ball with you.”
She tried to smile.
“What do you mean? You were just throwing it.”
“Am I a good mother, Joey?”
“A good mother?”
She put her hand on my cheek.
She hugged me.
Then handed me the ball and went into the house.
Back in my room I climbed the ladder to the top bunk and lay on my stomach, propped up on my elbows. I had stuff to read for school: three pages. That was all. What a joke. I’d read a paragraph, then drift into some thought. Like why was Mom being so weird?
I jumped when a sudden breeze rustled the bushes outside.
Jeez! I was getting spooked in my own room, if you could call that place I lived in a room. What it was was half the garage. One flimsy wood wall stood between my bunk bed and Mom’s beat-up old car. On the ceiling was a single bulb in a circular, cake-shaped fixture with a few small moths glued to it. On one side of the light, a model B-52 hung by a piece of thread with its nose pointing down.
I tried to read.
The gulf which separated the chiefs, or
alii,
and the commoners had to be accepted. No one dared question the fact that chiefs were descendants of the gods.
Another short gust of wind rustled the bushes. I looked up. The weather must be changing.
I stuck my pencil in my mouth and bit down, crunching into the yellow paint—then spat the pencil out.
A centipede was oozing out of the rock-and-cement wall along the opposite side of my room. There were cracks in the mortar where those things came out of at night when the place was quiet.
Icy prickles rose up all over my neck.
The centipede was red brown, with dark bands dividing its segments. It undulated on a hundred spiky legs, flowing and rippling down the rock, following the rough contour like a snake. It had to be five inches long at least.
I felt sick to my stomach.
A countertop ran along that side of my room, and the centipede flowed down onto it and scurried behind a picture of my grampa in a standing frame.
I spat bits of yellow pencil paint off my tongue, waiting for the centipede to come back out.
I froze, afraid to even move.
Centipedes stung, they were ugly, and I hated them more than scorpions and wasps and blue-bubble Portuguese man-of-wars. I even hated them more than black widows, which hid in girls’ hair at school and could kill you, a true fact I’d heard from a kid on my street named Frankie. But worse than all that, centipedes made me sick because of one time when I was with Willy and Julio and went to get a drink of water, hanging my head under the faucet on the side of our house, and a
monster
centipede came scrambling out into my mouth.
Ghhaaaaaaaahh!
I ran around in circles, spitting and gagging and wiping my tongue off with my hand. The centipede disappeared into the grass. Willy and Julio thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.
Now I turned my book over and inched down the ladder, keeping my eyes on that picture frame. I slipped out into the garage, then into the house.
Everything was dark and quiet.
My feet were silent on the cool linoleum kitchen floor, on the scratchy grass mats in the living room, on the waxed concrete hallway down toward my mother’s darkened bedroom.
At first I thought everyone was asleep.
But as I passed by Stella’s room, I saw a sliver of light running along the bottom of her closed door. I could hear her radio, too, playing low. I tiptoed by. If she knew I was scared of a centipede, she’d torment me for weeks with her smirks.
Stella was seventeen years old. She was from Biloxi, Mississippi, a place she said was a lot like Hawaii. She came out here to live with her aunt. But that didn’t work out, so she looked around for a live-in baby-sitting job. She was a junior at Kailua High School and didn’t want to leave her friends.
Mom slept curled up on her side, facing the wall. I crept closer, tripping over her fat scrapbook, where she kept magazine cutouts of her future dream house.
“Mom,” I whispered.
She bolted up.
She tried to smile.
“What do you mean? You were just throwing it.”
“Am I a good mother, Joey?”
“A good mother?”
She put her hand on my cheek.
She hugged me.
Then handed me the ball and went into the house.
Back in my room I climbed the ladder to the top bunk and lay on my stomach, propped up on my elbows. I had stuff to read for school: three pages. That was all. What a joke. I’d read a paragraph, then drift into some thought. Like why was Mom being so weird?
I jumped when a sudden breeze rustled the bushes outside.
Jeez! I was getting spooked in my own room, if you could call that place I lived in a room. What it was was half the garage. One flimsy wood wall stood between my bunk bed and Mom’s beat-up old car. On the ceiling was a single bulb in a circular, cake-shaped fixture with a few small moths glued to it. On one side of the light, a model B-52 hung by a piece of thread with its nose pointing down.
I tried to read.
The gulf which separated the chiefs, or
alii,
and the commoners had to be accepted. No one dared question the fact that chiefs were descendants of the gods.
Another short gust of wind rustled the bushes. I looked up. The weather must be changing.
I stuck my pencil in my mouth and bit down, crunching into the yellow paint—then spat the pencil out.
A centipede was oozing out of the rock-and-cement wall along the opposite side of my room. There were cracks in the mortar where those things came out of at night when the place was quiet.
Icy prickles rose up all over my neck.
The centipede was red brown, with dark bands dividing its segments. It undulated on a hundred spiky legs, flowing and rippling down the rock, following the rough contour like a snake. It had to be five inches long at least.
I felt sick to my stomach.
A countertop ran along that side of my room, and the centipede flowed down onto it and scurried behind a picture of my grampa in a standing frame.
I spat bits of yellow pencil paint off my tongue, waiting for the centipede to come back out.
I froze, afraid to even move.
Centipedes stung, they were ugly, and I hated them more than scorpions and wasps and blue-bubble Portuguese man-of-wars. I even hated them more than black widows, which hid in girls’ hair at school and could kill you, a true fact I’d heard from a kid on my street named Frankie. But worse than all that, centipedes made me sick because of one time when I was with Willy and Julio and went to get a drink of water, hanging my head under the faucet on the side of our house, and a
monster
centipede came scrambling out into my mouth.
Ghhaaaaaaaahh!
I ran around in circles, spitting and gagging and wiping my tongue off with my hand. The centipede disappeared into the grass. Willy and Julio thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.
Now I turned my book over and inched down the ladder, keeping my eyes on that picture frame. I slipped out into the garage, then into the house.
Everything was dark and quiet.
My feet were silent on the cool linoleum kitchen floor, on the scratchy grass mats in the living room, on the waxed concrete hallway down toward my mother’s darkened bedroom.
At first I thought everyone was asleep.
But as I passed by Stella’s room, I saw a sliver of light running along the bottom of her closed door. I could hear her radio, too, playing low. I tiptoed by. If she knew I was scared of a centipede, she’d torment me for weeks with her smirks.
Stella was seventeen years old. She was from Biloxi, Mississippi, a place she said was a lot like Hawaii. She came out here to live with her aunt. But that didn’t work out, so she looked around for a live-in baby-sitting job. She was a junior at Kailua High School and didn’t want to leave her friends.
Mom slept curled up on her side, facing the wall. I crept closer, tripping over her fat scrapbook, where she kept magazine cutouts of her future dream house.
“Mom,” I whispered.
She bolted up.
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