Skylark Read Online Free Page B

Force it into my eyes. We’ll be fine.
    Goatee Man’s performance piece is more a story than a poem. It’s about a rat that chews through the walls of the White House and becomes Barack Obama’s pet. At night, when everyone in the White House is asleep, the rat climbs up to Obama’s pillow and gives him pro-rat advice like “Make farmers plant more corn” and “Rats aren’t to blame for the bubonic plague—change the history books” and “Make rat catchers pay higher taxes.” It’s pretty funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but people chuckle and Goatee Man gets a good round of applause.
    The next reader is old, with a white beard and glasses. He hasn’t memorized his piece and fidgets with his pages, losing his place a bunch of times. It’s about how family is important and how you’ve got to hold them close. But he just blurts it out. Even though it’s an important idea, the way he tells it is boring. It’s like a lecture, a big message that everyone got ages ago. As the old guy reads, Clem slides down in his chair. That’s my cue. I reach into my coat pocket and pull out the chocolate bar I bought this morning with some of the money Dad left. Snickers, Clem’s favorite. Clem sits up.
    He’s truly hungry. He eats the thing in three bites, in under a minute, barely chewing. Then he turns the wrapper inside out and licks it clean. I bite my lip. I feel more sad than embarrassed. When Clem finishes his hot chocolate, he reaches in with his pinky and wipes every last bit from the sides of the cup. He sucks all the chocolate from his finger. When I finish my drink, he does the same with my cup.
    After the old man, who gets light applause, is a guy about twenty. He has blond dreadlocks and is wearing shorts—in early April—and a hemp necklace strung with shells. His story is called “Tofino,” and it’s about getting hit on the head by his surfboard. In the story, he passes out, and while he’s “under”—under the surface of the water, or unconscious—he has a love affair with a mermaid. They get married and everything. One night he wakes from a terrible weight on his chest. His mermaid wife is sitting on him, urgently trying to wake him because he has to go to the surface or he’ll die.
    The surfer is devastated to leave “that place of perfect happiness, a place where you never cry, because you are already living in a giant tear.” Eventually, he breaks through the surface of the water, back into the air.
    The pain in my lungs is horrible. I’m sobbing.
    My surfing partner grabs me. “Man, was I worried,” he says. “You were down there for, like, a whole minute.”
    I stare at him. I want to tell him what happened, where I’ve been. I touch my face, but there are no tears. Only ocean water.
    People clap like crazy when the guy’s finished.
    Next up is the girl who wrote about “where mercy grows.” Her new piece is about the loose shingles on her apartment building that flap in storms. In her poem, she’s lying in her bed, waiting for the entire roof to fly off. She says, “Exposure’s around the corner. It will fly in on the next ragged wind.” She even sings at one point.
    When she’s finished, I look over at Clem to see if he realizes how good Mercy Girl’s poem was. He’s reaching for a plate of food from the next table.
    â€œAre you sure they’re not coming back?” I ask.
    â€œPositive. They took their coats and left as soon as Poor Exposed Me started telling her story.”
    Clem plunks two plates onto our table—one has half a bagel and cream cheese, the other has three-quarters of a raspberry square. Clem digs in. He doesn’t offer me any, but I don’t mind. I’m too nervous to eat. Then I notice Surfer Boy across the room, staring at me and Clem. Is he going to tell the café owners about