All the Broken Things Read Free Page A

“and did you fish?”
    “No.”
    His mother made him stay far back from the side of the boat because they were a waiting kind of fish. They were sharks. He’d seen how fast they took the dead when the living shoved them off the deck. The ocean housed another world you couldn’t see unless it came to the surface, or where the water was very shallow.
    When his father died, his mother asked one of the men to keep him below deck. Bo thrashed to get away but the man held him, until Bo was panting, furious. He had a right to see his own dead father. His mother told people—if they dared ask—that her husband had been lost at sea, but he was never lost. She
gave
him to the sea.
    Bo’s face must have showed some of this, for Teacher put her hand to her mouth, then changed the subject.
    “Okay, class, eyes up at the front.” She yanked a map down and picked up her wooden pointer. They named all the oceans until they could reel them off in any order.It was a kind of apology, he knew—the class was lulled by it. Teacher had a way of entrancing them: Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic, Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic. The class had the oceans memorized, but they did not really know them, did not know the flat expanse of shimmer, did not know their boredom and how they held the key to whether they might find land and live, or just sail on forever, like some of the other boats had, never to be found, the people dying one by one.
    “Bo,” Teacher said, finding her way again.
    He’d been looking at his desk, and now he looked up fast. “Yes, Miss?”
    “Can you show us on this map where you lived?”
    Bo preferred not to. But he got up and located Toronto on the map. “Here,” he said, and the class erupted into laughter.
    Teacher smiled. “Okay, but before, where?”
    “Vietnam,” Bo said, and traced his finger across and across until he got there, “is here.”
    “The other side of the world, class. Bo, you may sit down.” Teacher began to pace down one aisle. “Vietnam had a terrible war,” she said. “And many people had to leave.”
    The whole class could feel that this was not part of the lesson. This was something else. They looked into the air, and some of them at Bo, as if he could stop her. The class seemed to tighten—not just the children, but the walls, windows, knotting around Bo. And still she went on.
    “The U.S. wanted to stop communism and they did horrible things to fight the North Vietnamese Army. For one thing, they sprayed poison over their forests, and killed everything.”
    Teacher had stopped pacing and was standing halfway between the back and the front of the class, going on and on. From where he sat, Bo could smell her perfume. He stopped listening to her. He just smelled her, and tried to find space. He imagined the chalk and the chalk brushes and all the little things in the room hurtling toward him as if he were a magnet, and then, without him even knowing it, he whispered, “Stop,” and she heard and looked down at him and seemed to awaken from whatever trance she’d been in.
    “Class,” Teacher said, through that tunnel of waking. “History lesson is over. Moving on to something very important.” She unhooked the ocean map scroll and rummaged for another one, an old-times map that she pulled down, fidgeting until the locking system held. Smiling at them all, she pointed to Ancient Greece. “The play we are going to put on for this year’s Variety Show in June has its origins in Ancient Greece. We are going to start studying this old story now because it fits nicely with our study unit
What Is a Hero
?”
    There came a heaving groan from the class. It was a reaction to the words
play
and
Variety Show
. The class felt itself too old for plays, too old to be corralled into sucha thing, even if secretly many of them loved both the idea of a play and the annual Variety Show. These students were smart enough to hide their enchantment. Teacher tried to