“Ouch!” She bent forward to rub at the reddening welt.
“My God,” he said. “I’m so sorry … I didn’t—” He truly, no joke, was such an idiot.
“It’s okay. No break in the skin or anything,” she said before rolling her skirt back down. “I like Booker T. Washington’s philosophies. Smart as a whip, that one.”
Isaiah’s exuberance and cautiousness left his body. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” he said, shaking his head back and forth. “He most definitely is not.”
He knew he shouldn’t challenge her so quickly, but he couldn’t help it. Passion overtook him.
“Du Bois is the smart one,” he told her in a lecturing tone. “Washington is weak. Have you studied Du Bois’s theory of triple paradox?” Isaiah knew he should stop talking, but he couldn’t seem to figure out how. “In direct response to Washington’s approach, Du Bois asked which is more effective toward racial progress: submissiveness, educational advancement, or suffrage. The question is intellectually sound and perfect, very much unlike Washington’s simplistic view on slow, generational progress.”
A pause hung in the air between them, and Isaiah looked at his feet.
“I…,” Angel began. “Well, I thoughtfully and respectfully disagree with your and Du Bois’s assessment.”
“Which part exactly?” Isaiah itched to argue.
“That discussion is for another time,” she said with a tilt of the head. “But in your short speech, I can already see that you may well believe every word from Du Bois’s lips was placed there by God himself, and to that, I caution you. He is just a man. Which means he will disappoint you.”
Shocked by her measured response, he felt his shoulders deflate, so he hitched them back up, forcing his spine straight and chin higher than they naturally sat. Familiar performance overtook his body, changing his posture into something closer to Muggy’s than his own.
Angel quickly closed the space between them like she was about to kiss him square on the lips. He stood his ground, ready. But she didn’t kiss him. She grabbed both of his hands and locked eyes with him. He saw the universe in her eyes, the sparkling universe. He itched to write that down—sparkling universe in her eyes. He could write pages about only her eyes, verb-filled run-on sentences about every eyelash.
“You don’t have to pretend with me, Isaiah,” she said, pulling his ace card with such honesty and rawness that he couldn’t deny it. “Be you. That’s enough for me.”
She squeezed his hands once and walked through the school gates, leaving him standing there, alone and dazed.
Her breath smelled clean, like honeysuckle or maybe huckleberry. The smell lingered on the wind for a while, and Isaiah was sad when an especially hasty gust took it away. He knew right then that he was madly, truly, singularly in love with Angel Hill.
“You’re a fool to like her,” Muggy said as he jumped down from the nearby tree limb. The same kind of perch he’d been spying on her in the day before. “And an even bigger fool to leave this on your bed with a floozy nearby.”
Muggy tossed the leather-bound journal high. Isaiah watched it flip through the air as if it were moving in slow motion. He caught it and saw a page was aggressively folded down. He opened the journal to that particular place—it was the poem he’d written about Muggy.
The Shield
I hate him he’s my shield,
His filthy, rotting guts,
He’s cruel but he’s my shield,
He’s built me from the bottom up.
I’ll use him,
I swear,
And leave him when I’m good enough,
To stand alone,
Without him, Dear God, that day can’t come soon enough.
I’ll be, one day.
Shieldless,
Muggyless,
One day.
A Proud.
Poet.
“That one’s my favorite,” Muggy said before leaning against the tree’s thick trunk. “Even though the end doesn’t rhyme, which, what rhymes with ‘Muggyless’?” Isaiah caught quick eyes with Dorothy Mae, who was waiting in the nearby bushes with her head bent with shame, her face in her hands.
ANGEL
“I’ll do it!” Angel burst into Miss Ferris’s classroom. “When do we get started?”
“Now,” Miss Ferris replied with her hands raised, “this is a quick turn of events. What’s changed?”
Angel didn’t want to admit it. Honestly, she wasn’t sure what she’d be admitting to in the first place. Isaiah had written the most beautiful poem about her, that was true, but that wasn’t the whole reason she’d changed her mind. There was also her father. She wanted to ease the stress of their small home. Her mother’s wrists were in constant pain from too much hair braiding, and he’d voluntarily skipped a few medications to make the monthlies.
On top of all of this, though, was a selfish longing to get away from it all, and she hated herself for thinking it. She was put on this earth to help people—from her colicky infant neighbor to her ailing father. It was her purpose. When she was very small, Angel dreamed only of taking care of others. For the first time, she wanted a few hours per day to do only the thing she wanted to do.
“I could use the money.” She told the half-truth to a skeptical-looking Miss Ferris. “I could use the money,” she echoed herself before kicking an invisible ball at her feet.
“O-kay,” Miss Ferris replied in huffing disbelief. She then looked at her watch. “We have a few minutes to go out back and tour the bicycle. Let me show you. I’ve named her Blue.”
Blue leaned on the shed near the large trash dump in the back of the school, but it looked like it belonged inside. Rusty and dented with a dangling chain, there was no rehabilitation that Angel could see. Blue wasn’t blue at all, either; instead, the bike was the color of dry moss in a drought. All in all, Blue was a giant mess of an eyesore. Its three redeeming qualities were the third wheel, large basket on the rear, and sidecar for pulling a second passenger.
“Here she is!” said Miss Ferris as if Blue were a shiny new buggy. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? I picked it off the side of the road last year. Who would simply abandon something like this? She could use a tiny bit of work, but imagine the possibilities, Angel. The books.”
Angel bent forward to inspect the bicycle, and upon a closer look, she saw a tiny procession of spiders emerging from an intricate web on the rear basket. Angel leaped back in disgust; she loathed spiders with a terrified passion.
Miss Ferris noticed Angel’s disgust and seemed cut by it. “She needs a bit of elbow grease, but between the three of us, we can have her shipshape in no time.”
“So Isaiah’s officially involved?”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “He was involved, as you say, from the moment I explained it. Would you sacrifice the next few days to help get Blue in order? Sabbath off, of course.”
“Miss Ferris,” Angel said, attempting to sound calm. “This bike needs a lot of work.”
“We can do it,” she replied. “I swear we can.”
Angel walked home that afternoon with a spring in her step. While she hadn’t seen Isaiah after their morning talk, they’d be together a fair amount that summer. It’d be interesting to see him in that light—using his hands and mind and creativity to bring Blue back to life in order to hand out books.