Ground Zero by Alan Gratz
Brandon Chavez wn trouble.
He should have been in school this morning, taking his seat by the window and sharing a new skateboarding magazine with his friends. Instead, he sat next to his dad on a crowded subway train, heading from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
Brandon wasn’t allowed to go to school today.
He was suspended.
SHOOM. Brandon jumped as the train burst from its underground tunnel into the full light of day for its climb to the Manhattan Bridge. It was a bright, blue, clear September morning, and he squinted from the sudden sun.
Beside him, his father folded up the newspaper he’d been reading.
“Okay, Brandon, when are we going to talk about this?”
Brandon didn’t want to talk about getting suspended. He hadn’t talked during dinner last night, or at breakfast this morning, or while he and his dad had waited for the subway. Now Brandon could feel the silence, like an invisible thing that had squeezed in between them on the seat and was pushing them apart.
His dad turned to face him. Leo Chavez wasn’t a big man, but he had a stocky chest and strong arms. Brandon thought he would have made a good professional wrestler. There was a quiet power in his dad, and Brandon could feel that power directed at him now.
“I get a call at work from your school, and I’m thinking, is Brandon sick? Did he crack his head open again doing stunts on the playground?” his dad said. “But no. They’re calling to tell me my son punched another kid in the nose.”
“He deserved it!” Brandon said. All his anger and frustration from yesterday came flooding back as he turned to his father. “Cedric brought these Wolverine gloves to school, like from the X-Men movie? And Stuart Pendleton stole them and wouldn’t give them back!”
“So you punched Stuart in the nose.”
“He wasn’t going to give them back! What was I supposed to do?”
Brandon’s dad sighed. “I don’t know, Brandon. Talk to him. Tell a teacher or something.”
Talk to him? You couldn’t talk to a bully like Stuart Pendleton! And telling a teacher might have gotten Cedric his gloves back, but Stuart would have just beaten Brandon up later for tattling.
“You don’t understand,” Brandon told his dad.
“I understand enough to know that punching him wasn’t the answer,” his dad said. “And the principal told me that this other boy you were trying to help, his toy got broken in the fight.”
Brandon brightened. He had a plan to fix that part, at least. But before he could explain, his dad kept talking.
“I had to leave work early yesterday, Brandon. You know we can’t afford for me to miss any hours. Things are tight enough as they are.”
Brandon nodded and stared out the train window. That was why he was going into work with his dad this morning—Brandon’s father couldn’t take a sick day, and there was nobody else to stay home and watch him.
The Q train rattled up onto the Manhattan Bridge, and Brandon saw the World Trade Center in the distance. It was hard to miss. The gray, rectangular Twin Towers stood more than twice as tall as the other skyscrapers around them at the southern end of Manhattan. The two towers were almost identical, except for the huge red-and-white antenna on the roof of the North Tower. That was where Brandon’s dad worked. He was a kitchen manager at a restaurant called Windows on the World at the very top of the North Tower, on the 107th floor.
“Brandon, what do we say about us? About you and me?” his dad asked.
Brandon gave the answer that had been drilled into him since his mother had died from cancer five years ago, when he was only four. “We’re a team,” he said.
“We’re a team,” his dad repeated. “That’s what we’ve always said. This is how we survive, right? Together. It’s you and me against the world. But you shut me out on this one. And you let down the team.”
The disappointment in his father’s voice was like a punch in the gut, and Brandon felt tears come to his eyes. It hurt way worse than if his dad had just been mad at him.
The train went underground again, and the bright blue sky disappeared.
After a quick transfer to the R train, Brandon and his dad got off at their stop. They climbed the subway stairs into the underground mall below the World Trade Center Plaza. The mall was already packed by eight fifteen a.m., with long breakfast lines at Au Bon Pain and the Coffee Station.
Brandon trailed along behind his dad, lost in his thought. He wished he could have a do-over. Go back in time and make a different decision. But even if he could go back, what would he do differently? Stuart Pendleton deserved to get punched in the nose.
“I still don’t think I should have been suspended,” Brandon told his dad as they cut through the bustling crowd. Five subway lines and the PATH train from New Jersey all stopped at stations below the mall, and three different exits led up to Manhattan streets.
“So you think you just get to go around punching people you don’t like?” his dad asked.
“If they’re bullies, yes!” Brandon said. They turned left at the Warner Bros. store, with its big statues of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, but he hardly noticed them today.
“There are rules, Brandon,” his dad said as they headed for the escalators at the far end of the mall. “You punch somebody, you get suspended, no matter why you did it. Your actions have to have consequences. If they didn’t, you’d be the bully.”