—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

Chapter 21

 

Bugles, cap guns, sirens, firecrackers, war whoops... Cobble's Corner was a madhouse.

Traffic had to beep and inch through the mob. Kids cried for autographs. Scraps of paper fluttered down in a shower of homemade confetti.

A beaming Mr. Cobble handed up a certificate to Maniac for the year's worth of large pizzas. Maniac accepted it and said his thanks. The undone knot lay in a coiled heap at Maniac's feet. Mr. Cobble grabbed it. Already people were guessing how long it was. *

*It turned out to be four and a half blocks long. Someone tied it to a stop sign and started walking, and that's how far he got before it gave out.

The yelling went on and on, the way yelling does if only to hear itself. But one person wasn't yelling: Amanda Beale. She was holding one of the homemade confetti scraps, gaping at it. Then she was scrambling across the sidewalk, the street, shoving people's legs aside, grabbing more scraps, crying out, "Oh no!... Oh no!" And then she was running.

Maniac saw. He leaped from the table. He picked up a scrap. There was printing on it, about Africa. He picked up another; this one mentioned ants. Another: Aristotle.

The encyclopedia A!

He followed the scrap-paper trail up Hector and down Sycamore, all the way to the Beales' front steps. The only thing left of the book was the blue-and-red cover. It looked something like an empty looseleaf binder. Amanda was hunched over, rocking, squeezing it to her chest. "It was my fault," she sobbed. "I got careless. I left it in the living room. Anybody could look through the window and... and..." She clenched her eyes so tightly it was a wonder the tears got out.

More than anything, Maniac wanted to hug Amanda and tell her it was okay. He wanted to go inside, be with his family, in his house, his room, behind his window. But that wasn't the right thing. The right thing was to make sure the Beales didn't get hurt anymore. He couldn't keep letting them pay such a price for him.

He turned and headed back up Sycamore. Maybe the man with the can-of-worms voice was right: "Back to your own kind... back to your own kind..."

He never got farther west than the far curb of Hector Street, because McNab and the Cobras were there to meet him, grinning, leering, hissing, "Yo, baby, we hear ya got a little pizza prize there... come on back... we missed ya... we been waitin' for ya..." So he turned and started walking north on Hector, right down the middle of the street, right down the invisible chalk line that divided East End from West End. Cars beeped at him, drivers hollered, but he never flinched. The Cobras kept right along with him on their side of the street. So did a bunch of East Enders on their side. One of them was Mars Bar. Both sides were calling for him to come over. And then they were calling at each other, then yelling, then cursing. But nobody stepped off a curb, everybody kept moving north, an ugly, snarling black-and-white escort for the kid in the middle.

And that's how it went. Between the curbs, smack-dab down the center, Maniac Magee walked --- not ran --- right on out of town.