Chapter 31
Tornado Season
The reason my parents wound up settling in Ink Lake was simple: They fell in love.
Not with each other, that had happened years before, but with a farmhouse outside the city that an old woman was selling for a song.
The roof leaked, the barn needed fixing, but they were determined to get it—they thought they’d be happy there.
And they were, at least till tornado season came and black gold changed everything.
I was born there, right in the living room.
My mother went into labor and my grandmother had to help her because the doctor took longer than she could wait.
They were scared because I didn’t cry when I was born.
I wouldn’t for several minutes. “You were fine, though,” my grandmother said.
“You just never were much of a noisy one.” Maybe that’s why my parents always said those were the happiest days of their lives.
I wasn’t a difficult child; I didn’t throw tantrums at the grocery store or get into trouble.
“You were so good,” my mother liked to say. In the past tense, obviously.
But I wasn’t just a good kid. I was also the weird kid once I got away from the safety of our home: the farm boy, solitary, different.
I don’t remember exactly when those labels started piling on.
When is the precise moment a child becomes aware of others blowing him off?
When does he know he doesn’t fit in? Is it a comment, a look, a gesture?
I never found out.
Mondays were the worst day of the week and Fridays the best. At school, the hours were endless.
On the farm, the world spun faster. I was happy with my parents and my grandparents.
We fixed the roof together, mended what needed to be mended.
We planted corn and soy, and they grew and grew. We turned that place into a refuge.
I didn’t like to go to school, but I got good grades anyway. Class was easy, almost boring. I read a lot, any book that fell into my hands. I didn’t have high standards; I just liked jumping from one word to the next, as if I were running over cobblestones.
But I was always alone.
When I turned nine, my mother got these pretty blue-and-white note cards on thick paper and told me to make invitations with them and we’d send them to the kids in my class.
It was summer and it was hot out. Grandma made a cream and almond cake.
That was my favorite. Out in the yard, they had balloons and hung a big colorful garland between two trees.
And we waited.
But no one came.
Mom mailed out seven invitations and not a single person showed up at the farm. She got sad and accepted defeat and so did I. I didn’t care about my classmates not showing up, not really. I was upset for her. I had accepted my solitude.
“It’s their loss,” Grandma grunted, disgusted. “They’ll never get to try my cake recipe. But you, honey, will get two pieces instead of one.”
“Great.” I accepted my cake with pleasure.
We ate in silence under the garlands.
“Your mother will get over it,” Grandma said.
“Those kids don’t know what they’re missing.
You’re a heck of a boy, Will. A wonderful child.
Don’t ever forget that. And another thing: Don’t change, and don’t let them win.
Someday you’ll be surrounded by people who will love you for who you are.
You just need to keep your patience and be strong. ”
I said sure. She was my grandmother; she was supposed to know about these things.
But there was another reality. One named Taylor Parks.
For years, I managed to stay off his radar, probably because I didn’t talk much and at lunchtime I sat as far as I could from the crowd.
But in that particular year, he decided it amused him to make my life hell.
He and his friends would stuff my locker with toilet paper, trash, even a dead bird, would call me farm boy and laugh, and eventually everyone in class copied him, either because they feared or admired him.
If he saw me with a book at lunch, he’d come over, take it out of my hands, and tear the pages out in front of my nose.
I tried to confront him a few times, shoving him, insulting him, but he was almost a foot taller than me and always had his guys with him.
So for months and months, I had no choice but to take it.
In class, I sat in the back by myself. I’d play at being silent, like a cat. Pretend I was invisible. Pretend I didn’t exist. Never raise my hand, even though 99 percent of the time, I knew the answers to the questions the teacher called out, hoping to get the students involved.
One cold November day, Lucy Peterson came through the door.
She hadn’t been there at the beginning of that school year, but I remembered her the last one.
Everyone called her the sick girl, and they treated her delicately, as though just a glance might break her.
Since there were no other empty seats, the teacher told her to sit beside me.
She came over, holding the pink straps of her backpack tight.
Class started.
I looked over at her a couple of times. Her hair was short and patchy, with bald spots on the right side of her head.
I don’t think we’d said more than ten words to each other in our lives, but she was still a familiar face.
She’d originally been assigned to the other homeroom, but I guess it had filled up in her absence, so they placed her in mine.
Our teacher passed out the assignments and time started to slow down. Lucy and I shared a table, and she placed on top of it a shiny pen case that looked like a mermaid’s tail with a couple of colored pens. I just had a pencil, and I always kept it in my pocket.
When the bell rang, we all got up at once. The classroom was like a jungle in that moment. Taylor appeared in the corner of my eye, snatching away the sandwich my mother had made me that morning.
“Let’s see what we’ve got today.”
“Give me that,” I said, trying to snatch it back.
“Lettuce, tomato, and cheese. Gross.” Taylor frowned and threw it over my head into the trash can in the corner. “Three-pointer!” he shouted.
His friends laughed and followed him outside.
I just stood there staring into the trash.
“You want half of mine? It’s turkey.”
I turned and found Lucy Peterson’s gentle eyes staring at me. She reached out with half of her sandwich and wouldn’t let me say no. I took it, and she walked out the door. A couple of girls were in the hall waiting on her.
From then on, Lucy and I would talk sometimes in class. It didn’t change my life, and people still picked on me, but it did make the hours pass more pleasantly. We’d chat, whisper, tell jokes, and I realized how much little gestures can mean: a token gift, a knowing stare, a pleasing smile.
“Why is all your stuff shiny?” I asked her one day in math, when we had both finished our assignment.
“Because shiny things are pretty,” she responded, and as though to show me she was right, she took out a little jar full of glitter. “See? Look at this. It’s stardust.”
I smiled. She was a little less mature than the other kids in class, but it made sense. Her illness kept her living in a bubble. Why wouldn’t she be more innocent than the rest?
I grabbed it and moved it back and forth.
“Stardust…”
“Keep it. It’s yours.”
I accepted, only because I didn’t want to disappoint her.
A few hours later, at home, I lay on the lawn under the afternoon sun and turned it back and forth, staring at the glimmers. It was pretty, I thought. Incredibly so. My deskmate was right.
We made fun of Taylor and his friend sometimes and would stare at each other and giggle when the teacher asked him some simple question she’d already said the answer to and he’d get all nervous.
It was good to know there was someone else who saw him as I did when the rest of the class put him on a pedestal, either because they really did admire him or because they were afraid of falling victim to one of his so-called pranks.
On Valentine’s Day, Taylor’s box was jam-packed with love notes.
He took one or two out and read them in a sarcastic, condescending tone.
“Wow, he knows how to read. That’s a surprise,” Lucy said, and it was so funny, I cracked up in the middle of the hallway. That was the first time I’d ever done that.
People gave me weird looks. They must not have known I was capable. For them, I was still the weird kid, the lonely kid, the sad kid.
Nothing changed for me until three things came and marked the end of one stage and the beginning of another.
First was the spring, the harshest and coldest in decades.
The storms were like a bad sign, and it was no surprise when tragedy followed: A tornado struck the city and devastated it.
It ripped the roof off the barn, knocked down much of the fence, and tore through many of the surrounding farms, leaving them in ruins.
Second, Lucy Peterson got pneumonia and stopped coming to school. All I managed to find out from some of her friends was that she’d gone to the hospital. I never saw her again. She vanished from my life as soon as she’d appeared.
Third, my uncle Marcus called Dad in the middle of the night, just as we were on our way to bed, and told him an enormous piece of fallow land he and my father had inherited from my great-grandparents in Canada was very close to a field where they’d struck oil and was likely worth a fortune.
“Get ready,” he said, “and don’t waste money fixing up your farm.
Trust me. After this miracle, we can have anything we want. ”
A few months later, we were rich, and we left Ink Lake.