Silver

Silver Maloney lived with her mother, Molly, up on the shores of Desperado.
“Why’d you name her Silver, Molly?” The townsfolk asked again and again and Molly always gave them the same answer with a chuckle.
“Cause gold is worth somethin’!” The townsfolk would chuckle along, but it was the kind of laugh that meant nothing. Inside, they were confused. Why would you name your only little girl something mean like that?
Summer was Silver’s favorite season- it was the season of her birthday, when Mr. Macy down at the ice cream parlor would hand her a triple-scoop sundae topped with chocolate sauce for free- and it was the season of tangerines. If Silver had to choose her favorite food, it would be those little balls of glow and sunshine. How could you not love that sweet, sweet taste of summertime and sugar?
Each year she would pick and pick at the fancy farm the Jones’s owned and she would eat the ones that had fallen on the ground when no one was looking. There was no such thing as a rotten tangerine to her.
The year Silver turned ten, her mother took her to the movie theater up in Millington. Molly left the theater to get some more snacks and never returned. Silver stood on the sidewalk, frozen to the spot, and eyed the street with apprehension. Maybe if her mother had named her Gold, she would have kept her. Maybe if she had brought some of those tangerines home to her mother, she would have kept her. Maybe if she’d done this, done that.
“Where’s your daddy?” The theater owner asked her that night when she hadn’t moved from her spot on the sidewalk.
“Don’t know. Ran off a long time ago.”
“Where’s your momma?” Silver shrugged.
“Ran off a little time ago.”
“Well, you can’t just stay out here all night. Go up to Patty’s and call somebody.” Silver held her tongue and nodded, picking up her feet one at a time and following the illuminated sign of Patty’s Sports Bar. She should have told him she didn’t have nobody. No, didn’t have nobody to look after her now. Nobody to call. Back home, they hadn’t owned a phone. Phones were for rich people to talk to other rich people. “What do you need a phone for, anyhow? Just yap your mouth off and then it won’t work no more. Can’t get ahead in life if your mouth don’t work.” Her mother told her once when Silver asked for a phone to talk to her friend Cherry at school.
Silver passed Patty’s up, content with finding someone to talk to that would care. Walking home wasn’t an option. It had taken at least two hours to get here and that was by highway. You couldn’t walk on the highway. You’d end up sleeping in the middle of the road with your eyes closed.
“You think he’s a dead one?” Jack, her mother’s boyfriend, would ask her every time they came upon a dead critter in the road.
“I dunno. I guess. He’s just layin’ there.”
“We’ll find out, then, won’t we?” Jack would run over the possum or skunk or raccoon or whatever had met its fate with a front bumper or tire. Silver listened to the sounds of bones crunching, liquid squirting up into the undercarriage of the old truck Jack owned. Stolen, Silver presumed.
She always wondered if they had been alive and just wanted a nice, warm place to lie and hadn’t thought about mean old Jack sneaking up on them when they rested their eyes. That’s what she felt like, Silver figured. An innocent little critter sleeping peacefully and then all of a sudden, she’d woken up in hell. Her mother had left her stranded because she wasn’t Gold.
The year Silver turned thirteen, she dressed up as a boy to work in the coal mines for some money. After digging through a clothing store’s dumpster, she found a pair of blue jeans and a torn pair of overalls. She cut her long red hair short with a dull switchblade. Her favorite season, summer, was the year she worked in the coal mine. All day long was nothing but soot and flashlights. Coughing, wheezing, sneezing and aching. Fox, the men called her, cause she was as slick as one. They’d send her through tiny crevices in search of underground tunnels previously made that had fallen in. She was the possum resurrected from the roadway, digging far into the ground to keep away from the road.
Late into the winter, Silver went down with the coal miners into a new mine they’d been chipping out since summer. Come winter, Silver knew, was when the mining slowed. Frozen ground and frozen coal wasn’t worth much.
“Wait for it to thaw,” Boss Crow repeated over and over, “Frozen coal ain’t worth gold.” Down in the tunnels, the cave collapsed in on the miners and Silver sighed while the others panicked.
“Fox, think you can fit through there?” The leader, Timothy, pointed to a small hole in the corner of the debris. Silver shrugged and moved forward, slipping one arm in and then another.
“Nope. Too tight.” The miners whispered and wailed, reminding Silver of the squeal of truck tires on critter blood. Useless, she told them, to whine. Save oxygen to make sure we’ve got enough to last until they come and get us. They all nodded, listening to Fox cause he knew how to not panic. He knew how to stay cool.
“What’s your real name, Fox?” A new miner, a boy around the age of fifteen, asked her about four hours into being trapped.
“Silver. Silver Maloney.”
“Why’d your parents name you Silver?”
“Cause Gold is worth somethin’.” The boy frowned at her retort and she felt her heart go thump thump thump, quick pitter patter like critter feet running across the road, laying their lives on the line every crossing.
“I never heard of the Maloney’s. Where your momma live?” Silver shrugged.
“Ran off a long time ago.”
“What about your daddy?”
“Ran off a long time ago.” The boy kept his mouth shut, intent on breathing in and out slowly to let Silver have some air of his own.
“I would have liked to have been a fox, you know,” Silver admitted when she felt herself drifting off to sleep. The miners were on the other side of the rubble now, picking and picking at it like crows on a dead critter.
“Why?”
“They’re so pretty. So pretty. And you never see one in the middle of the road. Them foxes are fast, like lightening. And they don’t ever get left behind cause they don’t need no one. No one but themselves and maybe a mate every now and then.”
“Silver Fox. Sounds like a code name, like some of them detectives in movies.” The boy next to her chuckled. She’d forgotten to ask what his name was. Too sleepy, too tired, though. Time to go to sleep.
“Silver’s worth something, right? The metal? It’s worth something, right?” She had to know, surely he would give her an answer.
“Sometimes.” He shrugged, “Only when it’s rare.”
The year Silver turned thirteen, she found herself dead in the middle of winter. She was buried in a pine box nailed by the boy who sat next to her and told her she was worth something. The boy carved her name into a rock and planted it on the head of her grave as the coal miners tossed dirt on top of her casket.
After the grave was deserted, a red and white fox came to sniff and dig at the unsettled ground. Giving up on what it was searching for all along, it trotted across the graveyard and slipped in between the wrought-iron fencing. Its paw touched the asphalt, it twisted its head from side to side and then darted across the road and into the trees, shining like silver from the frost that covered them.


-Round Here We Talk Just Like Lions, But We Sacrifice Like Lambs
Kaila Nicole

Maximum Disappointment

"Max and the Flock are flying high over Africa, but this time they're not alone. A sky full of cargo planes accompanies the team as they bring much-needed aid to the continent's poverty stricken regions. Among the volunteers is the mission's benefactor--the mysterious billionaire, Dr. Hans Gunther-Hagen. Max is intrigued by his generosity, but there's also something about him--and his intense scrutiny of the Flock--that makes her nervous.

But Dr. Hans isn't the only puzzling thing about their trip. The Flock also receives a cryptic message from a young girl, who tells them, "The sky will fall." Max and the Flock are ready to return home, still unable to make sense of her statement. But the surprises don't end with their departure, and something unbelievably momentous shakes up the Flock--pushing Max and Fang closer than ever. Angel makes a disturbing prediction. Fang will die before Max. Will the team be able to stick together through the chaos?"

Seriously. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? I'm certain these books are doomed. What started out as a relatively well-written series has become utterly cheesy. Obviously, James Patterson is not going to a kill a major character.
If he were to kick some off the character list, it would be in this order:
Gazzy
Nudge
Iggy
Angel
Fang
Max
I mean, honestly? You think he's going to just kill Fang off right now? Don't think so.
On another note, I'm kind of regretting having Fang and Max together in the books. In Fanfiction, it was awesome to read about what we wanted to happen. But now that it's real... it's so... PG. I understand that younger kids read these books, but it seems like the past few books have been incredibly juvenile.
I really do hope Patterson gets his act together and realizes these cheesy book summaries aren't going to help his MR career. His other books are undoubtedly amazing and he will continue to write great novels, but the MR series might just need to bite the dust after book 6 or 7.

Well, I'm off to finish the season premiere of The Office.



-Kaila