Chapter 16 2004
Miraculously, thanks to Kai, I made it through second grade.
And, thanks to me, Kai passed fourth grade.
Secretly, I called him my onion, a multilayered ogre with fierce protectiveness over anyone he deemed a friend.
Which, from what I could tell, was limited to me.
No one called me Poopface in front of him, not even Bart, and Patch quickly became my new name.
We went everywhere together, a modern version of Freak the Mighty—big and small, brains and brawn—two parts of a whole and exponentially more powerful together.
I believed with all my heart that Boodo’s amulet was responsible, its magic putting Kai in the library and struggling with a book report on a book I happened to have read on my first day back.
Who would have thought such a small thing as helping on a book report would result in such a remarkable friendship?
We even had a secret handshake, the same one Goofy and Mickey Mouse used, which was perfect since Kai was tall and secretly dorky like Goofy, and I was short and normally (when I wasn’t at school) happy and friendly, like Mickey.
But at the end of the school year, Kai told me the terrible news that he wouldn’t be returning to Gaines the following year. His parents had decided to send him to military school. I didn’t know how I would survive without him. He was the first true friend I’d made outside my family.
I was relieved when I returned home for summer break to discover my second elephant-coin wish had worked and that Mother was home. She explained she was no longer broken down thanks to taking Jesus into her heart.
I was happy for her, though it turned out that Mother accepting Christ as her savior meant a lot of work for both of us.
Attending church on Sundays was no longer optional, and I was required to attend Bible study on Wednesdays while Mother attended her own Bible group.
We prayed before each meal, read the Bible together in the afternoons, and every one of us, including Profe and Boodo, were expected to make the sign of the cross each time we passed the gold-and-wood crucifix Mother had hung in the living room over the fireplace.
We only did it when Mother was watching, and Boodo, being Muslim, did her best to avoid the situation.
I could tell how much it upset her to cross herself.
Like Profe, I didn’t take either of Mother’s or Boodo’s beliefs too seriously.
I crossed myself when I passed the crucifix.
And in the afternoons, when I was with Boodo, I knelt on my prayer rug beside her, faced the Kaaba, and performed salat to Allah.
The truth was, I liked having something that Mother and I shared.
I enjoyed our afternoons together reading the Bible and that sometimes, after, we would talk.
I learned a lot about her that summer. Like that she’d had a brother named Harold who had fallen off our dock and drowned when he was four and she was seven.
And that, after he died, her parents sent her to Gaines to live year round.
She also told me she’d been in love once, when she was in college.
Then her boyfriend graduated, and they broke up, and that was the end of it, though I could tell Mother still thought about him.
When I wasn’t with Mother taking Christ into my heart, I was with Profe or Boodo. Profe and I had a beautiful routine that summer. We’d get up early, make ourselves a thermos of tea and pack a lunch, then set out on “our day of learning and adventure.”
“So much to do and so little time,” he said nearly every morning, appalled by how little I’d learned at Gaines.
Learning with Profe was nothing like learning at school.
He believed the world was a classroom and that experiences were the foundation of any good education.
Our week typically started with an expedition—a trip to a museum, park, nature reserve, or even the mall—where we would “observe, document, and analyze.” Sometimes we went with an objective—fossil hunting, observing behaviors, learning about the Mesozoic Era.
Other times, it was simply to try something new and see where it led.
Profe loved nature. His feather, fossil, and arrowhead collections were astounding, and nothing was better than stumbling on a specimen he didn’t already have.
We would research it and catalog it, and each of us would make a drawing of it in our journal.
Profe had close to a hundred journals. I was working on my third.
That summer we explored three new caves.
We visited the Museum of Russian Art and the Bell Museum of Natural History.
We went to the annual Pine Island Cheese Festival, the jazz festival in downtown Minneapolis, Porch Fest in New London, and Kolacky Days in Montgomery.
We saw two concerts at Orchestra Hall along with a James Taylor concert at the Xcel Energy Center.
It was also the summer of the Olympics. Profe was mostly interested in the swimming, while Mother was a fan of the gymnastics. She was especially fond of Carly Patterson, who ended up winning the individual all-around gold medal.
“Just look at her,” Mother said as we watched her on the podium receiving her medal. “She’s like an angel, as if the Lord reached down to personally bless her and make her special.”
I loved every bit of the Olympics, especially the running. At night, I dreamed of someday racing around the track as the crowd cheered, of leaning my chest over the finish line and standing on the podium as the national anthem played and as a man draped a gold medal over my head.
Michael Phelps became my hero. He won a record six gold medals and two bronze, making him the most decorated Olympian in history.
And it didn’t matter one bit that he was different looking, with his crazy long torso, narrow smile, and large ears.
All that mattered was how good he was. People liked winners. I was starting to understand that.
On the days Mother needed Profe to drive her places, I was with Boodo.
On those days, we ran errands and cooked together, and sometimes we’d sneak a visit to Blue House so I could see Astur and the rest of my Blue House family.
We also managed to see every movie I’d missed while I was at school: Ella Enchanted, Home on the Range, Shrek 2, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
It was a wonderful summer, and it went by far too quickly.