“Later, Colon.”
Gracie
When I was a little kid, maybe about six years old, I had this friendnamed Robin Rutledge. She lived a few blocks away from me, but we originally met at the playground in between our houses. When I started the first grade, I was happily surprised to find Robin in my class. She was a daredevil—one of those kids who feared nothing, who could easily flip upside down on the monkey bars or stand up and pump her legs on a swing with no problem at all. I think by this point I’ve discussed my athletic prowess enough that you can imagine that Robin and I were not exactly equally matched. As such, I was often the viewer of her tricks and antics, content to sit on the sidelines munching on Ho Hos while she tempted fate with her crazy stunts.
One day in first grade, our class went out on a trip to Van Cortlandt Park. It was a day not unlike today, sometime in the late spring. Robin brought a skateboard, and I was intrigued. We weren’t supposed to leave the perimeter outlined by our teacher, Mrs. Lefkowitz, but we snuck off anyway to an area of the park with a long flight of cement steps that led down to a duck pond.
“Wanna watch me ride my board down the steps?” she asked. In my recall, there were actual flames in her eyes, though I doubt it actually happened this way.
“Sure,” replied my naïve, young self.
And sure enough, she hopped on the board, tilted it down over the first step and went off, bumping, bumping down the steps until she hit the ground below. She made it down in one piece and somehow managed to stop the skateboard before careening into the pond.
“Woo hoo!” she called up to me from the bottom of the stairs.
“You’re crazy!” I yelled back.
She ran back up the steps with the skateboard under her arm. Out of breath, she said, “Now you.”
I shook my head. “Nope. I can’t stand on that thing! I’ll break my neck.”
“Then sit,” she suggested.
Even at the fledgling age of six, I knew what I was good at. While speed and balance were not my thing,sittingwas well within my wheelhouse. And, I had to admit, Robin madeeverythinglook fun. “Okay,” I said. “I can sit.”
She positioned the skateboard at the top step, and I sat down on it, tucking my feet up under my behind so as not to hit anything with my knees.
“You ready?” she asked gleefully.
I held on to the sides of the board with my hands and gave her the go ahead. Then, she pushed me ever so slightly, and I began the uneven trip down what felt like a never-ending flight of stairs. With every step, my insides shook and my jaw clenched harder. About halfway down, I decided I could take it no more and I turned my head to look back up at Robin.
This was the exact moment when the front of the skateboard hit a discarded soda can, jamming the wheel and propelling the backside of the skateboard up over my body. I tumbled off it and went down, down, down the rest of the steps, rolling like a snowball on a hill, feeling theburn of my knees and elbows scraping and rescraping, until finally I hit the pavement with a thud.
I was beside myself with embarrassment, shamed and in a good amount of shock and pain. By the grace of God, none of my bones felt broken, likely because I was so close to the ground to begin with. But you know that feeling when something is wrong and you can’t quite put your finger on it? That was my experience in that moment. I had a funny taste in my mouth, sort of like metal, and my lower lip was stinging. I stuck my tongue out to feel it and noticed what looked like a ladybug on the ground a short distance away. I took a closer look at it while feeling my face with my hand. Everything felt wet. That was when I realized.
All of my front teeth were gone.
Robin came bounding down the stairs. “You okay?” she asked, cheerfully.
I looked up at her and watched as her expression morphed from joyful to terrified in one quick moment.
“I’ll go get Mrs. Lefkowitz!” she cried and ran off.
I sat there alone then, toothless and scared, hurt and anxious. I began to cry. I felt the insides of my mouth with my tongue and my fingers and realized I had lost a total of four teeth. I crawled around on the ground, hunting for them. After all, I was going toneedthose teeth to prove to the tooth fairy what had happened. I scooped up the one that resembled a ladybug, but I couldn’t find the others. My tears blurred my vision and made it impossible to see anything clearly.
Hours later, after an emergency visit to the dentist and over an hour of scolding from my mother, I looked in the mirror and smiled. It was hard to adjust to my new face, but Nonna reminded me that baby teeth are meant to fall out, so they can make space for grown-up teeth. I just had to be patient and wait for the big teeth to come in. And eventually, they did. They were a little bit crooked, but they worked just fineand filled out my face nicely enough. Even now, all these years later, my smile’s not half-bad.
Sometimes accidents turn out okay, I tell myself when I get home. Then, I pull my calendar out of the junk drawer in my kitchen and try to figure out how many days I’ve got until one full revolution of the moon passes, per Olga’s advice.
Finally, I sit down and start to write.
Prologue
Shawna Carter wasn’t a bad-looking girl. She was just a little bit awkward, like most fourteen-year-olds. Her boobs were growing, her face was changing, her hair—oh, her hair—was frizzy and confused about how to act under the gentle motion of a brush. Her clothes were good enough: certainly far from “cool,” but also far from “get yourself laughed out of class on the first day of high school.”
All Shawna wanted was to go unnoticed.Just fly under the radar like a stealth jet, she told herself as she got dressed that morning.Be nice, be friendly, speak when spoken to. Don’t trip or fart or laugh too loud, and everything will be okay.
She stepped off the school bus and faced the grand entrance of her new high school, Bronx Academy. It was a seemingly huge, almond-colored building with endless red doors for access. Gone were the days of middle school, where Shawna could be a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. This was the big leagues. The last graduating class had over 1,600 kids in it.
