Unforgettable by Loretta Ellsworth Page B

protest?”
    Roxie’s soft voice drifts from behind me. “Because I want my parents to be safe. They breathe in taconite powder every day at work.” She sounds like dandelion fluff.
    â€œWhat kind of music you like, Baxter?”
    â€œI’m good with whatever,” I reply. I don’t listen to music because it gets tied in to the memory of when I heard it, each and every time.
    â€œFor the new guy, here’s an Iron Range song. It’s the only song I like from my parents’ generation.” Eddie pushes a button and the sounds of “Endless Highway” fill the van. I expected heavy metal music from Eddie. His voice is a boulder.
    Halle leans forward, her elbows on the back of my seat. She whispers in my ear. It tickles and I hunch my shoulders. “Bob Dylan grew up on the Range. All the old people listen to him here.”
    Eddie drives slowly, or maybe the van isn’t capable of going any faster than thirty miles an hour. He turns and pulls up to a drive-through lane. Fumes from the exhaust leak in the windows. I hold my breath.
    Eddie leans out the window. “Who wants a burger?”
    Everyone yells their order at the same time. I end up with a burger and Coke I didn’t order, but I pay for and eat it anyway.
    Halle orders fries. “I’m a vegetarian, but I’m not that strict. I don’t mind a little meat grease in my fries.”
    We drive past a lake and head north of town. It’s 3:30. I know I’m supposed to be at home waiting for the cable guy, and I can’t say what every other teen says when he blows off something his mom told him to do. I can’t say I forgot.
    When I was little, Mom accidentally closed the car door on my pinkie. Just thinking about it makes my eyes water and my finger throb. I used to think that’s how everyone’s memory worked, that you’re trapped in those memories, and every hurtful experience and bad choice is with you forever.
    So I’m worried that I’m making a bad choice now; ditching the cable guy to ride in a beat-up van and protest in front of a taconite plant. We drive past scattered buildings and farms, and soon those fade away, too. Steep banks give way to pine trees, small lakes, and wide canyons filled with gray-and-red rock, all of it man-made. A line from Gatsby plays in my head about the Midwest being the ragged edge of the universe. If that’s true, then the Iron Range is the pit at the bottom of that edge.
    There’s a feeling of desolation and destruction out here. Halle calls it the rape of the land. The buildings of Wellington Mines rise up from a cloud of red dust in the distance like a lost city. A huge lost city. Warehouse-sized buildings and trucks that dwarf Eddie’s van are surrounded by tall chain-link fences. I feel as though we’ve entered another world.
    Eddie parks the van in weeds next to the road just outside the entrance.
    â€œAren’t we going inside?” I ask.
    Eddie shakes his head and reaches back for one of the homemade signs. “Not allowed inside the fence. But we’ll catch the four o’clock shift change.”
    Everyone grabs a sign and tumbles out of the van. I pick up what’s left: a bent piece of yellow cardboard with a paint stick fastened to the bottom. It has black printed letters on it that read, TACONITE KILLS!
    â€œI’m getting better signs made,” Halle says. “Professional quality. Ones that will blow them away.”
    Her sign is white with computer-printed letters on it: KEEP OUR WORKERS SAFE.
    â€œAnd better slogans. Catchier phrases.”
    â€œHow long have you been doing this?” I ask.
    â€œWould you believe this is just our second demonstration? We formed the club in junior high at the end of last year. It was just Gina and Roxie and me. This year we tried it at the high school. Seven kids showed up at our first meeting, but two left and never returned. And then my ex quit