A Star is Born by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

seat.
    The room didn’t really get dark but we could see the film all right. First they showed this family sitting around the table having cups of cocoa in the morning and then this voice-over came on asking if anybody wondered how this “delicious cup of goodness” got to their breakfast table.
    One boy said that they made it in New Jersey, but I didn’t believe that.
    Then we saw the woman in the family buying the cocoa in the supermarket, then there was a picture of a black guy driving boxes of the stuff from a warehouse. I put down some tick marks on a sheet of paper. After that there was a ship with huge steel containers of something I assumed was cocoa and then a quick shot of people loading the ship.
    â€œI’m giving this film one and a half stars,” Kambui said.
    Then the film showed a farm and trees and stuff. I didn’t know cocoa grew on trees, so that was kind of interesting. We watched people gathering the plants and loading them onto trucks. Some of them were looking at the camera and smiling and I liked that.
    When the film ended everybody started comparing their number of how many people made money on the cocoa. I had counted five: the guy who ran the supermarket, the guy who brought the cocoa from the warehouse to the supermarket, whoever brought it to the warehouse from the ship, whoever brought it to the ship, and whoever grew it in the first place.
    With Mr. Siegfried you were always going to be wrong. He was fair on tests, but in class he had a way of always making you feel off balance.
    He started adding in bookkeepers, the people who made the containers, salespeople, and even people who traded in cocoa on the stock exchange. Boring. I could see where Mr. Siegfried was coming from but I really didn’t care.
    â€œThere were children picking the cocoa,” Bobbi said. “How come they weren’t in school? The announcer said it was their winter.”
    I thought that Mr. Siegfried was going to say something about kids going to school wasn’t our subject, but he didn’t. He got right on Bobbi’s comments and asked her to look up when the schools were open in Brazil, where the film had been made.
    â€œAnd I’ll give you extra credit if you document your findings, Miss McCall.”
    That was swift of Bobbi, but I felt a little bad that I hadn’t picked up on it. The thing was that Bobbi picked up on a lot of things that other people didn’t.
    The afternoon went by and I kind of vegged out. I saw LaShonda across the hall and she signaled a T for me to text her.
    Â 
    what’s up?
    wanna come to a tennis game this afternoon?
    u playing?
    no, Chris is. it’s an xhibition at Jackie Robinson Park.
    yeah, ok — what time?
    3:30
    see ya then
    Â 
    I didn’t know what kind of program it was going to be but I thought I would go just to show LaShonda some support. I had seen handicapped kids play sports before and didn’t really dig it. It was good that Chris was getting out more, though.
    The thing was I didn’t know what was actually wrong with Chris but I knew something wasn’t right. Whenever I saw him and LaShonda was around he would put his forehead against her and keep it there unless they needed to walk somewhere. He was a friendly kid, sort of, but he never looked right at you. It was like he was overhearing a conversation rather than you were talking to him.
    I went right from school to the park. I asked Kambui to come with me but he had to take his grandmother to the Social Security office. I got to the park just at three-thirty and there weren’t many kids there. In the swing section there were some women with small kids and one fat lady with some rabbits and a serious little girl trying to get the rabbits to sit together.
    LaShonda was sitting on a bench facing the basketball court and I joined her.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked.
    â€œJust needed somebody to holler at,” she said.