The next day, Jaris wanted to take Sereeta to the Ice House for a frozen yogurt. He asked Chelsea if she wanted to tag along. It was a hot day, and Chelsea jumped at the chance of eating something icy. All the way down the road, she struggled to decide what flavor she would choose for this unexpected treat.
Then, by the side of the road, Chelsea saw something bloody.
“Jaris!” she screamed. “A car killed another opossum!”
Sereeta got a sad look on her face. “The poor thing. I hope it didn’t suffer,” she remarked.
“Jaris,” Chelsea said, “maybe it’s a mother opossum, and she still has babies in her pouch. Shadrach says that sometimes happens. Then the poor babies just die slowly by the roadside. Could we stop and take a quick look?”
Jaris looked unhappy at the suggestion. “Uh, I think it’s just a male opossum, Chelsea,” he responded. “And he’s dead, so he’s not suffering.”
“How do you know?” Chelsea demanded. “Couldn’t you stop for just a minute so I could make sure?”
“Let’s stop, Jaris,” Sereeta urged. “Now I’m worried too. I’ll keep thinking about it if we don’t stop. I’ll be thinking those little opossum babies are dying in the heat. Chelsea and I’ll just jump out of the car and look.”
By this time, the car had passed the dead opossum. Jaris made a U-turn and pulled to the side of the road near the dead opossum. Sereeta and Chelsea hurried over to the animal. Chelsea got there first. The adult opossum was bleeding from the head where the car had struck it.
There was no more life in the adult opossum, but it was a female. The half exposed pouch was filled with tiny, squirming babies.
“Jaris!” Chelsea screamed. “She has babies, and they’re still alive!”
Jaris got out of the car as Chelsea was pulling an old towel from the trunk. “We can wrap them in this,” Chelsea directed. “Shadrach told me just how to pick them up without hurting them.”
“What?” Jaris groaned. “Chelsea, they’re so tiny. They can’t ever live outside the mother. Chili pepper, be reasonable. You can’t save them.”
“So what should we do?” Chelsea demanded, now in tears. “Just leave them to slowly die out here in the sun?” Chelsea was shaking with emotion.
“That guy Shadrach,” Sereeta asked, “he’s near here isn’t he? On Indigo Street? I’ve passed his place on my bike. We could just take them there. It wouldn’t take long.”
Sereeta helped Chelsea load the dead mother opossum along with her pouch of babies into the towel. They had made a kind of sack from the towel. Sereeta and Chelsea sat in the back seat of Jaris’s Honda, both holding a corner of the sack. Jaris had a look of total bewilderment on his face as he drove toward the refuge.
“His pickup is there in the yard,” Chelsea pointed. “Shadrach’s home! He’ll help us now.”
Shadrach answered Chelsea’s knock immediately. “Oh, hi Chel,” he began to say.
“Oh, Shadrach,” Chelsea began to rattle, “we found a dead mother opossum by the side of the road where a car hit her. She’s got lotsa live babies in her pouch, and I know you can save them. We put the mother and babies in a towel, and I’m sure you can save the babies. I just know it. Will you help, Shadrach?”
“Sure!” he agreed, following Chelsea to the car. He lifted the towel sack up and took it inside. After a few moments, he shook his head. “I’m sorry, Chelsea, but they’re just too young to be saved,” he told her sadly.
“Oh, but they’re alive,” Chelsea protested. “You can—” “No, Chelsea, look how pink they are, like little worms,” Shadrach pointed out.
Chelsea was so sure Shadrach could save the baby opossums. She looked at them, and tears ran down her face.
“They’d only suffer if we let them live any longer,” Shadrach advised. “There’s a veterinarian over on Hockins Street, just around the corner. He helps me with the opossums. I’ll take them over right away, and they’ll be put down.”
Shadrach studied Chelsea closely, and he said gently, “I’m sorry, Chelsea. I know you wanted a different outcome. You don’t have to come with me to the vet. You did a good thing bringing the little critters in. You’ve spared them a lot of suffering out there on the road.”
“I want to go with you to the vet,” Chelsea insisted.
Shadrach looked at Jaris and Sereeta. They nodded.
“We’ll follow you over,” Jaris said.
The veterinarian was an elderly man who seemed very kind. He examined the baby opossums and declared, “They can’t survive at this stage. They’d just die slowly.”
Shadrach said, “This little girl found the dead mother and the babies on the side of the road. I told her we couldn’t save them.”
The veterinarian looked at Chelsea and smiled. “You have a good heart, child.” Then he disappeared into another room with the baby opossums.
Chelsea stood there, wiping away her tears. “I so hoped they could be saved. They were like moving around,” she sobbed. “I could feel them moving under the towel. I was so happy they were alive.”
Shadrach put his hand on Chelsea’s shoulder. “They would have died slowly in that pouch on the road, Chelsea. They would have suffered. You saved them from that. You rescued them from needless pain. You spared helpless little critters a lot of suffering. That’s a beautiful thing. You can be proud of that.”
Jaris, Sereeta, and Chelsea were finally back in the car on the way to the Ice House.
“You’re one special kid, Chelsea,” Sereeta commented.
“Anybody woulda felt sorry for those poor little things,” Chelsea responded.
“But not anybody would have done something about it, Chelsea,” Sereeta said. “That’s what makes you special.”
In a little while, they were sitting in the Ice House and eating frozen yogurt. Jasmine Benson and two of her friends came in and sat nearby. The other two girls with Jasmine were from Lincoln High. Jasmine was talking in a loud voice that almost anybody in the yogurt shop could hear. She was so busy laughing and talking, she had not noticed Jaris and Sereeta.
“She was really drunk, and her daughter and her boyfriend had to practically carry her into the house,” Jasmine crowed. “One time too, she came to Tubman High really drunk, and the teachers had to take her home and—” At that moment, Jasmine saw Sereeta and dropped her voice to a whisper. She said something to the two Lincoln High girls, and they looked over at Sereeta.
Jaris felt sick at the pain on Sereeta’s face. He thought this is how it’s going to be during Sereeta’s senior year at Tubman. Girls like Jasmine gossiping about Sereeta’s mother and her alcohol problems. Mean girls like Jasmine who loved to gossip about other people no matter how much they hurt people.
Maybe the worst part was that Jasmine would never admit that she reveled in the failures of other people. She would simply say that she was talking about it because she felt so sorry for Sereeta. She wanted to share that sorrow with other girls. Jasmine would say that she was just pointing out to those other girls how brave Sereeta was. After all, she was continuing to come to school, even though her mother was a laughingstock.
Jaris would have liked to go over to Jasmine’s table and spill the rest of his soda over her head. But that would have just hurt Sereeta even more.
“I guess we’re all done here,” Jaris remarked, as Chelsea took the last spoonful of her yogurt. On their way out, Jaris gave Jasmine the dirtiest look he could muster. When Jasmine saw Jaris, she started to smile and greet him. Then she realized he’d heard everything. She saw the hatred in his eyes, and she said nothing.
Jaris thought about telling Sereeta how sorry he was, but doing that didn’t make sense either. She knew he was sorry. Some people in the world were creepy, like Jasmine, but what good would talking about it do?
During the car ride home, Jaris had made a good bit of money this week, much of it in tips from the Chicken Shack. He had already added to his small savings account. He had also been planning to donate some money to a charity. In fact, he had the cash on him. He’d expected to over to the church this afternoon.
Now he posed a question to Chelsea. “That guy Shadrach, he takes care of the opossums with just his own money and some donations, right?”
“Yeah,” Chelsea replied.
“I got a little money to give,” Jaris told her. “I’ll give half to Pastor Bromley’s program for the foster kids and half to Shadrach. I’ll give you the money for Shadrach, and you can give it to him the next time you see him.”
Chelsea grinned broadly, “Oh, that’s great, Jaris. How about if we go together and give it to him?”
“Okay, it’s not too late,” Jaris agreed.
They doubled back to the opossum rescue center and knocked on the door. When Shadrach appeared, Chelsea made the announcement. “My brother thinks you’re a great guy, Shadrach. He wants to make a donation to help you with the opossums.”
Jaris peeled off two twenties and a ten and handed it to Shadrach.
“Hey, thanks a lot!” Shadrach responded. “You guys want to come in? I live in a small apartment next to the shelter. I got some nice cold sodas.”
“Yeah, sure,” Jaris agreed.
They entered a tiny apartment with a single bedroom, living room, and kitchen. Shadrach pulled sodas from the refrigerator, and the three teenagers sat at the kitchen table. “You been hanging here for long, Shadrach?” Jaris asked.
“Oh, maybe two years,” he answered.
“How come you like opossums so much?” Sereeta asked. “I think they’re kinda cute, but not everybody does.”
Shadrach laughed. “That’s putting it mildly. If there was an ugly contest among the animals, opossums would come in first,” he chuckled. “Maybe that’s what attracted me to them. People like foxes, raccoons, even chipmunks. But the poor opossum is right there next to rats.”
Sereeta sipped her soda and made a comment. “I bet you like all kinds of animals, people too. You can tell when somebody has compassion.”
“That’s a nice compliment,” Shadrach replied, “but probably half true. I do like all animals, but people . . . not so much I’m afraid.”
Chelsea had always noticed a deep loneliness in Shadrach’s face. It wasn’t just the scarring in his cheek, but an overall emptiness and sadness. That’s why Chelsea was so happy when Ms. Colbert kissed him.
“I don’t want to be nosy,” Jaris asked. “But your injury looks like it mighta from an IED.”
“Yep!” Shadrach answered. “Being in a war kinda can sour you on humanity sometimes. You wonder why such stuff happens. Like no opossum ever planted a roadside bomb, y’hear what I’m saying?”
It was an uneasy moment of silence. Jaris responded, “I hear ya, man.”
Shadrach broke the silence then. “I’m doing better now. Things are looking up.” He talked a little about his background. He’d been bitter and lonely for a long time. He drifted around the country, taking various jobs. He was a college graduate with a degree in mathematics. He wanted to use that, but he wasn’t ready for steady work.
Then he talked about a turnaround event in his life. One day, Jaris was driving Chelsea and the other girls to the mall. They saw Shadrach at the side of the road with that wounded opossum. Everything changed that day for Shadrach. Nobody had cracked Shadrach’s wall of isolation quite like Chelsea Spain had. She had come bounding into his life like a half-pint tornado. She was a beautiful, bubbly little girl who seemed totally accepting of the way he looked.
Shadrach had looked into the eyes of dozens of people since he was wounded. He always saw a lot of shock, even horror, or at least discomfort.
But Chelsea looked right at him. All she saw was a man holding a hurt animal, and she was worried about its fate. In an eye blink, she lifted Shadrach’s spirits as they had not been lifted in a long time. If a pretty little girl like her could look at him and not be put off, well then maybe he wasn’t so bad-looking at all. Maybe a lot of the shock he thought he saw was in his mind. In a strange way, Chelsea had rescued him that day while he was rescuing the opossum.
Chelsea didn’t know what to say, and so she said nothing.
Shadrach smiled at her. He seemed to want to talk about things he hadn’t talked about in years. These three teenagers called to something deep within him, something that had been locked up for a long time.
“I was engaged to be married when I was deployed to Iraq,” he went on. “It was my third deployment. The third one is supposed to be the charm, but it didn’t happen that way. We had big plans. We were in love. But she couldn’t handle what happened. I don’t have any hard feelings for her. She’s a great girl. I still got a soft spot in my heart for her.”
“She broke it off?” Jaris asked.
“Yeah, she did,” Shadrach replied. “We can’t do more than is in us to do. She just couldn’t handle it. She couldn’t cope with it, not only the injury, but the way I was. I was shattered in my head. I’m an artist. I used to do illustrations for books and magazines. I couldn’t even do that anymore.”
Shadrach got up from the table and went over into the next room. They all heard a couple of drawers opening and closing. Then Shadrach returned with a handful of illustrations. Some were sketches, and some were watercolors. A few were oils. They were images of people and animals—rabbits and wolves and deer. They were good.
“I made a pretty good living for a while,” Shadrach told them. “I’m slowly getting back into illustrations. I live on that, and the government gives me a pension. I’m doing okay. But, you know, it’s hard being alone. You lose the ability to really talk.”
“Yeah,” Chelsea agreed. “I love to talk. I talk all the time. Some of my teachers at Marian Anderson Middle School called me a motormouth.”
“I can tell,” Shadrach remarked with a smile. “Wow! This is more than I’ve told anybody in years. You know, Chelsea, you’re the one got me going. You’re amazing.”
The man looked around at the teenagers at the table. “Anyway, I’ve talked long enough, I guess,” he concluded. “Now you know where I’m coming from. I rescued my first opossum, musta been about two, two and a half years ago. I looked into those beady little eyes and I thought, ‘Hey, this guy accepts me unconditionally. He just needs a friend. He’s not judging me.’ I thought that was pretty cool. I didn’t think a human being could look at me like that. But then you did, Chelsea.”
Chelsea felt so proud and happy to hear Shadrach say that. Strangely, she hadn’t tried to make him feel good about himself. She just didn’t really care that he was injured. She liked him right away—and that was that.
Chelsea thought briefly about Ms. Colbert and how Falisha felt about her mother being with Shadrach. Shadrach and Ms. Colbert did have something going. Chelsea thought Falisha could change her mind about that. Anybody could change.
“I’m glad we’re coming to the opossum rescue place, Shadrach,” Chelsea told him. “I’ve learned so much in just the coupla times I’ve come. And Maurice is learning too. Maurice was kind of a tough troublemaker, but being with the opossums has made him nicer. He won’t admit it, but he really likes the opossums. He was so proud of holding Magic like that.”
“You mean Maurice is turning into a human being?” Jaris asked, laughing.
“Yeah, but he still calls you my ‘lunatic brother,’ Jare,” Chelsea responded. “But he’s much better now that he’s working with the opossums. I don’t know why, but I think the critters bring out the best in people. Even Athena is changing. She’s always kinda self-centered and prissy, but she’s getting to like the opossums too.”
On their way home, Chelsea was tempted to tell Jaris and Sereeta about the friendship between Shadrach and Ms. Colbert. But Chelsea and her new group of friends had made kind of a pact. They had all promised one other that their secrets would stay with the group. And the friendship between Ms. Colbert and Shadrach was sort of a secret. Falisha had trusted them when she shared her dislike of Shadrach, so Chelsea couldn’t tell anybody about that. And Ms. Colbert and Shadrach kissing the night they set Magic free, that was a major secret. That was something Chelsea would not share even with Falisha.
Chelsea had seen sad evidence of what happened when gossip got around Tubman. People like Jasmine used it to hurt Sereeta. If the word got around that Shadrach and Ms. Colbert were more than friends, it could hurt Ms. Colbert. Chelsea really liked the teacher, and she wouldn’t do anything to hurt or embarrass her.
That evening, Chelsea called Athena. She told her about finding the dead mother opossum and how they couldn’t save the babies. “Shadrach was so sweet and nice. I cried, Athena, but he made me feel better ’cause he said I spared the babies a lot of suffering.”
“That’s nice about Shadrach,” Athena replied.
“Yeah, he’s one of the nicest people I ever met,” Chelsea agreed.
“They’re fighting,” Athena reported. She sounded strange, not her usual cocky self.
“Your parents?” Chelsea asked.
“Yeah, they’re fighting like cats and dogs,” Athena said. “It makes me sick. I’m wondering what’s gonna happen, you know. Not that it makes any difference, but, you know, I hate change.”
“Don’t worry about it, Athena,” Chelsea consoled. “My parents fight too. Mom and Pop go at it sometimes, but then they make up. It’ll be okay. The other night Pop was so mad he drove off in a huff. But then he came back home, and they were all lovey-dovey.”
“It’s not like that here,” Athena responded. “They don’t . . . make up anymore.” Chelsea felt a coldness come over her heart. Nothing ever seemed able to upset Athena, but now she was upset. “It’ll be okay, Athena,” Chelsea assured her. “Tomorrow they’ll be better.”
“Maybe,” Athena murmured. “I gotta go. I’m going down to the twenty-four-seven store and see what’s happening there.”
“Athena,” Chelsea advised nervously, “I wish you didn’t go there. It’s almost night. I mean, the sun will be going down, and it’s, you know, dangerous.”
“You should come with me, Chelsea. It’s fun,” Athena suggested. “I mean, it really is. Guys pass by. And they whistle and holler, and it’s fun.” Athena was speaking in a wistful voice.
“My parents wouldn’t let me,” Chelsea replied. “And I’d be scared anyway.”
“Okay,” Athena said. Then she said good-bye and closed the phone.
Chelsea glanced out the window. The sun had not gone done completely, and the sky still had a lot of red in it.
Chelsea didn’t know it, but Maurice had bicycled to the Spain house. He was sitting on the sidewalk, staring at the house.
Jaris happened to notice him. “Chili pepper,” Jaris told her, “there’s a real creepy-looking punk out there looking at our house. I think he knows somebody in this family. Should I go out there and chase him?”
Chelsea pulled the curtain aside. “Jaris Spain,” she scolded him, “don’t you dare chase Maurice. He’s my friend now. He’s scared enough of you.”
Then Chelsea realized he was playing a prank on her. Jaris didn’t really intend to chase the boy away. Chelsea glared at her brother while he smirked at her.
“Jaris,” she told him, “you know how you’re always talking about Alonee’s posse, your tight little group of friends? Well I got one now too, and Maurice is a member.”
“Oh man!” Jaris groaned. “You guys better rethink the membership requirements for your group if you let Maurice in.”
Chelsea gave Jaris a friendly but firm poke as she passed him on her way outside.
“Hi Maurice, wassup?” she asked.
“Is the madman home?” Maurice inquired.
Chelsea giggled. “You mean my brother? Yeah, he’s home. But he won’t bother us.”
“Hey, Chelsea, Heston ain’t your boyfriend is he?” Maurice asked her.
Chelsea shrugged. “Pop says I’m too young for a boyfriend, but we hang sometimes.”
“He never kissed you or anything, right?” Maurice persisted.
“I don’t kiss and tell,” Chelsea answered. “But when I was in seventh grade, a boy named LeRoi kissed me in the basketball court.”
“Didja like it?” Maurice asked.
“No, LeRoi was a terrible kisser. He almost bit me!” Chelsea laughed.
“I’m a good kisser,” Maurice told her. “I’m gonna be the next boy who kisses you, and you’ll like it.”
Chelsea looked at Maurice. He had deep, dark eyes. He had a wild look when he smiled. He laughed then, and he didn’t look so sinister. Chelsea got goose bumps.
“Well, we’ll just see about that,” Chelsea responded. She couldn’t help smiling.
“Maurice,” she went on, “me and you and Heston and Athena and them are good friends, right? We got each other’s backs, right?”
“Sure,” Maurice agreed.
“Maurice,” Chelsea continued, “Athena feels bad ’cause her parents are fighting. She’s gonna go down to the twenty-four-seven store tonight and wave at guys. I’m scared for her. Could you sorta bike down there and keep an eye on her?”
“You got it, babe,” Maurice agreed. “I’ll see she’s okay.”
“I gotta go in now,” Chelsea told him. “Pop’s making curried pork and sweet potatoes. Thanks, Maurice. I feel better about Athena now.”
Chelsea ran inside. Leaning against the closed door, she hugged herself. A strange sense of excitement filled all her senses. She was suddenly so ready to be a freshman at Tubman.
Then something clicked in Chelsea’s mind. Shadrach rescued animals. In a way, he saved kids by tutoring them. Jaris was a rescuer too. He had yanked her out of that party where there were drugs and liquor. Now she and her friends were rescuers. Chelsea had even tried to save the baby opossums. Tonight, maybe Maurice would have to rescue Athena from getting into trouble.
“We’re all rescuers,” Chelsea said to herself. “We’re all here to help one another.”
She was pleased with that thought. She grinned as she went to wash up for dinner.