Flipped (4 page)

When I went in to see him, those big hands of his were woven together, resting on the newspaper in his lap. I said, “Granddad? You wanted to see me?”

“Have a seat, son.”

Son? Half the time he didn't seem to know who I was, and now suddenly I was “son”? I sat in the chair opposite him and waited.

“Tell me about your friend Juli Baker.”

“
Juli?
She's not exactly my friend … !”

“Why
is
that?” he asked. Calmly. Like he had prior knowledge.

I started to justify it, then stopped myself and asked, “Why do you want to know?”

He opened the paper and pressed down the crease, and that's when I realized that Juli Baker had made the front page of the
Mayfield Times
. There was a huge picture of her in the tree, surrounded by a fire brigade and policemen, and then some smaller photos I couldn't make out very well. “Can I see that?”

He folded it up but didn't hand it over. “Why isn't she your friend, Bryce?”

“Because she's …” I shook my head and said, “You'd have to know Juli.”

“I'd like to.”

“What? Why?”

“Because the girl's got an iron backbone. Why don't you invite her over sometime?”

“An iron backbone? Granddad, you don't understand! That girl is a royal
pain
. She's a show-off, she's a know-it-all, and she is pushy beyond belief!”

“Is that so.”

“Yes! That's absolutely so! And she's been stalking me since the second grade!”

He frowned, then looked out the window and asked, “They've lived there that long?”

“I think they were all born there!”

He frowned some more before he looked back at me and said, “A girl like that doesn't live next door to everyone, you know.”

“Lucky them!”

He studied me, long and hard. I said, “What?” but he didn't flinch. He just kept staring at me, and I couldn't take it — I had to look away.

Keep in mind that this was the first real conversation I'd had with my grandfather. This was the first time he'd made the effort to talk to me about something besides passing the salt. And does he want to get to know me? No! He wants to know about Juli!

I couldn't just stand up and leave, even though that's what I felt like doing. Somehow I knew if I left like that, he'd quit talking to me at all. Even about salt. So I sat there feeling sort of tortured. Was he mad at me? How could he be mad at me? I hadn't done anything wrong!

When I looked up, he was sitting there holding out the newspaper to me. “Read this,” he said. “Without prejudice.”

I took it, and when he went back to looking out the window, I knew — I'd been dismissed.

By the time I got down to my room, I was mad. I slammed my bedroom door and flopped down on the bed, and after fuming about my sorry excuse for a grandfather for a while, I shoved the newspaper in the bottom drawer of my desk. Like I needed to know any more about Juli Baker.

At dinner my mother asked me why I was so sulky, and she kept looking from me to my grandfather. Granddad didn't seem to need any salt, which was a good thing because I might have thrown the shaker at him.

My sister and dad were all business as usual, though. Lynetta ate about two raisins out of her carrot salad, then peeled the skin and meat off her chicken wing and nibbled gristle off the bone, while my father filled up airspace talking about office politics and the need for a shakedown in upper management.

No one was listening to him — no one ever does when he gets on one of his if-I-ran-the-circus jags — but for once Mom wasn't even pretending. And for once she wasn't trying to convince Lynetta that dinner was delicious either. She just kept eyeing me and Granddad, trying to pick up on why we were miffed at each other.

Not that he had anything to be miffed at
me
about. What had I done to him, anyway? Nothing. Nada. But he was, I could tell. And I completely avoided looking at him until about halfway through dinner, when I sneaked a peek.

He was studying me, all right. And even though it
wasn't a mean stare, or a hard stare, it was, you know, firm. Steady. And it weirded me out. What was his deal?

I didn't look at him again. Or at my mother. I just went back to eating and pretended to listen to my dad. And the first chance I got, I excused myself and holed up in my room.

I was planning to call my friend Garrett like I usually do when I'm bent about something. I even punched in his number, but I don't know. I just hung up.

And later when my mom came in, I faked like I was sleeping. I haven't done that in years. The whole night was weird like that. I just wanted to be left alone.

Juli wasn't at the bus stop the next morning. Or Friday morning. She was at school, but you'd never know it if you didn't actually look. She didn't whip her hand through the air trying to get the teacher to call on her or charge through the halls getting to class. She didn't make unsolicited comments for the teacher's edification or challenge the kids who took cuts in the milk line. She just sat. Quiet.

I told myself I should be glad about it — it was like she wasn't even there, and isn't that what I'd always wanted? But still, I felt bad. About her tree, about how she hurried off to eat by herself in the library at lunch, about how her eyes were red around the edges. I wanted to tell her, Man, I'm sorry about your sycamore tree, but the words never seemed to come out.

By the middle of the next week, they'd finished taking down the tree. They cleared the lot and even tried to
pull up the stump, but that sucker would not budge, so they wound up grinding it down into the dirt.

Juli still didn't show at the bus stop, and by the end of the week I learned from Garrett that she was riding a bike. He said he'd seen her on the side of the road twice that week, putting the chain back on the derailleur of a rusty old ten-speed.

I figured she'd be back. It was a long ride out to Mayfield Junior High, and once she got over the tree, she'd start riding the bus again. I even caught myself looking for her. Not on the lookout, just looking.

Then one day it rained and I thought for sure she'd be up at the bus stop, but no. Garrett said he saw her trucking along on her bike in a bright yellow poncho, and in math I noticed that her pants were still soaked from the knees down.

When math let out, I started to chase after her to tell her that she ought to try riding the bus again, but I stopped myself in the nick of time. What was I thinking? That Juli wouldn't take a little friendly concern and completely misinterpret it? Whoa now, buddy, beware! Better to just leave well enough alone.

After all, the last thing I needed was for Juli Baker to think I missed her.

I love to watch my father paint. Or really, I love to hear him talk while he paints. The words always come out soft and somehow heavy when he's brushing on the layers of a landscape. Not sad. Weary, maybe, but peaceful.

My father doesn't have a studio or anything, and since the garage is stuffed with things that everyone thinks they need but no one ever uses, he paints outside.

Outside
is
where the best landscapes are, only they're nowhere near our house. So what he does is keep a camera in his truck. His job as a mason takes him to lots of different locations, and he's always on the lookout for a great sunrise or sunset, or even just a nice field with sheep or cows. Then he picks out one of the snapshots, clips it to his easel, and paints.

The paintings come out fine, but I've always felt a little sorry for him, having to paint beautiful scenes in our backyard, which is not exactly picturesque. It never was much of a yard, but after I started raising chickens, things didn't exactly improve.

Dad doesn't seem to see the backyard or the chickens when he's painting, though. It's not just the snapshot or the
canvas he sees either. It's something much bigger. He gets this look in his eye like he's transcended the yard, the neighborhood, the world. And as his big, callused hands sweep a tiny brush against the canvas, it's almost like his body has been possessed by some graceful spiritual being.

When I was little, my dad would let me sit beside him on the porch while he painted, as long as I'd be quiet. I don't do quiet easily, but I discovered that after five or ten minutes without a peep,
he'd
start talking.

I've learned a lot about my dad that way. He told me all sorts of stories about what he'd done when he was my age, and other things, too—like how he got his first job delivering hay, and how he wished he'd finished college.

When I got a little older, he still talked about himself and his childhood, but he also started asking questions about me. What were we learning at school? What book was I currently reading? What did I think about this or that.

Then one time he surprised me and asked me about Bryce. Why was I so crazy about Bryce?

I told him about his eyes and his hair and the way his cheeks blush, but I don't think I explained it very well because when I was done Dad shook his head and told me in soft, heavy words that I needed to start looking at the whole landscape.

I didn't really know what he meant by that, but it made me want to argue with him. How could he possibly understand about Bryce? He didn't know him!

But this was not an arguing spot. Those were scattered throughout the house, but not out here.

We were both quiet for a record-breaking amount of time
before he kissed me on the forehead and said, “Proper lighting is everything, Julianna.”

Proper lighting? What was that supposed to mean? I sat there wondering, but I was afraid that by asking I'd be admitting that I wasn't mature enough to understand, and for some reason it felt obvious. Like I should understand.

After that he didn't talk so much about events as he did about ideas. And the older I got, the more philosophical he seemed to get. I don't know if he really
got
more philosophical or if he just thought I could handle it now that I was in the double digits.

Mostly the things he talked about floated around me, but once in a while something would happen and I would understand exactly what he had meant. “A painting is more than the sum of its parts,” he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic.

I understood what he was saying, but I never
felt
what he was saying until one day when I was up in the sycamore tree.

The sycamore tree had been at the top of the hill forever. It was on a big vacant lot, giving shade in the summer and a place for birds to nest in the spring. It had a built-in slide for us, too. Its trunk bent up and around in almost a complete spiral, and it was so much fun to ride down. My mom told me she thought the tree must have been damaged as a sapling but survived, and now, maybe a hundred years later, it was still there, the biggest tree she'd ever seen. “A testimony to endurance” is what she called it.

I had always played in the tree, but I didn't become a serious climber until the fifth grade, when I went up to rescue a kite that was stuck in its branches. I'd first spotted the kite floating free through the air and then saw it dive-bomb somewhere up the hill by the sycamore tree.

I've flown kites before and I know—sometimes they're gone forever, and sometimes they're just waiting in the middle of the road for you to rescue them. Kites can be lucky or they can be ornery. I've had both kinds, and a lucky kite is definitely worth chasing after.

This kite looked lucky to me. It wasn't anything fancy, just an old-fashioned diamond with blue and yellow stripes. But it stuttered along in a friendly way, and when it dive-bombed, it seemed to do so from exhaustion as opposed to spite. Ornery kites dive-bomb out of spite. They never get exhausted because they won't stay up long enough to poop out. Thirty feet up they just sort of smirk at you and crash for the fun of it.

So Champ and I ran up to Collier Street, and after scouting out the road, Champ started barking at the sycamore tree. I looked up and spotted it, too, flashing blue and yellow through the branches.

It was a long ways up, but I thought I'd give it a shot. I shinnied up the trunk, took a shortcut across the slide, and started climbing. Champ kept a good eye on me, barking me along, and soon I was higher than I'd ever been. But still the kite seemed forever away.

Then below me I noticed Bryce coming around the corner and through the vacant lot. And I could tell from the way he was looking up that this was
his
kite.

What a lucky,
lucky
kite this was turning out to be!

“Can you climb that high?” he called up to me.

“Sure!” I called back. And up, up, up I went!

The branches were strong, with just the right amount of intersections to make climbing easy. And the higher I got, the more amazed I was by the view. I'd never seen a view like that! It was like being in an airplane above all the rooftops, above the other trees. Above the world!

Then I looked down. Down at Bryce. And suddenly I got dizzy and weak in the knees. I was miles off the ground! Bryce shouted, “Can you reach it?”