Story A Day 02: "Magnetic Words"

For the Story A Day challenge.

The kids sat around in their tree-house looking glum. They called it a tree-house, anyway. It was an abandoned warehouse, all boarded up because the roof had caved in. When they broke in for the first time they found nature taking the place back over. There was grass on the ground, and a young sapling had taken root right in the center, like it was the king of all the other plants. That’s how they got their inspiration. That’s how they found out what all the grownups had done.

At first, it had gone so well. Even the youngest of them, six or seven years old, could draw a tree. They worked in pairs with spray-paint cans. One did brown, the other green, just a rough shape, enough to get the point across quickly. The older kids would do a quick stencil to go with it: REMEMBER ME?

Within a week, half the city was covered with little trees. It all looked so much brighter. There hadn’t been much green around there for a whole lot of years. They all felt pretty good about themselves until the police started their crackdown. A few kids had gotten locked up overnight to teach them a lesson. Parents were called out of their drab gray offices where they worked their boring gray day jobs to pick them up, losing money and making them all kinds of angry. They increased the patrols, always on the lookout for anyone suspicious. It got harder to find a place that wasn’t being watched.

The kids started getting sneaky then. Everyone knows when you tell a kid not to do something, it just makes them want to do it even more. They got pushed, and they pushed back. Grownups were always underestimating how clever kids can be, assuming they knew more just because they were older. But all the kids knew how dumb they were. They watched for all the wrong things.

They’d get all the black and brown kids to dress up in baggy jeans and hoodies with the hoods up and walk around looking nervous. That always caught the cops’ attention. A nervous-looking white kid might need help, but a nervous-looking brown one was almost certainly up to no good. That’s how they thought. That’s how stupid they were. The dark kids would lure away the cops while the white ones would move in and get the job done. It worked for a while.

But grownups had ways of making up for their stupidity. They talked to the city government, went on and on in public speeches about the menace of juvenile vandals. As though they had done anything to hurt anyone. The only thing they had done was make the grownups feel guilty about how thoroughly they’d destroyed everything natural.

There’d been parks, once. Trees. Real ones. Ones that grew up out of the ground and made the air a little sweeter. Then the parks got smaller and smaller. New buildings went up. People talked a lot about Progress and The Economy and Population Density and other stuff like that. Everyone was sad to see the parks go, but it was Necessary. They all pretended that the declining air quality was due to smoking and old car engines. They made new laws about smoking that everyone ignored. They built a new fleet of city buses. Then they just carried on and everyone forgot about it, as though it had always been that way. More buildings kept going up. Old wooden ones got torn down, replaced with Modern Architecture. Concrete. Glass. Metal. There was metal everywhere.

When the cameras went up, the kids started to lose hope. Those things were always watching, for Public Safety. They tested them, just once, and Oliver had gotten picked up in under two minutes. He was 13 and brown, so they were talking about trying him as an adult and putting him in real jail.

So the kids sat around in the tree-house and looked glum and tried to come up with new ideas.

“We could do it everyone at once.” That was Sasha. She was 12, and she was the one who had found the tree-house in the first place and started the whole thing. “They can’t take us all to jail, can they?”

James rolled his eyes at her. “Well they wouldn’t take you to jail because you’re a white girl.”

“Yeah,” nodded Buddha, grinning. They called him Buddha because his parents were from India and they couldn’t pronounce his real name. “They’d probably write up a whole heartwarming story about how a gang of criminals corrupted your fragile little white mind and give you a bunch of extra money for college.” A few of the kids laughed half-heartedly.

“Don’t laugh at us! That’s not fair,” retorted Laura, offended at the suggestion. She was Sasha’s little sister, only 8 years old.

“No, it’s not,” agreed James with a sigh.

No one had anything to say to that. They were quiet for a few moments, staring at the little tree and feeling sorry for themselves. Finally, Lisa, the oldest of them all at 14, slammed her fist into her palm and stood up.

“This is stupid,” she declared. “Those stupid grownups are ruining the whole world and punishing us just for saying we don’t like it. There has to be something we can do.”

“Not without going to prison,” groaned Buddha. “There’s no way to paint anything now without getting caught.”

“Why do we have to use paint?” asked Tommy innocently.

“What else can we use?” countered Laura.

There was another silence, but a productive one this time, as everyone thought about that one.

After a few minutes, Jose jumped up and clapped his hands on his head. “I got it!” he cried, then jumped up and down excitedly for a few seconds while everyone else demanded to know what he got. “All the buildings, all the new ones, they got metal all over them!”

The other kids nodded, following him so far and wishing he’d get to the point.

“Magnets! My dad’s company makes magnets! Those super-strong ones they use to build cars and stuff! He brings home boxes of them all the time!”

The next day, they met again, and this time Jose brought a few boxes of thin, heavy metal bars labeled neodymium magnets. “I tested one on the way here. Looks like they use the right kind of metal in most of the buildings. I couldn’t get them back off once I stuck them!”

They spent the whole week writing on them with super-permanent markers before their first test run. They could stand facing the cameras and just toss them in the direction of the wall, and they’d stick. They wrote on both sides, so it didn’t matter which side landed and stuck. The cops tried to get them for it, but the judge said a magnet just couldn’t be vandalism because it was technically not permanent, but the cops with their big clumsy adult fingers could never pry them off. They talked to the building owners and suggested painting over the metal, but no one wanted paint on their modern architecture.
Before long, the whole city was covered with a few simple magnetic words: MOMMY, WHAT’S A TREE?