Ewww,” Inessa Weaver cried, wrinkling her nose. “Look at that awful looking man over by the side of the road!”
Jaris Spain was driving his younger sister, fourteen-year-old Chelsea, and her friend, Inessa, to the mall. They were going to buy new summer outfits. It was late on a summer afternoon. The kids were just out on summer break, and the first day of school seemed far, far away. Both Chelsea and Inessa would be freshmen this year at Harriet Tubman High School. Jaris was going to be a senior.
“He’s got something in his arms,” Chelsea pointed. “It’s furry looking, and it’s moving and,”—Chelsea shuddered—“it looks all bloody and stuff.”
“His face looks so weird,” Inessa commented. “He looks like one of those guys in horror movies.”
Jaris slowed down his car and began pulling toward the curb near the man.
“You’re not going to stop are you?” Inessa screamed. “That monster could attack us!” Only the seat belt was keeping Inessa from scrunching down onto the car floor.
“Oh, Inessa,” Chelsea scolded. “Don’t freak. That’s just some poor guy who had an accident or something. It’s not his fault he got burned in a fire or something.”
“Probably got hurt in the war,” Jaris remarked. Once the car was stopped, Jaris could see the bloody creature in the man’s arm was an opossum. “Hey bro!” Jaris called out to the man, who looked about thirty-five or forty. “Opossum get whacked by a car?”
The man nodded. He had one good eye. The other eye was covered by a patch. Inessa covered her eyes with her hands and crouched in the car. She couldn’t stand to look. “I get them all the time,” the man answered. “Wounded opossum. Cars hit ’em. Sometimes big dogs tear ’em up. Poor little critters. They’re trying to make their way in a world without much use for them. They’re like the rest of us, I guess.”
Chelsea looked out the window of the car. “What’s gonna happen to the opossum you got there?” she asked.
“I’m part of an opossum rescue group,” the man explained. “We bring ’em back to health, or we put them down painlessly. Not right to just let them die in the street or the brush. Too much suffering there.”
Chelsea stepped from the car. “Can I see it closer?” she asked. Jaris got out too.
“Chelsea!” Inessa screamed. “Don’t go near that man and that horrible animal.”
“I’m Jaris Spain,” Jaris said, extending his hand. “This is my sister, Chelsea. We’re Tubman High students. Chelsea loves animals.”
The man took Jaris’s offered hand with his left hand. That hand wasn’t bloody. “Hello,” he replied, “I’m Shadrach.” He had once been handsome, but something had happened to his face. His right eye was gone, and the right side of his face was scarred. He was tall, about six feet, and he had a nice smile. Chelsea liked him immediately.
Shadrach looked at Chelsea. “Would you like to learn more about the opossum rescue work?” he asked her. “If so, go to Shadrach.com.”
“Do you help the opossums all by yourself?” Chelsea inquired.
“No, people help me, people like you. Check out our Web site,” Shadrach responded.
Chelsea looked closely at the beady-eyed little opossum with the pink nose. “Good luck, Mister Shadrach,” she wished, meaning the opossum and the man.
When Chelsea got back into the car, she spoke to Inessa. “You shoulda come with me and seen the opossum, Inessa,” she said. “It was so cute. And the man wasn’t bad either. He’s just hurt. He rescues wounded opossum. That’s really nice, I think.”
“They give me the creeps,” Inessa complained. She was relaxing a little now that the car was moving away from the man and the opossum. “Sometimes at night the opossum come in our yard, and I’m afraid to go out. They’re so spooky. My pa goes out and chases them.”
“I saw a TV piece last month,” Jaris remarked. “It was about the work the opossum rescue people do. It’s pretty cool. They even got a nursery for the baby opossums. They say sometimes the mother gets killed, and the babies are still alive in her body. Sometimes they can save the babies.”
“Maybe I could do something like that this summer,” Chelsea thought. “I could volunteer at that place.”
“Yeah, chili pepper,” Jaris agreed. “That’d be good.”
Jaris thought volunteering like that would keep his little sister out of trouble. While she was an eighth grader at Marian Anderson Middle School, Chelsea had a few bad scrapes. She started hanging with a creepy Tubman freshman, Brandon Yates. He lured her to a party, where the kids were drinking liquor, and doing drugs. Jaris had to rescue her.
Then she went for a wild ride with Yates and his dopehead brother Cory. They’d pulled up in front of Marian Anderson Middle School in a silver Mercedes. The boys talked Chelsea, Athena, and Keisha into taking a short ride with them in the car. The ride turned into a dangerous high-speed race on and off the freeway. Luckily, no one was killed.
After that, Pop came down hard on her. He grounded her for a long time. In fact, Chelsea was still grounded. She couldn’t go anywhere by herself. Normally, she and Inessa would have taken the bus to the mall by themselves. But Chelsea was grounded, and her freedom was curtailed. Jaris felt he was the one who was suffering for her mistakes. Either her parents or Jaris had to drive her. Mom kept promising that maybe she’d get her freedom back when she started as a freshman. But she’d have to convince her father first that she was responsible.
On their way to the mall, Jaris drove past Spain’s Auto Care. Pop, Lorenzo Spain, had just bought the garage where he had worked for many years for old man Jackson. The Spains had to put a mortgage on their home to buy the garage. But having the business meant the world to Pop. Mom had to swallow her fears of having a big mortgage so that Pop could have his dream. Jaris’s parents fought for weeks over risking everything for the business. He and Chelsea listened fearfully while their parents argued.
“But what if you fail, Lorenzo?” Mom had wailed.
“What if you trusted your husband more, babe,” Pop had answered.
Now, as Jaris passed the garage, he slowed down and hit the horn. Pop was working on an old Chevy Malibu. He turned, grinned, and waved.
“Pop’s smiling a lot more these days, huh, chili pepper?” Jaris commented.
“Yeah!” Chelsea agreed. “He used to be so gloomy all the time. He kept saying he was just an old grease monkey. Now he owns his own business. I’m so happy for Pop.”
The girls peered silently out the car windows as Jaris thought about how things used to be. He remembered the many times his father came home from work, angry and frustrated. He was always talking about his bitter regrets. A sports injury had kept him from his dream of winning an athletic scholarship to college. He felt like a loser most of the time. Sometimes Pop was often down and depressed. A darkness seemed to engulf the whole house. Even Jaris felt overshadowed by it, and he thought maybe he was a loser too.
“I’m gonna text Athena,” Chelsea declared. “She said she might meet us at the mall. That’d be so fun. Athena is fun to shop with.”
“I don’t want her shopping with us,” Inessa grumbled. “She’s always getting into trouble.”
Chelsea had to admit it. Athena did have a way of attracting trouble, but she was Chelsea’s best friend. Inessa was nice, but she was too cautious. You could hardly have any fun with Inessa.
“Athena’s okay, Inessa,” Chelsea responded, texting her.
“My parents don’t want me texting and tweeting and stuff like that,” Inessa commented. “My father says that’s all a big waste of time and money. My dad works hard, and he can’t afford nonsense.”
Meanwhile, Chelsea got a text back from Athena. “She says she can’t come,” Chelsea reported. “I’m gonna ask her about her rescuing opossums this summer. Would you like to do that too, Jaris?”
Jaris smiled. “I’d like to chili pepper,” he replied. “But this summer I’m gonna be working almost full-time at the Chicken Shack. I gotta save money for college. And I’d like a better car. I’m driving one of those beaters Pop is always talking about.”
After a few minutes, Chelsea groaned, “You know what Athena texted me? ‘ROTFL.’”
Inessa stared at Chelsea, “Why did she say that?” she demanded.
“She’s rolling on the floor laughing,” Chelsea explained grimly, “because she doesn’t want to work with the opossums. But I sure do. I mean, I’ve always thought maybe I’d be a veterinarian or something. Working with animals appeals to me. That’d be a good way to find out if I’m good at working with animals.”
“Well, check out Shadrach.com, Chelsea. See what he offers,” Jaris suggested.
Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Like Pop’s gonna let me go and help Shadrach with the opossums!”
“I sure wouldn’t let anybody I cared about go near that horrible looking man,” Inessa announced. “He looks like the monsters in those scary movies. You gotta be careful of people like that.”
“Inessa,” Jaris explained, “in the movies the bad guys are made up to look scary. In real life, some of the worst crimes are committed by handsome dudes. I don’t know about Shadrach. We’d have to know more about him. But he could a wonderful man, maybe a war hero. And if that’s so, we oughta be honoring him for his sacrifice instead of being scared of him.”
“He couldn’t be a war hero,” Inessa insisted. “I bet he’s a crook who was trying to burn down a building. He probably got hurt that way.”
Jaris shook his head.
A minute later, the Honda pulled into the parking structure at the mall. “Now, lissen up, girls,” Jaris commanded. “Buy some nice stuff and get it done. I’m not spending the whole day sitting on a bench while you guys try on everything in the stores.”
“You could buy stuff too, Jaris,” Chelsea suggested. “You always wear those old jeans and T-shirts.”
“I hate shopping,” Jaris responded. “I love my old jeans and shirts. I hate spending money too.” Jaris was like his father in that way. Pop wore stuff until it fell apart. “Do you see Pop hanging around the stores? Does he go feeling the fabrics and turning the stuff around and around like you guys do? That’s a girl thing.”
They all got out of the car and started toward the mall entrance.
Jaris was like his father in many ways. He had the same deep insecurities that plagued Pop. Next term, Jaris wanted to enroll in Advanced Placement American History. The course was taught by his favorite teacher at Tubman, Ms. Torie McDowell. But he wasn’t sure he was smart enough to get college credit while still in high school. He thought he could do the work, but maybe not. There would be awfully bright kids in that class. Jaris worried whether he might be over his head. Yet he wanted those college credits, and he’d feel like a coward if he ducked the class.
Jaris and the two girls walked down the wide promenade with stores on either side. Loud rock and rap music poured from the Tiger’s Paw, a popular teen apparel store. A look of excitement lit up Chelsea’s face. “Oh Inessa!” she cried, grabbing her friend’s arm. “Athena got an amazing top in here last week!”
“They sell really skimpy stuff,” Inessa noted.
Jaris groaned. The last thing he wanted to do was go into Tiger’s Paw and rub shoulders with an army of hysterical thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. An elderly man was sitting on a bench outside the store. Jaris had planned to buy a tall, iced coffee and join. But he knew what would happen if Chelsea brought home more short skirts and skimpy tops. Pop would go ballistic again. He would roar around the house like a wounded lion. He’d rant that his little girl was “goin’ wild again.” Mom would insist Chelsea was just dressing like her peers, and his parents would be at it again.
Jaris walked into the store with the two girls. The only other boy in the place was a kid about fifteen with a magenta mohawk. His arms were covered with tattoos, mostly of skulls. Jaris tried to pull his head into the collar of his T-shirt, like a turtle pulls in its head. But he couldn’t do it. Jaris spotted some fairly modest, brightly colored T-shirts. He pointed and suggested, “There! Look at those great T-shirts. They’re on sale too.”
“I hate them,” Chelsea declared. “They’re so last year.” She elbowed two twelve-year-olds out of her way to get closer to a rack offering scoop-necked tops. “Inessa, look!” she screamed. “This is what Athena got.” The boy with the magenta mohawk looked startled, and he moved out of Chelsea’s way. He thought something terrible may have happened, as if the clothes might be diseased. Jaris thought that anything was possible in this dark, spooky place that smelled of incense. Jaris smiled weakly at the magenta mohawk. He explained, “Just excited little girls, man.” He felt an unlikely kinship with the boy.
“This is it!” Chelsea screamed again, clutching a lilac-colored scoop-necked top. Jaris was getting what Mom would call a “splitting headache.”
“Get it in a large enough size, chili pepper,” Jaris sighed. “So you’re not, you know, falling out of it.”
“I take really small,” Chelsea insisted.
Jaris was almost knocked off his feet by two hefty fifteen-year-old girls. They were dashing to the jeans counter. A trembling pink light indicated that prices had just been slashed. When he recovered his balance, Jaris gritted his teeth. He commanded Chelsea, “Take a medium and a small, and try them on. Now.”
Chelsea emerged from the fitting room, spilling out of her small top. Jaris had a nightmarish vision of Pop seeing her in this top headed for school. In his mind, he could hear Pop bellowing. “All the punks gonna be droolin’, little girl. Oh yeah. They gonna be droolin’ so much they’re gonna need to change their shirts. Y’hear what I’m sayin’?” Jaris couldn’t face it. Since Pop had coerced Mom into signing the new mortgage, the feeling around the house was miserable. Jaris didn’t want to risk a fresh war over Chelsea’s risqué clothing.
“Chelsea,” Jaris declared grimly. “Go back and get the medium one for cryin’ out loud!”
“Jaris!” Chelsea wailed. “Inessa, tell him the truth! Isn’t this just perfect on me?”
“If I wore something like that,” Inessa replied, “my father’d make me wear a pullover. And I’m not even built like you, girl.”
“Thank you, Inessa,” Jaris said.
“You’re a traitor, Inessa,” Chelsea screeched.
“Get the medium one,” Jaris advised through gritted teeth. “Now.”
Chelsea wanted to protest further. But she saw the growing rage in her brother’s eyes and decided arguing wouldn’t work. She returned to the fitting room, tried on the medium top, and came out saying, “It fits like a tent, but I’ll take it.”
“Now get the jeans,” Jaris commanded.
“I’m a size two,” Chelsea announced at the jeans rack.
Inessa laughed. “Girl,” she snickered, “you can’t fit into size two jeans. You’d look like pork sausage in those casings!”
“Size six,” Jaris snapped to the young male clerk. Jaris thought to himself, “Dude how do you stand working in here?”
In about an hour and a half, Chelsea bought two tops and a pair of jeans. Inessa bought a workout wear. Jaris herded the girls toward the parking structure with their bags. He looked at his watch. He had enough time to drop off the girls and get to work at the Chicken Shack. After work, he wanted to pick up Sereeta, his girlfriend, and get some frozen peach yogurt at the Ice House.
As they drove for home, Chelsea texted Athena. She said she had two cute new tops, but they were miles too big for her. It was all Jaris’s fault because he was even worse than Pop. In the seat next to Jaris, Chelsea mumbled what she was texting Athena.
Jaris tried to get Chelsea’s mind off the size of her new clothes. “Be sure and try Shadrach.com, chili pepper,” he urged her. “Sure would be great if you spent the summer working with the opossums.”
He thought, “Better them than me! If Chelsea gets busy with the opossum population, there would be fewer trips to the mall and other places.”