Social Issues
"Tell me about your tree," said Uncle as he planed the angles of the face. "What did you see among the branches?"
Solomon described the hummingbird nest and the antics of the baby birds. Uncle rounded the brow with the adze, chipped the hollows of the eyes, and told the hummingbird story.
"Did your tree smell nice?" asked Uncle as he used the hook knife to carve the nose. Solomon remembered the sweet spring smell of sap and the pungent, fall odor of crushed leaves.
Martha's eyes widened. Dad looked right back at her, calm as calm. Mom was in bed when she should have been helping Martha get ready for school. Mom, who had never let her be alone with her birth mother for one minute in her whole entire life (not even when Martha was being born), was suddenly sending her off on her own and not even coming downstairs to tell her about it. And no one was asking Martha what she wanted. They obviously didn't care. Neither of them.
You've been designated special ed?" Kevin gasped.
"Not yet. They still have some testing to do, but they're letting me work there on a trial basis."
"Wow," Kevin said. "I can't believe that you did it...you fooled them."
"It wasn't hard."
"You're, like, a genius," Ahmad said. He sounded impressed.
"An evil genius," Cody said.
"There's nothing evil about this. Nobody gets hurt. Besides, I don't want any more talk about me being a genius. I'm just Ed... special Ed.
I reached down and picked up one of the tomatoes. It was so overripe it was squishy and soft to the touch. My fingers sunk in, almost breaking the skin. I tossed it a few inches up into the air and caught it again. Nice weight. Nice.
Keegan still had his back to me. There was a slight wind—left to right—so I'd have to take that into account. I drew my arm back and threw the tomato. It flew through the air, slightly spiraling, toward him and—splat! It smashed right into the back of his head and exploded into a thousand pieces of pulp!
