Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

picnic area. She was flapping her arms like she had become one of them, like she could take flight at any moment.

Elinor had found a place about an hour and a half drive from Norfolk. It had a reputation for being one of the best rehabilitation centers in the state. Manny liked the idea of Teagan receiving specialized care, but the location meant she would have to stay at the facility throughout the week. He wasn’t ready for that just yet.

This thought of separation had become increasingly difficult, and yet imagining it sometimes filled him with such relief he was immediately stricken with guilt. Elinor did not understand it. She said he of all people had no right to be so protective, let alone feel guilty. His naval deployments had left a huge hole in their family life, she had said once. He had never forgotten it.

.  .  .  .

At one of the centers they had visited, there had been a girl. He had seen her sitting alone in the cafeteria. Elinor and the kids were exploring the courtyard. He spotted them through the main facility windows, Teagan holding out her arms straight now and pretending to be an airplane. Tom stood around with his hands in his pockets.

The girl in the cafeteria slumped forward in her wheelchair, and Manny noticed, as he neared her, that she was mestiza. A part of him felt it was his duty to stop and talk to her, even though he didn’t know if she could speak, let alone understand him.

“How are you today?” he said.

The girl in the wheelchair looked up at him.

One of her eyes had a blown pupil. He had seen this before, back when he was a child in the islands, walking through the marketplace with his lola. There had been a man selling an assortment of fish. Beside the man had been a boy holding a cigar box filled with coins, looking oddly like the parent, with an authoritative smirk. The man’s face had fallen on one side, the eye, nearly black in its entirety, trying to hold it up.

The girl in the wheelchair could have been Manny’s daughter.

Manny shook his head. She was someone’s daughter.

Or had been.

“Was your lunch good?” he said to the girl.

She smiled at him with her broken face. She raised her hand and moved her fingers in the air. She waited for him to respond.

For a moment, he was a boy again and whatever had made this girl who she was to become had yet to occur. He could hear his lola telling him not to stare. The sound of her voice came to him from a great distance, across a ghost ocean, and now he waded out into it.

At first, I thought you were my dad. You kind of look like him. He comes to visit when he can, but he lives so far away, you understand.

The janitor tells me it’s okay. The janitor is nice. He cleans the floors and fixes things. I hear some of the nurses talk about him, but I don’t care. I think they’re just jealous because he checks on me.

Sometimes he’s like an older brother, but lately, he’s been telling me that I’m his girlfriend now. That when I get old enough, he’s going to marry me and take me away from this place. I tell him, “Yeah right, Buster.” He doesn’t understand me, doesn’t understand sign language.

No one here seems to understand.

three

They had gathered in the old football stadium. Tom was already sitting quietly with other boys from his grade. Mr. Rochambeau, the vice principal of their junior high, was busy berating the students who had yet to settle. Most of them, a mix of the school’s seventh, eighth, and ninth graders, raced up and down the wide metal bleachers.

Mr. Rochambeau’s plaintive voice vanished into the afternoon air. No one seemed to be listening. His voice grew higher in pitch, forcing a clip of feedback on the already stressed PA system. Tom ducked his head and mimicked the man’s slight lisp. He had studied this trait to some degree these last few years, and was known in certain circles for doing a pretty decent impersonation.

Tom’s friends nodded in approval.

“Good one, Fino,” they all said.

Normally a tall, stooping figure in the school’s hallways, Mr. Rochambeau looked tiny, his stature diminished where he stood next to a podium someone had placed directly on the fifty-yard line. “People, please,” Mr. Rochambeau pleaded into the microphone. His voice echoed briefly over the field.

“Pweeple,” Tom mimicked.

Tom’s friends laughed.

“All right, all right,” Mr. Rochambeau continued. “The sooner we settle down, the sooner we can sign these yearbooks. And go about our lives.”

Some kids who were running the bleachers paused at the resounding oddity of this last sentence. Others had grown tired and found a seat. There were even the unfortunate few who had to be singled out and ordered to a cordoned-off spot in the parking lot behind the stadium. Ms. Smith, one of the gym teachers, had staked out a detention area on short notice. She held to her chest a battered clipboard and kept a chewed plastic whistle pressed between her thin lips.

.  .  .  .

When all of the students had finally taken a seat, Mr. Rochambeau smiled and made an announcement. This year, they were going to begin a new tradition. Each grade sat in a distinct section of the bleachers, dividing the main side of the stadium into three parts. Mr. Rochambeau would point to one section. That would be the signal for the chosen grade to make as much noise as possible.

“So who’s the best?” Mr. Rochambeau said.

The students looked around, confused.

Mr. Rochambeau shook his head in disgust. “I said, ‘So who’s the best?’”

Now they understood.

Each of the grades let out screams, hollering and whistling in between gaps of strained fervor. The ninth graders, including Tom and his friends, were convinced they were the leaders