Hello, Bryan-David

A boy can walk onto a school campus carrying twelve cents in his pocket and still feel rich because three guys across the quad know his name.

At thirteen, I understood that economy.

Perfectly.

I was a legend in the making and I knew it.

Clueless when it would happen.

Undoubtedly uncertain how.

My mind was a virtual never-ending runway for possibilities.

I was certain anyway.

I believed fun, exhilaration, mischief, talent, nerve, adventurous boyhood, and a highly creative relationship with the truth were going to get me there.

My mind quite often assured me insanity was good for me.

Consequences?

I figured they’d catch up eventually, and if they did … a cop was probably involved.

That was fine. I had confidence.

Absotivoposilutely dangerous most times.

I had an audience. I had a reputation beginning to form. And once a boy starts believing his own legend, he feels a certain responsibility to keep feeding it.

I had to act accordingly.

Back then, I had a bad script playing in my head. I was reminded by more than a few people that spending too much time in there was dangerous.

Walters Junior High gave that script plenty of room to run, and fifth period Social Studies gave it an audience.

Mr. Scoville was my teacher.

He was a good man. Patient. Kind. More patient than I deserved. He gave me chances, warnings, fresh starts, and enough room to make better choices.

I used the room for different purposes.

Drumming. Writing. Sending notes. I liked social studies, but my mind was loud. I didn’t know how to shut it off. I needed to run hard and fast. Somewhere.

Then life invited me to take off.

Mr. Scoville followed the standard referral system. When a student finally exhausted his patience, he wrote the referral and sent the offender to the office for detention or execution, depending on the offense and, I suspected … who the student was.

There was a yellow carbon copy.

It became my ticket to a whole new world.

Most of the time, Mr. Scoville forgot to send the office copy ahead.

I discovered this through careful research.

My research methods involved getting thrown out of class.

The first time, I walked toward the office and realized nobody seemed concerned with how quickly I arrived.

Interesting.

The second time, I slowed down.

The third time, I began exploring.

Soon, a referral from Mr. Scoville became less punishment and more independent study.

Most of the time, I meandered campus, navigating with a watchful eye. A teacher or a janitor could catch me.

Worse … Mrs. Kornblum.

I found the possibility exhilarating.

I cruised the hallways and stopped near open classroom doors to wave hi to friends. I flashed a grin.

No fakeosity. Authentic me.

Sometimes I teased somebody through the doorway, just enough to establish that I was outside while they were trapped inside learning.

There is status in freedom when you’re thirteen.

Especially useless freedom.

The hallways became my runway.

Sometimes that runway carried me off campus.

I wandered through the neighborhood just to see what I could see. I loved Fremont. Every tree seemed to carry its own shade of green. Then fall would arrive and the streets would explode in royal purple, flaming red, and vibrant orange. Spring brought sweet air, fresh-cut lawns, sprinklers hitting warm asphalt, wet earth rising into the afternoon.

I loved breathing it in.

I loved being out there.

I could walk through the neighborhood, take in the trees, smell the lawns, watch the streets, and somehow convince myself that getting thrown out of class had improved my education.

Once, a man watering his lawn looked at me and asked why I wasn’t in school.

Fair question.

I ran.

He climbed into an old blue Ford and came after me.

I cut through a fence near the back of Walters and came out by the baseball field feeling pretty good about myself.

Another successful operation.

Then I reached campus.

Mrs. Kornblum was there.

Mr. Scoville was there.

The man with the blue Ford was there.

They saw me.

There was no chance under heaven I could run my way out of that moment.

One thought landed clean.

%$&^!

Mama was getting called.

Again.

The fighter in me searched briefly for another exit.

None existed.

That little adventure eventually carried me back to Blacow, where Mama reminded me that Mr. Melendez and Mr. Berridge remained available as instruments of correction.

THAT’S AN OPTION STILL!?

Yep.

My old consequences knew my address.

For a while, I developed a sincere interest in reducing my natural propensity for unwisdom.

It didn’t take.

Back at Walters, I kept spending respect currency.

Mr. Scoville kept writing referrals.

Fifteen times.

Maybe seventeen.

I lost count.

Somewhere around there, my adventuring landed me in the office of Vice Principal Suzanne Kornblum.

Ugh.

She was hot.

That’s another story.

I was traveling through the hallway when she found me.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

$#%^!

I explained that I was just on my way to her office.

She laughed.

This created a HUGE problem, unbeknownst to me.

I was smart enough to know adults laughing at your defense almost always means the defense has hit structural failure.

Mrs. Kornblum walked me to her office with one hand on my shoulder.

I suspected it was less affection and more custody.

Maybe both.

Waiting inside was a stack of referrals.

Mine.

A janitor had noticed the pattern and started collecting them.

What was it with janitors?

For real.

Then another detail landed.

Why had I thrown the referrals into the trash?

Every yellow carbon copy represented another afternoon when I’d transformed school discipline into a walking tour of Walters Junior High, or the surrounding neighborhood.

There they were.

Proof.

Gravity hit.

Mama got called.

Then counselor Mrs. Teri Scherer entered the situation.

Mrs. Scherer was inexplicably fine.

I had a massive crush on her.

I remember sitting there mortified with that stack of evidence against me, Mrs. Kornblum holding court, Mama somewhere in the process of learning just how industrious her boy had become, while part of my mind remained occupied with a separate question.

Did I have a shot with Mrs. Scherer?

Thirteen-year-old boy cognition is a complex system.

Virtually incomprehensible.

Somewhere between third and seventh grade, I’d become the kind of kid a child psychologist could’ve built a solid practice around.

Consequences could be arriving from several directions while hormonal conflagrations retained processing priority.

My legend was slipping from my grip.

A smarter boy might’ve recognized this as an opportunity to change direction.

I had other gifts.

I went my own direction.

Around that time, Mark Twain had taken possession of a large piece of my imagination. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn belonged to the world I wanted. Hannibal. The mighty Mississippi River. Handcrafted rafts. Fishing poles. Riverboats. Boys moving through America with freedom in their blood and adventure waiting downstream.

Yeah.

That’s what I needed.

Since there was no chance Mama was packing up the family so I could live the life I had built in my head, I figured I’d help myself to an epic adventure.

Mario understood.

Mario was a sixth grader then, one of my boys, my little brother in all the ways that counted. We’d be going to the Boys Club right next door to Walters anyway.

He trusted me.

That trust would become relevant.

We started planning.

Missouri.

Hannibal.

The mighty Mississippi River.

A raft.

Catfish cooked in cast iron over our campfire.

Riverboats.

Freedom.

We had massive vision.

Logistics remained under development.

A proper journey required a map.

Mr. Scoville had one.

A giant pull-down map of the United States hung in his Social Studies classroom.

I had studied that map for a while.

More accurately, I had studied Mr. Scoville’s relationship with the map.

He never used it.

That struck me as wasteful.

The map had a destiny.

I had a plan.

It must be meant to be.

After school, I found a janitor and explained that I’d left homework inside Mr. Scoville’s classroom.

True.

I had.

This was one of those exquisite moments when honesty and omission worked beautifully together.

He unlocked the room.

There it was.

The pull-down map of the United States of America.

Not in front.

Four layers back.

Huge.

Heavy.

Built for a classroom wall and attached to a spring roller.

This wasn’t a poster a kid could fold into his backpack.

I needed help.

The janitor looked at the map.

Then he looked at me.

“Are you sure you have permission? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

That stayed in my brain for a minute.

Maybe less.

His concern felt administrative.

I pleaded with him to help me take it down.

Together, we wrestled the United States of America off the wall.

I rolled the whole thing up.

Walked out.

Mission complete.

Mario could hardly believe I’d pulled it off.

I turned thirteen that summer.

My first championship was under my belt.

Confidence came easy.

In spades.

Boxing had taught me something important. Train hard. Stay sharp. Think. Move. Be determined. Keep your hands up. Keep your head in the fight.

Win.

Somewhere along the way, my thirteen-year-old brain applied that lesson to absolutely everything.

Way beyond boxing.

I had proof that I could set my mind on something and make it happen.

That kind of proof is dangerous in the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy with imagination, nerve, and entirely too much faith in his own judgment.

So when Mario stared at me in disbelief after I walked out of Mr. Scoville’s classroom carrying that enormous pull-down map of the United States of America, I honestly didn’t understand the surprise.

Seriously?

I’m Bryan-David Scott.

Then came the practical question.

Where do you hide the United States?

Mario answered immediately.

Not at his house.

Hard no.

Mama was home, so I tucked the rolled map into a corner between my room and the garage, went inside, greeted everybody, and moved toward my bedroom carrying all the swagger of an innocent boy returning from another productive day of education.

I closed the door.

Exhaled.

Yesssss.

Then I opened my curtains.

My sister was standing outside the window.

Holding the map.

The United States of America filled the glass.

Ugh!

I skirted my way outside, talked fast, recovered the evidence, dragged that enormous map into my bedroom, and shoved it under the bed.

I believed I looked calm.

I believed I looked collected.

My sisters knew something was up.

Handle them right, and silence ruled.

Mishandle them, and I was dead.

Probably grounded for life.

My self-assessment needed work.

Later, I spread the map out and started plotting.

Missouri waited.

Adventure opened in front of us.

We figured we could hitchhike part of the way, hop a freight train for another stretch, then use waterways wherever geography allowed.

It made good sense until my brain began asking logical questions.

Which direction did the waterways actually flow?

How many miles could two boys put behind them using this system?

What happened when the food ran out?

What happened if our faces ended up on milk cartons?

Gravity sucks.

Freight trains carried their own complications. I’d recently watched a movie where a man met a train wheel and lost a leg.

That image stayed with me.

I needed Mario.

Mario had no answers.

Perfect.

Keep moving forward.

He trusted me anyway.

If we survived, legendary would become epic.

Yeah.

I liked the math.

The next day, fifth period arrived.

Social Studies.

I checked in with my boys and said hi to Rosie.

Rosie was awesome.

Beautiful. Warm. Friendly smile.

She had class.

I moved through the room with the swagger of a champion and handled the normal business of being thirteen.

Be cool.

Then I began playing drums.

Three desks made a respectable drum kit.

I always had a pair of sticks.

Vic Firth.

Pro-Mark.

That’s how I rocked.

Mr. Scoville entered.

Full diminuendo in effect.

He’d warned me about the drumming before.

Something around the three-hundred and eleventh warning ended negotiations.

He confiscated my sticks until the end of the school year.

Then class began.

Mr. Scoville passed around Xerox copies of a map of the United States.

Smudged blue copies.

Barely legible.

Every student got one.

I looked at mine.

Then I looked at the wall.

Mr. Scoville reached for the classroom map.

I couldn’t believe it.

This was really happening.

Months of never touching that map ended right in front of me.

I started laughing inside.

He pulled one map down.

Then another.

He looked underneath.

Checked again.

By this point, I was vibrating.

The United States had disappeared.

Mr. Scoville slowly turned his attention toward me.

Somewhere inside that good man’s mind, several months of experience landed.

This time, he remembered the yellow copy.

Mario and I had a problem.

Our planned departure from the East Bay moved from a week away to that night.

No problem.

We held a planning meeting.

Mario would leave his window latch open.

At 11:30, I’d slip out through my window carrying the map and a bag, pick him up, and head toward Hannibal.

So, yeah.

The plan had gaps.

We had become comfortable with gaps.

I watched the clock.

11:30 landed.

Out the window.

Map.

Bag.

Fremont night air.

Dark.

My heart pounding hard.

Every step carried the energy of a boy doing something enormous.

I reached Mario’s house and went straight to the window.

Locked.

I checked again.

Locked.

Mario, my trusted partner in interstate escape, had locked the window.

Ugh!

I tapped lightly.

Nothing.

Then I saw him.

Sleeping.

Maybe four feet away.

I tapped harder.

Nothing.

I banged on the window frame.

Still nothing.

Then headlights hit me.

A car pulled into the driveway across from Mario’s house.

Frank.

Of course.

Frank was good friends with Mama. He was a drummer. Seventies rock energy. Cool guy most of the time. He knew Mama was carrying a lot and had taken it upon himself to provide a little fatherly reinforcement around me.

That arrangement never fully clicked.

Every other day of my life, seeing Frank would’ve been okay.

Tonight, his face carried a different message.

He saw me standing outside late at night with a bag and an enormous rolled map of the United States of America.

He told me to get my %$# home.

The expedition to Missouri experienced postponement.

I started walking back.

Part of me still hoped Mama would sleep through the whole thing.

I’d been grounded for days before.

Days felt survivable.

I crossed Davis Street.

The kitchen light came on.

Ugh.

I reached the house.

One last miracle remained possible.

I moved toward my window and started climbing in.

Quiet.

Slow.

Halfway through, the door opened.

Mama.

She wore the bathrobe I’d bought her with money from my Argus newspaper route.

I remembered earning that money. Cold mornings. Folding newspapers. Ink on my hands. Papers landing where they belonged. Rainy days when I tied them to the door.

Work.

Pride.

Buying something for Mama with money that came from my own hands.

There she stood in that robe.

The kitchen light burned behind her, leaving most of her face in shadow.

I stopped moving.

My breathing stopped.

The referrals.

The hallway runway.

Mrs. Kornblum.

The janitor.

Mrs. Scherer.

Mr. Scoville.

Mario.

The borrowed map.

Missouri.

Hannibal.

The Mississippi.

My championship.

My legend.

Everything went quiet.

Every awesome, structurally compromised piece of thirteen-year-old reasoning had carried me back to the one person who never needed the performance.

Mama.

I was halfway through the window.

Through the dark, her voice came quiet and clear.

“Hello, Bryan-David.”