Fresh Ink Read online

  I didn’t have any keys yet, so I just looped mine on my backpack’s zipper tongue. My keychain was a Buck Head, and my last name was Buckman, so that was a cool matchup. The kids I should have left elementary school with, like Hayley, got a Turtle keychain at Moving Up. I loved mine, but the Buck Head reminded me that I’d failed Kindergarten. When you screw up Taking a Nap and Playing with Finger Paint, no one forgets. And if you did happen to forget, Carson Mastick had given me a helpful nickname: Hubie Doobie, the Flunked-Out Booby.

  We each adapted to our new lives differently. Hayley and Carson wrapped themselves in white-kid hairstyles and clothes, but you knew they were Indians as soon as you saw them with us. Bill and Andy Crews, two cousins who I met in my Kindergarten do-overs, were dark like me. We had fewer options if we wanted to disguise ourselves. Older and bigger than every kid in my class, I stuck out. Even before my beaded keychain, I refused to try Passing for a kid from the Italian suburbs or Passing for a tanned farm boy. Strangers would know exactly where I was from. I have a big hawky Indian nose, thick lips, and long black hair tied back in a sneh-wheh, now past its second summer. When I didn’t braid it, you could see it was uneven and split.

  Hayley Sampson’s dad was white, so people said she had half-Indian blood, which I thought was bizarre. Did she bleed different colors depending on where she got cut? This half blood allowed her to almost cover up any visible trace of us. She was better at her disguise than Carson, and he moved easily between groups, like he wore Skin Camouflage. The only thing giving Hayley away were her Indian eyes. I don’t mean that they had a melodramatic tear dangling out of them like a pull chain. They were just deep, deep brown, the color of a horse.

  Last Spring, after her mom died, Hayley had racked up enough Days Absent to win herself a Repeat Year, and so we became classmates again. I thought I’d show her the ropes about being an official failure. But that first morning in homeroom, Hayley sported a new, wild look beyond the usual human colors. Her face shimmered like a powdery pearl, slashed with maroon lips and lavender eyelids. Heavy black liquid gave her crow’s wings for eyelashes. Her purple-black hair was sprayed into an explosion on top of her head. It was like the white side of her had wrestled the Indian side down for the count, but they’d both come out a little rougher.

  Since she was now with kids a year younger than her, and we were the only Indians in our section, she knew no one but me. I was used to flying solo, since my place as The Big Indian Kid made white kids nervous. By the middle of the day, she’d begun to sit next to me. We just sat together, silently pretending that we didn’t live a road apart. I knew when it was safe to talk. Those Passing Indians, as soon as they got to the buses, suddenly they were Indian again, like Abracadabra. But if you tried to chat them up in school, prepare to be ignored. At the end of the day, I silently went to my locker and she went to hers.

  “So you look kinda different these days,” I said as we neared the safety bubble of Rez buses. “What’s going on up in here?” I motioned around her head.

  “Soon’s I can, I’m signing up for BOCES,” she said, as if she hadn’t ignored me all day. “Gonna get my cosmetology license. Then, fast as we’re out, I’ll have the perfect job training. Can’t sign up until Ninth, so right now I’m practicing on myself and my old Barbie Glamour Head.”

  I nodded. My girl cousins had those heads too, perched on their bedroom dressers, slathered in makeup and sporting ratted spiky blond halos. The disembodied Barbie heads freaked me out. The Barbies reminded me of the scary Flying Head in the stories our gramps told. He claimed those heads cruised around the Rez to catch kids awake past bedtime. After a while, I’d refused to go into my cousins’ room. Sometimes one of those girls would chase me with the Barbie head, making haunted noises, if she felt especially evil and ambitious.

  “You could use a sprucing up,” Hayley added. “I could even those out.” She touched the scroungy tip of my sneh-wheh, clucking at my split ends. In the two years I’d been growing my hair long, it had never been touched by a girl. A dumb guy might think this would change how we talked to each other, but I knew better. The next morning, as soon as we left the bus, she got Rez Amnesia again. I took what I could get.

  “I hate this class,” Hayley whispered, not looking at me as we walked into Health, the third week in.

  “You ain’t alone,” I whispered back, staring at the weird scene on the floor. Everyone hated Health, where they forced you to talk in class about the things you were discovering on your own, in private. The first week, we blew through the safe units on Nutrition and Hygiene, like Flossing, the Dangers of Smoking and Gum Disease. The Stress and the Body Unit took up the second week. The textbook pictures weren’t real Stomachs Under Stress, but instead drawings of pale pink organs, bunched like the paired socks your mom brought home from the laundry.

  “Folks, I’d like you to meet Resusci-Annie,” Mr. Corker said, hovering above this mysterious figure collapsed near his desk. He grinned, loving the small chaos he’d thrown us into, eyeing Hayley for any bad reaction. Were we supposed to go to our seats? Introduce ourselves? Were we supposed to gather around Annie, like he was trying to herd us?

  We knew the splayed woman wasn’t real. Her vinyl skin and scraggly straw-colored doll hair made her look like a special Rough Life Anti-Glamour Edition of the Giant Barbie Head Hayley had mentioned. This Annie at least had a body, but she seemed boneless or something. Her sneakered feet lay at weird angles, flat against the classroom floor.

  “She’s not breathing,” Mr. Corker said, trying to sell us on the idea she was alive. The room filled with silence as we stared at the lifeless jogger. “Okay!” he said with a loud, awkward clap. “Resusci-Annie is a simulator, to help us learn to properly administer CPR.” He paused and then elongated the next three words, “Cardio…Pulmonary…Resuscitation. Now, she is not a toy!” he added, as if we’d suddenly tried to play with her. “She’s a lifesaver.”

  “That don’t mean you can suck on her, Hubie,” said Marco, one of the jerks in my class, his friends laughing. I wondered if Carson Mastick had told white kids that I’d failed Kindergarten, or if they’d just overheard him calling me Hubie Doobie the Flunked-Out Booby.

  “Hey! Guys,” Mr. Corker jumped in. “These are exactly the shenanigans I warned about. Health is no joke!” The laughers cupped hands around their grins, like TV chimps. I wondered if Mr. Corker himself had a Stomach Under Stress. This class used to do CPR toward the end of the year, but for us, it was going to be Week Three. Maybe the ghost of Hayley’s mom and her heart attack haunted Mr. Corker. He’d been Hayley’s teacher last year and here she was again. I didn’t ask if she’d failed CPR or if they just hadn’t gotten to it in time. He seemed super aware of Hayley when we walked in to find Annie, a waxy, blond, dead, loose-limbed jogger in a heap on our floor. Hayley looked down, matching Annie’s blank stare.

  “If you see someone in distress, you may be the only person around who knows what to do. Like Annie, you too could save lives. Think about it.” He then performed the proper method, step by step. We had to ask Annie if she was all right, touch her neck to try to find a pulse. We were then supposed to lean over, place an ear to her mouth, and pretend she might answer and breathe when we knew she wasn’t going to cooperate. Mr. Corker tilted Annie’s head back, pinched her nose, took a deep breath, and then locked lips with her, repeating this sequence a few times.

  “Looks like she’s gonna hurl,” said Tom, one of Marco’s grinning chimps, when her body heaved, filled with Mr. Corker’s forced breath.

  “That what happens when you try to kiss a girl, Doobie?” Marco said to me, not bothering to cover his grin. Now that some guys had gotten growth spurts, they tested their manhood by poking The Big Indian Kid. They acted like they were Running with the Bulls, like we’d seen men do in our Social Studies Unit on Spain, except in this case, I was the bull.

  “Marco!” Mr. Corker shouted, running an alcohol wipe along Annie’s lips and onto her slightly exposed teet
h. “Here, on the mouth! Tom, chest compressions.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Tom said.

  “You’re gonna learn. Firsthand. Right now,” Mr. Corker said, “since you can’t seem to pay attention otherwise.”

  “What if I don’t wanna?”

  “Detention and an F for this Unit. Your choice.” Tom and Marco grumbled, bumbling to the floor. Mr. Corker talked them through the CPR basics: checking and clearing Annie’s airways, sealing her lips and pinching her nostrils closed, then breathing into her mouth.

  “You need to find,” he said, pausing, getting ready to speak a word he couldn’t avoid, “her breastbone. To commence with proper chest compressions. Regularly check her neck artery for a pulse.” Mr. Corker squeezed a bulb that sent air down a tube into Annie, giving her some artery action. He waited until Tom broke a sweat pushing up and down on Annie’s chest, elbows locked, before he squeezed Annie’s pulse bulb. Mr. Corker then alcohol-wiped her mouth and had Marco and Tom change places, working them hard again.

  “All right, who’s next?” Mr. Corker said as the jerks stood.

  “Jacqui,” Marco said, standing. “How about you let me find your breastbone to practice proper chest compressions? Get your pulse going?” Jacqui fake-slapped his chest, laughed, and stepped forward, volunteering.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, kneeling easily, leaning her face into Annie’s, taking her duty seriously. She looked amazing without even trying. She could be flirty, kind, and sensitive, take her grades seriously, and be dressed perfectly all at the same time. Other girls, Hayley included, could juggle maybe two of those things, but even there, it was touch and go. Jacqui floated on a cloud of her own Natural Amazingness.

  “I’ll do compressions,” I said, kneeling next to her, still feeling like a Spanish bull, this close. If I made one wrong gesture, I might send tiny Jacqui flying across the room. Mr. Corker ignored the whispering chimps around us.

  “Forget them,” Jacqui said, touching my arm, her skin slightly warmer than mine. “We’ve got a life to save.”

  I tried taking her advice, but even compressing, I heard Tom say that I was just trying to get Jacqui’s white-girl spit in my mouth the only way it would happen. I compressed so hard I felt like I might bust the spring in Resusci-Annie’s chest. Marco said I wanted to see how wide Annie’s mouth opened. They speculated that my locked elbows were clogged with embedded dirt, but my skin was just naturally darker there, and a few other places. When I was seven, I’d tried to scrub the color off my elbows so hard they blistered and bled. As I compressed Annie’s chest in silence, one fist over the other, my ears burned deeper red.

  “Oh, I forgot!” Mr. Corker said when we stopped. Resusci-Annie’s lips wore the same frosted red that Jacqui’s had. He dug into his desk for Kleenex and a jar of Noxzema. “Girls, and some of you guys, maybe, I don’t know. Please wipe any makeup off before your turn. We don’t want it staining Annie’s skin. You want her to be normal colored for the people who come after you.” Normal. Hayley and I locked eyes.

  After final bell, safely within the private area near our Rez buses, Hayley came up to me. She’d reapplied her maroon lips, and outlined their edges to make them seem smaller, like Barbie lips. “How come you let those guys talk like that?” she asked, pretending she hadn’t chosen to be deep undercover, like cop show heroes trying to spy on criminals in their hideouts.

  “I was the only Indian there,” I said, and it was out before I could slam my big skut-yeah shut. “I just meant…guy! I was the only Indian guy there.” But she’d already joined girls from her end of the Rez, safely in the bubble of our portable Rez on wheels.

  From that day forward, she wouldn’t even silently sit near me. I almost wanted to expose her disguise to the new girls she shared makeup tips with and the guys she flirted with, but I’d been followed in stores often enough to wish that I had more say in how others saw me. On the bus, no matter where I sat, she made sure to walk past, not even snapping her deep, horse-brown eyes in my direction. She wasn’t going to waste energy making a face at me.

  The week of Thanksgiving, Resusci-Annie long stored back in her suitcase, our classes were briefly segregated. We were supposed to cover a Very Special Unit they might as well have called the Line Drawings of Adulthood Unit. The girls from my class went with Ms. D’Amore, and the guys from her class joined us in Mr. Corker’s room. If your parents didn’t sign the permission slip, you were shipped off to the library to maybe conduct your own solo research on the Puberty and Reproduction Unit.

  That week, I had a chance to talk to someone in class. Bill and Andy Crews, those two cousins I sometimes hung out with on the Rez, flopped down next to me. It wasn’t hard for them to find seats. Between the TV chimps and the other kids afraid of The Big Indian, I had an armada of empty desks around me most days. Marco speculated to the other chimps that Mr. Corker might bring in Playboys. Carson Mastick’s dad had more intense mags than the likes of Playboy. No way was Mr. Corker gonna pass those around to a bunch of Seventh-Grade guys.

  Corker shut the door and positioned his overhead projector. Was our teacher really going to talk about boners or, even weirder, say the word boner aloud? When he slapped a transparency onto the projector and turned it on, I figured we were safely away from such talk.

  Just like the other illustrations we’d been shown, the simple drawing didn’t look like anyone’s anatomy I’d ever seen. It resembled the clogged drains in the Liquid-Plumr commercials, except here, the downward-drooping pipe had a stubby, rounded end. The drawing had arrows pointing to specific parts. We were each extremely well versed in these particular parts on our own, but it was safe to guess that none of us had ever used the alien words printed at the end of each arrow tip. Like the Stomach Under Stress illustration, the main organ in this drawing was pale pink, the color of Shrimp Cocktail.

  Corker handed out identical worksheets, but at the ends of the arrows, the words were missing. He told us to copy off the projection and memorize the new words. “No improvising with colorful language, now. We are young men, growing mature.” I suspected that he hated this Unit the most, even worse than the recent Learning to Spot and Treat Lice Unit. “Part of that maturity is using proper names!”

  We wrote the new words, passed the sheets forward, and waited. The next transparency-worksheet combo included the distribution of two slim boxes of colored pencils. I knew for sure it was the week Corker hated the most. This worksheet featured a line-drawn Naked Boy with generic features and similar stubby equipment. On the screen, Projected Naked Line Drawing Boy was also Shrimp Cocktail Pink.

  Corker hit the screen with his rubber-tipped pointer and said this kid was our age, and that right around now, changes started happening. In his most soothing voice, he assured us these changes were perfectly natural, perfectly normal. Our voices would crack and lower, our Adam’s apples would start sticking out, we might get zits, and we’d probably want to choose a deodorant to use every day (circling back to the Hygiene Unit). These changes had happened to me when I was ten. Even if I hadn’t been a year older than everyone else in my class, this update still would have been old news to me.

  “And now,” he said, “as I mentioned, this may have already started happening with some of you guys—and I don’t need to know; keep that info to yourselves, please—but this will happen.” He dropped an overlay on top of Naked Pink Boy. On the screen, shapeless light brown blobs were now projected in Naked Pink Boy’s pits and around his stubby pipe. Marco and Tom asked if we were gonna get tans in these places that didn’t usually get tanned.

  “Come on, guys,” Corker said, sighing. “You know what this is. I mean, um, some of you are already trying hard to start peach-fuzz mustaches.” He laughed a fake three-stutter burst, stroking his own bushy mustache without being aware he was.

  As the two slim boxes came my way, I slid a colored pencil from each and passed the boxes to Bill and Andy. The boxes were not assortment packs. I looked at the two pencils and
the words printed along their slim spines. Flesh and Burnt Sienna. The three of us, in our tiny desk Rez, looked at each other and shrugged. Andy started dutifully coloring in first. He frowned at his cousin, and Bill caved. They cupped their arms around their sheets, as if I would try to copy off of them. But I knew what they were really hiding, and I was definitely not going to take the same path they were on.

  Even at the Rez school, they’d been Goody Two-Mocs types. They weren’t super smart like Lewis Blake, who tried to Pass by getting all A+ Grades, but these two always worked to keep out of trouble. They stayed in Boy Scouts, even when we discovered we’d have to do a bunch of fake Indian crap to get badges. Everyone else dropped out, but Andy and Bill joined a troop just off the Rez, a couple of Living Mascots.

  I picked up a colored pencil and started shading. Toward the end of class, Bill and Andy looked at mine, glanced sidelong at each other and then down at theirs. The five-minute bell rang. Mr. Corker took Naked Pink Boy and his brown fuzzies off the overhead projector and threw on another transparency that seemed pretty unlikely. On the screen, the image looked like a badly drawn buck head, with a couple of hard-boiled eggs hanging from the antlers.

  “Tomorrow?” he said. “The female reproduction system.” That drawing didn’t look like anything I’d seen in the mags Carson’s dad had. I was curious. “Please turn in your puberty drawings before you leave. Make sure your name’s on them or you won’t get credit. And, men? Please don’t steal my colored pencils. I need them for next period.”