A Different Blue

Chapter One





SEPTEMBER 2010



The bell had rung ten minutes ago, but I wasn't too worried. Actually, the truth was I didn't care, so why would I worry? The first day of school was useless anyway. Most of the teachers didn't mark tardies on the first day or yell at you in front of the class. It was the last period of the day, and my mind had already left the building and fled out over the desert and into the hills in search of shapes and silhouettes. Already, I could feel the wood beneath my hands. Reluctantly, I forced my mind back to my body and straightened my shoulders so I could make an impression as I walked into class, which was usually my goal. Partly because I enjoyed the attention but mostly because I knew if people were intimidated by me they would leave me alone. Teachers left me alone, overly friendly girls who wanted to be BFF's left me alone, but the guys were usually at my beck and call if and when I wanted one of them.

I whipped back my long black hair as I entered the room. My eyes were heavily made up, and my jeans were so tight that sitting down was highly uncomfortable, although I'd perfected the art of slouching so they didn't pinch . . . too much. I cracked my gum and slid one eyebrow up disdainfully as I looked for an empty seat. All eyes swiveled toward me as I sauntered up the center aisle and slid into the seat right in front, dead center. Damn. Being late had its downside. I took my time taking off my jacket and dropping my purse to the floor. I hadn't even deigned to look in the direction of the new teacher whose voice had faded to silence at my arrival. A few people snickered at my nonchalant display, and I shot a venomous sneer in the general direction of the laughter. It stopped. Finally, I slid into my seat and raised my eyes to the front of the classroom, sighing deeply and loudly.

"Carry on," I droned, with another toss of my hair.

"Mr. Wilson" was written across the whiteboard in capital letters. My eyes locked on him. He was staring at me with a furrowed brow and a slight smile. Dark hair in need of a haircut curled above his ears and fell onto his forehead. It looked as if he had tried to tame it into respectability, but his mop had obviously rebelled at some point during his first day at Boulder High School. I raised my eyebrows in amazement and tried hard not to snort out loud. He looked like a student. In fact, if he hadn't had on a tie, knotted hastily over a blue button-up dress shirt with a pair of khakis, I would have thought he was some kind of teacher's aid.

"Hello," he said politely. He had a British accent. What was a guy with a British accent doing in Boulder City, Nevada? His tone was warm and friendly, and he seemed unbothered by my purposeful disrespect. He looked down at the roll that was sitting on a music stand to his right.

"You must be Blue Echohawk . . ." His voice trailed off a little and his expression was one of muted surprise. The name tends to throw people. I have dark hair, but my eyes are very blue. I don't really look like an Indian.

"And you must be Mr. Wilson," I retorted.

Laughter rang out. Mr. Wilson smiled. “I am. As I was telling your classmates, you may call me Wilson. Except when you are late or disrespectful, in which case I would appreciate the Mr," he finished mildly.

"Well in that case, I guess I'd better stick to Mr. Wilson then. Because I'm usually late, and I'm always disrespectful." I smiled back sweetly.

Mr. Wilson shrugged. “We'll see.” He stared at me for another second. The set of his grey eyes made him look slightly mournful, like one of those dogs with the liquid gaze and the long expression. He didn't strike me as a barrel of laughs. I sighed again. I knew I didn't want to take this class. History was my least favorite subject. European History sounded about as bad as you could get.

"Literature is my favorite subject." Mr. Wilson's eyes left my face as he launched into an introduction of the course. He said the word literature with only three syllables. Lit-ra-ture. I wiggled myself into a mostly comfortable position and stared crossly at the young professor.

“You might wonder, then, why I'm teaching history.”

I didn't think anyone cared enough to wonder, but we were all a little transfixed by his accent. He continued.

"Remove the first two letters off the word history. Now what does it spell?"

"Story," some eager beaver chirped from behind me.

"Exactly." Mr. Wilson nodded sagely. “And that's what history is. A story. It's someone's story. As a boy, I discovered that I would much rather read a book than listen to a lecture. Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story. My job this year is to introduce you to stories that open your mind to a broader world – a colorful history – and to help you see the connections to your own life. I promise to not be too dull if you promise to attempt to listen and learn."

"How old are you?" a girl's voice rang out flirtatiously.

“You sound like Harry Potter,” some guy grunted from the back of the room. There were a few giggles, and Mr. Wilson's ears turned red where they peeked out beneath the hair that curled around them. He ignored the question and the comment and began handing out sheets of paper. There were some groans. Paper meant work.

"Look at the page in front of you," Mr. Wilson instructed, as he finished distributing the sheets. He walked to the front of the classroom and leaned against the whiteboard, folding his arms. He looked at us for several seconds, making sure we were all with him. “It's blank. Nothing's been written on the page. It's a clean slate. Kind of like the rest of your life. Blank, unknown, unwritten. But you all have a history, yes?"

A few kids nodded their heads agreeably. I looked at the clock. Half an hour until I could take off these jeans.

"You all have a story. It's been written up to this point, to this very second. And I want to know that story. I want to know YOUR history. I want you to know it. For the rest of the class time I want you to tell me your story. Don't worry about being perfect. Perfect is boring. I don't care about run-on sentences or misspelled words. That's not my purpose. I just want an honest account – whatever you are willing to divulge. I will collect them at the end of the hour."

Desk chairs scraped, zippers were yanked opened in search of pens, and complaints were uttered as I stared down at the paper. I ran my fingertips down it, imagining I could feel the lines that ran in horizontal blue stripes. The feel of the paper soothed me, and I thought what a waste it was to fill it with squiggles and marks. I laid my head down on the desk, on top of the paper, and closed my eyes, breathing in. The paper smelled clean, with just a hint of sawdust. I let my mind linger on the fragrance, imagining the paper beneath my cheek was one of my carvings, imagining I was rubbing my hands along the curves and grooves that I'd sanded down, layer upon layer, uncovering the beauty beneath the bark. It would be a shame to mar it. Just like it was a shame to ruin a perfectly good sheet of paper. I sat up and stared at the pristine page in front of me. I didn't want to tell my story. Jimmy said to really understand something you had to know its story. But he'd been talking about a blackbird at the time.

Jimmy had loved birds. If woodworking was his gift, bird watching was his hobby. He had a pair of binoculars, and he would often hike to a high spot where he could observe and document what he saw. He said birds were messengers and that if you watched them closely enough, you could discern all sorts of things. Shifting winds, approaching storms, dropping temperatures. You could even predict if there was danger nearby.

When I was very small it was hard for me to sit still. It actually still is. Birdwatching was hard for me, so Jimmy started leaving me behind when I was old enough to remain at camp alone. I was much more responsive to woodcarving simply because it was so physical.

I must have been seven or eight the first time I saw Jimmy get really excited about a bird sighting. We were in southern Utah, and I remember where we were only because Jimmy remarked on it.

“What is he doing in these parts?” he had marveled, his eyes fixed on a scrubby pine tree. I had followed his gaze to a little black bird perched halfway up the tree on a thin branch. Jimmy went for his binoculars, and I stayed still, watching the little bird. I didn't see anything special about it. It just looked like a bird. Its feathers were solid black – no flash of color to draw the eye or brilliant markings to admire.

“Yep. That's a Eurasian Blackbird all right. There are no blackbirds native to North America. Not like this guy. He's actually a thrush.” Jimmy was back, his voice a whisper as he looked through his binoculars. “He's a long way from home, or else he's escaped from somewhere.”

I whispered too, not wanting to scare it away if Jimmy thought it was special.

“Where do blackbirds usually live?”

“Europe, Asia, North Africa,” Jimmy murmured watching the orange-billed bird. “You can find them in Australia and New Zealand too.”

“How do you know it's a he?”

“Because the females don't have the glossy black feathers. They aren't as pretty.”

The little yellow eyes peered down at us, fully aware that we were watching. Without warning, the bird flew away. Jimmy watched him go, tracking him through the binoculars until he was beyond sight.

“His wings were as black as your hair,” Jimmy commented, turning away from the bird that had enlivened our morning. “Maybe that's what you are . . . a little blackbird a long way from home.”

I looked at our camper sitting in the trees. “We're not a long way from home, Jimmy,” I said, confused. Home was wherever Jimmy was.

“Blackbirds aren't considered bad luck like ravens and crows and other birds that are black. But they don't give up their secrets easily. They want us to figure them out. We have to earn their wisdom.”

“How do we earn it?” I wrinkled my nose up at him, baffled.

“We have to learn their story.”

“But he's a bird. How can we learn his story? He can't talk.” I was literal in the way all kids are literal. I would have really liked it if the blackbird could tell me his story. I would keep him as a pet, and he could tell me stories all day. I begged for stories from Jimmy.

“First you have to really want to know.” Jimmy looked down at me. “Then you have to watch. You have to listen. And after a while, you'll get to know him. You'll start to understand him. And he'll tell you his story.”

I took out a pencil and spun it around my fingers. I wrote, "Once Upon a Time" across the top of my sheet, just to be a smart ass. I smirked at the line. As if my story was a fairy tale. My smile faded.

“Once upon a time . . . there was a little blackbird,” I wrote. I stared at the page. “. . . pushed out of the nest, unwanted.”

Images gathered in my head. Long dark hair. A pinched mouth. That was all I could remember of my mother. I replaced the pinched mouth with a gently smiling face. A completely different face. Jimmy's face. That face brought a twinge of pain. I moved my inner eye to his hands. Brown hands moving the chisel across the heavy beam. Wood shavings piled on the floor at his feet where I sat, watching them fall. The shavings drifted down around my head, and I closed my eyes and imagined that they were tiny pixies coming to play with me. These were the things I liked to remember. The memory of the first time he had held my smaller hand in his and helped me strip away the heavy bark from an old stump rose in my mind like a welcome friend. He was talking softly about the image beneath the surface. As I listened to the memory of his voice, I let my mind trip back across the desert and up into the hills, remembering the gnarled claw of mesquite I had found the day before. It had been so heavy I'd had to drag it to my truck and hoist it, one side at time, into the truck bed. My fingers itched to peel back the charred skin and see what was beneath. I had a feeling about it. A shape was forming in my head. I tapped my feet and curled my fingers against the paper, daydreaming about what I could create.

The bell rang. The noise level in the room rose as if a switch had been flipped, and I jerked from my reverie and glared down at my page. My pathetic history waited for embellishment.

“Turn your papers in. And please make sure your name is at the top! I can't give you credit for your history if I don't know that it's yours!”

The room was empty in about ten seconds flat. Mr. Wilson struggled to align the stack of papers that had been shoved in his hands as students exuberantly vacated his classroom, eager for other things. The first day of school was officially over. He noticed me still sitting and cleared his throat a little.

"Miss . . . um . . . Echohawk?"

I stood abruptly and reached for my paper. I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it toward the trashcan beneath the white board. It didn't quite make it, but I didn't retrieve it. Instead, I grabbed my purse and the jacket that was completely unnecessary in the 110 degree heat that awaited me outside the school. I didn't look at my new teacher as I strode to the back of the room and swung my purse over my shoulder.

"Later, Wilson," I called out, not even turning my head.





Manny was waiting by my truck when I reached the student parking lot, and seeing him there made me groan. Manuel Jorge Rivas-Olivares, aka Manny, lived in my apartment complex. He and his little sister had adopted me. They were like the stray cats that would hang around your door and meow pitiously for days on end until you finally gave up and fed them. And when you finally fed them, it was over. They were officially your cats.

So it was with Manny and Graciela. They just kept hanging around until I finally took pity on them. Now they thought they belonged to me, and I didn't know how to make them go away. Manny was sixteen and Graciela was fourteen. Both were small-boned and fine-featured, and both were incredibly sweet and annoying. Just like cats.

There was a bus that ran to the complex, and I made sure Manny's mother knew all about it and even assisted her in getting Manny and Graciela registered to ride it. I really thought this year would be different now that Graciela was in ninth grade and would be riding the high school bus too. Guess not. Manny was waiting for me with a big smile and an armful of books.

“Hey, Blue! How was your first day? Big senior year, Chica! I bet you'll be homecoming queen this year. The most beautiful girl in the school should be homecoming queen, and you are definitely the most beautiful girl!” Very sweet, very annoying. Manny spoke a mile a minute with a slight Hispanic accent and just a hint of a lisp, which might have been the accent but was more likely just Manny.

“Hey, Manny. What happened to riding the bus?”

Manny's smile slipped a little, and I felt bad for asking. He waved my question away and shrugged.

“I know, I know. I told Gloria I would take the bus, and I made sure Graciela caught it . . . but I wanted to ride home with you on the first day. Did you see the new history teacher? I have him for first period, and I can tell he's going to be the best teacher I've ever had . . . and the cutest too!”

Manny had recently started calling his mother Gloria. I wasn't sure what that was about. I also considered telling him he might want to reconsider calling Mr. Wilson cute. I assumed that was who he was talking about. I didn't think there were two new history teachers.

“I love his accent. I hardly heard anything he said all period!” Manny slid daintily in the passenger side when I unlocked my truck. I worried about the kid. He was more feminine than I was.

“I wonder what he is doing in Boulder? Ivy and Gabby are sure he is, like, MI-6 or something.” Manny had dozens of girlfriends. In fact, the girls all loved him because he was so non-threatening and fun, which made me wonder again why he couldn't ride the bus. It wasn't like he didn't have friends.

“What the hell is MI-6?” I grumped, trying to manuever through the crush of vehicles leaving the school. I hit my brakes as someone cut me off and then hung his middle finger out the window as if I was the one who pulled out in front of him. Manny reached over my arm and pounded on the horn.

“Manny! Stop! I'm the one driving, okay?” I commanded, knocking his hand away. It didn't even faze him.

“You don't know what MI-6 is? Freaking James Bond? Chica, you need to get out more!”

“What would someone from MI-6 be doing at Boulder High School?” I laughed.

“Beats me, but he's British, he's hot, and he's young.” Manny ticked his points off on graceful fingers. “What else could it be?”

“You really think he's hot?” I questioned doubtfully.

“Oh, definitely. In a very naughty librarian kind of way.”

“Oh, sick, Manny. That only works when the librarian is female.”

“Fine, a naughty professor then. He's got sexy eyes and floppy curls and his forearms are very well-developed. He's a hottie in disguise. Totally MI-6. Do you have to work tonight?” Manny bounced to a new subject, having clearly proven the new Mr. Wilson must be a spy.

“It's Monday. Monday means work, Manny.” I knew what he was fishing for and resisted. “Stop feeding the kitties,” I reminded myself firmly.

“I could sure go for some of Bev's quesadillas right now. I am one hungry Mexican.” Manny laid the accent on thick. He only referred to his ethnicity when he talked about food. “I sure hope Gloria remembered to go shopping before she left for work. Otherwise, me and baby sister are eating Ramen again,” Manny sighed mournfully.

The baby sister line was over the top, but I found myself weakening. Manny was the man of the house, and that meant providing for Graciela, which he did with gusto, even if providing meant asking me to provide. I worked at Bev's Cafe several nights a week, and without fail I brought home dinner for Manny and Graciela at least once during the week.

“Fine. I will bring you and Gracie some quesadillas. But this is the last time, Manny. It cuts into my paycheck,” I scolded. Manny smiled brilliantly at me and clapped his hands like Oprah does when she's excited.

“I will see if my uncle has any more mesquite you can have,” Manny promised, and I nodded and stuck out my hand to shake on it.

“Deal.”

Manny's Uncle Sal worked on a crew with the forest service. They frequently cleared scrub and brush and kept the mesquite from encroaching on government owned ranches. Last time Sal had come through for me, I had enough wood to last me two months of serious carving. I drooled at the thought.

“Of course, that means you will owe me, chica,” Manny suggested innocently. “Dinners for at least a month of Mondays, okay?”

I just laughed at his negotiating skills. He already owed me for two months of Mondays. But we both knew I would agree. I always did.