On a muggy August day before my fifth grade school year was to begin, Mom circled my three brothers, my sister and me. She told us that we were moving to Indiantown, a scratchy, green patch of inland South Florida that we’d visited a few times. Indiantown was all I knew of “the country.” Mom said we’d be moving in a week and living in Indiantown in a trailer on my grandfather’s cattle ranch. It’s just for one school year, she said. She told us that we would move back to our same house on our same street with our same friends in one year. It will be an adventure, she said, which is pretty much how Mom advertised all changes.
Mom had told us a couple of times all about Henry David Thoreau and his idea about living a life he made up himself. She said that moving to Indiantown would make us kind of like Thoreau because we too would be marching to a different drummer. Mom said we would be richer because we were trying something new. Money doesn’t make you rich, she said to us over and over again; experiences make you rich. Adventures make you rich. I was 10. I believed everything she said.
So we moved to Indiantown. We rode the bus to school and on the days I wore a bra, I sat in the seat in front of Lawrence Perez so he could see through the back of my shirt and maybe notice the wide, white straps. There was nothing yet to notice in the front of my shirt, but I knew from good authority that wearing a bra made your boobs grow. That’s what JoAnn Dwyer told me, and she was one of the only girls in fifth grade whose boobs had budded.
Lawrence Perez had oily, black hair and wore the same pants to school every day. He had 11 brothers and sisters. Some of them rode the bus, too, and I heard them behind me speaking Spanish, a language melodic and mysterious. Because Lawrence could speak two languages I thought he was a genius. He sat next to me in class and smiled all the time at everyone, his teeth extra white against his brown skin. During the boring parts of math class he drew pictures of horses in dresses or cows wearing hats. He passed his doodles across the aisle to me when our teacher, Miss Wells, wasn’t looking.
Lawrence lived at the turn off onto Fox Brown Road in the migrant worker houses, a cluster of pale blue, concrete houses that all looked like game pieces on a Monopoly board. Mom told us that migrant workers were the people bent over in the fields picking the bell peppers, crook-neck squash, watermelon and tomatoes growing in the farmland all around Indiantown. I saw the migrant workers every morning and afternoon from the school bus window. They wore straw hats and lobbed vegetables into baskets. From the distance they looked like figurines.
Near the migrant worker houses sat the Starlite Roller Rink, a corrugated metal building with a neon sign that buzzed and crackled like one of those lights that fries mosquitoes. I didn’t see Lawrence at the rink much, but a bunch of kids from my school showed up there on Saturdays. Indiantown had no movie theater or mall; the Starlite was where we hung out when there wasn’t a rodeo in town.
One Saturday afternoon as my wheels purred on the wooden floor, I saw Lawrence with a bunch of kids. He smiled at me. He skated onto the floor with some of his brothers and sisters. Then he skated up beside me. As we talked, I faltered and caught my wheels when I crossed one foot over the other to navigate the turn. Lawrence reached out to help me and grabbed my hand. Even when I was steadied and okay, he held on, interlacing his fingers with mine, and I let him.
A couple of days later Lawrence and his brothers and sisters weren’t on the bus. He wasn’t in school. And then the next day he wasn’t and the day after that. When I asked Miss Wells what happened to him, she told me that Lawrence and his family had moved on. They had to go to another town where the crops needed picking. He would be back next year. When I asked Mom about it, she said that Lawrence and his family had adventures, too, and they sometimes moved to different places for a while just like we did.
I don’t remember the texture of my sadness but it must have been there, making an indelible mark on memory because I write about him now, more than 50 years later. I do know that a while after Lawrence disappeared, the kid across the street whose mom worked in the post office started hanging around a lot more. One day he gave me his ID bracelet and asked if I wanted to go steady. I said yes, but I don’t really know why. He didn’t make me laugh. He never held my hand. He couldn’t help it, but he just wasn’t Lawrence.
