Free The Year the Lights Came On by Terry Kay Page B

didn’t move. He looked asleep. “Freeman, I’m not arguin’ that,” he said defensively.
    “Well, let’s vow.”
    “Don’t need to,” Wesley replied. “We know what we got to do.”
    “Wes,” R. J. warned, “we ought to vow.”
    Wesley turned on his side, picked up a pine needle and began to braid it. That was always a signal he was thinking.
    “I’ll tell you what,” Wesley finally said. “Let’s have a hearing if anybody gets to bein’ buddy-buddy with them. Some of the little kids just don’t know what they doin’.”
    “All right,” R. J. quickly agreed. “Suits me.” R. J. liked the idea of a kangaroo court. That made it dramatic.
    “Everybody agree?” asked R. J.
    Everyone nodded.
    “No playing around with them,” I emphasized. “No—uh…”
    “What’s the matter, Colin?” Freeman asked.
    “Uh—nothin’. Nothin’. I’m agreeing, that’s all.”
    Megan. That meant I would have to summon all my cunning, employ every instinct I had, not be caught with Megan. These were my friends and Wesley was my brother. But Megan—Megan belonged to another me. She gave me Three Musketeers candy bars and I drew her pictures of dogs.
    “You wait,” Wesley said slowly. “You wait. Something’s gonna break for us.”
    *
    At the exact moment we were sealing our strategy in the High Council session of a Sunday afternoon, Alvin Bond was discovering The Secret. We did not know it, but Alvin Bond and The Secret would be Wesley’s “something” that broke for us. It would happen the following day, on Monday, and it would work because Alvin would become the most unlikely hero in the history of Emery Junior High School.
    Alvin Bond was an Our Sider, geographically and by heritage, but he never quite belonged to the inner circle of rule and example. Alvin was like a leftover thought in a conversation, something you meant to say but didn’t and when you remembered it, the conversation was over. It was partly because he lived on the Harrison side of Highway 17 and the rest of us lived on the Goldmine side. And it was partly because he was sixteen years old and only a ninth grader. Alvin had failed the fourth, the sixth, and the eighth grades—not because he was dumb, but because his teachers did not understand his nature.
    Alvin was shy, shy in a thin, emaciated way that described him emotionally as well as physically. He was at least five feet, ten inches tall and his arms were three inches longer than those of anyone in Emery. He weighed, probably, one hundred and twenty pounds, and the way he stood, shoulders pointed, hands folded in front, he looked like a praying mantis. During all his years at Emery, Alvin had stayed to himself. If he had any friends, none of us knew it, though everyone from Our Side had a kind feeling for him. Alvin was all right, as far as we knew.
    We had even become accustomed to watching Alvin walk backward. Alvin walked backward all the time. Even when we lined up to march into the auditorium for Friday assembly, Alvin walked backward. And he never spoke. Never. There was a story that he had once talked during an arithmetic lesson in the seventh grade, asking Old Lady Blackwall if he could go use the toilet. But that flood of rhetoric was followed by a two-year silence. Some of the Highway 17 Gang would occasionally kid Alvin about the cat’s having his tongue and Alvin would stare them down with a contemptuous, never-blinking gaze. I once heard Dupree whisper, “That boy’s the champion stare-downer of all time .”
    Staring people down used to be a test of character in Emery.
    *
    It was recess on Monday, and we were working out for a softball game against Airline. It was a day of high-pitched chatter, the ripe swat of a Louisville Slugger against a bruised Spalding practice ball, the “Attay, babe! Attay, babe!” compliments for a perfectly fielded grounder, and the grand posing of swinging three bats in the on-deck circle. We were not a great softball team, but