Chapter Two
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It was years before the next incident. Really, he’d
forgotten all about the first time it had happened because of everything that
happened after. Months and months of his mother being harassed by the mailman,
everything from not delivering her mail to identity theft. The local postal
service sided with the mailman and didn’t take any actions to stop what was
going on until the mailman, emboldened, started targeting other people of
color. Eventually, he went to jail, but not before Jeremiah and his mother were
forced to move.
Even though his mother had never been late on a bill, even
though his father had died in Afghanistan serving in the Marines, even though
there was definitive proof of the mail tampering and identity theft, the only
thing the creditors and companies saw was a single, black mother and wouldn’t
make any allowances for the things that had happened. It all… wore his mother
down. She wasn’t the same person anymore. The fight and the optimism went out
of her.
The monster had been completely forgotten, even by Jeremiah,
submerged in the tragedy with the mailman. His mother believed that the mailman
had done something from outside the house to scare Jeremiah and cause
everything that had happened. That wasn’t totally inaccurate.
Jeremiah’s new school, because he had had to change schools
– it had been the desire to have Jeremiah in a “good school” that had been the
reason for where they lived – was decidedly less good. You could tell because
there were almost no white kids at this school, unlike his first school which
was almost only white kids. The new school had no working computers in any of
the classrooms, and all of the textbooks were clearly hand-me-downs from other
schools. Jeremiah was more than slightly ahead of all the other kids in his
classes and, so, bored. All the time.
It got him picked on. Being the smartest kid in class is never
the way to make friends. But he hadn’t been the smartest kid in his first
school, just in the top five or so. Here, though, he was smarter, or, at least,
more learned, than everyone. Even some of the teachers. He didn’t know it, but it
was that he read that set him so far apart. Reading had been highly valued at
his first school, and he had developed a habit. It got him labeled a
troublemaker by the administration and a know-it-all by his classmates. He
hated it. Every day.
If he had known it was the books, maybe he would have quit.
Maybe. But he didn’t know, and he didn’t have any friends, not really, so he
read all the time. He thought the problem was with him. Something innate.
He loved science fiction the most. He didn’t know it yet
because he was only 11 and not very inciteful, but it was the idea that in the
future in there was no racism that drew him to it. People were just people and
nothing like what happened to him and his mother could happen in a world
without racism. So he loved Star Trek, and he loved books where humanity
was humanity and there was nothing made of what color skin anyone had.
But he didn’t know that’s what it was that he liked, not yet.
On days when he had had his book taken away by the teacher,
like today, because she told him Stranger in a Strange Land was
inappropriate reading – when he asked her if she had read it, she said “no” and
scolded him for “talking back” when he tried to ask how she knew it wasn’t
appropriate if she hadn’t read it, and sent him to the back of the room – he leaned
his head against the window and daydreamed.
The glass was cool against his forehead, and he was imagining that he’d been raised on Mars and could do all of the things that Michael could do so that he didn’t have to sit in a boring classroom. He was vaguely watching out the window and vaguely watching the reflection of the classroom in the glass and superimposing the classroom being outdoors and thinking how much better it would be to be sitting outside on the grass having class out there and trying very hard to visualize everyone outside, trying so hard it made his eyes hurt and the kids in the reflection started looking funny, so he glanced into the class, turned his head just enough to see the teacher and everyone in front of him…
