Read Online Phoenix Island by John Dixon - Free Book Online Page B

each day after school and walk her home. He talked about how some nights his dad would peel a raw potato and slice it up, and they’d stand there in the kitchen and eat it, salting each slice and laughing at the loud crunching. And she told him about her grandmother, who had lived in the Bolivian Andes, and who had visited each summer, and how the old woman would dump potatoes in the backyard and then take off her shoes andsocks. “That’s how she peeled them,” she said. “She walked all over them with her bare feet.”
    They laughed a lot.
    One day, the drill sergeants told them to bring pencils and marched them to the “classroom”—a bunch of folding chairs under a simple pavilion—where the cadre distributed clipboards and paper, and First Sergeant Oteka said, “Today, you will learn rudimentary first aid. Pencils out, orphans. I expect extensive notes. There will be quizzes.”
    Octavia patted her pockets, checked the floor around her seat, and moaned quietly.
    “You okay?” Carl whispered.
    She looked at him with panic in her eyes. “I can’t find my pencil. Oteka’s going to kill me.”
    Carl handed her his and raised his hand.
    “Mr. Freeman,” Oteka said. “Please save your questions until I have covered material about which you might ask them.”
    Chuckles rippled through the seats.
    “First Sergeant, I can’t find my pencil.”
    Oteka said nothing to Carl but turned her head so that he could see the rows of scars on that side of her face. “Drill Sergeant Parker, one of your orphans is unprepared for today’s instruction. Please correct this.”
    “Yes, First Sergeant.” Parker came off the column, face red, eyes flaring. He yanked Carl from his chair and dragged him to the back of the pavilion, where he pushed him up against a post and grabbed him by the front of the shirt. “Jacking with me again, huh?” He struggled to keep his voice low enough not to disrupt the class, and this forced restraint only seemed to make him angrier. He shoved Carl to the ground. “Front.”
    Carl started pushing.
    Parker crouched down and smiled, his eyes still smoldering with rage. The guy was probably on steroids, Carl figured, all those muscles and temper tantrums.
    “Just a few days, Hollywood,” Parker said, “and I’m going to fix your wagon once and for all.”
    Carl pushed, wondering what Parker meant by fix your wagon . Athreat, sure, but a threat of what, exactly? Not that he would show it, but the once and for all part bothered him even more. Was Parker trying to get Carl kicked off the island? Trying to get him sent back to North Carolina, to prison?
    Parker smoked him, front-back-go, for several minutes, then said, “Here’s a pencil.” And Parker drove a pencil into Carl’s thigh, burying the point.
    Carl jerked a little with the shock and pain of it, but he remained at attention and didn’t make a sound until he said, “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
    Parker yanked the pencil out of Carl’s leg and held it in front of his face. The sharpened part was all red. “Don’t forget your pencil, now.”
    When Carl returned to his seat, he hid the wound with his clipboard. Octavia gave him a small, sad smile and squeezed his arm. Later, as they were lining up for chow, she gave him his pencil back . . . and with it, a note. She kept her hand on his for a second longer than necessary. “Thanks, Carl. You shouldn’t have done it, but thanks. You really saved me back there.”
    “No problem,” he said. “Um, am I supposed to read this now or later?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said. Then she glanced at a pair of sergeants near the steaming serving dishes. “Actually, wait a bit.”
    Later, hidden away in the bathroom, he opened the note and smiled.
    Dear Carl,
    Thanks so, so, so much (times a million) for what you did! It was sweet. If we weren’t here, I would take you out for ice cream or to the movies or something to thank you. But I guess if we weren’t here, I wouldn’t have