A late-December rain poured down outside. The wind slapped it against my window. I’d pulled up the blinds in my room to watch it at night. Across the street, our neighbors still had a giant white inflatable Christmas snowman in their front yard. The snowman swayed in the wind. Most nights since we got home, I hadn’t slept all the way through. I’d had nightmares of falling. I’d wake up from the nightmare right at the moment Mom and I leapt from the plane. It will sound strange, but sometimes I wished I could stay in the nightmare five minutes longer. It might have given me a clue about how we got to the hospital. Because I only remembered the awful stink of jet fuel and then jumping. The fuselage was about twenty feet above the ground when it came to a stop in that field. Twenty feet is about the height of a two-story building.
I’d looked it up.
So we’d leapt twenty feet into the darkness. If it hadn’t hurt Mom so much, I might have considered that a cool fact.
But once I knew that fact, I stopped having the jumping nightmare. I didn’t know facts could do that.
Several other survivors had also jumped from the wreckage. Those facts had been printed in a recent article and added to my find-the-flag project.
As far as the crash was concerned, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it had collected 70 percent of the plane debris, the black boxes, and a substantial number of items belonging to the passengers, but there was no mention of a missing American flag. The initial findings of the cause of the crash were expected in about six to eight weeks.
Mom had gone to the doctor for a new arm brace.
“Look, Wayne, I’m learning to use my left hand now,” she said. She was proud of her progress.
I went to a voice specialist and was evaluated.
“It’s going to take some time, Wayne, but you should be talking in three months or less,” the doctor said. He was proud of his diagnosis.
And neighbors brought us food that tortured my taste buds. Do you know what it’s like to look at delicious food you can’t eat? It’s like this. It’s like looking at the school lunch calendar and counting the days until it’s pizza-stick day. Pizza-stick day was a reason to go to school. Seriously. Even parents came to school for lunch on pizza-stick day. They were legendary.
All that food in our fridge? It was like getting in line to purchase pizza sticks only to have the cafeteria lady say, We just ran out, Wayne. Sorry.
True story.
The biggest new fact was that Grandpa had really moved into our house. He brought four things with him that he was very proud of.
The Car, a.k.a. his pristine 1967 candy apple–red Mustang convertible that “you may never lean against or get near under penalty of death.” A beat-up suitcase that “you may never touch.” A closetful of button-down flannel shirts that “you may get out of the dryer right now.” And Hank Williams. Hank Williams was a red-eared slider turtle who “you’d better feed right now.”
Every time Grandpa saw me, he had an order for me to go and do something useful. And it was fine by me. I was trying my best to avoid him. On a scale from one to awkward, we were off the charts.
Get-well cards.
Did you know there was a man in New York who received a winning lottery ticket inside a get-well card while he was in the hospital? He did. When he scratched it off, he realized he’d won seven million dollars.
True story.
Our kitchen countertop was littered with cards, some of which included bad poetry. One was from my dad. He wrote that he’d try to stop by soon. My dad was remarried now and had a new little kid. They didn’t even live far from us. You would think that would make it easy to stop by. You would think.
“You should go do something with your dad,” Mom said.
Why? I was still annoyed about not driving home from the hospital with him. I could have written him a note, but he could have stayed, too.
“Because he’s your dad,” she said.
So?
“You’re being stubborn. It’s good to be around him a little bit,” she said. “He can teach you man things.”
Man things?
“You know what I mean.”
No. No, I didn’t.
So I told her I’d think about it so that she wouldn’t get all worked up.
Some other get-well cards declared that every cloud had a silver lining.
The poet John Milton is the originator of this saying.
I looked it up.
Well, I had been inside an actual cloud. Its lining was not silver. It was more of a dirty cotton ball. (That is a fact, Mr. Milton.)
This just proved my theory about poets. They are making stuff up so that life will sound better than it is. I didn’t know why Sandy was such a fan.
If there was any silver lining in my situation, it was that the plane had crashed during Christmas break. I planned to hide out on Cedar Drive as long as possible.
But the Saturday morning after I’d stayed awake watching the rain through my window, school came to me.
“Wayne,” Grandpa called. “Report to the front door. A trio of friends is here to see you.”
My mind raced. A trio?
There were three kids from Beatty Middle School in my entryway. Their mouths hung open. Eyes fixed on me with the kind of looks people displayed when they drove past a car crash. I’d forget that my face was all beat up, and then someone would look at me and I’d remember all over again.
“Hi, Wayne,” Mysti said. She handed me a card. I was sure it was a get-well card.
“Duuuuuude. Your face,” Anibal said.
Anibal stretched the word dude into two syllables. Rama elbowed him hard in the rib cage.
Coming to my house was probably the idea of Mysti Murphy and Rama Khan. Those two girls had nice ideas, such as letting me sit at their lunch table or sharing delicious pizza sticks.
No way was it shoe-stealing Anibal Gomez’s idea. He did not have a reputation for having nice ideas. He had a reputation for having ideas only he thought were funny, like stealing my shoes and hiding them in the library.
So the fact that he was involved in coming to Cedar Drive put me on high alert.
“Has Sandy seen you, man?” Anibal said, cocking his head to the right.
“Don’t listen to him, Wayne,” Rama said. “He’s a fetus.”
No, Sandy hasn’t seen me. Why? What has she told you?
They studied me. Studied me like I was a test and they had to memorize details. The fill-in-the-blank spot where my eyebrow used to live. The L shape of stitches across my face. And also, my new, shorter hair. Mom thought it was a good idea for both of us to shorten our hair. Good idea for her, maybe. I just did it because I was doing whatever she said.
My mouth went dry and then tried to cough up something to say, but all that came out was Errrr.
“We brought you something,” Mysti said.
She handed me a brown paper sack. It said GOODWILL in red lettering on the outside.
“We brought you shoes,” Anibal said, at which point Rama elbowed him a second time. “What? They’re shoes. Which is kinda funny coming from me, but that’s how we knew your shoe size. Ironic, huh?”
Stupid irony.
“Don’t make me regret bringing you with us, Anibal,” Mysti said. “Anyway, we heard you lost your shoes, and, well, Anibal did know your shoe size.”
I didn’t lose them. I left them behind.
Do you know why flight attendants tell you to take off your shoes and remove any pens or pencils from your pockets before an emergency landing? This is because the emergency slides are inflatable. They don’t want any shoes or pens to puncture the slide on the way down.
I looked it up.
Somewhere in the chaos of the plane’s free fall, I’d followed those instructions. Which turned out to be stupid because there were no slides for our emergency exit.
“Sorry they aren’t new shoes,” Mysti said. “We couldn’t afford much right now.”
I couldn’t say anything. And then I realized that I didn’t want to say anything.
I wanted to disappear.
“Well, my mom is waiting for us in the car,” Rama said. “We hope you get better and come back to school soon.”
Mysti looked like she might cry. I swallowed hard. I stared at the brown bag. I suddenly wanted them to leave.
I wondered how I could avoid school. Maybe my plane-crash status would free me for the rest of the semester, let me make up my classes during the summer. I would look it up later and check.
I’d seen a reflection of the new Wayne Kovok in their eyes. I didn’t like it.
Do you know how to make this look? Okay, just as your dog straight-tails it and takes a dump, glance over at him. You got it? You are repulsed. The dog is humiliated. It’s awful for all parties involved.
So that was how Mysti, Rama, and Anibal looked at my face.
With the dog-dump stare.
And they were my friends. How would nonfriends look at me?
I opened the Goodwill bag. There was an old, beat-up pair of dingy white tennis shoes. Someone else’s shoes.
And they fit perfectly because I was now, in fact, someone else. Someone from another country. Another planet.
I decided right then that I didn’t want to see my Beatty Middle School friends. More accurately, I didn’t want to be seen by them. I wanted to hide. I’d figure out a way.
So I went to our computer and typed out an e-mail before I lost my nerve.
Data sent to Mysti via e-mail because she was the only one safe to tell:
Dear Mysti,
Thanks for the shoes. No offense, but I don’t want to be around anyone at all right now. I’m going to go monk for a while. Or maybe I should say go mime, without the stupid striped shirt. I already have the no-voice part down. Explain this to Rama. I’m writing this to you because you know how she is—she will try to convince me I should talk to you guys. I want to be alone now, okay? Please understand.
W
Data received from Mysti via e-mail:
Wayne,
I understand. Once my mother put a bowl on my head and then cut my hair. It was hideous. I wanted to disappear! Rama said to look up emu oil for your face, BTW. Sorry about stupid Anibal.
M
And that was how I said good-bye to my old friends.
And a friend said good-bye to me.
A friend who sort of compared surviving a plane crash to having a horrible haircut.
A friend who took my request for being a middle school monk without any protest.
I mean, I expected a little protest.
A tiny protest.
A crumb of a protest.
Do you know what happened to that crocodile that survived the plane crash in the Congo? I’ll tell you what happened because I looked it up. (Uncle Reed left out one very interesting detail about that story.)
The crocodile? It got a machete chop by first responders at the crash site. Yeah. It survived the whole plummet and fall and crash. It survived!
And then it was sliced through the head, dead.
I’m not saying that Mysti’s e-mail was the same as a machete chop. No way. I’m saying that plane-crash survivors don’t have any special superpowers. They can still get hurt after the crash.
True story.