by J.C. Cervantes
Mr. Hawkins drove a van with stickers all over it.
Mostly Grateful Dead.
He wore a scowl that made the deep lines of his tanned face look
like dried mud.
He was the school mystery.
No one knew anything about him.
Was he married? Did he have kids? Where did he grow up?
Why didn’t he ever talk about himself?
He could hear the tiniest of whispers
across the classroom. He knew things,
things he shouldn’t have.
Some kids thought Mr. H was an alien with eyes
in the back of his head.
He was different.
He did things no other teachers did.
He took the class on fossil excavations,
taught us about the building blocks
of the universe,
showed us what the inside of a frog looked like.
He had a thing for bones.
Even the kind you couldn’t see,
like the bones of an idea.
Or the bones of a hope.
A dream.
Hopes and dreams have bones?
What did that mean?
I knew better than to ask. Mr. H would say,
What do you think it means?
Mr. H wanted you to figure things out on your own.
It was the library.
That’s where I grew
the first bone.
In all those stories and spines.
The class went for an afternoon visit.
Mr. H planted himself in a corner chair, a level above
the rest of us
like a king or
a god.
He read a book with a black bird on the cover.
He never looked up. Not once.
He still busted
two kids who had been
messing around.
We all wanted to know
What did he say?
Are you in trouble?
They told us
He said something about opportunities.
Everyone cracked up.
He said something about paying attention.
And not being able to hear
hopes and dreams.
That old man
is crazy.
Everyone laughed again. Even me, but deep down
I started to wonder if I
wasn’t paying attention.
I went back to the library.
Again and again.
The librarian always let me
stay
for as long as I wanted
hunting, absorbing, wondering.
Dreaming.
I checked the same books out
over and over and over.
Stories of magic.
Belonging.
And impossible odds.
Jenny, you have to give others a chance to read these.
But there was no one else in the library, and besides,
they weren’t looking for the same
magic.
I read poetry,
mythology,
Shakespeare.
That was my secret.
My friends wouldn’t understand.
I read
when no one was looking.
Once, I saw some of the same books tucked behind Mr. H’s desk and I wondered
if he kept them
a secret too.
I asked him about them.
He said something about doorways to new worlds.
He gave me books
to read.
After I returned them, he always asked,
How was the journey?
The words spoke to me,
the poetry sang to me.
I felt something
deep
deeper than bones.
Truth: I started
to write poems
to understand the world.
I once walked on clouds and breathed beneath the sea.
I knew how to fly until they told me what to be.
What to be.
So many voices telling telling telling.
The world doesn’t work that way.
Don’t waste your time.
That’s a bad idea.
Girls don’t do that.
It’s in the spines I wanted to say.
In the bones.
Mr. H
he was different.
He said things like
Dream away.
You can be anything you want.
Just make the journey
worth it.
It was only
a small idea
Hidden there
in the pages of my journal
between the maybes and
what-ifs.
But whoever becomes somebody
when they live on a street that no one can pronounce?
I took the bus to the city library.
My friends liked to go for the deli across the street. Two-for-one BLTs
with extra bacon.
I looked up famous authors
studied their lives.
Did they know that they wanted
to be writers?
Artists?
Storytellers?
They lived in big cities.
They looked very serious.
They went to big schools.
Knew the right people.
Mostly men.
Sometimes women.
A bone.
But who says they want to be
a writer?
Too big. Too grand.
Too Everything.
I put Shakespeare away.
I tossed the myths
into boxes.
I did other things
to Belong.
Did you know
bones grow until you’re twenty-five?
You can break them
and they heal.
Some say they grow back
stronger.
I’ve never broken a bone.
I saw it once.
Ugly, twisted—bloodied
flesh that screamed pain.
Before graduation
Mr. H told me to remember
the bones of
my hopes and dreams.
I promised.
But what if I wasn’t born with the right bones, I wanted to say.
I got busy.
Sports, and beaches
and slumber parties.
I got busy
listening to music
I didn’t like.
I tried on faces and voices and skin
that didn’t fit.
I tried
to be like everyone else.
They seemed happy knowing
nothing about bones.
Why can’t I be like them?
Every time I tried,
I broke another
bone.
Sometimes I would see
Mr. H’s van in the old
school parking lot after hours and I’d pop in to say, Hi.
I worried
he’d ask if I had remembered
my promise.
If I had kept it, but
he never did.
He’d just show me
a new map or
book or fossil he’d collected.
It made me wonder,
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
He set the fossil aside.
Everything.
No one can
be everything.
I can, he said.
Or at least
everything I wanted.
How?
I’m a scientist,
an artist,
a mathematician, an engineer,
an archaeologist
all because I’m
a teacher.
But
what if it’s too hard?
What then?
He shrugged
pulled another book from his shelf.
Have you read this one?
A few years later,
Mr. H left that school.
I never saw him again.
I wished
everyone got a teacher as good as he was
at least once
in their life.
For years
I forgot him.
Left him on the grounds
of that school.
But in my mind,
he was always there,
in that classroom with his stacks of books,
his planet posters,
and piles of old maps. Looking at the world
through the eyes in the back of his head,
paying attention
to his dreams.
Here’s the thing
about hopes and dreams—
they know how
to sleep.
And they know when
to wake up.
In college I wrote things.
Not stories.
Things about theories and arguments
and “great literature.”
Things about dead authors: Dickens and Twain and Hemingway.
I read a line
by Maya Angelou:
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story within you.
I wondered if the hard stuff,
the stuff we hide
is where our
true stories lie.
The stories we keep hidden
from the world,
because it’s easier
to play small than
to dream big.
I wish
I still had the pencil
I used that day.
I didn’t know those words would become
a book.
Hopes and dreams
they don’t always come
fully formed.
Sometimes they arrive
in bits
and pieces,
like a puzzle you have to put together
over time.
Sometimes with the help
of many hands.
And sometimes
it’s too late
to turn back.
Too late
because you’ve had a taste
of a new world
where you can be
Everything.
The words came that day.
They poured out of me every day.
And the next day
and the next
and the next.
In those stories
I got to be
a witch,
and a baseball player,
a demon, and a god,
a broken-hearted teen,
and a hero.
I got to be
Everything.
When I began to teach English at the university,
I thought about Mr. H.
I knew he would like that I had figured it out
on my own.
The bones of my hopes and
dreams.
That I’d kept
my promise
after all.
That first day
I walked into the classroom
I began with these words,
We’re going to start with the bones.
J.C. CERVANTES is a New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults. Her books have appeared on national lists, including the American Booksellers Association New Voices, Barnes and Noble’s Best Young Reader Books, and Amazon’s Best Books of the Month. She has earned multiple awards and recognitions, including the New Mexico Book Award and the Zia Book Award.
She currently resides in the Land of Enchantment with her family, three spoiled dogs, and a lifetime collection of books. But she keeps part of her heart in Southern California, where she was born and raised. When she isn’t writing, she is haunting bookstores and searching for magic in all corners of the world.