Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury Page A

it. The deadline for telling me what you will be working on.”
    I glanced over at Billy and Mose and Rico. For once, the three of them were sitting up straight and looking as innocent as Lucky’s puppies.
    Mr. Ramos sat on the edge of his desk. “Well?” he said.
    Billy raised his hand.
    “Ah, Billy. Good. What’s it going to be?”
    “I thought I would make a display on how to throw a curveball. I could do some drawings and write something. And then I could do a demonstration.”
    Mr. Ramos raised his eyebrows. “Hmmm … morelike physics than earth science. But if that’s what you want to do, then that will be fine.”
    Mose and Rico stared at their desks.
    “Okay, the Corteles cousins … what about you?”
    “Mose and I want to do one together,” Rico said.
    Mose perked up.
    “Let’s hear it, then,” Mr. Ramos said.
    “We’re going to make a vollacano and show how it works.”
    Mose stared at Rico. I had to laugh, it was so obvious Mose hadn’t heard a thing about any volcano project.
    “All right,” Mr. Ramos said. “But first you’ve got to get the pronunciation right. It’s
volcano
. And it better be good, because there will be two of you working on one project.… Understand?”
    “Yessir, Mr. Ramos,” Rico said.
    Mose nodded okay.
    Billy put his hand up to cover his mouth and whispered to Rico, “Yessir, Mr. Ramos.” Rico reached across the aisle and slapped Billy’s arm with the back of his hand.
    “Was there something else, Rico?” Mr. Ramos asked.
    “No, no. That’s all.”
    “Okay. Now, this is for all of you. I want to see some
real
progress by December fifteenth—that’s one month from now.”
    Mr. Ramos winked at Mose and Rico, but Mose didn’t see it. He was too busy writing a note to Rico.
    •   •   •
    After school, we skipped the school bus and headed out to catch a city bus. Rico had heard a rumor that the Kaka’ako Boys had a new pitcher, who was also a slugger, some guy from the island of Hawaii who was over six feet tall … and only in the eighth grade. We had to check it out.
    Mose was still in a bad mood over the volcano. But for Rico, the more he thought about it, the more he slapped himself on the back. “Don’t worry,” he said to Mose. “Easy, this. All we gotta do is get a pile of mud and dig a hole in the middle. Then let it dry and paint some red coming out. Maybe put a stink bomb inside to make it smell like real.”
    “Jeese.” Mose rolled his eyes. “This is a
science
project. You gotta do a report, and you gotta be able to
explain
the thing. Who’s gonna do that?”
    “You. I make it, you fake it.”
    Mose shoved Rico. “Do me a favor—don’t think anymore today, okay?”
    “Here comes the bus,” I said. “Stop goofing off, or he won’t let us on.”
    Mose and Rico settled down. The driver gave us dirty looks when we put our five cents in the meter. We stumbled to the back while the bus lurched on down the hill toward the ocean.
    “Rico, how much money you got left?”
    “Nothing.”
    Mose looked at me. “That was all I had.”
    We all turned to Billy.
    “Rich
haole,”
Rico said. “It’s up to you, or else we going walk back.”
    “Ten cents,” Billy said.
    “I told you he was rich,” Rico said.
    “But not rich enough,” I added. “Two of us gotta walk.”
    “Nah,” Billy said. “We can all walk.”
    Mose shook his head and started another round of shoving. But we stopped when we noticed the bus driver’s eyes in the mirror.
    We got off and headed down to Atkinson Park, where they had a couple of baseball diamonds. We passed the soda works and the soy factory, the buildings squeezed so close together only a cock-a-roach could fit between them. Small kids were playing in the streets. They were a mixed-up bunch of all the races in Kaka’ako, mostly boys who roamed around like ants. A bunch of them followed us in a pack about a block behind.
    That part of Kaka’ako was crammed with falling-down two-story wooden