I Kill the Mockingbird (3 page)

“Stick a fork in us,” Mom says. “We’re done.”

“Amen,” I say.

“Merrrrrrrry Christmas!” Elena shouts.

“Thanks, girls,” Mom says.

Dad helps pack up the camera equipment and move it back into the house. I begin gathering plush sheep and cows and donkeys. “Lots of girls would like to go out
with Michael,” Elena tells me.

I stuff a load of felt snouts and furry tails into a plastic storage bin. “That’s nice.”

“But not you?”

I don’t answer.

“Why not?”

The pine branches above us, which are usually filled with birds and squirrels chirping and chattering, grow suddenly quiet as if even the wildlife wants to see what I have to say. “Michael is my friend. I don’t want to mess that
up.”

Elena nods thoughtfully. “You’re afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of anything.”

“Everybody’s afraid of something. Personally, I struggle with
hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
.”

“Very funny.”

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
is a word that Mr. Nowak used to put on our spelling tests. It means the fear of long words.

Elena puts her hands on her hips. “If you’re not going to do anything,
then I’m going to tell Michael that I have a crush on him.”

I stop in my tracks. “You do?”

Elena laughs. “Not really. I just wanted to see your reaction.”

“That wasn’t funny.” I turn and consider my friend. “But why don’t you? I mean we’ve all been together forever. You know Michael as well as I do. Why do I feel this way and you don’t?”

Elena shrugs. “This might sound silly, but when I have
a boyfriend, I hope I can kiss him without using a step stool.”

“That makes sense,” I admit.

“It makes sense now,” says Elena. “But one day I’ll probably get swept off my feet by the Jolly Green Giant.”

“Or somebody like Fat Bob,” I say.

“I’m going to set the bar a little lower,” Elena tells me. “Literally. But you don’t have to.”

I think about what Elena is saying. “Okay,” I finally reply.
“I’ll talk to Michael.”

Elena retrieves a pink pig from the grass. “That’s good.”

I remember another one of the big words that Mr. Nowak taught us how to spell. “But I’ll do it chronogrammatically.”

Elena looks perplexed. “You’re going to speak in Roman numerals?”

Now it’s my turn to be confused. “I thought that chronogrammatically meant saying things in your own time.”

“Chronograms are words
or phrases that have letters like M or C or L or V. The letters tell a date written in Roman numerals.”

“Why exactly do you know that?” I ask her.

“I live in a bookstore,” she reminds me. Elena gathers the Virgin Mary sheet around her shoulders. “Saying what you mean is hard enough, Lucy. Then you go and add seven or twelve or fourteen extra syllables for no good reason. Pretty soon, we’re back
to the Tower of Babel.” She shakes her head. “It’s a little scary.”

“Elena,” I say, “you’re a little scary.”

“That’s why you love me,” she says, “but don’t call me little.”

4

Jesus in a Bike Basket

Once Elena and I finish gathering the stuffed animals, we drag the rest of the manger scene into the garage. We have a two-car garage, but my parents rarely squeeze more than one vehicle in here. Dad’s Jeep lives in the driveway, and Mom’s Volkswagen, which hasn’t left the garage in months, stays inside. Right now, the VW is surrounded by several old bikes, a rickety
wooden stepladder, and a big red snowblower.

Elena places our plastic baby Jesus inside a wicker basket that’s attached to the handlebars of an adult-sized tricycle near the Volkswagen’s back bumper. Somebody donated the three-wheeler to St. Brigid’s, so Dad brought it home in case Mom wants to use it while she’s recuperating. St. Brigid herself will come back from the dead on a skateboard before
my mother chooses to pedal around West Glover on a tricycle.

“Want to go for a ride?” Elena asks me.

I shove the last box of Christmas decorations into a corner. “Sure,” I tell her.

“Can I ride the tricycle?”

I point to a big wire cargo bin that’s fastened behind the trike’s seat. “We’ll have to put something heavy in there or else it tips over really easily.”

Elena moves the plastic doll
from the basket to the bin.

“Baby Jesus is not enough,” I warn her. “You’ve got to have a lower center of gravity.” I find a small, unopened bag of rock salt and place it into the bin next to the doll. “Now you should be okay.” I grab the pink princess three-speed that my parents got me when I turned ten. It’s too small for me now, but I still like it. “We’re going to the Green,” I shout into
the kitchen.

“Okay,” Dad calls back.

“Michael is playing baseball at the Green,” says Elena.

“So?”

She shrugs. “I’m just saying.”

Together, we pedal away from the garage and then down the driveway. I’m behind Elena, and I see one wheel of the tricycle lift slightly off the road when we turn onto the road. “Be careful!” I call after her.

“Don’t worry!” She stands on the pedals and speeds
away.

We roll down my street, and Elena waves at my neighbors. Michael’s driveway is empty, which means that his mom is probably cruising around town in a West Glover police car. During the school year, she’s the police officer who makes classroom visits encouraging kids to read books, stay off drugs, pick up trash, learn how to swim, put out forest fires, and grow up to be president one day.
When she’s not at work, Mrs. Buskirk is a coach for a bunch of different youth softball and baseball teams. As for Michael’s dad, neither Elena nor I have ever met him. Michael gets Christmas and birthday cards from his father now and then, but he’s not part of the family photo album.

Elena and I stop at the signal light on Main Street. If we turn right, we’ll reach Uncle Mort’s bookshop. If
we turn left, we’ll see the West Glover Public Library, which is just a block away. Instead, we cross Main Street then keep going straight. One more block brings us to the Federal Green, a wide, open park at the heart of our town.

Back in Puritan days, West Glover’s Federal Green held a community sheep grazing pasture, an outdoor market, and a set of stocks and pillories for troublemakers to
endure public humiliation. Now it’s home to tall gnarled sycamores, a brightly colored play structure, and a couple rough, mowed baseball fields. There’s a soccer field and a big, white bandstand, too.

The metallic clank of an aluminum bat echoes across the park. Elena and I turn toward the baseball diamond and pedal through the grass. The baby Jesus bounces around the tricycle’s storage basket
like a kangaroo on a trampoline until we finally stop at the wooden stands near the first-base line. That’s where we find Michael, all dressed up in his green-and-white Little League uniform. He’s sitting by himself in the bleacher’s first row.

Elena cruises to a stop beside the bleachers. “What are you doing?” she says to Michael.

Michael looks up from a worn copy of
Fahrenheit 451
. “What does
it look like I’m doing?”

“It doesn’t look like baseball.”

“I played in the first game. They asked me to sit this one out.”

“Why?” I ask him.

“I hit four home runs.”

Elena remains in her tricycle seat. “So?”

“And seven RBIs.”

“Seven is a lot,” I say.

“It might have been eight.” Michael scuffs his shoes in the dirt. “And then they kicked me off the team.”

“Excuse me?” asks Elena.

Michael
shrugs. “After my last home run, the coach on the other team complained. He says I can’t be fourteen years old.”

“But Michael,” I say, “you are fourteen years old.”

Michael nods toward the opposing team’s bench. “According to them, I’m sixteen or eighteen or thirty-seven.”

Elena stands on the tricycle’s pedals. “That must have been some home run.”

Michael points across the Green at the big
white-steepled church in the distance. “It landed on the steps of First Congregational.”

Elena stares at the church, which is across the street from the Green. It’s more than a football field away. “That’s a big league home run!”

“Look where it got me,” Michael tells her.

“That’s not fair,” I say to Michael.

“You’ve got to call your mom,” Elena adds.

Michael points to the opposite side of
the Green where a couple tiny T-ball teams are running around. “She’s over there helping the little kids.”

“Do you want me to get her?” I ask.

“No.” Michael reaches into an old
Star Wars
backpack that’s sitting by his feet. He finds a water bottle, takes a long drink, and then sets the container on the bench. “The other coach was right.”

Elena hops off the tricycle. “You’re thirty-seven?”

Michael shakes his head. “I should be playing against tougher competition.”

Just then, a batter sends a pop fly into shallow left field. The shortstop, the third baseman, and an outfielder all rush to make the catch. They collide and then collapse onto the ground.

“You might be right,” I tell him.

“I’m waiting for this game to finish,” Michael continues, “then I’m going to ask the coach if he’ll
help me sign up for one of the senior leagues. That way, I can go up against high school and college players this summer. It’s the only way I’m going to get better.”

“Fine then,” Elena says. She points toward Michael’s backpack. “What else did you bring to read?”

“You don’t have to sit around too,” Michael tells her.

“We’ll wait.” She leans back and gives me a wink.

I try to give her a mean
face, but it’s no use. Elena does what she wants. I don’t know how she manages it. In so many ways, she’s had no control over her life. She lost both her parents. Her body got all wrecked and then reassembled by strangers and she was passed off to an uncle who, luckily, is really nice. Her life has been a roll of the dice. And yet she is so strong and funny and sure about things.

“It’s up to
you,” Michael says. He places his copy of
Fahrenheit 451
on the bleachers then reaches into the
Star Wars
backpack and pulls out two more paperbacks. “Do you want
David Copperfield
or
To Kill a Mockingbird
?”

Elena takes
Fahrenheit 451
. Michael turns to me. I don’t speak. I just hold out my hand. Michael smiles. “One
Mockingbird
coming up.”

5

A Mob. A Horde. A Multitude. A Throng.

Here’s the thing.
To Kill a Mockingbird
is my favorite novel of all time. When Mr. Nowak announced that it was his only choice for summer reading, I wanted to jump up and cheer. There are long sections of the book that I know completely by heart. Last year, Michael and Elena even helped me read the whole thing out loud to my mom when she was too
sick to do anything but lie down. We sat beside her bed and took turns. Once, when Elena was reading, Mom lay so still that we thought she might be dead. None of us knew what to do. Elena was reading the scene where Atticus Finch, the main character’s father, has to shoot a dog that’s got rabies. It is a very tense moment, and when Atticus finally pulled the trigger, I burst into tears. Mom opened
her eyes. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was thick and groggy.

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Why are you crying?”

“The book,” I said. “The dog—”

Elena shifted in her chair near the foot of Mom’s bed. “Mrs. Jordan,” she said, “we were afraid that maybe you were—”

“What?” said Mom.

“A little dead,” admitted Elena.

Mom took a sip of water. “Don’t buy a box for me yet.”

My face burned red. Mom wasn’t going
to get a box. Dad already let me know that he and Mom wanted to be cremated one day. “You can spread us around the graveyard at St. Brigid’s,” he told me. “We’ll be good for the grass, and it will be nice to be near the church.”

Mom was in the hospital the day Dad shared that bit of news with me. It was cold outside, and Dad and I were carrying groceries from the car into the house. “Haven’t
you had enough church?” I blurted out.

“I have absolutely no idea,” he told me. “That’s why I keep going.”

“Why else?” I asked him.

Dad put the groceries on our kitchen table. “Life is a gift. Going to church is like sending a thank-you card.”

At our house, thank-you cards are a big deal.

“Mom’s cancer isn’t a gift.”

Dad started putting food away. “Remember when you chipped your tooth last
year?”

Without thinking, I ran my tongue over my front teeth. One of them is mostly plastic now. I cracked it during a soccer game in the middle of seventh grade. The boys called me snaggletooth for a week, and I cried myself to sleep every night. “I remember.”

“Did you know that I went to high school with your dentist?”

“Dr. Sullivan?”

Dad nodded. “Mary Sullivan was my date to the junior
prom.”

“I didn’t know that,” I admitted.

He passed me a bag of fresh broccoli, which I carried to the refrigerator. “I wore a powder-blue, polyester tuxedo with lapels the size of the Bermuda Triangle,” Dad recalled. “There was also a matching ruffled shirt and a bow tie that looked like I stole it off Ronald McDonald.”

I turned around just in time to catch the red pepper Dad threw my way.
“I don’t think Ronald McDonald wears a bow tie.”

“Now you know why. In any case, Mary and I are still friends. That’s why I told her I was worried that your mother had been losing weight. She’s the one who called Mom and convinced her to make an appointment with the doctor who found the cancer. I wouldn’t have seen Dr. Sullivan if you hadn’t broken the tooth.”

“So?”

“So did you think that your
chipped tooth was a gift from God?”

“No.”

Dad waved a roll of paper towels at me. “And yet—”

“There’s a big difference between cancer and a chipped tooth.”

“I’m not saying that cancer is a gift. Neither is a chipped tooth. But you don’t know what will come of it. Personally, I don’t believe that God has motives that we are supposed to understand or enjoy.”