Flying Solo Read online

  “Waahh!” Christopher cried, furiously rubbing both eyes.

  “Good-bye,” Jasmine said coldly. “Now where’s the map legend?”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you guys?” John asked, pointing at Bastian. “It’s his last day. We have to do a rock ritual.”

  “It’s not on the schedule,” Karen said doubtfully.

  “Forget the freakin’ schedule!” John cried. “He’s leaving! This is our last chance!”

  “Fact,” Christopher put in.

  For a second nobody spoke.

  “I guess you’re right,” Karen said reluctantly. “Mr. Fab probably would’ve put it on the schedule if he’d known it was his last day.”

  “It just seems weird to do it without Mr. Fab,” Jessica said.

  “Map skills or rock ritual?” Missy asked. “Which way should we go? Should we vote?”

  “What do you think, Bastian?” Vicki asked.

  Bastian was looking out the window.

  “He’s thinking about Hawaii and all those hula hula girls,” Tim said.

  “You bet,” Bastian said. He was really thinking about Barkley, flying alone across the Pacific, the largest ocean on earth. The flight would leave tonight at 6 P.M.

  “Okay, who votes for a rock ritual?” Karen said.

  Everybody raised his or her hand except Jasmine and Jessica.

  “Opposed?” Karen asked. The class stared at the two girls but they still didn’t raise their hands.

  “Are you waiting for a third choice?” Christopher asked.

  “I abstain,” Jessica said, arms folded.

  “Me, too,” Jasmine put in.

  “Oh, brother!” Tim grabbed his head.

  “C’mon, we’re running out of time,” Karen said. “Go get the rocks, Bastian.”

  1:40 P.M.

  Rock Ritual

  Bastian went to the closet. From the top shelf he took down a large wooden bowl. Inside there were about a dozen beautiful rocks: polished agates and geodes, glittering chunks of pyrite, and several quartz crystals. The bowl was heavy, and he had to balance it carefully so it wouldn’t drop. He put the bowl in the middle of the circle.

  Mr. Fabiano was big on rituals, especially inventing new rituals for things that mattered. He had a special welcome ritual for when a new kid came into the class. He had the ritual of playing music during writing time. He had the ritual of reading aloud a certain book, The Day You Were Born, whenever someone had a birthday.

  The purpose of the rock ritual was to say goodbye to a class member who was leaving. Mr. Fabiano called it a “closure ritual.” The class made a circle around the person and watched while that person chose one of the rocks. Everybody else took turns holding the rock while sharing a memory about the person who was leaving. The rock got passed around the circle from student to student, soaking up memory after memory, story after story. The departing person took the rock away when he or she left.

  Rachel remembered the rock ritual they had when Miss Wilcox, their student teacher, left the class in February. In October they had tried to do a rock ritual after Tommy Feathers died, but that time it didn’t work. They used the pyrite cube—“fool’s gold”—that had been Tommy’s favorite rock. The pyrite cube got passed from student to student but nobody had anything to say. Now the golden cube was sitting on Mr. Fabiano’s desk.

  “Ah, the ritual of the sacred rocks!” Christopher exclaimed, bowing so low his head touched the floor.

  “For once, act your age and not your IQ,” Jessica suggested. Some kids laughed at that.

  “Gee, the last time I heard that one I fell off my pet dinosaur!” Christopher exclaimed.

  “Shush,” Karen urged.

  The class waited while Bastian peered into the bowl and picked up a fist-sized rock, brown on one side, studded with sharp white crystals on the other. He moved the rock into a shaft of sunlight and the crystals threw tiny rainbows onto the wall.

  Karen clapped twice.

  “The ritual of the rock begins in silence,” she said.

  Bastian put the rock in front of him and everyone closed their eyes for one minute of silence.

  Bastian closed his eyes. He felt the strangest feeling inside him, a sensation that had been growing during the day: a jagged kind of sadness he had never felt before. He opened his eyes and peeked at the other kids. He had spent eight months with them. He would try to keep in touch with a friend like John, but the rest of them would drift out of his life forever. He didn’t feel broken up about leaving any of them. So why this sadness so sharp, so sudden? It didn’t make sense.

  Sean O’Day came and squeezed into the circle next to Rachel. At that instant all Rachel could think of was Tommy Feathers, the way he always scurried to sit next to her during circle time.

  That was the thing about Tommy. She might forget his dirty hands, or the off-key way he hummed during writing time. But she would never, ever forget the way he looked at her. A look filled with love that was transparent as the cleanest glass. You could see right through it. Would anyone else ever love her like that?

  “All right,” Karen said. She picked up the rock Bastian had chosen and handed it to Christopher.

  “My turn? Okay, well, I remember the time last fall we were playing kickball. We were losing, like, nine to nothing. We scored a bunch of runs in the last inning. And you kicked a grand slam to win it, ten-nine.”

  “Yeah.” Bastian nodded. “And Rick Frost tried to trip me when I came around third. Dork!”

  Christopher passed the rock to Robert.

  “I remember at the beginning of the year when you made that substitute cry,” Robert said.

  “Yess!” Christopher said, raising his fist. Tim and John gave each other high fives.

  “Remember when you whipped those pennies against the blinds?” Robert asked. “That was so loud!”

  Rachel remembered. The substitute teacher was an older woman who couldn’t control the class. Kids threw airplanes, spitballs, Cheez Doodles. She demanded to know who threw the pennies at the blinds and when nobody would tell her, she started to cry.

  “That was so excellent!” Christopher said.

  “That was so mean,” Jasmine muttered.

  Robert passed the rock to Corey. He examined it, then looked up and grinned.

  “Remember when you blew up that mailbox?” he said.

  “I was there!” John said, drumming his thighs. “Ooooh! That was great!”

  “Who, me?” Bastian asked innocently.

  “He put a cherry bomb in, shut the door, and BLAM!” Corey said. “There was metal all over the place.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Bastian said, nodding left and right.

  “Whose house was it?” Vicki asked.

  “Who cares?” Christopher said. Corey passed the rock to Sean.

  Sean took the rock and slowly turned it over in his hands.

  “Well, I remember your birthday party,” he said softly.

  “We threw Mr. Fab into the pool!”

  Everybody smiled.

  “Yeah,” Jasmine said, “and your mother ironed all his paper money to dry it. Remember that?”

  “He wasn’t even mad,” Tim said. “My old man would kill me if we threw him into the pool.”

  “Shh,” Karen said. “It’s Sean’s turn.”

  “You got that puppy for your birthday,” Sean said. “That’s the kind of dog I want to get. I’m saving my money.”

  “Yeah,” Bastian said. And he felt it again. A rush of sadness—strange, mysterious—welling up inside him. And all at once he got it. He understood. He had been moving toward it all day, but he hadn’t figured it out until that very moment.

  The sadness was about Barkley.

  Dad was right. It would be flat-out wrong to put Barkley through the Quarantine. Four months was one hundred and twenty-two days. Two thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight hours. One hundred and seventy-five thousand six hundred and eighty minutes. That was too long for a little puppy to
wait, no matter how many times Bastian visited him. It would be cruel to put Barkley through all that.

  A moral decision. And he knew the right thing to do.

  He had to give Barkley away.

  Give Barkley away?

  Yes.

  No decision had ever felt more right. Or made him feel more miserable.

  Now he understood the real reason for this rock ritual. It was a closure ritual. A chance to say goodbye, not to the other kids, but to Barkley. He tried out the words, saying them under his breath.

  Goodbye, Barkley.

  Sean passed the rock to Rachel.

  “You gonna pass?” asked Tim, nervously bouncing his knee up and down.

  Rachel held the rock in one hand, a pen in the other. At the far end of the room she could see the picture of Tommy Feathers.

  According to his parents, Tommy Feathers went to bed at a normal time and never woke up. Dr. Norton was preparing an autopsy, but he said that preliminary indications were that the boy had died from natural causes.

  Rachel swallowed and stared at the picture. Whenever she looked at it she imagined that he was looking for her.

  Natural causes. Tommy had been fourteen years old when he died. How natural was that?

  “You passing, or what?” Tim asked again. “C’mon, give it here.”

  Rachel gave Bastian a level look. Then she leaned forward and began to scribble on a note card.

  “We’ll be here all day!” Tim muttered.

  Rachel handed the card to Missy. She read it and blew out her fat cheeks.

  “You want me to read this?” Missy asked. Rachel nodded. Missy read the card in a clear voice:

  I remember how you teased Tommy Feathers.

  Silence. Kids glanced from Rachel to Bastian.

  “Yeah, so?” Bastian said. “Big deal.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to tell, like, good memories?” Jasmine asked.

  “A memory is a memory,” Missy said.

  Rachel bent and started to write on the other side of her card.

  “She had her turn,” Tim said. “C’mon, pass the freakin’ rock!”

  “Yeah!” Christopher said, but everybody waited for Rachel to finish writing.

  You raced him to the bus, Missy read in an angry voice, but as soon as he started running you’d stop and let him keep going all the way to the bus. He was a slow kid and you teased him. You called him Doctor Drool.

  “So what?” Bastian said, shrugging. “Is it my fault the kid drooled? Yeah, I teased him. I tease everybody. Name one person in here I don’t tease, huh?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “What?” Bastian shouted, looking around at the other kids. “You think I was the only one, huh?”

  “Shush!” Karen said.

  “Hey, I didn’t kill him!” Bastian hissed. His eyes narrowed. His voice got low and gravelly. “The kid had medical problems, okay? He died in his sleep! And he was a pain in the butt! Everybody’s afraid to say it, but it’s true! You know it and I know it!”

  Rachel was writing again, lips compressed with fury.

  “I think we should stop—” Jessica began.

  “Yeah, maybe we’d better—”

  “You should talk!” Bastian shouted at Rachel. “Why don’t you write about the fifty million hearts and valentines he made you!”

  “Will you please keep it down!” Karen begged, but Bastian ignored her.

  “Remember that time he asked you to be his girlfriend?” he yelled at Rachel. “You blew him off! You just laughed at him! SHUT UP, RACHEL! JUST SHUT UP!”

  He grabbed the pen out of Rachel’s hand and threw it across the room. Rachel balled up the note and threw it at Bastian. It bounced off his chest. Then she dropped her face into her hands and started sobbing. Her shoulders shook. The sobs filled the room and they startled the class because they carried the buried sound of a voice they had not heard for half a year.

  “It’s okay,” Sean whispered, putting his hand on her shoulder. With his other hand he picked up the note and unwrapped it.

  Remember that little Nerf football you gave him for his birthday? Sean read quietly. Tommy kept it in his desk. He told me it was the best present he ever got. He looked up to you, Bastian. He trusted you.

  Bastian closed his eyes. There, in the darkness, he saw the whole thing: Barkley, Tommy, the Nerf football. Barkley and Tommy looking at him.

  Bastian leaned forward and started to cry.

  Everybody froze.

  Suddenly Bastian sprang up. He drew back his arm and threw the rock at the window. By some miracle it flew through a four-inch space between the opened top window and the glass below it. Bastian swore and ran out of the room. John ran out after him.

  2:01 P.M.

  Tommy Feathers

  Class 6-238 stayed in the circle. The room was silent.

  “I told you it was dangerous to run a class without a teacher,” Jessica said. “You guys thought I was crazy but I was right: People can get hurt. When I said that I didn’t just mean physically hurt. I meant—”

  “Two points for Jessica,” Christopher mocked.

  “Well, this is what I was talking about!” she retorted. “Kids aren’t equipped to handle stuff like this! Look at Bastian.”

  “He had it coming,” Rhonda said.

  “Shut up!” Tim told her.

  “Hey, everybody take it easy,” Vicki said. “That’s over with.”

  “Look, it’s not the end of the world,” Karen said. “A kid in our class died and some people cried. What’s so horrible about that?”

  “Today’s the six-month anniversary,” Missy said in a soft voice. “Tommy died on October twenty-eighth.”

  Everybody looked at the calendar. Rachel sat up. She took a tissue and blew her nose.

  “I always thought it was weird,” Missy said.

  “What?”

  “That we stopped talking about him,” Missy said. “I mean, first he was here, then he was gone, and we just . . .”

  “What did you expect?” Tim asked.

  “I don’t know,” Missy said, shrugging her big shoulders. “That we’d at least mention him once in a while.”

  Rachel wiped her eyes. She took a deep quavery breath and the class turned to her as if she might speak, but she did not.

  “It’s true,” Vicki said. “We never talk about him.”

  “I think about him a lot,” Robert said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Corey said. “I’ve had dreams about Tommy.”

  “We never wrote about him,” Jasmine said.

  “Fact,” Christopher said. He nodded.

  “Let’s write, right now,” Karen said. “C’mon, let’s do it.”

  “No way,” Tim said. He sat on his hand. “Uh uh. I’m finished writing. I’ve got writer’s cramp.”

  “C’mon,” Karen urged. “We’ve got just enough time before the assembly.”

  “What I want to know is: Who made you the teacher?” Tim demanded.

  “You got a better idea?” Karen asked him.

  Everybody got up and walked back to their desks. Rachel went to the stereo. She flipped through the CDs until she found what she was looking for—the 1812 Overture.

  The music began, lively, stirring. As much as anything those notes brought the presence of Tommy Feathers back into class. Rachel had finally gotten her eyes dry, but now the tears started coming back and she went to fetch the box of tissues.

  Missy

  Yes, he was a little weird. But he was the sweetest thing. He adored Rachel. He’d look at her with those big puppy dog eyes. And he was so nice to me. He was mostly nice to everyone. And he was an amazing cook. I guess it runs in the family. He used to bring lots of stuff from Feathers’ Bakery into class. It was not good stuff if you were trying to lose weight but it was always delicious. My personal favorites were the lemon doughnuts. Just before he died he brought in raspberry pie, pieces for everybody in the class. I guess that was his goodbye gift to us. He made a whole pie out of
golden raspberries and gave it to Rachel. Golden raspberries! I mean, who ever heard of golden raspberries?

  Tim

  He had a big head. It sounds freaky to say that about him, but that’s the thing I remember most. I remember last year when we went to an assembly for bike safety. We were all trying on helmets but for Tommy they had to find one that was adult size—extra large. That big head made him look a little freaky. The first time my little brother met him, he stared and I had to tell him to quit it. But it was pretty freaky seeing a kid with a head that big.

  Jasmine

  Last fall Mr. Fab said—not all stories have happy endings. Boy, that’s for sure.

  I’ll never forget seeing him at Feathers’ Bakery—his parents really loved him. You could just tell. They didn’t care that he was a little slow—and they didn’t treat him any different than anyone else. He waited on customers, boxed doughnuts, poured coffee, counted out change. They got up at 5 A.M. on weekend mornings to make doughnuts, and Tommy got up with them—Mom said they were trying to make him independent, so he could run the bakery himself someday.

  Just before Christmas I went into Feathers’ Bakery to get some jelly rolls. Mr. and Mrs. Feathers looked so sad. They didn’t smile—they hardly said a thing. It was the saddest thing—their only son, dead. I haven’t been able to go back there ever since.

  Christopher

  Fact: Tommy Feathers died on October 28th. Fact: My father has had at least a dozen patients die in the operating room during heart surgery. Fact: Everyone dies. It’s sad, but it happens.

  Opinion: As soon as Tommy Feathers died people stopped telling the truth about him. Fact: He was a pretty good cook but his hands were never that clean. Fact: I’ve seen Tommy Feathers push down younger kids and make them cry. Fact: I’ve heard him tell dirty jokes. Nasty jokes. Opinion: Tommy Feathers was not the nicest person in the world. I’m not saying he was evil, I’m just saying he had plenty of faults like everyone else. Why should we turn him into some kind of saint just because he died?