Free Jumped In by Patrick Flores-Scott Page A

line?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œBecause I was. And I was a real looker back then.”
    â€œOkay, but what did you do?”
    â€œI would let these couple of curls dangle down below the bill of my hardhat, and your grandfather, a strapping young buck working the crane, would see me walk in every day. He could view the whole factory from up on his perch. He kept an eye on me for months before he had the guts to ask me out for lunch. But he did it. He finally asked me out.”
    After a while, she explains that she used to check welds and rivets where the sections of the airplane’s body—the fuselage —came together. It was her job to make sure that the welders didn’t miss any spots and the riveters didn’t screw up any rivets. Bill was the one moving those massive fuselage parts around the factory so folks could put them together. That was pretty much what they did for about forty years of their working lives. That and apparently flirt enough to make everyone in the Renton Boeing plant sick to their stomachs.
    â€œI gotta get going now. Thanks.”
    â€œNo problem. Thanks for the chat.”

 
    SUN BREAK
    I START MY HIKE UP THE HILL TOWARD P AC H IGHWAY  … in the sun.
    Where the hell did that come from?
    Halfway to the top, I stop and turn around. I look west, down into Puget Sound and over to Vashon Island. The view is an intense mix of colors. The dark blue water. Vashon Island’s midnight green trees. And the whitest, puffy clouds. Winter in the Northwest. I don’t know if it’s worth all the days of depressing rain and gray for the few unbelievable hours a month that look like this.
    But it might be.
    I get greedy. I think about what I might see from the top of the hill. My heart starts pumping hard—in a good way. I rotate myself toward Pac Highway. I huff and I puff, sucking in chunks of air, hiking up as fast as I can, thinking this might be the most perfect morning ever.
    It is. The mountain’s out.
    Mount Rainier.
    Crystal clear.
    The white snow popping the massive volcano’s outline out of a bright blue sky.
    This place is amazing.

 
    MAKING SURE IT DOESN’T SUCK
    I GET TO L UIS’S . He says his mom’s got to work all weekend, so she won’t be interrupting.
    I figure we’re mostly done writing the poem. Luis looks tired, but he’s way hyped, like he stayed up all night thinking about it. “We don’t have much time, Sam. We have to make sure this doesn’t suck. We don’t wanna look like idiots.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œWe can’t just be rhyming to rhyme. We gotta be saying something .”
    â€œOkay.”
    So we talk more about what we have to say, what we want our classmates and Cassidy to understand about us. And we end up laughing our way through the day. By the time it’s over, we’ve thrown out what we had and we’ve got a whole new poem with a superhero theme.
    I don’t know if it’s great . But I think it’s pretty cool.
    We huddle at the kitchen table and silently read what we have. Luis reads it out loud a couple more times. He seems happy with it.
    â€œAre we done?” I ask.
    Luis studies it. “Hard to say.”
    He gets up from the kitchen table and heads to his room with page in hand.
    I follow.
    He walks over to his closet door, opens it and disappears inside. Blankets and dirty clothes fly into the room. There’s a clunk of stuff being shifted. In a second, he walks out holding a black-gray machine. It’s a huge old-fashioned typewriter. It looks like something from a hundred years ago.
    â€œWhere’d you get that?”
    â€œMy grandpa died and left it to my mom. She never uses it, so she gave it to me.”
    â€œDo you use it?”
    â€œNot much.”
    Luis grabs a piece of paper from the closet and puts it in the typewriter. He cranks the knob and the paper scoots into place.
    â€œYou got a laptop?” I