred years older than the cars at Dickerson—she’s shaped differently, with her fat fenders, and she growls and clanks louder than all the rest of the cars put together. I cringe at the sight of the winch and the job box propped across the bed and the word salvage on the door.

At that moment, as I stare at Victoria, her skin seems the same shade as imported chocolates. When I look down at my legs, beneath the hem of my sundress, my skin looks like ordinary old mud.

No—not ordinary. I was ordinary at Montgomery. At Dickerson, I’m the girl from the poor neighborhood who doesn’t have fancy new clothes, and who lives with her grampa the trash hauler.

Old Glory honks to get my attention. Gus calls out, “So how was the first day?”

I don’t want to show any hurt feelings in front of him, so I smile wide, like I’m trying to show off a trip to the dentist.

When Gus sees that smile, he cocks his head to the side and sighs. “Come on—climb in,” he tells me. “I’ve got something I need to show you.”

As Old Glory slows down a few blocks away, I realize last night’s storm sank its monstrous teeth into the Hopewell Community Church. Our church looks like a piece of white angel food cake with a giant bite taken out of it. The steeple hangs, broken. Shattered stained glass from the enormous windows glitters across the parking lot.

My stomach feels yanked—the same way those trees around Hopewell must have felt when their roots were pulled right out of the ground. Crisscrossing power lines are draped like useless, broken rope across nearby car roofs.

“Went to Sunday School there when I was a boy,” Gus mutters. “Got married there. Baptized your own mother there. Had your grandmother’s funeral there.”

Tiny groups cluster on the sidewalk, staring at what’s left of our little white church. Women are huddling close, blowing into Kleenexes. They rub each other’s shoulders and shake their heads.

I watch how everyone stands back from the old church—like it’s a dead body or something. A dead body with a white sheet draped across it. The only one who’s close to the church is the minister.

Even from a distance, I can make out the black canvas and white leather toes of his high-tops—the shoes he always wears because his name is stamped right there on the ankle: Chuck Taylor. Chuck says he also wears them because they’re like the strings people tie on pinkie fingers to remind themselves of something. And what the Reverend Charles V. Taylor (Chuck for short) wants to remember most are the back alleys his feet used to linger in when he was a real troublemaker. He says remembering those times makes him a better minister.

Gus always tells me it happens that way sometimes. The wildest kids can grow into the straightest and narrowest adults.

Even though Chuck is wearing his same old shoes, there’s nothing usual about the scene at all. He stands in front of the crooked front door, shaking his head and rubbing his chin like he knows he needs to go in, if only he could get up enough courage to do it.

I know exactly how he feels as I sit in worn-down Old Glory, with an awful wrecked car attached to her, on our way to a junkyard filled with trash, and with a whole year at Dickerson stretched out before me.

Courage, I think as I stare at Chuck, can sometimes be like when you’re dying for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but there’s only a skiff of peanut butter left on the side of the jar, and no matter how much you scrape, you begin to wonder if you’ll ever get enough on your knife to cover an entire slice of bread.