Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Twenty-four


Field of Dreams





Some girls are presented at debutante balls. Others are bat mitzvahed. Lucky Korean girls have a Gwallye ceremony to celebrate their coming of age.

Me, I get a hootenanny.

God bless America.

The hootenanny of all hootenannies takes place tonight, and my birthday is tomorrow. My fifteenth birthday.

“Your Quinceañera,” my mom informs me this morning. “The funny thing is, when I started planning the hootenanny, I didn’t put two and two together. I knew the hootenanny would be on Saturday and your birthday was the next day, but the fact that you’re turning fifteen just hit me last night. That’s a special birthday for a girl.”

“Yes, if the girl happens to be Hispanic or Latina,” I tell her. “But, sadly, I am neither.”

We’re sitting at the breakfast table eating French toast, and because the sun didn’t rise until 7:10, it isn’t even that absurdly early to be up and at ’em. Not that I wouldn’t prefer to be snug as a bug up in my bed, mind you, but you take what you can get when you live in Farm World.

My mom leans back and takes a sip of coffee. “So, how should we celebrate this milestone birthday of yours?”

“By not having a hootenanny?” I suggest.

“Not have the hootenanny?” My mom looks aghast. “Honey, it’s going to be the social event of the year. And all your friends will be there—Sarah and Emma, Monster, Virginia—”

“Verbena,” I correct her.

“And I invited Mrs. Brown and Monster’s grandmother and all the ladies from the quilting circle.”

“And don’t forget Mrs. Welsch,” I remind her. “The Agrarian Librarian.”

My mom spikes a piece of French toast from my plate. “It’s a shame about that rat eating her chicken. But I’ve promised her one of our Faverolles hens. Those girls are big.”

I take one last swig of orange juice and stand. “Well, I’ve got some goats to tend to, if you’ll excuse me.”

“What about your Quinceañera?” my mom calls after me.

“We could have it in Mexico City,” I call back over my shoulder as I take to the stairs. “Where it would actually make sense and be semi-appropriate.”

After pulling on my Farm World jeans and “Rednecks for Peace” T-shirt, I hurry out to the goat pen. There’s a lot to talk about, and Loretta Lynn is just the girl—er, goat—to talk to. I don’t even mind the fact that Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells are clearly eavesdropping.

“So you’ll be happy to know that the presentation was a huge hit,” I tell Loretta Lynn as I clean out the straw that’s gotten into her water. “The best part was when we had Mrs. Brown come in and talk. Did I tell you that we broadened our topic to include Mrs. Brown, not just Hazel Pritchard?”

Loretta Lynn widens her eyes. This is news to her.

“Yeah, so we did,” I continue. “I mean, it only seemed right. The Freedom School was her idea, after all. And Emma helped us set up a multimedia presentation, so we had Sarah’s pictures of the school, and Mr. Pritchard talking to my dad about Mrs. Pritchard, and film footage of the Pritchards’ yard. It was really cool.”

Loretta Lynn bleats in an inquiring sort of way.

“Of course we got an A,” I tell her. “Do you even have to ask? By the end of our presentation, Ms. Morrison and Marley Baxter were both crying. It was really cool. And after class was over, Wallace asked Sarah out, and she said yes.”

Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells butt heads at this news. Frankly, it was a shock to me, too. I didn’t even know Wallace had the gift of speech. But as it turns out, once he opens his mouth, he’s actually a very articulate guy.

“So what kind of phone do you have?” he asked Sarah. “Those pictures of the school you took were awesome.”

The conversation took off from there, and before you knew it, Wallace had offered to escort Sarah to the city council meeting on Wednesday. As it just so happens, he always attends city council meetings and is more than willing to guide Sarah through the ins and outs of local politics.

It would appear to be a match made in heaven.

“And then guess who was waiting for me at my locker after class?” I ask Loretta, who smirks at me, as though she knows exactly who was waiting for me.

“No, it wasn’t Monster,” I tell her, matching her smirk for smirk. “It was Jeremy Fitch.”

That shuts her up.

It shut me up too. I’d thought Jeremy Fitch was a part of the story that was over. He’d been a fun fantasy crush, but a dud in real life, and besides, I didn’t have any interest in being a member of his fan club. So when I saw him waiting for me at my locker, I was a little taken aback. It was like reading Twilight and suddenly Harry Potter shows up in Chapter Eight. What was he doing there?

“You going to Jam Band today?” Jeremy asked, casually leaning against the locker next to mine. “I could give you a ride home.”

“How much would it cost me?”

Jeremy grinned his charming grin. “Oh, that. I was just freaking out that day. My dad told me the night before I was going to have to get a job to pay for my own insurance and gas. Sorry I was so uncool.”

I waited for him to give me my five dollars back.

He didn’t.

“So, anyway,” he continued after an uncomfortable silence. “You need a ride?”

“I’m skipping Jam Band today,” I told him, grabbing my algebra book and shoving it into my backpack. “My mom’s got this big party tomorrow, and I have to help her get ready.”

“Oh, yeah, I heard about that. Sounds like a lot of guys from Jam Band are going. Am I invited too?”

I was tempted to tell him no. I was tempted to explain to him that all fall Sarah and I had had a huge crush on him, but then he’d shown his true colors and the spell had been broken, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend or even a crush, Monster and Todd had shown me that a girl shouldn’t just settle for anyone, and besides, Jeremy wasn’t half the man Monster was, and quite frankly, I’d rather not see his sorry butt at my mom’s hootenanny—

And then Monster came up behind Jeremy and slapped his back and said, “Hey, how’s it going, dude?”

Which is when I remembered that Jeremy was Monster’s friend, and I guessed any friend of Monster’s was a friend of mine.

“Sure you’re invited,” I told him. “Maybe Monster could give you a ride, save you some gas money.”

Jeremy winked at me. “Great idea.”

Wow, what had Sarah and I been thinking?

“So I guess I’ll try to be friends with Jeremy,” I tell Loretta Lynn, who’s licking the last of the grain from her lips. “But do I want to go out with him? I think not.”

In the two weeks since Monster and I shared our brief kiss, I’ve given a lot of thought to who I’d like to go out with, but I remain uninspired. Verbena wants me to hook up with someone from Jam Band now that she and Jason are an item, but the black T-shirt thing gets old after a while. Besides, I still can’t help but think of Marc Roberts, my eighth-grade crush. Smart, cute, nice—and, well, okay, normal.

Just like I used to be.

“You mean boring,” Verbena had said at lunch on Friday, when I mentioned Marc to her. We eat in the cafeteria most days now, but usually spend the last ten minutes of lunch period in the library, for old times’ sake. Jason joins us, even though the library isn’t really, as he puts it, his scene. He occasionally offers a quote from a song to underline someone’s point, a bit of Led Zeppelin lyric or a piece of Jack White wisdom, but for the most part doodles on his arm with his Sharpie and doesn’t say much at all, except to protest when Verbena grabs the Sharpie away for her own doodles.

They are clearly a couple in need of his ’n’ hers Sharpies.

“I don’t mean boring,” I told Verbena, popping an M&M into my mouth just to see if Mrs. Welsch will pounce on me. But ever since our talk about where to keep chicken feed, Mrs. Welsch has adopted a live-and-let-live attitude and hasn’t shushed me once.

I always knew that underneath it all she was good people.

“This Marc Roberts guy sounds outrageously boring,” Verbena insists. “And way too young. I don’t know why you and Monster don’t give in to your passion.”

“Because Monster has his own apartment,” I tell her. “I’m not ready for a man with an apartment.”

“I am,” Verbena purrs, nudging Jason with her elbow.

Jason looks up from his doodling, startled. “My mom won’t let me get my own apartment. She still makes me share a room with my little brother.”

Verbena sighs.

“I just want someone normal,” I tell Verbena. “No apartments, no Romeo games, just a nice, normal guy.”

Verbena looks me straight in the eye. “Oh, Janie, you are so past normal. Normal was ten miles ago and in another county.”

I’ve been thinking about what Verbena said ever since. I think about it when I look at my collage, which is leaning against the barn. It’s not the collage I originally planned—the quartz, the parasol, the cutout words, the sketch of Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard. I made that collage, and it was nice. Ms. Ashdown declared it a perfectly fine first effort.

“But I know you can do better,” she told me, peering at me over her cat’s-eye glasses. “I know you can do something bigger.”

I think she meant “bigger” as in “conceptually bigger,” but I did her one better. I went all-out big. I went large.

I went huge.

It’s not a collage exactly, not the way you normally think about collage. Call it found art. Call it Rauschenberg-esque. When Ms. Ashdown drove out to see it, she called it postmodern—right before she gave it an A.

“But where did you find that cross?” she asked. “It’s beautiful—and kind of terrifying.”

So I told her the story of Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard—and Mrs. Brown and the Freedom School.

“And so you’ve put the cross on its side?” Ms. Ashdown asked, walking closer to the barn, where I’d leaned the cross and made a kind of garden around it—a border of rocks from the Pritchards’ yard, and some rosemary I’d found growing in Mrs. Pritchard’s herb garden.

“It makes an X that way,” I explained, but by the way Ms. Ashdown raised one eyebrow, I could tell she didn’t quite get it.

“That’s how people who can’t read or write sign their names.” I gestured for Ms. Ashdown to come closer. “But see those pieces of paper shellacked to the cross? Mrs. Brown let me use some of the stuff from the notebooks we found stored in the school. So that right there”—I pointed to a scrap with MARY SIMMONS written across it in an unsteady cursive—“is from Mrs. Simmons’s notebook, and there’s where George Whisnant practiced his signature, and over there, that’s Cletus Miller’s.”

Next weekend Monster is coming over with his truck, and we’re moving the cross over to the Freedom School. Mr. Pritchard’s nephew, Philip, a civil rights lawyer in Atlanta, deeded the old house to Mrs. Brown, who continues to work on her plans to make Fannie Lou Hamer a household name. Emma’s helping her, and so is my mom. When the Freedom School reopens in the spring, Sarah and I are going to tutor kids in reading.

When I think about everything that’s happened since school started, well, I don’t think the word “normal” applies to any of it. Verbena is right—I’m way past normal. Only I’ve realized that when you move beyond normal, the road you’re on doesn’t necessarily take you to the land of the abnormal or the weird or the freakish. Instead you might find yourself in a place where people build Freedom Schools and have the courage to live large.

It’s a place where people don’t worry too much when they get a little goat poop on their shoes.

Around six forty-five my mom starts to get seriously anxious. The hootenanny starts at seven—but what if no one shows up? “I’ll feel like a hooteninny if nobody comes,” she declares, which cracks Avery up so much she gets the hiccups. We spend five minutes pouring glasses of water down her throat and jumping out from behind the door in an attempt to scare the hiccups away.

By the time things have settled down, it’s 6:50, and the first set of headlights appears on the horizon, followed by what appears to be a wagon train of minivans and pickup trucks. Someone’s high beams catch the cross leaning against the side of the barn.

I hope people go up and take a close look at it. I hope they read the names.

My dad puts an arm around my mom’s shoulder and says, “You better get your fiddle tuned up. Looks like it’s going to be a hoedown, pardner.”

The great big irony of this hootenanny? My mom doesn’t actually play an instrument. She just likes the idea of a hundred other people sitting around playing instruments while she listens.

Normal so clearly does not run in my family.

By nine o’clock, Sarah and Emma have become the stars of the show. They are backed by the Jam Band and the Manneville Ukulele Orchestra as they lead everyone in a rousing version of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. I’m standing at the edge of the crowd, taking it all in, when Monster comes up beside me, his hands behind his back.

“Why aren’t you playing with the Jam Band?” I ask, trying to sneak a peek to see what he’s holding—because he’s definitely holding something.

“I was, but your mom asked me to do her a favor. So if you’ll just close your eyes . . .”

I laugh, but Monster insists. “Shut ’em tight. I got something that I need to present to you. And you oughta thank me, because I talked your mom out of doing it in front of the whole party.”

I shut my eyes tight. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

Monster places something on my head. I reach up to feel it. Whatever it is, it’s sharp and pointy. “What’s up there?” I ask. “Can I look?”

I open my eyes. Monster’s grinning. “Happy Quinceañera, big girl.”

The crown I pull off my head looks like something out of Snow White, beautiful and shiny, encrusted with all sorts of fake jewels that sparkle in the party lights strung across the barn.

“Your mom made it,” Monster informs me. “She said it took her all week.”

“No way!” I exclaim. “My mom couldn’t make this. This is way beyond her.”

“She said she ruined four sweaters in the attempt.”

“Well, that does sound like her creative process,” I admit.

Suddenly I hear my name called from across the distance. It’s Sarah and Emma. Emma is holding up my bass.

Monster pushes me forward. “Go on, birthday girl. Show ’em your stuff.”

“You come too,” I tell him, suddenly feeling nervous and a little embarrassed, picturing myself in front of a crowd of mostly strangers, playing bass and wearing a fake diamond-encrusted crown.

“It ain’t my birthday,” he says, but he takes my hand and gives me his big Monster grin, and off we go for a little klezmer birthday fun.

Normal, in case you were wondering, is vastly overrated.