There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,14

Jacquie was acting weird—all loud and crooked-looking. She was nice to me. Too nice. She called me over, hugged me too hard, then introduced me to the group as her baby sister in a too-loud voice. I lied and told everyone I was twelve, but they didn’t even hear me. I saw that they were passing a bottle around. It’d just gotten to Jacquie. She drank long and hard from it.

“This is Harvey,” Jacquie said to me as she knocked the bottle into his arm. Harvey took the bottle and didn’t seem to notice Jacquie had said anything. I walked away from them and saw that there was a boy standing apart from everyone else who looked like he could have been closer to my age. He was throwing rocks. I asked him what he was doing.

“What does it look like?” he said.

“Like you’re trying to get rid of the island one rock at a time,” I said.

“I wish I could throw this stupid island into the ocean.”

“It’s already in the ocean.”

“I meant down to the bottom,” he said.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“ ’Cuz my dad’s making me and my brother be over here,” he said. “Pulled us outta school. No TV, no good food, everyone running around, drinking, talking about how everything’s gonna be different. It’s different all right. And it was better when we were home.”

“Don’t you think it’s good we’re standing up for something? Trying to make things right for what they done to us all these hundreds of years, since they came?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all my dad ever talks about. What they done to us. The U.S. government. I don’t know nothing about all that, I just wanna go home.”

“I don’t think we even have our house anymore.”

“What’s so good about taking over some stupid place no one wants to be, a place where people been trying to escape from since they made it.”

“I don’t know. It might help. You never know.”

“Yeah,” he said, then he threw a pretty big rock over by where the older kids were. It splashed them and they yelled curse words at us I didn’t recognize.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Rocky,” he said.

“So Rocky throwing rocks then?” I said.

“Shut up. What’s your name?”

I regretted having drawn attention to names, and tried to think of something else to ask or say, but nothing came.

“Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield,” I said as fast as I could.

Rocky just threw another rock. I didn’t know if he wasn’t listening or if he didn’t find it funny like most kids did. I didn’t get to find out either because just then a boat came roaring up from outta nowhere. Some of the older kids had stolen it from somewhere else on the island. Everyone walked toward the boat as it approached. Me and Rocky followed.

“You gonna go?” I said to Rocky.

“Yeah, I’ll probably go,” he said.

I went to Jacquie to ask if she was going.

“Fuuuuck yeah!” she said, completely drunk, which was when I knew I had to go.

* * *

—

The water got choppy right away. Rocky asked me if he could hold my hand. The question made my heart beat even faster than it was already beating from being on that boat and going so fast with all those older kids who had probably never driven a boat before in their whole lives. I grabbed Rocky’s hand when we went up high off of the crest of a wave, and we kept our hands held like that until we saw another boat coming toward us, at which point we broke our hold as if catching us holding hands was why the boat was coming. At first I thought it was the police, but soon I realized it was just a couple of the older men who ran another boat back and forth between the island and the mainland for supplies. They were screaming something at us. The men forced our boat to the front of the island.

It was only when they docked that I could really hear the screaming. We were being yelled at. All the older kids were pretty drunk. Jacquie and Harvey took off running, which inspired everyone else to do the same. Me and Rocky stayed on the boat, watched the older guys scramble to do something about everyone falling and running and laughing that stupid drunk laugh about nothing. When the two men realized they weren’t gonna catch anyone, and that no one was gonna listen, they left, either because they