What They Found by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

driver who opened the door for Burn and she opened the door for herself,” Abeni said, peering through the blinds. “And she made sure she showed some leg as she got in.”
    * **
    We talked about Burn and his lady friend for a while longer before going back to the day’s business. When the door opened two days later and I saw him standing there I was surprised. Mama and Abeni had gone downtown to buy supplies and I was checking the bills. I knew he wasn’t going to do anything to me, but I felt a sense of panic when he asked if we could go out sometime. That was when the conversation ended with me telling him about the boat trip.
    I tried to put Burn out of my mind. I hadn’t encouraged him in any way and he was smart enough to see that I wasn’t the kind of girl he usually dealt with. At least I hoped he was.
    Saturday morning. The late-August sun had burned off the mist from the night before by the time I arrived at the pier. The first cars and ambulettes had already arrived and the children were being escorted onto the boat by either the Center staff or the volunteers. The children were excited. I had been told that the youngest child would be nine and the oldest a young adult as old as twenty-one. Somehow they all looked younger.
    The woman I was to work with asked me to help get the lunch baskets aboard.
    “I always feel that this is like the push-off for the invasion of Europe,” she said, smiling.
    A lot of the children had cerebral palsy and wereeither mildly or severely limited in their movements. Some were in wheelchairs and others used crutches. They used them well, too, I thought, as I struggled up the walkway with a stack of lunches.
    I was hoping that Burn wouldn’t show up. He would just be out of place and in the way. But on the way down the gangway I saw a gypsy cab pull up. He got out dressed remarkably sensibly for him, designer jeans and sneakers and a tight denim shirt that showed off his arms. I introduced him to some staff members as Mr. Burn and saw a smile flicker across his face.
    He was all business helping the kids onto the boat and getting them settled. When the boat moved away from the pier he stood at the rail and watched as they waved goodbye to their parents and guardians.
    We made sure that each of the children was comfortably positioned and gave them morning snacks and either juice or soft drinks. By the time the boat reached the George Washington Bridge I was already a little pooped.
    “Why they so pale?” Burn asked, settling into the folding chair next to me. “I mean the white kids.” Three-quarters of the younger children were white and the rest black or Latino.
    “Because many of them don’t get out all year,” I said. “The Center works with them while they are in rehab, but after that it’s up to other agencies to provide recreation. Sometimes their situations are really hard.”
    “Yeah.”
    Burn didn’t say another word for the next half hour. He watched intently as the kids ate or played some of the games that the staff led. Occasionally he let his eyes drift toward the shore or follow the flight of the gulls following the boat for scraps of food. I thought I should at least talk to him. He was helping out and had worked hard. But I wasn’t sure what to say to a guy everyone knew had been shot at least four times.
    “I guess you decided that you wanted to be called Burn,” I said.
    A beat. “You think people would call me something I didn’t want to be called?”
    “I guess not,” I said, “but why Burn?”
    “It tells you where I’m coming from.”
    “Okay.”
    “Noee’s a nice name,” he said. “It’s different.”
    “It’s not really my name,” I said. “My real name is Carol. When I was a kid I found out that there were two ways of spelling my name. Some people had an ‘e’ on the end of Carol. For some reason I didn’t want them spelling my name wrong and that became more important than the name itself. So when people asked me my