When the Sanders family pulled up in their station wagon, Lori was ready. She had packed her clothes, her favorite books, and her art supplies in a single cardboard box. She hugged all of us except Dadshe had refused to speak a word to him since he plundered Ozpromised to write, and climbed into the station wagon.
We all stood watching as the car disappeared down Little Hobart Street. Lori never once looked back. I took that as a good sign. When I climbed the staircase to the house, Dad was standing on the porch, smoking a cigarette.
"This family is falling apart," he said.
"It sure is," I told him.
THAT FALL, WHEN I was going into the tenth grade, Miss Bivens made me news editor of The Maroon Wave. After working as a proofreader in the seventh grade, I'd started laying out pages in the eighth grade, and in the ninth grade I began reporting and writing articles and taking photographs. Mom had bought a Minolta camera to take pictures of her pictures, so she could send them to Lori, who could show them around art galleries in New York. When Mom wasn't using it, I wore the Minolta everywhere, because you never knew when you'd see something newsworthy. What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace. Since I'd never made a lot of friends in Welch, I hardly ever went to the school's football games or dances or rallies. I felt awkward sitting by myself when everyone else was with friends. But when I was working for the Wave, I had a reason to be there. I was on assignment, a member of the working press, with my notepad in hand and the Minolta around my neck.
I began going to just about every extracurricular event at the school, and the kids who shunned me before now accepted me and even sought me out, posing and clowning in hopes of getting their picture in the paper. As someone who could make them famous among their peers, I was no longer a person to be trifled with.
Even though the Wave came out only once a month, I worked on it every day. Instead of hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour, I spent it in Miss Bivens's classroom, where I wrote my articles, edited the stories written by other students, and counted the letters in headlines to make sure they fit the columns. I finally had a good excuse for why I never ate lunch. "I'm on deadline," I'd say. I also stayed after school to develop my photographs in the darkroom, and that had a hidden benefit. I could sneak into the cafeteria once everyone had left and dig through the garbage pails. I'd find industrial-sized cans of corn that were nearly full and huge containers of cole slaw and tapioca pudding. I no longer had to root through the bathroom wastebaskets for food, and I hardly ever went hungry again.
*
When I was a junior, Miss Bivens made me the editor in chief, though the job was supposed to go to a senior. Only a handful of students wanted to work for the Wave, and I ended up writing so many of the articles that I abolished bylines; it looked a little ridiculous having my name appear four times on the front page.
The paper cost fifteen cents, and I sold it myself, going from class to class and standing in the hallways, hawking it like a newsboy. Welch High had about twelve hundred students, but we sold only a couple hundred copies of the paper. I tried various schemes to boost the circulation: I held poetry competitions, added a fashion column, and wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the state Department of Education. Nothing worked.
One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again: the school's athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column called. "Birthday Corner," listing the names of the eighty or so people who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens wondered aloud if. "Birthday Corner" represented serious journalism. I told her I didn't careit sold papers.
*
Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I'd been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad, about how he'd been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the time he was twenty-two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier in his X-1, even though the night before, he'd been up drinking and had been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs.
Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a speech at Welch High and that he'd agreed to let me interview him afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got home from school the day before the big interview. He sat down to help me draw up a list of intelligent questions so I wouldn't embarrass myself in front of this greatest of West Virginia's native sons.
What was going through your head when you first broke Mach I?
What was going through your head when A. Scott Crossfield broke Mach II?
What is your favorite aircraft?
What are your thoughts on the feasibility of flying at the speed of light?
Dad wrote up about twenty-five or thirty questions like that and then insisted we rehearse the interview. He pretended to be Chuck Yeager and gave me detailed answers to the questions he'd written out. His eyes got misty as he described what it was like to break the sound barrier. Then he decided I needed some solid grounding in aviation history, and he stayed up half the night briefing me, by the light of a kerosene lamp, on the test-flight program, basic aerodynamics, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach.
The next day Mr. Jack, the principal, introduced Chuck Yeager during assembly in the auditorium. He looked more like a cowboy than a West Virginian, with his horseman's gait and his lean leathery face, but as soon as he started speaking, his voice was pure up-hollow. As he talked, the fidgety students settled into their folding chairs and became enraptured by the legendary, world-traveled man who told us how proud he was of his West Virginia roots, and how we, too, should be proud of those roots, roots we all shared; and how, regardless of where we came from, each and every one of us could and should follow our dreams, just as he had followed his. When he finished talking, the applause about shattered the glass in the windows.