“Excuse me, sir?” she says sweetly.
I gasp. Until this very moment, I never thought it was possible to choke on air.
“Everything okay, kids?” The man’s eyes scan the sidewalk as if to find an adult to assign us to.
“Everything’s fine with us. And how are you today?” Max sounds deeply concerned—about him. For someone who called my smile suspicious, she’s being awfully cheery.
“Uh . . . great, thanks for asking,” the man replies with a chuckle. “What are you kids up to so early?”
I’m sweating. There’s a glob of paste poking out from Max’s cap. I wonder if this guy’s noticed it.
“Just trying to change the world, sir.”
“Change the . . .” The man looks as stumped as I feel.
“Yes, sir. My friend and I want to change the world,” Max says, waving her hand in my direction with the flair of a magician. “We’re out trying to raise money so that we can open a children’s center. Anything you’d be willing to donate would be greatly appreciated.”
“What kind of children’s center?” he asks, giving a gentle tug on the German shepherd’s leash. The dog has started to lick my hand. I let him, praying he has no K-9 dog cousins who have taught him to sniff out people running from the law.
“It’s going to be called Gamers’ Galaxy. We’re going to have all kinds of video games for kids to play. It’ll be free for boys and girls. We’re going to offer snacks and special tips to help the youth sharpen their skills on games like . . .” There’s a slight pause in Max’s speech but then it picks up with the upbeat tone of a brilliant idea. “Max Attacks.”
I can’t believe my ears. She’s either a genius or trying to give us away.
The man shakes his head and stares at Max as if he’s not believing her completely. “I’ve never heard of . . .”
I can’t let this fall apart. My mouth opens and I follow Max’s lead.
“I’m surprised you haven’t. Max Attacks has seventeen different levels, and you can only move from one to the next if you kidnap the king and take over his minions.”
Max jumps back in.
“Did you happen to see that Gavin Hopewell movie with the robots? It’s based on that movie. Man, he was an unstoppable warrior in that movie and this game is just like . . . like—” she says, looking for the right words to describe the character.
“Right, right. Listen, where are your parents? Is someone here with you?”
Max slips her backpack off her shoulders and gives a quick nod to the store we’re standing in front of.
“Yup, my mom’s just printing up some more donation forms in her office on the second floor. She’s got a little credit card gadget too so we can take cards if you don’t have the cash. I’ve got a form right here,” she says as she starts to unzip her book bag.
“Oh, is that so? You know what, I’d love to help but forgot my wallet at home this morning,” he says with a disappointed shrug. He drops the leash a bit and the smaller dog lets out a yelp as he pulls forward. “Good luck, though.”
He’s gone, both he and the dogs looking relieved to be on their way. I look at Max and burst out laughing.
“I can’t believe you just did that!”
“I can’t believe you just did that!” Max grins and starts walking again. We walk another three blocks, then she pauses at the corner and looks left and right. She adjusts her cap and smooths her hair behind her ears.
“C’mon. I think it’s another block over.”
“I thought you said it was—”
“It’s gotta be close. We walked out of the subway station and then we were at the hospital in a couple of minutes.”
She steps off the curb and into the street when I pull her back with a tug on her backpack.
“Max, we might be walking in the wrong direction.”
Max looks flustered. She squints against the morning sun. She doesn’t look as confident as she did when we talked this over in the hospital.
“We probably just missed it by a block.”
I let out a slow breath. Max has no idea which way we should go.
“Max, I think we should try a different direction.”
Max is speed-walking now, her thumbs hooked under the backpack straps on her chest. I jog a few steps to catch up with her. Her jaw is clenched tight.
“Max! Hey, just listen for a second!”
A flush of red is rising from her neck to her cheeks. Her eyes glisten in the sun.
“Max. It’s all right. We’ll find the subway station. We can do this, okay?”
Max stops abruptly and presses her hands against her head.
“I just need to think.”
I don’t know what to say. This is the first time I’ve seen Max look anything but cool and collected.
“Let’s sit here for a minute,” I say, and lead her to a bus shelter. The metal bench feels cool even through my jeans. I rub my hands together. Outside the bus shelter is a sign with letters and numbers. My riddle-solving skills can’t figure out what the numbers and letters mean.
“Max, we can figure it out together.” Max is getting more frustrated. Maybe she’s realizing this was a big mistake. She thinks her parents don’t care much about her, but I can’t imagine that to be true. She’s got American parents and probably lives in a nice house. She’s smart and funny. Unlike me, she doesn’t have any real problems.
“Max, you don’t have to do this,” I say quietly. “I can walk you back to the hospital and then try to get to Seventy-Fourth Street on my own.”
Max looks hurt that I would make such a suggestion, but she doesn’t say anything. Maybe she’s considering it.
“Aren’t you scared to be on your own, Jason D?”
Of course I am. But I don’t have a choice right now. I’ve been alone since those two men put my mom in their car. I’ve heard people on television talking about what should happen to undocumented people, but I never thought they were talking about my mother.
“I am.”
Her face looks a little strange to me. She’s staring off like she can see something I can’t. Her lips are twitching. I’m a little worried but I don’t know what to do. After a few seconds, she gets up and walks out of the bus shelter. I follow her.
“Max?”
“I remember now,” she says with both hands on her temples. “I see it. This city is shaped like a banana. The avenues run from top to bottom. The streets are shorter and they go across.” She looks at the street sign on the corner and then strains to see the sign on the next block. I follow her, catching on to how this works.
“That means Seventy-Fourth Street is going to be that way. We can just keep walking.”
“It’s a really long walk,” Max says. She’s dropped her hands to her sides again and takes a seat at the bus shelter. “I have a T-shirt at home with the New York City subway map on it. My mom got it for me when I told her I wanted to see stuff in the city. She gave me that T-shirt and a small Statue of Liberty figure, as if that was close enough to the real thing. We need to find the subway. Walking the whole way will take forever.”
We start moving up the avenue again, street numbers climbing, which means we’re going in the right direction.
“We never come into the city,” I tell Max. “My mom’s always been really scared of it because she’s always hearing about something bad happening here. She was afraid it would be too much like Afghanistan. I guess some stuff is hard to forget.”
“For me, lots of stuff is hard to forget.” Max has her eyes on the concrete as we walk.
“Like Gavin Hopewell’s movies?” I like him too. I like having things in common with Max. She’s a real American, the kind who never gets asked where she’s from. Everything would be different if I were more like her.
“Who could forget his movies? Even the one about the baseball team was good,” she says with a small smile. “No, I’m talking about remembering weird things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like sometimes I remember being in a place, but I’ve never been there before. Sometimes I remember stuff that my parents forget, but I can see it in my head like a scene from a movie. Like once, I remembered what my grandfather was wearing the last Christmas we had with him before he died. It’s like having a treasure box that sometimes opens and out pops something shiny and cool.”
“Is that part of the whole genius thing?”
Max blinks twice and kicks away a chunk of concrete that’s come loose off the sidewalk.
“I guess so.” Max doesn’t sound as cheerful about it as she should.
A car honks as it passes us, and I see Max jump and pick up her pace. She’s avoiding my eyes. Everything about her tells me she’s running away from something more than overbearing parents. I can spot a puzzle when I see one, and it’s clear to me that this girl with her treasure box of memories doesn’t want to be figured out.
Thirteen
Just beneath New York City’s surface lies a network of subway tracks. It’s like an ant farm with a world of movement hidden underground. Max tells me what the subway station looks like. As we walk, my eyes stay peeled for a black subway sign on green railings. It’s now eight thirty and we still haven’t found what we’re looking for.
I gulp when I spy two police cars coming down the cross street.
“Jason D . . .”
Max has seen the cars too.
“Red door on your left,” I say sharply, and she follows me up the three concrete steps to the doors. I wish I had eyeballs on the back of my head so I could see if we’re being followed.
The door is heavy but between the two of us, we are able to pull it open wide enough to slip through. We stand with our backs to the door for a second. We’ve entered a dimly lit room that is long and deep. At the far end is a podium with an explosion of color behind it. The glass wall looks something like a kaleidoscope. On either side of a center aisle, there are rows and rows of empty wooden benches.
For a second I think this is some kind of theater. Then I spot a cross on the wall and I realize we’re standing in a church. To my left, there’s a pedestal filled with sand. A colony of thin candles stands in the sand, a few of them flickering with yellow flames. Some have melted into pools of wax.
There are a few people sitting on the benches. Max points toward them and motions me forward.
“Let’s go sit in case the police come in here. They won’t recognize the backs of our heads,” she whispers.
I’ve never sat in a church before so I follow Max’s lead. She slides into the center of an empty row, but it’s the third bench from the front of the church. We keep our heads low and hear the people around us talking quietly. Some have come alone, some have come as a family. We take a few moments to catch our breath.
“Maybe we can slip back out now,” I suggest. But just as I say the words, light spills into the room and a flood of people enter through the heavy doors behind us. Max and I look at each other as people fill the seats on either side of us, locking us in.
“If this Sunday service is anything like the one I go to, we’ll be here for an hour. Should we . . .” Max whispers.
“Everyone will look at us,” I warn.
And so we sit through a service. A priest stands at the podium and thanks everyone for coming. I listen and learn a few things. The people in this church pray with hands clasped together. My mom and I pray with our hands cupped. They say Amen. We say Ameen. They believe God is kind. So do we.
I think of the candles I saw when we first entered. The candles remind me of the day every year when my mother goes a little quieter than usual. Once a year, in late November, she makes maleeda, a bowl of finely crumbled cake that looks something like graham cracker crumbs. It is the only time she talks about my father. She puts his framed picture on the table and plants birthday candles in the mound of maleeda. Sugar crystals sparkle under the orange glow of the flame. My mom and I sit at the kitchen table and close our eyes. We cup our hands together and she recites a quiet prayer, words I don’t understand, but the sounds give me comfort because I’ve heard them so many times. My mother always sighs as if she’s sort of relieved after she says them.
Every year, she shares something new with me. Over the years, I’ve learned that my father loved spicy food and folk music. At weddings, he danced with his arms spread wide like he was going to embrace the whole party. When he was seven years old, he rode his bike into a ditch and broke a rib. He was a terrible singer, but that never stopped him from trying. He loved words and had a small collection of his most favorite books.
I always want my mother to tell me more, but she shakes her head each time.
It’s hard to talk about, my little king.
“Jason.” Max pulls at my arm. People have started to stand and file out of the church. We follow and make our way to the doors.
“It’s nine thirty,” I say, catching a glimpse of the screen of a cell phone. “We just need to stay hidden in crowds. We stick out too much on these streets.”
“I did an essay on the subway system for my social studies class in our modern transportation unit. The New York City subway has over two hundred miles of train routes and millions of daily riders,” she says with authority. “It should be pretty hard to find two kids in tunnels that move millions of people. The sooner we get to the subway station, the better.”
We stand on the steps of the church for a moment and, confirming that the coast is clear, make our way back to the sidewalk. We walk another few blocks and pass a photocopy shop, a shoe store, four nail salons, a Chinese restaurant, and two Mexican restaurants. It’s like they’ve taken my entire town of Elkton and squeezed it into a couple of streets.
We go two blocks up, looking both ways at the crosswalk to spot a subway entrance. There are people walking in all directions around us, but most certainly not a million of them.
“How can it be this hard to find millions of people? Ugh!” Max’s frustration is boiling over. She looks at her watch.
A police car stops at the intersection one block away. It’s at a red light, and I can see an elbow resting on the rolled-down window. Is that one of the two cars that passed by us earlier? I feel my palms grow moist and rub them on my pants.
Don’t get nervous, I tell myself.
“Hey, Max. Do you smell that?”
The light turns green but the police car doesn’t move. Instead, it pulls over to the curb. Because of the sun’s glare and the distance, it’s impossible to tell if the driver is looking at us.
“We’ve got bigger problems than funky smells, in case you haven’t noticed,” Max says through gritted teeth.
I feel steam rising from beneath me. It smells faintly like metal and old trash. I look down and realize I’m standing on a grate. I tug at Max’s elbow as I feel a rumbling giant pass beneath us.
“Max, that’s the train! It’s right under us!”
If the train is under us, there must be an entrance nearby. We look around and spot it. Just a few feet before the parked police car is the subway entrance, marked with two tall green lamps and a black placard with the numbers four and six in green circles. Glancing up every few seconds, we speed walk to the end of the block. I wonder if the officer is watching us or calling in backup.
The car door opens and a uniformed policeman steps out, adjusting his sunglasses. He’s talking into a phone that’s pressed to his ear.
It can’t be a coincidence that we’ve seen three police cars in less than an hour.
I feel a rush of air rising up from the stairwell, and the ground vibrates beneath my feet. Two hundred miles of train routes, four hundred stations, and millions of people of camouflage—this is our best chance at avoiding capture.
“Max, stick close!”
Max is as ready for this moment as I am. We hurry down the steps, pressed against the handrail with heads lowered. The people coming out of the station move like a swarm of bees and bump against us as they climb the stairs. There’s the
garbled sound of an announcement in the background.
When we get down to the station, I spot a turnstile and two ticket machines. They look similar to the ones at the train station in Elkton but different colors. Max takes out a ten-dollar bill.
“My mom’s always nagging me to spend my allowance on something useful,” she says with a mischievous smile.
I tap on the screen to purchase a subway card. Max slides the money into the slot, and the machine clinks and hums before it spits out a yellow card.
Max is on my heels as I swipe the card through the slot, and a green light gives a go sign. I press my torso against the metal bar and hand the card back to her so she can follow. We walk onto the platform. The last few people are getting off a train marked with a green four on the outside. We step into the emptied train car, and I slide into a seat.
“Hey, Max.”
“Yup.” Max has taken a seat beside me and placed her backpack on her lap. She cracks open her notebook just wide enough so that she can read and I can’t. The doors are still open and the train hasn’t started moving yet.
“I’m going to pay you back for this.”
“Whatever.” She shrugs off my promise. I think back to how flustered she looked earlier, and know that today might not work out the way we want it to. I want to see her smile again.
“I will make it up to you. And if we end up back in the hospital, I’ll give you all my meal trays.”
“That’s awful, Jason D,” Max groans. She leans her head back and smiles briefly. “I’m pretty sure this train’s going in the right direction, but I wish we could ask someone to be sure.”
No one else has entered this car of the train, which is odd. I wonder if Max’s research is completely off, or if the passengers have all boarded the other train cars. Then I see it, a framed poster between two windows.
“Max, I have rivers without water, forests without trees, mountains without rocks, and towns without houses. What am I?”
Her eyes look off into the corner as she thinks.
“I dunno. What are you?”