Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [15]
“It’s Labor Day!” he shouted, as if his mom was right there and could hear him. Labor Day meant not only that all the libraries were closed, but also that his vacation, even if it hadn’t officially started, was almost officially over. Tomorrow was supposed to be his first day back at Curley Middle School. His mom had promised they would stop on the way home and buy the supplies he needed: new sneakers, binders, maybe even one of those electronic spell-checkers. No problem, she had said. Everything would be cheaper in Maine.
This time he threw his backpack at a tree, but the strap caught on his pinky finger. The pain was excruciating.
He sat down on the grass and held his hand against his belly.
He hated to accept it, but his pinky was probably broken. He had broken a toe once — banged it at the swimming pool near where his best friend, Nina, lived. As he’d hobbled to the doctor’s office, Jack’s mom had told him elephant jokes.
“Who does an elephant call when he breaks his toe?”
“Who?”
“The tow truck.”
That joke was so bad, Mom had probably made it up.
Jack closed his eyes and pictured a herd of elephants on the savanna. Walking in a long line or playing at a water hole. Why hadn’t he been born an elephant? He pictured himself playing with other elephants, spraying them with water from his trunk.
But he wasn’t an elephant, and he was not going to find his mother by lying on the lawn of the Jesup Memorial Library.
Dragging himself back to the town center, Jack recalled that Bar Harbor had lots of the types of shops and restaurants his mother would like. Which again made him hopeful; it would be like her to get waylaid in a place that had so many unusual things to see: tourmaline jewels, hand-painted sea chests, blueberry syrup. He might just walk into a shop and see her there.
Jack knew that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. That a mother wasn’t supposed to go off without telling her kid . . . and that her kid wasn’t supposed to be able to walk into a store and find her there coincidentally. He wished that things were different. That he could be the one hanging out in a store and that his mom would be the one to pop in and say, “What are you doing in here, Jack? I’ve been looking all over for you!”
Once, Nina had asked him why he was alone so much, and he had tried to tell her — tell her about his mom’s pinwheel times. How sometimes the air felt so still to her, like there wasn’t any oxygen or breezes to be found. These times made his mom so prickly, she could hardly sit still. And she crabbed a lot. So sometimes she stayed away because she didn’t think it was fair that she was being mean.
But then the wind would come, the air would be light, and she could, well, float! And even though the world looked the same to him, his mom said she could see things, magical things: lit pathways in the sky, a spiderweb that connected all living things. “You are connected to the elephants, Jack,” she’d say. Once, during a spinning time, she’d brought home every single flavor of ice cream the store had, and they’d done a taste test. (Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey was the best.)
Another time, she kept asking him, “What is the rarest color?” Jack had done a Google search, but he could only find answers to questions like, What is the rarest eye color? (green), and, What is the rarest color of geckos? (no one agrees). So he and his mother went to OfficeMax (where there would be lots and lots of little items) and began tallying the number of times they saw each color. The noncolors — black, white, and gray — were everywhere. Fuchsia and lime green were kind of rare, but the rarest of all was a brownish purple his mother named sunken treasure. From then on, they had searched for objects that were this rare color — more red than blue, more brown than red. It was weird: Once he knew this color existed, he yearned for it. And he felt stupidly happy when he saw it somewhere — in the bark of a tree, or in a picture in his social studies book.
One day, he’d come home from school and there was