“Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mama’s back…”
The chanting voice drifted towards me through the wispy fog, followed by a faint scraping noise.
Again, I heard, “Don’t step on the crack or you’ll break your mama’s back.” Then the noise again.
I leaned against the trunk of a massive, stretching oak tree that dominated the small sandy lot at the corner of Palmetto Place and Queen Anne Lane. I’d stood there about fifteen minutes, waiting for the school bus on my first day in my new school. It was just after sun-up on a brisk November morning. The dense fog that greeted me on my early morning walk to the bus stop was already starting to dissipate. Still, I could barely make out the shape of someone walking down the sidewalk, headed towards me.
As the figure came nearer, I saw it was a kid about my age dressed in some raggedy jeans and an oversized black hoodie. He was looking down at the sidewalk and chanting that old kid’s superstition as he carefully hopped over every single dividing line in the sidewalk. I knew he thought he was alone on the foggy morning and hadn’t noticed me standing underneath the tree branches.
“Don’t step on the crack or you’ll– whoa!” He abruptly broke off, stopping in his tracks when he noticed me leaning on the old oak. He said, as a red flush spread over his cheeks, “Oh, um… hey.”
“What’s up?” I answered with a quick chin lift. “You waitin’ for the bus, too?”
The scruffy looking kid replied in a low voice as he walked a little closer to the street corner, “Uh, yeah. You must be new? Nobody else ever gets on at this stop.”
“My family just moved here from New Bern,” I said. “We live a block over on Oceana. I’m Bryan Cooper. What’s your name?”
“Nate Turner. I live right down there,” he said, pointing back down the street. “The green house with the widow’s walk on top.”
He looked down at his feet, shuffling nervously.
The familiar sight of a lumbering yellow behemoth appeared at the end of the street through the last wisps of fog. After the loud squealing, grinding noise of the brakes engaging, it slowed to a stop at our corner.
I followed Nate through onto the bus and found an empty seat near the front.
My first day at Fort Macon High was nerve-wracking. I walked with my schedule printout in hand, wandering confused down the halls, unable to make any sense of the seemingly random room numbers. I was lost all day and late to every single class.
The bus ride home seemed to never end, but I finally saw the giant oak tree up ahead. I stood to head to the front of the bus. That kid, Nate, was getting off the bus in front of me when he tripped and fell down the last step, sprawling onto his knees on the sidewalk. His bag went flying with books and papers tumbling in every direction. I hopped down beside him and offered a hand.
“Hey, man,” I said. “You all right?”
As the bus pulled away, Nate reached up and let me haul him to his feet. Then he bent over to lift his torn jeans away from his bloody, scraped knee.
“Ouch. Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Nate examined his injury and then shrugged his shoulders. He started picking up the scattered contents from his book bag.
I helped him gather an English book, a few scattered folders and a couple of pencils when I reached for a sketchpad that lay open on the ground. My eyes bugged out as I looked at one of the most amazingly detailed and complex sketches I’d ever seen. I picked up the sketchpad to get a closer look.
“Dude! Did you draw this?” I declared, examining the sketch in awe. “Wow! This is freaking amazing!”
The pictures was of an incredible drawing of a beach scene. It was obviously a pencil sketch but it was so realistic it could have almost been a photo. In the foreground, a toddler packed sand into a bucket beside a sandcastle, with a spectacular ocean and sky scene in the background. I could see a group of kids off to one side throwing a Frisbee, a surfer out on the waves, a few seagulls flying across the sun, and even a hermit crab scuttling over the sand.
Nate reached out to grab it away from me but I stubbornly held on, turning away as I flipped to the next page. Another amazing drawing greeted my gaze, this one a close-up of a pelican swallowing a fish. Again, the detail was extremely lifelike.
The next page was a drawing of a shrimp boat at dock, every possible detail of the scene carefully etched onto the page so that it seemed I could actually see the boat rocking and hear the waves lapping against the wooden dock.
This kid was amazingly talented.
“Hey! Let me have that!” Nate exclaimed.
I reluctantly closed the sketchpad and handed it over. “Man, these are awesome drawings. I’ve never seen so much detail in a pencil sketch. You are really good, dude. You should go to art school.”
“Nah,” Nate said, shrugging as he put the sketchpad back into his bag and went back to gathering his spilled belongings. “I just scribble sometimes. I’m not going to college. I’ll be working on the shrimp boat with my dad.”
“Seriously?” I was floored! “You can’t let talent like that go to waste, man. You should be an artist!”
“You like really them?” Nate seemed about to smile. “I guess I am always drawing something. My mom teases me, says I was born holding a pencil.”
I laughed softly.
Nate sighed. “But it isn’t like I could actually make a living at it. My dad says drawing is fine as a hobby, but a real man pulls his weight and pays his bills. I have a job waiting for me on the boat. Besides, there’s no money for college in my family. Not everybody who lives at the beach is a millionaire, you know.”
With that, the kid in the ripped-up jeans grabbed the last piece of paper off the ground and turned to walk home, apparently dismissing the topic and me along with it.
Well, it’s been said (by my mom, mostly) that I can be a little stubborn. I like to call it “tenacious” (sounds nicer), but basically I don’t give up easily. I wanted to talk to this guy more about his art.
I followed along behind Nate and chatted him up. At first, he was reluctant to join my conversation, but I persisted. By the time we reached the end of the block, he had warmed up and acted a little friendlier.
An hour later, we were talking about everything under the sun, discovering all the things we had in common. When I went home at dinnertime, I was pretty sure I’d made a new friend in Atlantic Beach.
~*~
Senior year rolled on, and things gradually got a little easier to deal with at school. I learned my away around, made a few friends, and settled in at Fort Macon High.
Nate and I got pretty tight, spending hours laughing our heads off and gorging on chips and dip while we played Minecraft or Halo 4 on my PS3. Every now and then we hung out on the widow’s walk on top of his house and just gazed off at the horizon, talking about stuff like which girl we would ask to the prom (if we ever got up the nerve), and making plans for a beach campout when the weather warmed up.
But whenever the topic of graduation was mentioned, Nate clammed right up. I could tell that going to work on his dad’s shrimp boat was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but he seemed to think he had no choice. He didn’t even want to talk about alternatives.
But, my tenacity once again raised its ugly head. I stubbornly held on to the idea that my friend was throwing away a chance to follow his dreams, settling for a life someone else wanted for him. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to shake things up in the Turner household. I wanted to get Nate’s dad to see how much his son really wanted to go to college for art instead of going to work on the family shrimp boat.
I gathered together an arsenal of information. I started by going online to research careers in art. With a file folder stuffed with printouts showing all the different jobs available for artists–including potential salaries–I headed down to the boat docks on a warm Saturday afternoon.
I knew Mr. Turner was repairing some nets that day. Nate was with his mom, headed to Wilmington to bring some stuff to his sister Savannah at college, so he wouldn’t be around.
I was nervous about my plan to talk to Nate’s dad about college. I knew it was butting into someone else’s business, which was kind of what I was trying to fight against. But that whole stubborn thing kicked in: there was no way I was going to drop it without at least trying.
The sun sparkled brightly on the crystal blue waters of the harbor. I approached the moorings of the Turner shrimp boat, The Dream Catcher. Mr. Turner was busy weaving new line into a torn section of shrimp net as it hung from posts along the length of the dock. He glanced up from his work as I walked toward him.
“Well, hello there, Bryan,” Mr. Turn spoke in his usual gravelly voice. “What brings you down to the docks? If you’re looking for Nate, he’s gone to Wilmington with his mom today.”
I swallowed nervously before I spoke. ”Actually, Mr. Turner, I came here to talk to you. It’s kind of important.”
A puzzled frown wrinkled his sun-baked forehead as Mr. Turner put down the spool of line. He mopped sweat from his face with an old red bandanna he pulled from his back pocket.
“Okay, kid,” he said. “Shoot.”
“Thank you. Oh, and no one asked me to say all this. I’m here on my own.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur as I launched into an impassioned speech about how a person should follow their dreams, and how talent should never be wasted. I rambled on about how there is nothing wrong with working on a shrimp boat, that it is an honest job for hard-working men. Working the boats may be what Mr. Turner wanted to do but–so far as I could tell, as his friend–it really wasn’t what Nate wanted for himself.
And then I handed Nate’s dad the folder.
Mr. Turner quietly listened to everything I had to say, letting me get it all out before he spoke. “Bryan,” he said, “are you telling me that you think Nate can make a living with all that drawing and stuff he does?”
“Yes, Mr. Turner! I know he can! Just look in the folder at the list of art jobs I printed out. He can get a job in Graphic Design, or Digital Art, or he can be a Web Designer or even an Illustrator. There are tons of jobs for somebody with his kind of talent, Mr. Turner, and he could make some really good money… The best part is I know Nate could get a scholarship to art school. He’s really good. He could even go to UNC Wilmington next year with Savannah: they have a Graphic Arts program.”
He held the folder in his hand, the same puzzled frown marring his weathered face.
“I don’t understand why Nate hasn’t come to me himself about this. I guess I thought he was fine with coming on board The Dream Catcher with me.” He paused thoughtfully before continuing, gazing at the painted blue letters on the side of his boat. “I guess maybe he needs to catch his own dream.”
I was so stoked when I left the docks I was nearly walking on air. Mr. Turner hadn’t said for sure, but I really thought I’d gotten through to him. I didn’t want to jinx it by telling Nate yet, though, so when he called me later that afternoon and invited me to hang out to play some Minecraft I decided not to say anything.
That’s why, when the principal started announcing all the scholarship winners during our end-of-year awards ceremony a few weeks later, I was just as shocked as Nate was to hear his name called out. All the seniors were sitting together in the front of the auditorium when Mr. Tingle intoned into the microphone, “Nathaniel Evan Turner, Four Year Scholarship, Arts and Graphic Design, UNC Wilmington.”
Nate hesitantly stood up, a look of complete confusion on his face. He glanced at me a few seats down, then swiveled to look back at his parents in the audience a couple rows behind us. Mr. Turner was on his feet, grinning from ear to ear and clapping his huge hands together with fervor. Mrs. Turner stood beside him, and so did Nate’s older sister, Savannah. They were all cheering and clapping for Nate as he went up to the stage. Nate shook Mr. Tingle’s hand and accepted the certificate proclaiming his scholarship award.
I didn’t get a chance to talk to Nate until later that night, when both our families were enjoying a backyard barbeque at the Turner home.
“My parents told me how you talked to my dad,” Nate said as we climbed up onto the widow’s walk once again. “I still can’t believe they filled out scholarship applications without telling me. Did you know they snuck sketches out of my room to send in to the scholarship board?”
“I didn’t but I’m glad they did. Are you glad you got the scholarship?”
Nate leaned on the railing of the walk. He peered out over the view, grinned, and lowered his head as if almost ashamed. “Bryan, dude,” he said, “I am so glad I think I could fly right now! I never really thought I had a chance to do anything but haul shrimp nets. I’ll never forget how you came through for me, man. You don’t give up when you get an idea in your head, do you? I sure am glad that you’re so stubborn.”
I slapped him on the back and leaned onto the rail with him. “The word is tenacious, dude. Not stubborn,” I said, “just tenacious.”