World Made of Glass by Ami Polonsky

Author:Ami Polonsky [POLONSKY, AMI]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2023-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

ADVOCACY by Steven Cohen

January 11, 1986

About Randy and Tara. You shouldn’t have to

Deal with them, but you do. Create a

Vision

Of equality, and patiently (these things take longer than they should)

Cast it over them like

A net for minnows, or a shadow of hands. You should not have to

Carry them forward, but

You have to carry them forward.

After Julian and I ate the lunch he’d brought for us in his backpack, we walked across the park to the American Museum of Natural History. I was starting to feel exhausted from existing in so many seasons at once. All day long, I’d been burning up in the summer sun one second and freezing in a blizzard the next. Then, in the blink of an eye, I’d be back in springtime with Julian.

I loved the museum—its huge white stone facade, the columns, the stairs to the main doorways. I hadn’t been in almost a year. When Dad and I had come last June, it had been so hot outside and so cold inside. My favorite exhibit at the museum, even though it was horrifying, was the squid and the whale, and I was excited to show it to Julian.

When Dad and I had last been here, just after he’d been diagnosed, we’d stood together for a long time staring at the giant, boxy face of the floating sperm whale statue and the massive orange squid that had attached itself to the whale’s cheek. The statue didn’t make any sense. Whales were supposed to be these enormous, gentle, human-smart mammals, swimming around and enjoying life, but the whale had been attacked by the squid, which was so much smaller than it, and even though the two animals were frozen in time in the museum forever, you still had the sense that this jerk of a squid was going to be able to take the whale down. How was that possible? How could that happen? How could something so small destroy something so powerful?

I thought of all this again while standing on the second floor alongside Julian, looking down at the squid and the whale. I wondered what Dad had been thinking back when we’d stood here together. Maybe the same thing as me. Maybe something totally different. Now I’d never know.

“Whoa,” Julian said, studying the two animals in the diorama. “Who’s going to win?”

“The squid,” I told him definitively.

“Really? Why?”

I felt angry again. Why? Because it was obvious. That was why. How could he not see it?

“I kind of think the whale will win,” he went on.

“How’s it going to get that squid off its face?” I pressed.

“I don’t know,” he almost whispered, as if the fight between them were real and, in the end, one of them was going to die after all. “I just think the whale will be able to do it.”

We exchanged a look, and in that moment, the thick ropes in my bloodstream dissolved, once again, into nearly weightless threads. It was like Julian knew that the battle we were looking at was more significant than two massive fake animals on display in a museum.

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