Moondust Read Online Free Page B

to know.
    I understand more about King than Kennedy. On the windowsill of our classroom last term, there were piles of biographies of famous Americans and I devoured them, but the one I liked best was about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who risked all kinds of harm to help lead other escaped slaves to freedom in the north on the “Underground Railroad.” The local education authority had cooked up a scheme to mix kids from our mostly white suburbs with black ones from Oakland and take them on field trips. I’d made some good friends at places like the University of California science lab, where you could watch massive, tape-spooling computers do amazing things like make a dot travel from one side of a screen to the other, or count until they reached infinity or you got bored and pressed a red button – whichever came first – at which point they would start over again. The thing I remember most clearly about those outings, though, is Andy Leeman, who was sitting next to me the day they announced it, turning and scowling, “I wonder what it’s like to sit next to a
nigger.
” Every day on the news, there seem to be pictures of black people being hit with truncheons or pinned to walls by the jets of fire hoses. It’s frightening.
    In fact, the news always seems bad. Mum watches TV on a weekday morning when they hold the Vietnam draft, live, like a lottery. If your number comes up, she says, you’ve lost and have to go fight. At summer school this year, they showed us a film called
The Lottery,
in which the population of a small town gathers for an annual festival of some kind, where everyone – men, women and children – has to take a little folded-up piece of paper from a box and open it up. They’re all laughing and joking with each other until one woman, whom we’ve watched shepherding her children to the gathering, opens her paper to find a black spot on it, at which point everyone stones her to death.
    Afterwards, we had a discussion and I wondered whether the film was about bullying. There’s a girl in my class named Kelly, whom all the locally raised kids pick on viciously for reasons that I haven’t yet understood. Soon after we arrived from New York, I felt sorry for her and sat next to her on the schoolbus one day, but everyone else teased me so much that I stayed away from her after that. She seems to smile a lot, but not a happy smile. And last week, in her summer-school science class, Mrs. Lipkin came in to find that someone had drawn a swastika on the blackboard. She dropped her Coke bottle and threw both hands over her mouth and ran back out. Later she came in and explained why. She was Jewish. I’d been gazing at the symbol before she came in, thinking that it was an interesting shape. I had no idea what it meant. I loved Mrs. Lipkin, who would give me my first Beatles album at the end of the school year, and was upset that she was upset, and then a few days later Scott and I found a gopher snake that someone had strung up by the neck and used for target practice with an air rifle. There’s a lot of peace and love in the air according to the songs they play on KFRC, but not necessarily in the air around me.
    So, like all eight-year-olds, I recognize brutality to be the inevitable defining feature of my world. And outside of school, life is really okay. We spend our days catching snakes and lizards and frogs and, as if on a mission to prove that adults don’t have a monopoly on stupidity, black widow spiders, which we keep in jars as pets. Accordingly, the things I wouldn’t mind being when I grow up are: Evel Knievel, obviously; a zoologist specializing in creatures that terrify my mother; an astronaut and/or the lead guitarist in a band, even if Scott assures me that I have to be the bass player because I’m skinny and tall for my age.
    Of those four things, what I’d most like to be is an astronaut, but I’m not