Deep Down Popular Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Sneak Peek

  Copyright

  I have to thank a big old shiny metal leg brace for my friendship with Conrad Parker Smith, and if I knew where that leg brace was today, I’d get my granddaddy to make me a nice wood frame for it and I’d hang it right up on the living room wall and every time I came downstairs, I’d look at it and I’d say, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  I loved Conrad Parker Smith in the second grade. I loved him to the point where I used to hide in the bushes near the swing set on the playground at school, and when he’d go running by, I’d jump out and pull him down and give him a great big kiss on his cheek. He didn’t seem to really mind, but he never kissed me back. I used to give up my turn on the swing so Conrad could ride just a little bit longer or my place in the lunch line so he’d be able to get some french fries before they ran out. I wasn’t sure he even noticed me at all. Didn’t even know if he knew my name. He had all kinds of girls chasing him around the playground. There was Elizabeth Parnell and Sarah Jane Peabody and Moon n’ Stars Montgomery.

  By the third and fourth grade we were a whole lot more proper. Nobody would have been caught dead kissing anybody. But in the beginning of fifth grade, Conrad Parker Smith seemed to have an unspoken reign over everybody. The girls all loved him (including myself). The boys really liked him, too. He was always the first to be picked for a soccer game or a baseball game. If a boy was looking for a place to sit in the cafeteria and Conrad had a spot open, you could be sure that boy would sit there.

  For the most part, Conrad never paid that much attention to me, I imagine because I am what you call an outdoors girl. My mama calls me a tomboy, but I don’t think I am. I’m just a whole lot happier when I’m running in a field or walking along a creek. Getting all dressed up is about the worst thing in the world to me. I hate sticking my feet in party shoes or wearing ironed party dresses. I about have to scream. Same thing with my hair. Right before we went downtown last year to get a family photograph taken, I hauled off with a nice big old pair of scissors and cut my hair practically down to the bone. My older sister, Melinda, has beautiful hair and it was all curled for the photograph and she was wearing a fluffy pink perfect cloud of a dress, and here I was in love with Conrad Parker Smith with my hair so short, you couldn’t spit on it.

  In second grade I covered Conrad with kisses whenever I could. In third I gave up my swing or my cookie or my bus seat coming home. By fifth grade I never said anything to him at all. I sat way at the back on the other side of the room getting As in spelling, spending a lot of time reading. I read everything on the accelerated reading list. I had stars all over my reading notebooks and stars on all my report cards and nobody I could really call a friend.

  Meanwhile Conrad’s popularity was growing. Not only did the whole fourth and fifth grade worship him but the big old sixth graders too, and all the little kids right down to the preschool bimbos. That boy’s popularity was astounding, outstanding, overwhelming.

  It was about six months ago, somewhere at the beginning of sixth grade, that something happened. Conrad’s leg wasn’t working right. He developed a limp that got worse and worse. His soccer game went downhill till he had to quit altogether. He found himself struggling to keep up on field trips. He started avoiding school dances and his popularity began to dwindle. It dwindled and it dwindled until the popular kids began to get used to not having him there at their dances and parties and soccer games. It dwindled and dwindled until the popular kids started forgetting to invite him altogether.

  Then one day Conrad showed up at school wearing a big metal shiny brace on his leg. I wish you could have seen the look on the faces of the kids in that schoolroom. It was the worst possible thing that could have happened to Conrad’s falling popularity. That leg brace put the final touches on Conrad’s plunging status. Now more often than not, there’d be an empty chair next to him at lunch or you might even see him limping alone across the playground. The kids at Cabanash County Elementary have always been like the wind running along the open fields around here, one minute high and sure and the next minute low and turned away. Had I known! Had I known that leg brace would be for me a kind of gateway, a door into a whole new changeable world.

  My see-you-later-when-I-feel-like-it friend, Elizabeth Parnell, has moved up to a table in the middle of our class so she can sit with Sarah Jane Peabody, leaving me back here all alone, bubbling and fuming like a pot of Mama’s half-burned stew. Typical Elizabeth Parnell.

  I am sitting here staring at a mess of a map, a big sloppy-looking thing the fifth graders painted of the United States of America. All the colors are mushed together so you can’t even see our beautiful state of Virginia. It’s just a blob of yellow lost in a bunch of greens and pinks. I’m sitting back here steaming and stewing ’cause that girl is about as reliable as a rubber raft with a hole in it floating backwards down the Cabanash River.

  Our teacher looks out at our fourth-fifth-and-sixth-grade room like an explorer looking out at a new land ahead of her, like Lewis and Clark looking out off a cliff toward the empty expanse of America. “Jessie Lou,” she says with her hand up over her eyes to shade the light so she can see way back to my seat in the far corner of the room under the big ugly kid-made map. “Jessie Lou?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  “Jessie Lou, don’t you live over on Creek Road? Don’t you live on the same road as Conrad Parker Smith?” she says.

  I gulp. I take a swallow of classroom air and I gulp again. “Yes, ma’am, I do,” I say.

  “Well then, isn’t that just perfect! The principal asked that somebody take the responsibility of helping Conrad Parker Smith to get his bicycle home from school. That bike’s been here going on two months now,” she says, smiling, “and I’ve been thinking he’ll need someone to help him with his books, what with the new leg brace and all.” She keeps looking at me with that Lewis-and-Clark hand up, shading her eyes, looking way out at the frontier, way out into the faraway world of the corner table.

  I put my own hand up and brush it across the top of my head. I chopped my hair off real close last night so it probably looks like somebody buzzed my head with a Weedwacker. My hair feels all prickly and strange against my palm. “I’d like to ask you to be that person for the next couple of months,” says our teacher.

  I look down at my scrawny old legs that are covered with red scratches from the raspberry bushes. I was out last night scrounging around in the tall weeds trying to find a baseball that I threw too hard. My hands are all battered up, and I’ve got a mosquito bite on my knee that looks like a tarantula got after me. I take another swallow of that hard-to-breathe classroom air. “Me?” I say. “Me? You want me?” Then I roll my eyes over toward Conrad sitting on the other side of the room. He’s shaking his head no and looking up at the ceiling in dis
belief like there’s something up there walking along on eight legs singing the national anthem.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do mean you,” says the teacher. “That’d be real nice and supportive.” The room goes all silent like we’re a bunch of strangers standing in an elevator together, that kind of uncomfortable silent silence.

  “Okay?” says the teacher. She walks over to the chalkboard and goes on talking about Lewis and Clark and their expedition that we are studying. She writes LEWIS and CLARK in capital letters on the board. Then she writes out the name Sacagawea, the Indian girl guide. “Get out your history folders and let’s think about a time when America was wild and undiscovered,” she says. “When you got in a dangerous situation in the wilderness, you couldn’t get on your cell phone to call your mama or your daddy. No, you were on your own. You had to rely on yourself.”

  I can hear my teacher’s voice, but now her words are just a jumble of noise. I feel kind of shivering cold even though it’s already roasting hot outside. My hands and feet feel cold. It isn’t because my high-top sneakers are soaking wet ’cause they are dry today. It isn’t because I stole one of my older sister Melinda’s diet Jell-O pops from the fridge to eat on the way to school ’cause my granddaddy loves them so much he sucked up the last two this morning before anybody was awake.

  I guess I’m freezing cold because I can’t think of one word that I might say to Conrad Parker Smith. I can’t believe my teacher would go and ask me, me of all people, to assist Conrad. I guess I could say, “May I help you?” but that sounds like I’m selling polyester blouses at Marlene’s Fashion Barn on Route 28. The truth is, if I have to say anything more than yes and no, I’m sure I’ll shatter into a million pieces and my granddaddy will have to come and pull me home in an old red wagon.

  “Lewis and Clark were looking for a route to the sea. They were finding their way through the unknown. Imagine a sky at night completely dark with clean bright stars overhead. We never see a dark sky now — there are always lights of civilization on the horizon.” Mrs. Duster looks up at the ceiling, her face full of wonder.

  I look over at the table in the middle of the room where Elizabeth Parnell and Sarah Jane Peabody and Louise L. are sitting. They have little gold sticker stars all over their hair and they are hunched over together making fairy wands out of cardboard when they are supposed to be making some of the tools Lewis and Clark took with them on their expedition.

  Sarah Jane Peabody is having a fairy tea party after school and she’s got a pair of fairy wings in her backpack that she’s going to wear on the bus riding home. Elizabeth Parnell left her fairy wings at home on her patio table by mistake so she’ll be a fairy without wings at the party. I don’t feel bad for her at all. I didn’t even get invited. Maybe it’s just as well. If I was to wear a pair of those wings, I’d probably look more like a sorry old housefly.

  “Has anyone ever tried to find their way using the night stars as a guide? That’s what Lewis and Clark did. They looked at the night sky,” says our teacher, tilting her head back again and closing her eyes. Then she opens them and says, “Ever tried counting all the stars in the sky? You soon find out that it’s a hopeless task. Isn’t it.”

  Suddenly up out of nowhere the bell rings and it’s lunchtime. I usually love the first Tuesday of every month ’cause it’s Pizza Day, and here at Cabanash County Elementary you can choose your own toppings, and they’ll heat it up for you all nice and cheesy and melty, and when you bite into that pizza, it’s so tender and hot, you could just flap your way to heaven on a pair of old crow’s wings.

  Kids are pushing for the door now trying to get to that pizza, but I’m sitting here feeling faint like I can’t move. Why did our teacher have to pick me? Does she know about all the poems I’ve written to Conrad? Does she know his smile sends waves through me like the waves knocking against the shore on the Cabanash River when a motorboat goes through? I don’t think you can say no to a teacher if they ask you to do something for them. Can you? At least I never heard of anybody doing something like that.

  I go out in the hall and kids start flowing around me like rising water. I am leaning against a mural created by a bunch of idiotic third graders who think cotton balls are just the greatest thing in the world and they’ve glued them all over everything, using them to make trees, bushes, even people’s hair.

  From here I can see Conrad Parker Smith up near the pencil sharpener, not hurrying to get to lunch like he used to. He used to be the first one at the pizza counter, smiling away and adjusting his invisible crown when everyone hurried over to get in line. Now I see him still sitting in class, one of the last kids to leave.

  A little first grader has wandered into our room by mistake, and he’s standing there next to Conrad’s chair with his lunch box in one hand. The latch to the lunch box is half open, and while that little twerp stands there, all his wrapped-up sandwiches slide out on the floor. That’s a first grader for you. They never seem to notice anything.

  Conrad leans over and says, “Oh boy, now look what you went and did. What you got in here? Looks real good.” He stuffs everything back in the lunch box. “Shoelaces are untied, too. Hey, you look like a disaster area. Where’s your mama?” The little boy stands there looking up at Conrad.

  I move away from the door and knock a couple of cotton balls off the mural by mistake. I’m just trying to stick them back on when Elizabeth Parnell and Sarah Jane Peabody walk by me in the hall, all cuddly with their arms tucked together. Sarah Jane already has on her nylon sparkling fairy wings. Elizabeth Parnell turns to me and smiles real sweet and looks real sincere and she says, “Y’all have yourself a real nice Pizza Day, Jessie Lou.”

  And I say, “Guess I’m not going to be here. I am going home for lunch.”

  It’s one of those firecracker decisions that come up out of nowhere, a quick flash like a Roman candle on a hot July night. I gotta go home. Pizza or not. I just gotta gotta gotta go home.

  I fly in the door at home and crash-land on that nice old prickly brown couch in the cool dark living room. I just love the way that couch kind of scratches the back of my neck and I can feel all the times I’ve sat here watching 1950s Zorro movies with my granddaddy. (Zorro is this guy who wears a black mask, who’s a great sword fighter and always leaves the letter Z cut in a tree or a curtain when he’s been there.) It’s Granddaddy’s favorite. Right now I need to think about better times, like last Halloween when Granddaddy dressed up as Zorro and took me trick-or-treating.

  I can see the kitchen from here, and I stretch my feet all the way to the La-Z-Boy recliner and I close my eyes. Mama’s whipping up a batch of chicken salad, and Granddaddy’s hovering around nearby with two pieces of Pepperidge Farm white bread in his hands.

  “Take more than your share, Granddaddy, it comes back to haunt you in the middle of the night,” says Mama, tapping the side of the bowl with the wooden spoon and then washing it off in the sink.

  “Well, if anything that looks like chicken salad comes knocking at my door tonight, I’ll just tell it to go ’round and have it out with you first,” says Granddaddy, laying some lettuce on his bread and then scooping up a bunch of chicken salad.

  “Sew your own buttons on your trousers when you pop another pair then, Granddaddy,” says Mama. “And while we’re on the subject, I want y’all to get down in the cellar after lunch and haul up those bottles. Jean Duster’s heading up another bottle drive this year.”

  “Well, sweetheart, not just this afternoon ’cause I’m going bird-watching,” says my granddaddy.

  “You mean you’re taking your binoculars and you’re gonna go poke around down at the construction site. Have you ever considered that the men working down there might not want some old geezer snooping around pretending to bird-watch?” says Mama.

  “Well, it’s a sad and sorry thing that’s going on down there, isn’t it, Jessie Lou?” Granddaddy says to me, poking his head through the kitchen door for a minute. “A miserable, rotten, terrible thing. T
hat shopping mall is going to take all the business away from Main Street. And it will wipe out Bailey’s Hardware, that’s for sure.”

  “Those old Bailey brothers are stirring you up, Granddaddy. Far as I’m concerned, they’re a couple of good-for-nothings,” says Mama. “Wish you’d make friends with some of the seniors up at church. I don’t think those Bailey brothers have set foot in a church for sixty years.”

  “People are magpies, honey,” Granddaddy says, wrapping his arm around Mama’s shoulder for a minute and then nodding his head at me. “I suppose they’d rather go over in their cars to that big flimsy shopping mall and get something that’s going to fall apart but looks shiny and bright. Yeah, they’re kin to magpies. Do you know what a magpie is, Jessie Lou?”

  “Granddaddy,” says Mama, “’course she knows what a magpie is — it’s a bird, isn’t it, honey? Shopping mall will be good for the town. People won’t have to go to Charlottesville anymore.”

  “A magpie likes shiny things, brand-new things, things that glisten like a brand-new shopping mall. They don’t care that in about ten years that thing’s going to look like a box of rocks, Jessie Lou,” says Granddaddy. “They just don’t care.”

  My old granddaddy is practically obsessed with the new shopping mall being built. He rides over there with one of the Bailey brothers on a moped, and they poke around taking photographs of it and writing things down. Sometimes they go over there with their binoculars, whistling and trying to look casual.

  Me, I don’t really care about that shopping mall. I’m just sitting here thinking about Conrad and how I’ve loved that boy for all these years and I never in my life dreamed I’d ever have to actually talk to him. I close my eyes. I can just see him walking into the classroom this morning — the most beautiful, sweetest, full-of-brains boy I ever saw limping toward a table, pulling that new leg brace, dragging his books, wearing that tie-dyed T-shirt his mama made for him that says something about feng shui, which his mama is studying so she can get her life straightened out.