Down Sand Mountain Read Free Page A

called them Colored-People Tans, except they used the other word for it.
    Unfortunately, my tan idea didn’t last long. “He still looks like a colored boy,” Tink said when I finally came into the kitchen for breakfast.
    Wayne said, “Mom, you can’t let the freak go to school like that. Not with me. He’ll embarrass me.”
    I said, “You told me you were a Lone Wolf.”
    Wayne did one of his giant sighs, then he said, “That was last year. This year is different. I’m going out for JV football and don’t need a freak brother, a
freaktoid,
to mess everything up.” The way he said all that, it wasn’t like he was talking to me. In fact, it wasn’t like I was even there.
    Tink jumped up on her chair. “What’s a freaktoid? Does it mean colored?” I told her to shut up and she said, “You can’t make me.”
    Mom had cooked grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and stewed prunes because it was a special morning, and
Good Housekeeping
said lunch for breakfast once in a while kept a family from falling in a rut. I poked my finger in the middle of Tink’s grilled cheese because I knew she hated anybody to touch her food.
    Mom waved her spatula at me. “Dewey, that is unacceptable.” She grabbed my plate and set it down in front of Tink. “Here you go, Tink. You can eat your brother’s.”
    “Good,” I said. “I’m not going to eat it, anyway.”
    Wayne shoved the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and grabbed his new notebooks and pens and lunch money that Mom had lined up on the counter. He would have just left but Mom said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” and he said could he please be excused, please, and thanks for the breakfast.
    Mom said, “Wait for your brother,” then she wrapped another grilled cheese in a paper towel and handed it to me. She told me I could eat it on the way to school, and I wasn’t a freak, I looked fine, I was a very handsome boy. Then she stopped.
    “Where is your new shirt?”
    “What new shirt?” I said, though I knew exactly what she was talking about because it was still hanging on the back of a chair in my bedroom. It was something called Ban-Lon. Mom said it didn’t hold water, just sort of shed it, so instead of hanging it on the line to dry, all you had to do was wring it out. And it was wrinkleproof, too, so no ironing ever. I went back to the bedroom, knowing it was no use arguing, and looked at the shirt. It was orange. It had three buttons and a collar. It smelled like the chemical plant at the phosphate mine. In elementary school I only wore T-shirts, and they were always cotton, but my mom said, “This is high school and things are going to be different around here, Mister, so you better get used to it.”
    I pulled on the Ban-Lon and right away my skin went crazy. I think the cells on the outside were trying to crawl behind the ones underneath, a worse torture than getting tied down in the desert on an ant bed with honey smeared all over your body. I tugged at the neck and sleeves, trying to stretch it every way I could, but nothing worked, plus I started to sweat right away. If Wayne ever pulled it over my head, he could suffocate me with it. I was so miserable, I thought about suffocating myself. Our dog, Suzy, a half beagle–half basset, had followed me to the bedroom, and I was pretty sure she was shaking her head.
    When Tink saw me come out of the bedroom in the Ban-Lon, she blew tomato soup out of her nose and said, “Colored boy freaktoid.” I stuck my finger in her other grilled cheese, then ran out the door. I could hear Tink crying and Mom yelling until I was halfway down the block.
    Wayne was all the way over on Orange Avenue at David Tremblay’s house at the corner of Orange and Second Street by then. They’d been best friends since about first grade, so I guessed if Wayne was a Lone Wolf last year, then him and David must have been Lone Wolfs together. I walked toward them, trying to act like I wasn’t worried about