Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari

underwater and realized they couldn’t touch bottom, they decided to retreat. Looking like two drenched rats, the bullies barked and bellyached from the shore.
    “Chicken!” taunted Raymond.
    “Traitor!” screamed Farley. “You’ll pay for this, Bird.”
    As we pulled away, Farley and Raymond shrank in the distance. Feeling safe, I stopped rowing and let us drift into the bay.
    “One thing about Farley, he swims about as good as an anchor,” I joked.
    Kenji was silent, catching his breath.
    “Don’t say thanks or anything,” I snapped.
    “Thanks,” he said.
    “It’s the least I could do after you stole my report topic,” I told him.
    “I didn’t steal it,” he said. “Anyway, if you want it so bad, take it.”
    “What? You mean it?”
    “It’s just a stupid airplane,” he said.
    “Airplanes aren’t stupid,” I told him. “Especially Warhawks.” Just what kind of weirdo was this kid? “Don’t you know they had a ten-to-one kill ratio in China against the Japs?” Then I shut myself up. What was I saying? He
was
a Jap. “I meant, you know … the Jap-a-nese.”
    “I know what you meant,” he said.
    Great. Now it was gonna be a long uncomfortable silence and I’d probably say something stupid, like—
    “My little brother still pees in this water when he goes swimming.”
Oh my God!
I thought.
Did I really just say that?
    Kenji looked at me like I was a polka-dotted sea slug.
    I couldn’t help it. When things got quiet and uncomfortable, I’d sometimes say stupid stuff. Like once, we were all sitting around the Christmas dinner table waiting for Grandma to say grace—and she passed gas. I mean a really big one. But everyone pretended like she didn’t and just held their breath while she kept on praying. Uncle Rupert was practically turning blue. Finally I couldn’t take the silence and blurted out, “I didn’t know you knew how to fart,Grandma.” I had to eat dinner in Grandma’s cellar for that one, but Dad told me later that I probably saved Uncle Rupert from having an asthma attack.
    “I just meant, you know, I wouldn’t gulp down any of this water if you ever go swimming in the bay here,” I explained.
    “Sure,” Kenji said. He reached into his jacket and carefully pulled out a soggy yellow Milk Duds box. It was empty. He pulled another one out of his shirt pocket. Nothing. Then he found a third one in his back pants pocket. He dug his fingers in deep and pulled out the sorriest-looking, most waterlogged chocolate-covered caramel I’d ever seen. He was about to pop it in his mouth when he felt me staring, and stopped.
    “Milk Dud?” he said, offering it to me first.
    “Uh, no thanks.”
    Kenji shrugged “okay” and started chomping away. His foot happened to bump the fishing rod in the boat, so he leaned over and picked it up, kind of gently.
    “This your rod?”
    “Nope. It’s Father Krauss’s.”
    “Oh.”
    He examined the assortment of fancy lures and treble hooks dangling on the lead.
    I pointed to the silver lure with tiny mirrors on both sides. “That’s his favorite lure.”
    “It’s a pretty fancy setup,” Kenji said.
    “You fish?” I asked.
    “My father used to. He’s gone now.”
    “You mean… dead?” I said, surprised. I guess I hadn’t really thought about how this kid ended up living with his uncle here in Geneseo.
    “More or less,” he said.
    More or less? That didn’t make sense. “How can someone be more dead, or less dead? You either are or you aren’t, right?” I said. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, it’s none of your business.”
    So I shut up. I’d found that was the best thing to do when someone said “It’s none of your business.” There were some things (like why Minnie’s big sister Emily had to go live with her aunt after her belly started to get fat) that they’d never tell an eleven-year-old girl no matter how many questions she asked. I was trying to figure Kenji out, but it was almost like he was joking