Mighty Inside

Melvin Robinson lay in the bottom of the bunk bed he’d been sharing with his older brother, Chuck, for almost all of his thirteen years. In one week, he thought, I’m dead meat.
He closed his eyes and imagined himself walking through Cleveland High’s large wooden doors, saying the names of his friends and teachers in clear and confident tones, hearing himself say over and over, “Hi, I’m Melvin,” to kids he met.
“Hi” was a good place for him to start because making the H sound was a lot like exhaling, and he could do that without getting tripped up. Usually.
Before lying down, Melvin had shut both bedroom doors. One led to the kitchen, the other to a short hall and the tiny bathroom all six in his family shared. He had closed the curtains over the two small, high windows to block the bright summer sun. He was trying to stay cool, and he was trying to stay calm.
He clicked on his reading lamp. His eyes roamed the space where he slept his own private shelter. Over time, he had plastered the wall and the bottom of Chuck’s bunk with maps      Pops brought from train depots, and photos from National Geographic: Machu Picchu, the great pyramids of Egypt, Hopi caves in cliff walls. Images of Roman aqueducts bridging chasms made him think of their own Monroe Street Bridge spanning the mighty Spokane River, which cascaded through downtown in a series of waterfalls.
Pops had told him the largest of these falls had been a gathering place for the area’s first people, the Spokane Indians, before they were forced to live on a piece of “no-man’s-land” by the government in 1881. Melvin’s relatives had arrived in 1900 from North Carolina, and what they found in Spokane was apparently better than what they thought they could have in the South. They settled down, and now here he was, fifty-five years later, facing the biggest challenge of his life thus far: high school.
He stared at the Roman Colosseum on his wall. The stone stadium, with its three levels of arched openings, had once seated fifty thousand people and incorporated a retractable roof that had not been replicated in any of the great American stadiums, centuries later. Here, trained gladiators would take on wild animals and slay them or be slayed. Melvin was determined to see the Colosseum in person one day, but first, he had a battle of his own to win… at Cleveland High. Go Tigers.
     He looked across the room to where his turtle, Tuck, sat in the small tank on his and Chuck’s desk. Words flowed smooth as honey when he talked to his pet. All other times, he could never be sure. Some days he did okay. Other days, it was a nightmare.
Lately, every day was a nightmare.