Safe Passage by Ellyn Bache

faded red T-shirt with white letters saying FREESTATE STRIDERS. It looked like it came from the thrift store, but really it used to be Percival's . He put it on. It made him feel calmer, the way he'd felt when Percival put his hand on his hair. He thought of Percival in Lebanon, under the sand-colored concrete building. He knew what would happen if he had the ear operation. It would be worth it if he could take Percival's pain away or, at the very least, share it. He knew what he was going to do.
         Passing Simon's room on her way back downstairs after dressing, Mag was struck by the motionless silence that seemed to have settled over him. Usually he danced around or snapped his fingers, but now he was kneeling on the floor in his underwear, going through a box of discarded clothes in a silent, deliberate way. He did not even notice her walking by. A dark bruise throbbed on his calf from the second dog bite. She was suddenly hurt that he hadn't told her about it. He would have said his usual thing: "Mother, don't go into a hyperspasm about this. It's no big deal." But at least she would have known. And now it seemed that it was a big deal. After the first bite she'd called Monster's owners repeatedly, but nobody was ever home. It turned out that the family had left for vacation. Though there was no danger of a dog in this neighborhood not having its rabies shots, she'd been furious. She meant to take action. Yet nothing had come of it. By the time the family got back, the bite had been forgotten. Watching Simon now, she vowed that this time she would not forget. She would call the SPCA. She would sue. But it seemed a small, shabby thing to think about right now.
         When Simon came downstairs a few minutes later, she saw what he had been looking for in the box upstairs—a tattered running shirt Percival had worn hundreds of times and then passed down to the twins. Oddly, Simon had put it on along with a pair of good trousers instead of his usual jeans. The ludicrous outfit touched her. Normally, he would never wear such a combination. Only yesterday he had strutted around this very room, moving his hands in short, jerky angles to imitate the dances his black friends did, snapping his fingers, and pointing out in his imitation black-boy accent what he was wearing.
         "See my Lee jeans?" he'd said to her, modeling. "See my alligator shirt? I'm a J-Street regular, lady. Don't you tell me you think I get my clothes at the mission! " He had made a menacing face at that. J Street was in the black section where most of his friends lived, and the Rescue Mission was there, too. It had a thrift store with old clothes and furniture the residents of the area were supposed to be able to afford. But Simon insisted the black kids would no more buy their clothes there than come to school naked.
         "See, Boozer'll come in with a sharp new belt or shirt and Pooter'll say, 'Hey, man, where'd you get that—the mission?' So then Boozer says, 'No, man, I got it at the mall, but I seen you buying them pants at the mission the other day.'" Simon had shimmied his shoulders and slid backward on his toes as he told her these things, doing a dance step called the moonwalk that his friend Pooter had taught him at school. Pooter had taught him the moonwalk in the cafeteria, in front of everyone, even that idiot Jesus freak Hope Shriber —who, if Mag wanted to know the truth, liked to dance as well as anybody. He'd snapped his fingers and made his fist into a microphone, pretending he was Michael Jackson: "Uh …Billie Jean, is not my lov-er ," he'd sung. He'd danced and snapped his fingers and described the rotting smell of the Rescue Mission. As far as Mag knew, Simon had been to the mission only once, when they dropped off the remains of her last yard sale. But he spoke as if he lived on J Street and went there every day—talking in a loose, irreverent way that he had learned not from his black friends, but from