Some of the stuff that goes on in the Auburn Street Projects, I'm never gonna do. These projects are like some kind of never-never land, like they never got put on a regular map. Nobody comes around here on purpose. It's as if we all got lost, right in the middle of the city.
Reeve McClain, Jr. -- Junebug -- has decided to skip his birthday. Since ten is the age when boys in the projects are forced to join gangs or are ensnared by drug dealers, Junebug would rather remain nine. Still, he does have a birthday wish: to someday become a ship's captain and sail away. So Junebug comes up with a plan to launch a flotilla, fifty glass bottles containing notes with his wish, in the hope that someone somewhere will help to make his dream come true.
Some of the stuff that goes on in the Auburn Street Projects, I'm never gonna do. These projects are like some kind of never-never land, like they never got put on a regular map. Nobody comes around here on purpose. It's as if we all got lost, right in the middle of the city.
Reeve McClain, Jr. -- Junebug -- has decided to skip his birthday. Since ten is the age when boys in the projects are forced to join gangs or are ensnared by drug dealers, Junebug would rather remain nine. Still, he does have a birthday wish: to someday become a ship's captain and sail away. So Junebug comes up with a plan to launch a flotilla, fifty glass bottles containing notes with his wish, in the hope that someone somewhere will help to make his dream come true.
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Overview
Some of the stuff that goes on in the Auburn Street Projects, I'm never gonna do. These projects are like some kind of never-never land, like they never got put on a regular map. Nobody comes around here on purpose. It's as if we all got lost, right in the middle of the city.
Reeve McClain, Jr. -- Junebug -- has decided to skip his birthday. Since ten is the age when boys in the projects are forced to join gangs or are ensnared by drug dealers, Junebug would rather remain nine. Still, he does have a birthday wish: to someday become a ship's captain and sail away. So Junebug comes up with a plan to launch a flotilla, fifty glass bottles containing notes with his wish, in the hope that someone somewhere will help to make his dream come true.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429952439 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 05/26/2009 |
| Series: | Junebug |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 132 |
| Lexile: | 570L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 164 KB |
| Age Range: | 8 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Alice Mead is the author of many highly acclaimed novels, including Adem's Cross, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and two other books featuring Junebug. The first two Junebug books were both NCSS-CBC Notable Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies. She lives in Maine.
Read an Excerpt
Junebug
By Alice Mead
Macmillan
Copyright © 1995 Alice MeadAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5243-9
CHAPTER 1
I've got the sail hauled in tight. Lanyard's wrapped around my wrist. That sailboat leans over and just about flies out of the water, lifting high like a bird's wing. Foam and bubbles hiss past until there's a long, snaky trail behind us. I set sail for the West Indies, wherever they may be.
I don't really, though. Don't set sail for anywhere. Truth is, I'm just sitting in my seat, leaning my head against the wall of my fourth-grade class at the Auburn Street School, by the windows. That lanyard is the cord from the venetian blinds. It's Monday afternoon and I'm waiting for the three o'clock bell to ring so I can go get my little sister, Tasha, and head on home.
We're supposed to be finishing up a paragraph to hand in to Miss Jenkins, but I can't even get started. The only thing on my paper is my name and the title, "My Wish." Then nothing but thin blue lines.
I grab onto the cord one more time and look out the window. The wood along the classroom windowsills is old and yellow, and it has wavy black streaks underneath the shiny surface. I run my fingers along it. The windowsill's got lots of varnish on it, just the way sailboats have varnish on them, so the water won't rot the wood.
See? I know all about sailboats from those magazines Mrs. Swanson brings in to the project library. They come from a dentist's office. She's got so many she said I could keep some of them. Now they're under my bed in a big stack right next to my bottle collection.
Thinking about those bottles reminds me that I do have a wish. A birthday wish. And I'm going to put my wish on tiny pieces of paper, shove them into the bottles, and float them out to sea.
But my birthday wish is a secret. I'm hoping and hoping that it will come true. Until it does, I won't tell anyone about it. Especially Robert. He might make fun of me, so I'm not going to say one word.
I wrap the cord around my wrist. The wind's picking up. The seagulls are screaming overhead and the waves are going slap, slap, slap against the hull. Captain McClain yells to his crew. Shove over on the tiller and head into the wind! We're coming about!
The sails flap and crackle. I duck my head as the boom goes by.
"Junior!" says Miss Jenkins sharply.
"Huh?" I say.
Miss Jenkins's voice breaks through the sound of the gulls. She interrupts my journey. She's standing at the front of my row and it looks as if she just made some kind of announcement. Uh-oh. All the kids in my row are turning around, staring at me. But my buddy Robert, who sits in front of me, he's laughing, so I guess I'm not in real trouble.
"I said," repeats Miss Jenkins, "that anyone who didn't finish his paragraph should do it for homework."
"Oh. Okay."
I sure didn't finish mine, so I fold it up into a tight little square and shove it into my pocket. When the bell rings, everybody scrapes his chair back and heads on out, yelling goodbye to Miss Jenkins.
"Junebug," Robert says, out at the coathooks. "You gotta go get Tasha?"
Everybody except Mama and the teachers calls me Junebug, but my real name is Reeve McClain, Jr. Captain McClain to my crew, but they're invisible.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Oh, man." Robert shakes his head as if I just broke his heart. "Can't you leave her home?"
"Nope."
"Come on with me and Trevor downtown."
"Can't."
"Hey," Robert says. "Guess what I wrote about? I wrote about me being on the Knicks. Point guard. I get down low. Dribble in under the basket when no one's looking. Sneak a shot. Score!"
"Oh, yeah?" I say back. "How come no one's looking? How come no one stuffed you?"
"Because I made it up just the way I wanted it."
I have to laugh.
"You make me mad, Junebug," Robert says. "How are you ever gonna get good at basketball if you don't practice with us down at the Boys' Club? How are you gonna impress the talent scouts when they start coming around?"
"I'm not. I'm not gonna play for no NBA. They can't afford me, anyhow."
Now Robert has to laugh. The crowd has thinned out. We get our jackets on and head down the stairs.
"Yeah? Well, you gotta be on the NBA if you want to be in a sneaker commercial," he says. "You know that one where King Kong walks through the city?"
He puts his arms out stiff and walks like King Kong down the stairs. I shake my head. He's one sorry case. Robert watches too much TV.
"Why can't your Aunt Jolita mind Tasha after school? I thought you told me that she'd babysit when she moved in with you all."
"I don't know," I say, shrugging as if I don't care. I don't want to talk about Aunt Jolita. "She's never around."
"Yeah? Well, you better quit hanging around five-year-olds. This is your last chance, Junebug," Robert calls out, running toward the front door to meet Trevor. "Are you coming or not?"
"Nah," I say. "See you."
Every day, Trevor comes over from the sixth-grade portable classrooms. He's waiting by the door for Robert. When he sees me, he shakes his head with disgust. I don't care. I don't like Trevor, anyway. Trevor's eleven, and he hangs out with some older guys at night. But I don't want to think about that.
I don't want to think about my birthday, either. It's coming in two weeks. May 18. And then I'll be ten. And that's when kids like Trevor start asking you if you want to go with them and maybe run some errands, earn some money. Somebody told me Trevor bought himself a gun. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. I don't know. Thinking about the gun, I feel sick to my stomach right there on the staircase to the kindergarten rooms.
"Don't think about it," I tell myself. "Don't." I shove the sick feeling away.
Some of the stuff that goes on in the Auburn Street projects, I'm never gonna do. These projects are like some kind of never-never land, like they never got put on a regular map. Nobody comes around here on purpose. It's as if we all got lost, right in the middle of the city.
The only person who comes to the projects by herself is that reading teacher, Miss Robinson. She comes after school to the room where Mrs. Swanson has a little library set up. That's where Tasha and I go after school sometimes.
I take a big breath. Then I run down the rest of the stairs.
All the kindergarten classes are down in the basement next to the rickety old bathrooms. Little kids have to go a lot, I guess, and the teachers don't want to have to be running all over the school looking for them.
There's Tasha, sitting in her cubby, waiting. I know she won't leave without me. She's got a round face just like mine; we're like two moons shining up in the sky. She sits there waiting, her lips pushed together and her brown eyes wide and still.
Some of the Puerto Rican families are still here. Sometimes a whole family comes to pick up one kid. Their mamas kneel down and shove those little kids' arms up their sleeves — poke, poke. Puerto Rican kids act all bendy and loose, like they're made out of Play-Doh instead of bones, getting all shoved and zipped, first one way and then the other. Their mamas kneel down and talk Spanish right up in their faces — fast, fast, fast. Spanish words come out like lightning. Makes me sound slow as a turtle. Then out they go. The mamas hold their hands, and the little kids kind of lean off to one side.
Tasha puts on her yellow windbreaker, slow and quiet. I reach up into her cubby and pull out her papers.
"These yours?" I ask.
She nods.
I glance down at them before I shove them into my pocket. No stickers today. Tasha doesn't usually get stickers, because she doesn't usually finish her work. I didn't finish my work today, either, but I have to as soon as I get home. Mama counts on me doing well in school, and I can't stand to disappoint her. How many times has my mama hugged me and Tasha and said to us, "You two are all I've got"?
"Come on, Tasha. Let's go."
She starts off up the stairs. She doesn't say a word. She can talk. She just doesn't.
CHAPTER 2Outside, I decide to check the alleyway behind the newspaper store. I'm looking for bottles to add to my collection, and I might find some back there under the dead leaves. I only collect glass bottles, not the flimsy, plastic kind.
But Tasha hates stopping for bottles. She breaks loose from my hand and runs and twirls in the wind. Her yellow jacket swirls out in a circle. Her barrettes are colorful as candy.
I run and catch up with her. She's usually such a slowpoke.
At the edge of the curb, where the weeds grow in summer, the gutter is full of shiny, shattered glass. Tasha squats down to touch it, and I slap her hand away before she gets cut. "That's sharp, Tasha. Leave it alone."
We have to cross two big streets, and then the big wide cement place in front of our building. A rusty, leaning-over sign says "Auburn Street Plaza," as if it were a fancy hotel or something. Believe me, it isn't!
Tasha hates that wide-open place. She looks down at her feet the whole time until I say, "Okay," right at the entrance. A rusty old fence runs around the sides of the building. There's supposed to be a playground out back, but there isn't.
I see my friend Darnell by the door. He's with some older guys, so I know I shouldn't bother him now. Darnell's the one who named me Junebug, way back when his mother used to babysit me and Tasha. He said I was just like a big old junebug, banging away at the window screens, pestering everybody with questions. Down in North Carolina, where Mama comes from, they have a ton of junebugs in the summertime, but around here they've just got me. Darnell likes to say that one of me is enough. He says I wear him out, but I know he doesn't mean it.
Darnell's fifteen. Mama says he's fifteen going on thirty.
"Hey, Darnell," I say.
He raises his chin at me to say hi as I go by. "Junebug, my man," he says and puts out his hand.
I slap him five, but I can tell he doesn't want me around right now.
Tasha and I go in through the lobby. It's a dark old cement-block place with nasty words spray-painted on the walls. We have to go upstairs to the ninth floor. The stairs smell bad and sound all echoey and hollow. They vibrate, too. When someone's on the stairs behind you, you can feel them coming through your feet.
Tasha gets spooked in there, but Mama won't let us use the elevator. It's probably broken, anyhow. Usually is.
When we get to the ninth floor, I get out my key and unlock our apartment, 9G. We go in and Tasha turns and slams the door. Then she bolts it. She almost takes my finger off, she shuts the door so fast.
"Nobody's gonna bother us, Tasha," I say. "You don't have to slam the door like that."
Wish I believed it.
We're standing in the living room. Couch, coffee table, TV, and us. Before Jolita came, Mama used to leave us a note every day on the coffee table. It always said that if we have a problem, we can call her friend, Harriet Ames, or Darnell's mother. Darnell's mother's home in the daytime because she works nights, and Harriet stays home to mind her grandson. But now, with Aunt Jolita supposed to be watching us, there aren't any more notes. No Aunt Jolita, either.
Tasha opens the refrigerator and looks for Kool-Aid. I come into the kitchen and watch her lift the plastic pitcher out.
"Anybody bother us, Tasha, and Darnell will take care of it. Don't you worry."
Tasha pours the Kool-Aid into two glasses. Lime-green. Then she puts the pitcher away and as she starts to sip looks at me as if she's wondering, Does that crazy Junebug know what he's saying, or is he just some big old dumb-dumb of a brother?
We lean against the table and drink the Kool-Aid. I don't know why school always makes me so thirsty, but it does. The Kool-Aid slides down quick. I put my glass in the sink the way Mama told me, and I go over to the living-room window. It faces due east, but that's nothing special around here. It looks right across the tar and fence out back. Across some nasty old train tracks that have no train on them.
You know the faraway place where the sky and the ground touch each other? It's not there. Instead, there's just a wall of old, smashed-up windows rising up to the sky. The embankment is piled high with dead leaves and trash stuck up against the fence. For a minute, I think I see a tall white bird crouched on thin legs in the leaves. But it turns out to be a plastic bag, empty except for windy air.
I asked Darnell about that building. He said it used to be the old Barrington gun factory. Shut down now, of course. Just like everything else around here, it used to be something, but now it isn't.
I go across the living room to my bedroom and put a few of my best bottles on my windowsill, including my old-fashioned green Coke bottle. Aunt Jolita said she'd bring me some more bottles. She said a friend of hers sells makeup and fancy soap, and her friend has all kinds of little bottles she can get me. She's told me that a couple of times, but I'm not holding my breath, waiting.
I get my head down low and look out across the city of New Haven, to where I can see the horizon. I look out through the ripply green glass of the bottles, and it's like looking through clear seawater. I think about sailing to a silky-smooth beach, pulling up my boat, flopping down on the warm sand.
I pull my homework paper out of my pocket and unfold it. I look at the title. "My Wish." I get a pencil, and I think about writing about being Captain McClain, sailing over the round blue curve of the earth. I think about writing about the silky-smooth beach, but I don't.
What good's a wish when you're turning ten and all around you is shattered glass? So I don't write anything. Not now. I toss the paper on my bed and head on out of the apartment.
CHAPTER 3Most afternoons, we go down to the little library. It used to be a storage closet full of buckets of cleaning supplies and brooms and stepladders. They took that stuff out and put in some books and an old lady from the Baptist church. She wears flowered dresses, and she glares at us kids when we come in. She's Mrs. Swanson, the one who brings boxes of old magazines from a dentist's office. That dentist probably has a sailboat.
"You treat the books nice in here," she says. "You take care of them."
She thinks we have no manners because we live here. Some older kids who come in here just look at each other when she says that. She doesn't know our mamas brought us up right.
That church lady, Mrs. Swanson, she's scared of all the young men hanging out in the lobby with their screechy girlfriends leaning on them. They play loud music and they like to act rude when old people come by.
I go to the door of the library and look out. Jolita's out there with someone I don't know, but her friend's dressed to kill, with fancy orange fingernails and flared-out polka-dotted pants that swirl when she walks. Maybe that's Jolita's friend who sells the makeup.
"Hey, Jolita?" I call out.
She glances at me and narrows her eyes, wondering if I'm going to bother her or not. But I can see she's not in a bad mood. So I go ahead and ask, "Are you gonna bring me those bottles today?"
She lets out a big sigh of disgust and glances at her girlfriend.
"What's he want?" her friend asks.
"Some empty perfume bottles," Jolita tells her. "You think you deserve them?" she asks me.
"Definitely," I say. "Without a doubt."
"He's cute," her friend says.
"Not to live with he isn't," Jolita says. "All right. I'll bring them later."
Jolita and her friend head on out just as the reading teacher comes in. They don't say anything to Miss Robinson, and she keeps her eyes down, as if she doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. Then she sees me and Tasha, and she breaks into a big smile.
Tasha runs over to grab her hand, and the teacher calls out to me, "Hey, Junebug!"
Tasha leads Miss Robinson into the library. We sit at the little table. A couple of older girls, fifth- and sixth-graders, come here a lot, too, and use the crayons. They color real slow and careful, with dark outlines around everything. They always show their drawings to Miss Robinson when they get done. Some drawings she takes home. She says her refrigerator is covered with pictures.
Tasha brings a book and lays it on the teacher's lap.
"Now, what could this be?" the teacher asks Tasha, turning it over.
Tasha doesn't say a word, but that doesn't bother Miss Robinson one bit. "Hmmm. I wonder if it's the same book you brought me yesterday?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Junebug by Alice Mead. Copyright © 1995 Alice Mead. Excerpted by permission of Macmillan.
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