THEMES CHARACTERS

IDENTITY ARNOLD JUNIOR ADAMS - MAIN CHARACTER

"I have to prove that I am stronger than everybody I was born with too much grease inside my skull. My
else. I have to prove that I will never give up. And I thinking and breathing and living
don't just mean in basketball. I'm never going to engine slowed down and flooded.
quit living life this hard, you know? I was only six months old and I was supposed to
"How bad do you want to win?"I never wanted croak during the surgery.
anything more in my life." Well, I obviously survived the surgery, but I have all
I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But sorts of
I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. physical problems.
And to the tribe of basketball players, bookworms, First of all, I ended up having forty-two teeth.
cartoonists, teenage boys, poverty, funeral-goers My teeth got so crowded that I could barely close
and beloved sons. It was a huge realization. my mouth. I went to Indian Health
And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay. Service to get some teeth pulled so I could eat
normally, not like some slobbering vulture. I had to
INDIANS have all ten extra teeth pulled in one day.
We Indians have LOST EVERYTHING. Indian Health Service also funded eyeglass
We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we purchases only once a year and offered one
lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. style: those ugly, thick, black plastic ones.
We only know how to lose and be lost." My brain damage left me nearsighted in one eye and
"What do Indians have to be so thankful for?" farsighted in the other.
"We should give thanks that they didn't kill all of I get headaches because my eyes are, like, enemies,
us." you know, like they used to be
married to each other but now hate each other's
FRIENDSHIP guts.
"You really shouldn't be missing class this much," And I started wearing glasses when I was three, so I
she said. ran around the rez looking like a three-year-old
If I'd been stronger, I would have stood up to her. I Indian grandpa.
would have called her names. I would have walked And, oh, I was skinny. I'd turn sideways and
across the room and slapped her. disappear.
But I was too broken. But my hands and feet were huge. My feet were a
Instead, it was Gordy who defended me. size eleven in third grade! With my big feet and
He stood with his textbook and dropped it. pencil body, I looked like a capital L walking down
Gordy showed a lot of courage in standing up to a the road.
teacher like that. And his courage And my skull was enormous.
inspired the others. Some of the kids called me Orbit. And other kids
Penelope stood and dropped her textbook. just called me Globe. The bullies would pick me up,
And then Roger stood and dropped his textbook. spin me in circles, put their finger down on my skull,
Then the other basketball players did the same. and say, "I want to go there."
Then all of my classmates walked out of the room. I had seizures. At least two times a week.
I also had a stutter and a lisp.
MORTALITY Everybody on the rez calls me a retard about twice a
I've been to so many funerals in my short life. day.
I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two Do you know what happens to retards on the rez?
funerals. We get beat up.
That's really the biggest difference between Indians At least once a month.
and white people. Yep, I belong to the Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.
A few of my white classmates have been to a Sure I want to go outside. But it's safer to stay at
grandparent's funeral. And a few have lost an uncle home. So I mostly
or aunt. But there's nobody who has been to more hang out alone in my bedroom and read books and
than five funerals. All my white friends can count draw cartoons.
their deaths on one hand. I can count on my fingers,
toes, arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose and still not get
close to my deaths.
About 90 percent of the deaths have been because
of alcohol.
 ARNOLD'S SISTER
ARNOLD'S MOTHER My sister is good at ruining things.
“She still reads books like crazy. She buys them by But she is also beautiful and strong and funny.
the pound. And she She is the prettiest and strongest and funniest
remembers everything she reads. She can recite person who ever spent
whole pages by memory. twenty-three hours a day alone in a basement.
She's a human tape recorder. Really, my mom can She is so crazy and random that we call her Mary
read the newspaper in Runs Away.
fifteen minutes and tell me baseball scores, the
location of every war, the
latest guy to win the Lottery, and the high PENELOPE
temperature in Des Moines, She was so pretty and her eyes were so blue.
Iowa. “ I was suddenly aware that she was the prettiest
girl I had ever seen up
ARNOLD'S FATHER close. She was movie star pretty.
When he gets drunk, he sings old country songs. How did I, the dorky Indian guy, win a tiny piece
And blues, too. And he of Penelope's heart?
sounds good. Like a pro. Like he should be on the
radio. He plays the
guitar and the piano a little bit.
And he has this old saxophone from high school
that he keeps all clean
and shiny, like he's going to join a band at any
moment.

ARNOLD'S GRANDMOTHER
“I love my grandmother. She's the smartest person
on the planet.”
“She was amazing.
She was the most amazing person in the world.”
“She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you
know?”
“My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for
forgiveness, love, and tolerance”