JAWAD

I made a jet pack. And they killed me for it.

It wasn’t even real. It was plastic and tubes, glue and paint. I wanted to be a steampunk inventor for Halloween because I’d seen this awesome old anime called Steamboy about a kid who liked to tinker and create stuff, kinda like me.

In fifth grade, some of the kids started calling me Contraption Kid because I loved inventing things. Because someone gave me a stick of gum, two paper clips, and a string, and I invented a tool to sneak Starbursts out of the bowl on the attendance secretary’s desk. It definitely wasn’t as quick and easy as walking by and pocketing a candy when her head was turned, but it was way more fun. She only bought the original flavors. But that was fine by me because orange was my favorite anyway. I wish I could taste orange now. I wish I could taste anything.

For our elementary school engineering contest, I made a bridge out of Popsicle sticks and tape that held 150 pennies! Twenty pennies more than anyone else’s. The trick was to turn the bridge upside down to hold the cup of pennies, to work against its natural bend. I got a ribbon for it and won a book about how to make cool stuff out of recyclables, called Hey! Don’t Throw It Away! My parents were so proud. Baba always used to say that flipping your thinking was sometimes the best way to come up with an answer to a tough problem. Building that bridge was the first time I understood what he meant. My dad used to say a lot of stuff that went over my head.

Then this fall, right after I started ninth grade, the physics teacher organized an after-school club in the makerspace where we could work on our own projects. When I decided I wanted to build a jet pack for my costume, Ms. Ellis was totally into it. Recycle! Reuse! Repurpose! she’d always say. She knew exactly what I was doing. Saw my sketch and approved it. We’d been taking apart old electronics, like radios and TVs with dials and antennas, and Ms. Ellis said I could use any materials I could salvage. I was so excited, I took the whole project home to finish two weeks before Halloween.

My jet pack turned out so cool. I built it from two empty plastic soda bottles that I turned upside down and glued together, then linked with black plastic tubes—the stretchy kind you sometimes see on a vacuum. I added a TV knob and a dial from an old radio that had numbers from 88 to 108—its little needle was stuck on 96. Glued the whole thing to a ripped backpack I found in the trash.

I painted the pieces bronze and silver with leftover paint Baba kept in our building’s basement, the same colors we used to upcycle the old pink bike our neighbor gave me when I was seven and we didn’t have money to buy a new one.

I couldn’t wait for Halloween to show Ms. Ellis the jet pack, so I took it in early. She loved it. “Being creative takes courage,” she told me. “Never forget that.” She had that look in her eyes that teachers sometimes get when you surprise them in a good way. I had the jet pack with me in English class, but when Ms. Jensen saw it, she said it looked like a bomb. I thought she was joking at first. I mean, it was painted soda bottles! I didn’t even know what a real bomb looked like. But she kind of freaked out. Not the yelling kind of freaked out. The real quiet kind. The kind that’s so much scarier. Her face turned gray, and she started stepping away from me. I shrugged and headed to my next class.

They walked me out the school door on a bright October day in handcuffs. Hands behind my back, like I was a criminal. I told them over and over that it was a jet pack for my Halloween costume. But it was like they didn’t understand English. I was trying so hard not to cry. All I kept thinking, kept saying, was It’s not real. It’s a jet pack. It’s not real. It’s not real. Please. Kids were in the hallway taking pictures, livestreaming, whispering.

I thought that was the worst day of my life. Turned out, I was dead wrong.