“Jiminy Cricket, Vito! You… my goodness gracious, what are you doing down here?”
My articulate explanation was buried beneath my snot-filled sobs.
“Oh man, what’d you do? Here, Dad, take this.” He handed Papa the battle-ax and tended to my knee.
“What… why… why do you have an ax?” I asked between sniffles.
“Oh, that’s a hatchet. Papa’s giving that one to Tony and has another one for you. I’ll keep ’em in the shed at home and show you how to use it when you’re older. Gotta learn to work with your hands. Don’t make me regret moving you to Short Hills, right, pal? Stop playing with your hair. Let’s go upstairs. Isn’t it time for dessert?”
Everyone else had moved on to the tiramisu when the first firework shot off from across the lake and exploded like dragon’s breath in the violet sky. The soft lantern-burst of lightning bugs illuminated my path to the dock, where my uncle was handing out sparklers. I didn’t care much for sparklers and pleaded with my father to get real fireworks, but he said they were illegal in New Jersey (what about those socks across the lake?) and wouldn’t even budge on Roman candles. “They’re made in Pennsylvania, not Italy,” he said, thwarting my attempts to play to his Italo-patriotism.
The line for sparklers grew as the cousins gobbled down their last morsels of dessert. My knee was too sore to wait in line. I picked up a smooth stone and skipped it into the lake. With a running start, Luke whipped his own rock, which made three skips past mine before dropping.
I left the dock and walked toward my sister sitting alone, sparkler-less, on the vineyard swing hanging between the twin oaks as a breeze pushed molehill-sized waves out to the center of the water.
I was swallowed by the sweeping wave of depression as summer passed and the first day of school appeared on the horizon. During the summer break, I got to pretend I was on an island somewhere in the Caribbean or Mediterranean as I lay on the golden sand in Ocean City, the salt drying and tightening my skin as the sun’s rays extracted the ocean water. But my hard-earned tan—I yearned for a natural olive complexion like my father’s—had already begun to fade by the time I was in the car headed back to Glenwood for the first day of second grade. And if the summer simply ending wasn’t enough, I found out that Kader, one of my most loyal brothers-in-arms and protector of gnosis, wouldn’t be returning to Glenwood due to redistricting—Kader would attend second grade at Hartshorn (that’s Harts-horn for you Short Hills purists). I wouldn’t be able to see him again on a regular basis until middle school, when students from all five elementary schools came together like a uniting of the clans.
But it wasn’t all tales of woe. The good Lord answered my prayers and put that sock Pierce Stone in a different second-grade class. Glory be to God, I’m saved, hallelujah! And I didn’t need miracle water or Tom Jones Cleaver’s green miracle cloth either. I would only need to defend myself—unfortunately, weapons were strictly prohibited at school, even if they were made of wood—during that slice of paradise called recess.
My father dropped Karl and me off at the corner of South Terrace and Hobart and waved to Alfonso, the Italian crossing guard who came from Benevento (not far from Avellino, where my family came from humble roots) and barely spoke English.
We plunged downhill to the first day of school like raiders in the valley, ready to pillage Glenwood as if it were an ill-guarded ziggurat.
Karl broke for his first day of first grade, and I continued on to the buzzing nebula of my co-pupils forming around Mrs. Mason. I scanned my classmates, my mirth growing tenfold as I realized what an excellent class it would be. I had Lenny and Andrius, Silas, Maine Ogden, Jeremy Finklestein, Paxton (who had a new tricolored set of beads bouncing in his hair), Louis Martino, and Jack Yamamoto—a Japanese boy who had moved to Short Hills in the middle of last year. And besides the scheming shenanigans of Paxton Shaffer, I had evaded sharing a 1998–99 classroom with the malignants: Brad Knight, the Barriston brothers, and—of course—Pierce Stone.
Mrs. Mason herself was an amber goddess with tawny rotini hair, who maybe—maybe—could be put in a similar category as Andrius’s mom. I must’ve been staring or drooling or displaying some other form of ogling, because Michaela Silves literally had to snap her fingers in front of my shnozole to get my attention.
“Victor, I said, how was your summer?”
“Oh! Uh… it was good. Went to a few islands…”
“Really?! Which ones?” She intertwined our fingers and pulled on my arm hair.
“Oww! Oh, well…” I had studied my father’s atlas for months and couldn’t think of one damn island. Then I remembered the fantastic knowledge dart my mother provided for me this summer: Ocean City is an island! I didn’t have to lie anymore. “Ocean City… island, I mean.”
“Oh, where’s that? Like near Turks and Caicos?”
“South.”
“South of Turks? Oh, like near Bonaire?”
“Bonaire?” I had never heard of this island-grail, but it sounded exotic and packed with palm trees.
Mrs. Mason’s soft voice instantly cooed the blathering pod of second-graders like nothing I had ever seen. It would usually take Ms. O’Donnell three “quiet downs” and a seizure-inducing stint at the light switch to get us to shut up. It was too early to tell if that was solely the power of the Aphrodite-like Mrs. Mason or from the lack of malignants in the class. Either way, she saved me from disclosing my Caribbean-free summer to Michaela, who was still holding on to my pinky.
Our desks were arranged in clusters of four in alphabetical order. And they each had a compartment where we could put notebooks and pencils, and, when Mrs. Mason wasn’t looking, I would be able to write passages for my most
