Free Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

the sling.
    So now I’m stuck. I don’t know who to be: the one who admits that I can’t do it, or the pretender.
    Finally I decide I’ll give Mr. Daniels something so, so terrible that he’ll have to ask me to do it over.
    I don’t even try to spell anything correctly like I usually do. I just put a whole bunch of letters together that even I know make no sense.
    I walk up and hand it to him instead of putting it in the assignment cubby.
    “Thanks, Ally, but if you’re done, why don’t you put it in the cubby?”
    I push it toward him a little more. “I thought you may want to check it over.”
    We lock eyes for a few seconds and then he reaches out to take it from me. “Okay,” he says. He looks at it, his eyebrows scrunch up, and then he looks back up at me. He stays quiet. Thinking, I can tell.
    I hear it in my head.
Do better, Ally.
And I would. I would magically do better and Mrs. Silver would carry a trophy for me so big, she’d have to carry it on her back.
    “Ally?”
    “Huh?”
    “I said that you can just put it in the cubby, then.”
    And the pictures in my head pop like bubbles. I walk away without taking it back.
    • • •
    As soon as we all sit down in the cafeteria, Keisha announces to Albert, “Okay. This has been killing me. All. Day. Long.”
    “What?” I ask.
    “Albert. So this Flint shirt that you wear every day.”
    He interrupts. “I do not, in fact, wear the same shirt every day. I have five identical ones.”
    Keisha’s eyes are wide. “Seriously, Albert? You bought the same shirt five times?”
    He doesn’t seem to think it’s a big deal. “It’s the one I liked.”
    “Well, anyway, Albert,” Keisha says. “I finally found out what the heck your shirt means. I googled ‘Flint’ and you know what I found?”
    His eyes widen.
    “It’s a place in Michigan, a kind of rock, something people use to light campfires, what arrowheads are made of, and a kind of sneaker.”
    Albert doesn’t say anything.
    “Albert? Did you
hear
me? What is with the Flint shirt? That just makes no sense . . . No sense whatsoever.”
    Albert fidgets.
    “Hey, Albert,” I say. “You okay? You know, Keisha didn’t mean any harm. She just . . .”
    “I am quite aware of her intentions.”
    I worry. “What are those?”
    “To find out why I wear this shirt.”
    Funny how my brain wants to make things complicated and his just cuts to the simplest thing. Well, the simplest thing with a bunch of fancy words and mile-long sentences.
    “The meaning of my shirt is not any of those things.” He closes his eyes before he takes a deep breath. “Flint is an immortal genius from
Star Trek.
Season three, episode nineteen. It is titled ‘Requiem for—’”
    Keisha laughs, interrupting him. “Albert, are you
kidding
me?”
    Albert clears his throat and glances at the clock.
    “Albert,” I say, poking the side of Keisha’s leg, and she—by some miracle—stops laughing. “Go ahead. I want to know.” After that day of being mean, I want to be extra nice. “So, Flint is a smart guy?” I ask.
    Albert readjusts himself in his seat. “Flint goes away to his own planet. He puts up invisible barriers so that others won’t sense life-forms there. He creates robots to protect himself and keep him company. They are . . .
predictable.
”
    “Sounds super weird if you ask me,” says Keisha. “Why wouldn’t he live on Earth with people?”
    “He had once lived on Earth. He left to be alone. He
wanted
to be alone.”
    Keisha falls forward, dropping her arms on the table. “Why the heck would a man leave Earth with everything here to go off and sit on some rock in space all by himself?”
    Albert hesitates. “Well . . . he says it’s to ‘retreat from the unpleasantness of Earth and the company of people.’” Then he looks up right into my eyes. “I can see that. I can see why someone would want to avoid being with other people. A great number of them are not very nice to