A Star is Born Read online

  Okay. Woke up on a Tuesday morning and everything looked fine. My room was still rectangular, the windows were still in the same place, and there were still cars double-parked in the street below.

  When I got out to the kitchen Mom was at the table pushing a piece of lemon around her teacup with the spoon.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked.

  “Just thinking about what your father was saying the other day.” Mom sounded moany. “I wonder if he thinks I’m a lousy parent?”

  “What do you care?” I asked. “I think you’re okay.”

  “You’re just in love with my mac and cheese,” she said.

  “So today we’re going to be doing the duck dish, right?” I said. “I even got Bobbi coming over to help and she’s not into cooking.”

  “I hope it turns out all right,” Mom said. “They said it was easy on the website.”

  Mom was sweating making a fancy dish with me. It was funny in a way and not funny at the same time. She was an adult and we had been doing okay most of the time, but here she was getting all nervous about making dinner.

  I checked out my teeth and rinsed. Then I washed my face and checked out how big my head looked in the mirror. It was kind of big but not as big as it looked on television.

  “You’re going to come straight from school, right?” Mom at the door.

  “Yeah. Hey, do you think I’ve got a big head?”

  “It’s kind of big,” Mom said, turning my face toward her. “But you’re good-looking, so it’s okay. Good-looking covers up a lot of stuff.”

  “When do you think people will stop having problems?”

  “You mean when will there be world peace and the end of poverty?” Mom asked.

  “No, like, when do you stop worrying about how you’re doing?” I said. “You said looking good covers up a lot of stuff, and you look great, but …”

  “Some things you always worry about, I think,” Mom said. “When I was young my mother used to dress me so I would look frumpy and the boys wouldn’t notice me. She was always worried that some boy would take advantage of me. She still worries about it because people are people and they do what they want to do. And sometimes — well, you know….”

  “What?”

  “They do what they need to do instead of what they should be doing,” Mom said. “You’ve got things going on in your head that you know are right but you don’t always follow those things. Sometimes you just do what makes you comfortable.”

  “Like making this duck thing?”

  “It’ll be cool if it turns out great, won’t it?”

  “And when Dad calls and says what are you doing we can say we were making a duck castle, or whatever.”

  “Cassoulet. Cass-oo-lay! It’s French.”

  “It’s a French duck?”

  “It’s a French recipe.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it.”

  “So the point of the whole thing is that Mom is worried because my father’s putting her down because we aren’t running around living the high life,” I said to Kambui. “So we’re going to make this fancy French dish just so she can tell him about it.”

  “Yeah, but that’s, like, a girl thing, right?” Kambui was texting as we walked.

  “I think it’s more a fancy thing than a girl thing,” I said. “Anyway, Mom said that most of the top cooks in the world are guys. Maybe I’ll turn out to be some great cook or something. I’ll go along with it for her.”

  “That’s okay, man,” Kambui said. “And if it turns out really good you can cook something for me. But I don’t eat ducks.”

  “Zander, are you free for lunch?” This from Caren Culpepper when I was sitting in the media center.

  “Why?” This from me.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” Caren said. “I just need to get some things clear in my head.”

  “What things?”

  “I’ll meet you in the lunchroom in front of the popcorn machine,” she said. “Twelve-thirty.”

  Caren started walking away and I was just telling myself that there was no way I was going to have lunch with her when Phat Tony from the Genius Gangstas came and plopped his overweight butt next to me.

  “Hey, man, the people are talking that The Cruiser newspaper is lame compared to The Palette. You see the story they got this week?”

  Phat Tony pushed The Palette in front of me. There was a picture of a woman soldier on the front page.

  “They got an interview with her,” Phat Tony said. “She killed two dudes over there and she just volunteered to go back again. Your little jive newspaper ain’t got nothing like that, man. That’s a collector’s edition. All you got in your newspaper is whining and poems and stuff. You got a lame newspaper.”

  I knew, sooner or later, that I was going to have to go to war with Phat Tony. The dude just got on my nerves. I picked up the copy of The Palette he had pushed before me and turned to the article by the soldier. She wrote about how she wanted to defend her country and how her parents were nervous about her being in a combat zone and how she had been caught in an ambush and had to fire her weapon. What she said was she might have killed somebody, and maybe even two people. She said she wasn’t happy with the idea but she had to do what she had to do. It was a strong piece, especially with the photograph.

  I didn’t have anything to say to Phat Tony because he wouldn’t have understood it, anyway. The fool had a high IQ but I knew that didn’t make him smart in any kind of useful way. He had stink breath, too.

  THE CRUISER

  A SPECIAL EDITORIAL

  THE SAME STORY, A DIFFERENT VIEW

  By Sagal Shehabi

  The other day a young woman wrote a guest editorial in The Palette. I saw her in the school hallways. She was tall, for a woman, and blond, and quite beautiful. She spoke of serving in the military, and there was pride in the way she talked about doing her duty and using her weapon when she felt that was necessary. She was serving in a land with which I am familiar, because I was born there.

  There is chaos in my land, my Afghanistan. People die almost every day and in every manner possible. Shiites kill Sunnis, Sunnis kill Kurds, Kurds kill Shiites. The Taliban kill at will. It goes on and on. No one in Kandahar is untouched. For us there are few heroes, and fewer heroines. A bomb is thrown onto a bus, unmindful of whose life it will take. A soldier shoots into a crowd, the bullets spreading destruction according to the rules of physics, not humanity.

  When I was hit by a fragment of a bomb it was not me who was the target. The pilot of the plane did not know who I was or who my family was. He didn’t know that I was only five and had just learned to read, or that I was the first girl in my family who had gone to school. Or that I cried all that night as my grandmother held me. Or that I was so frightened that I did not even look up into the air for the next week.

  I have nothing against the young woman who came to Da Vinci and told how she had been a soldier. I just wanted to say that there are other sides to the same story.

  By lunchtime I was feeling low. Nothing was really breaking me down, but nothing was looking too cool, either. I was drifting off into Self-Pity City when Caren Culpepper and Zhade Hopkins came to where I was sitting. Zhade sat next to me (she was actually touching me!). I was surprised because I had forgotten that Caren had asked me to meet her.

  “What’s up?” Me, being lame.

  “Caren said that you won’t go out with her because you don’t like her father and everybody’s saying that if the Cruisers are so cool why are you putting down people’s families?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hear me?” Zhade asked.

  “Yeah, I heard you.” I looked over to where Caren was staring dead at me with her head to one side like she was daring me to say the wrong thing. “We weren’t even talking about going out.”

  “So, you going to go out with me or what?” Caren asked.

  “You want to go out?” I asked.

  “She’s here, isn
’t she?” Zhade said, looking at me all serious. “Or are you too macho to have a girl ask you out?”

  I felt like I was between the devil and the deep blue sea. On one hand I didn’t want to go out with Caren again because the last time I went out with her she put it out that I was sweating her big-time, which was a lie. On the other hand, what was Zhade’s play? I wasn’t sure if I was setting up a date with Caren or her. At any rate, I said I’d go out with Caren, hoping that it was going to lead to a date with Zhade.

  “Friday,” Caren said. “The day after you guys put on the play.”

  She was already standing up, and I looked at Zhade and she was standing, and she had this really satisfied look on her face.

  “Zander, you’re a good dude,” she said.

  Then they were gone.

  I saw Kambui in Biology and told him what happened.

  “The same thing happened to a paramecium I was raising,” Kambui said. “Two lady paramecia got him in the locker room and sexually molested him.”

  “Yo, Kambui, that is so seriously stupid I don’t know how you can get it into your mouth to spit it out.”

  “I ain’t going out with the assistant principal’s daughter,” Kambui said. “You are.”

  I got home and Mom was shopping on the Home and Garden Network. In between her buying everything I told her what happened.

  “Zhade was bringing in stuff about me being macho and getting up in my face like it was her that I was going out with or something. I was really confused.”

  “Both of them like you,” Mom said. “They’re just going about letting you know in different ways.”

  “Neither one of them said anything about liking me,” I said.

  “They didn’t have to,” Mom answered. “You’re easy. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, because you’re a guy. But, baby, you are easy. Right?”

  “No!”

  THE CRUISER

  A LETTER

  By Demetrius Brown

  Please excuse me because my English is still not as good as it should be. But my friend Tyree Jackson was arrested this week and it looks as if nobody cares. He was caught shoplifting in a large store downtown. The police had pictures of him stealing wallets from the men’s department and they caught him outside of the store. The thing that bothers me is that Tyree is a good person. Sometimes a good person does bad things. I know this.

  What bothers me even more was that everyone at school knew what had happened on the same day that Tyree was arrested and nobody did anything about it. I don’t know what Mrs. Maxwell did or what Mr. Culpepper did, but I know the students did not do anything.

  I ask you this question. Did Tyree stop being Tyree? Do we stop loving people because they have made a mistake?

  I did not expect a story to appear in the pages of The Palette. The editor of that paper is very smart but does not feel much. I did expect a story to be in The Cruiser.

  I don’t know what I will do, but I will reach out to Tyree, because he is someone I care about, as I care about all the world.

  THE PALETTE

  A Reply to Demetrius Brown

  By Ashley Schmidt

  I have read the letter that Demetrius Brown published in The Cruiser, and while I sympathize with Tyree, he was caught stealing and stealing is wrong! I am sorry that he stole, but I can’t bring my heart to feel for him. It is not that I am unfeeling, Demetrius, it is because I know the difference between right and wrong!

  THE CRUISER, SPECIAL EDITION

  A REPLY TO ASHLEY SCHMIDT

  By Zander Scott

  Hey, Ashley, lighten up! If you look at people only by what they have done in the last few hours or few days then you are looking at a very small part of each person. That might fit The Palette’s idea of what a human being amounts to, but it doesn’t fit mine. As Demetrius says, sometimes even good people can do bad things at times. When someone does do something bad or against the law we want to walk away like we are perfect. The Cruisers will look into the matter and I’m sure Mrs. Maxwell, Mr. Culpepper, and Tyree’s teachers will as well.

  I’m glad that you know the difference between right and wrong. I guess having faith in your fellow human beings is not part of your “right” thinking.

  So this recipe is like a road map to get to a supper for twelve people,” Kambui said. “So me and LaShonda are in the backseat reading the directions and everybody else is following our directions, right?”

  “Right!” Mom said.

  Me, Mom, and Bobbi were going to do the actual cooking, which I liked, because if it came out good I wanted to get credit for it.

  “Cut the ventrèche into one-half-inch squares,” Kambui said.

  The ventrèche looked like rolled-up bacon, and I started cutting it up. We had soaked the white beans overnight like the recipe said and boiled them until they were almost done, and they were in a big pot on the stove. I got the ventrèche all cut up and Mom put it in a bowl.

  “Season beans with salt and pepper!” Kambui said.

  Bobbi put some salt and pepper on the beans. She looked serious. I liked that.

  “Place half of the beans in the pot. Add the duck legs, the duck sausages, ventrèche, and garlic sausage, then pile on the rest of the beans,” LaShonda said. “This sounds good!”

  The kit we had bought had all the parts labeled, and Bobbi and Mom found all the duck legs and sausages they were talking about and put them into the pot.

  “Mrs. Scott, I don’t have any idea how this is going to come out,” Bobbi said.

  Mom shrugged. She didn’t know, either.

  “Mix tomato paste into dissolved demi-glace,” Kambui said. “Then pour it over the beans.”

  We did that.

  “Drizzle duck fat over everything.”

  “This recipe is not politically correct,” LaShonda said. “You don’t drizzle fat over food and think you’re being cool.”

  I drizzled the duck fat. I didn’t think I was being cool. I wasn’t sure what I was being.

  But after a while I could see everybody settling into their attitudes. LaShonda started helping out with the cooking, and Mom sat down. I didn’t want to sit down because I didn’t think just the girls should be doing the cooking.

  The pot we had wasn’t big enough, and I had to go downstairs and borrow a pot from Mrs. Santana on the second floor. When she heard what we were doing she came up and started sniffing around.

  “It smells like it’s going to be all right!” she said.

  By the time we put the pot in the oven, it was already smelling like something delicious and I was getting a little excited. Kambui was still trying to be cool, looking over the directions, but my layback had got up and walked out.

  What I was seeing was that LaShonda was slowly taking over the kitchen. Bobbi was on top of things and they had me doing the cleaning up. Mom was getting to be a happy spectator and Mrs. Santana was talking about how her family used to cook together in San Juan.

  “Everybody cooked!” Mrs. Santana said. “Abuela ruled the kitchen. She always had a wooden spoon in her hand and if you didn’t do something right — whack! — you got hit. Then afterward we would all sit down and eat together and everybody would be laughing and talking because we had all helped.”

  Mrs. Santana was talking about being a family and I could feel what she was saying. In a way, that was what LaShonda was saying, too, and I wished I had thought about asking her to bring her brother over.

  Mom wasn’t really into cooking that much, but I could tell she was glad to have us all over to the house. I wondered if that’s what she missed not being with my father.

  “We’re going to have enough food to feed an army,” she said. “Start thinking about who else we can have over.”

  It took almost three hours before the whole meal was finished. Me and Bobbi put our table together with a card table and covered them both with a big tablecloth while Mrs. Santana put on some yellow rice. We got the table set and put out all our plates while Kambui
started calling around inviting people to dinner.

  Who we had over:

  I asked LaShonda to call Chris and she did, but she had to get Mom on the phone to ask someone to bring him to our place. Mrs. Askew, from St. Francis, came with him.

  Kambui’s grandmother came over and said that the apartment smelled like “the back door to heaven.” Mrs. Owens was really short but kind of wide and friendly.

  The last person to show up was Mr. Santana.

  “Don’t speak nothing but English!” Mrs. Santana told her husband.

  “Voy a hablar inglés! No se preocupe!” he answered.

  There were ten of us altogether when we sat down to eat. Mrs. Owens said grace, and we dug in.

  It was good. I didn’t like the duck that much and the sausages didn’t taste like I thought they would, but it was all okay. Mrs. Santana liked it the most, or maybe Mr. Santana did, but he just sat there eating and mumbling in Spanish.

  Mrs. Askew thought the meal was “creative” and “a memorable experience.” Whatever. In the end we had pulled off making a dinner, had eaten some stuff that was good but that we would probably never eat again, and had a new topic to talk about.

  Chris sat next to LaShonda and I could see them together, almost as if it was some kind of dance. LaShonda smiled at us and talked when she was supposed to, but all the time she was moving along with her brother. When his arms got to swinging too wildly she held them down. When he began to open and close his hands very quickly, she took both of his wrists and brought his palms close so that they touched. Once she passed her hand in front of his face in a downward motion. It was a dance so subtle that it was almost invisible.

  Chris never looked directly at anyone. He was an alien among us and we were aliens to him. I knew then that LaShonda was stronger than I could ever be — than I would ever want to be.

  For a moment I was loving on LaShonda, thinking that maybe I would grow up and marry her. Then I thought about Chris and how hard it would be and made myself think of something else. That was something I could do that I knew LaShonda couldn’t. I could think of something else besides Chris.