Mini Marvelous

CHAPTER 1

JUST MARCUS

Marcus Amari Washington did not think of himself as special.

He didn’t think of himself as extraordinary, remarkable, or destined for anything greater than a decent grade on his history test and maybe — maybe — convincing his mom to order pizza instead of making him eat her leftover lentil soup for the third night in a row. He was, as far as he was concerned, just Marcus. Eleven years old. Four feet eleven inches tall — close enough to five feet that he sometimes rounded up when nobody was paying attention. A kid who liked comic books, building things, and spending too much time in his own head.

He lived at 14 Clover Street in the neighborhood of Halston Heights, a part of the city that most people either didn’t know existed or didn’t bother to learn about. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that made it onto travel blogs or tourist maps. There were no fancy coffee shops with chalkboard signs or boutique stores selling things nobody actually needed. What Halston Heights had was something quieter and harder to describe — a kind of warmth that lived in the cracks of the sidewalk and the sound of music drifting out of open windows on summer evenings. It had Mr. Beaumont’s barbershop on the corner of Fifth and Clover, where the old men sat outside on folding chairs and argued about basketball like it was a matter of national importance. It had Rosa’s Bakery, where the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon rolls hit you half a block away and made your legs walk faster without your brain’s permission. It had the community center on Eighth Street, and the little park on Vine where kids played until the streetlights came on and their moms hollered their names from front porches.

It was the kind of neighborhood that took care of its own, mostly. The kind where people knew your name, knew your grandmother’s name, and would not hesitate to tell your parents if they saw you doing something you had no business doing.

Marcus loved it. He wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

But lately, Halston Heights hadn’t felt quite the same. And Marcus knew exactly why.

Grandpa Earl was gone.

* * *

The house at 14 Clover Street had belonged to Earl James Washington for thirty-seven years. It was a tall brownstone with wide front steps, a black iron railing that Earl had installed himself, and window boxes on the second floor where he used to grow tomatoes every summer. The front door was a deep burgundy color — not red, not maroon, burgundy, Earl always insisted — and it had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head that Marcus had been terrified of as a toddler and now thought was the coolest thing in the world.

Earl Washington had been a lot of things in his seventy-four years. A Korean War veteran. A retired city engineer. A chess player of terrifying skill who had once beaten three opponents simultaneously at the community center and then gone home and made himself a sandwich like nothing had happened. He had been a husband to Marcus’s late grandmother, Nana Rose, who had passed when Marcus was only three. He had been a father to Marcus’s dad, David Washington, and a grandfather to Marcus in the fullest, most complete sense of the word.

He had also been the best storyteller Marcus had ever known.

On Friday evenings, when Marcus was younger, he would sit on the wide porch with Grandpa Earl while the neighborhood hummed and glowed around them, and Earl would tell stories. Not made-up stories — or at least, that’s what he always claimed. Stories about the city when it was younger. Stories about the people he’d known. Stories about things he’d seen, told with a particular gleam in his eye that made Marcus lean in closer every time.

“You know what the trouble with most people is?” Earl used to say, settling back in his old wooden rocking chair with a glass of sweet tea sweating in his hand. “They stop believing in things they can’t explain. The moment something doesn’t fit in their little box, they just —” he’d snap his fingers “— close their eyes to it. But the world is a whole lot bigger than anybody’s box, Marcus. You remember that.”

Marcus always said he would.

He was less sure he’d done a good job of it since Earl passed eight months ago. Because the world had felt smaller since then. Quieter. Like someone had turned the volume down on everything good and hadn’t quite turned it back up.

* * *

His parents — David and Lydia Washington — had decided to move into Grandpa Earl’s house three months after he passed. It made practical sense, his dad explained. The house was paid off. Their apartment had been getting expensive. And it felt like the right thing, to keep the house in the family, to keep it alive.

His mom had said it more simply: “Grandpa Earl put love into every corner of that house for thirty-seven years. I’m not letting strangers have it.”

So they’d moved in on a gray Saturday in October, carrying boxes up the front steps while the burgundy door stood open and the lion’s head knocker seemed to watch the whole operation with quiet approval. Marcus had stood in his new bedroom on the second floor — a room that had once been his dad’s childhood room, still faintly smelling of old wood and something Marcus couldn’t name but had come to think of as simply Grandpa — and looked out the window at Clover Street below.

This is home now, he’d thought.

And it was. Mostly.

* * *

On the particular Monday morning that this story truly begins — though Marcus had no idea anything was about to begin — he woke up at 6:47 a.m. to the sound of his father’s off-key singing drifting up from the kitchen.

David Washington had many wonderful qualities. He was patient, funny in a slow-building dad-joke kind of way, and could fix almost anything in the house with duct tape, a screwdriver, and a confident expression. He was not, by any objective measure, a good singer. But he sang constantly — in the shower, in the car, while doing dishes, while reading the newspaper — with the full-throated enthusiasm of a man who had either never been told he was bad or had been told and simply didn’t care.

Currently he appeared to be working his way through an old Stevie Wonder song, substituting words he couldn’t remember with the sound “dun dun dun” whenever necessary.

Marcus lay in bed for a moment, staring at the ceiling. The ceiling of this room had a small water stain in the upper left corner that was shaped, if you looked at it right, like a running dog. He had looked at it every morning for three months and it still looked like a running dog. He’d decided this was probably a good sign.

On the wall above his desk were four things: a poster of the solar system, a hand-drawn map of Halston Heights that he’d made himself in blue and black pen, a photograph of him and Grandpa Earl at the community center’s summer block party two years ago — both of them grinning at the camera, Earl’s arm around Marcus’s shoulders — and a small framed needlepoint that Nana Rose had apparently made decades ago, which read:

Greatness lives in you, young man.

It had hung in Grandpa Earl’s study for as long as Marcus could remember. His dad had given it to him when they moved in.

Marcus looked at it the way he looked at it every morning — for just a second, a quick glance that he told himself was casual but never really was — and then swung his legs out of bed.

* * *

The kitchen smelled like coffee and toast when he came downstairs, backpack already half-packed and dragging off one shoulder in the way his mom hated.

Lydia Washington was standing at the counter in her work clothes — she was a nurse at Halston Heights General, working early shifts three days a week — with a mug of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other, scrolling through something with the focused expression she wore when she was reading medical news or preparing to be concerned about something. She was a tall woman, warm brown skin, natural hair pulled back for work, with sharp eyes that didn’t miss much and a smile that could light up a room when she deployed it.

She deployed it now when she saw Marcus.

“Morning, baby,” she said, setting her phone down. “Sleep okay?”

“Yeah,” Marcus said, dropping into his chair at the kitchen table. “Dad’s singing woke me up.”

“Dad’s singing woke me up,” she said, raising her voice just slightly. “And I’ve been awake for an hour.”

From the other side of the kitchen, David Washington turned from the stove where he was scrambling eggs, spatula in hand, unbothered. He was a broad-shouldered man in his late thirties with a close-cut beard and his son’s same quiet, thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a blue button-down for work — he was an electrician, owned his own small company — and an apron that said GRILL MASTER in large letters, which had been a Father’s Day gift from Marcus and which he wore for all cooking, regardless of whether any grilling was involved.

“My singing,” David said with great dignity, “is a gift to this household.”

“The word gift is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” Lydia said.

Marcus grinned. This was a normal morning. This was a good morning. He settled into it the way you settle into a warm room after coming in from the cold.

His dad slid a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him — good eggs, fluffy and buttery, with a little hot sauce on the side the way Marcus liked — and a glass of orange juice, and then sat down across from him with his own plate.

“Big day today?” David asked.

Marcus shrugged. “Just school.”

“Just school,” his dad repeated, raising an eyebrow. “You know I’d have killed for just school at your age. School means your biggest problem is a pop quiz, not a broken circuit panel in a forty-year-old office building.”

“What happened to the office building?”

“Don’t ask. I’ll be there until dark.” David forked up some eggs. “How are things going? At school generally, I mean.”

Marcus focused on his orange juice. “Fine.”

He said it the way eleven-year-olds say fine — which is to say, in a way that answers the question technically while containing absolutely no actual information.

His dad looked at him for a moment with those quiet eyes, and Marcus had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of being slightly seen-through. But David Washington had a talent, which was knowing when to push and when to let a thing breathe.

“Okay,” his dad said simply, and went back to his eggs.

His mom kissed the top of his head on her way to grab her bag. “There’s a peanut butter sandwich in your lunch. And an apple. And don’t tell me you don’t like apples because I watched you eat three of them last week.”

“The small apples,” Marcus said. “Those big ones are too much apple.”

“That is not a thing,” she said, pulling on her jacket. “Have a good day, Marcus. David, please remember the plumber is coming at two.”

“I remember.”

“You said that last Thursday and then—”

“I remember, Lydia.”

She gave him a look that Marcus privately classified as The Look That Means I Love You But Also I’m Right, which she had deployed his entire life and which his dad always received with the practiced acceptance of a man who had made peace with his situation. Then she was out the door, a brief blast of cool morning air flowing through the kitchen before it swung shut behind her.

Marcus ate his eggs.

Outside, through the kitchen window, Clover Street was waking up. Mr. Peterson from next door was walking his ancient basset hound, Biscuit, who moved with the slow philosophical plod of an animal that had long ago made peace with the universe. Two kids from the block, the Mercer twins — nine years old, perpetually dirty, always running — were already outside for some reason, chasing each other around a parked car. A city bus groaned past, exhaling.

Normal. Ordinary. Just a Monday.

Marcus finished his eggs, drank his juice, grabbed his lunch from the counter, and told his dad goodbye. He shouldered his backpack properly — both straps, the way his mom liked — at least until he got to the end of the block, at which point he dropped it to one shoulder again.

He walked the four blocks to Langston Hughes Middle School the way he walked it every morning: alone.

Not lonely, exactly. Just alone. There was a difference, he’d decided. Lonely was a feeling. Alone was just a fact. He’d walked to school alone since fifth grade, when his best friend Jaylen had moved to the other side of the city and the walk that used to be half the fun had become just a walk.

He passed Rosa’s Bakery, which was already open. The smell of cinnamon and bread reached out and grabbed him like a friendly hand. Rosa herself — a small, round woman in her sixties who wore the same flour-dusted apron every single day and had known Grandpa Earl for decades — was wiping down the front window. She spotted Marcus and waved.

He waved back.

He passed Mr. Beaumont’s barbershop, not open yet, the chairs empty and the lights off, the sign in the window showing the hours in hand-painted letters. Mr. Beaumont had cut his hair since he was four years old. He always called Marcus “young scholar” and gave him butterscotch candies from a dish on the counter.

He passed the little park on Vine, empty at this hour except for a pair of pigeons engaged in what appeared to be a heated disagreement over a hot dog bun.

He walked. He thought. He arrived.

* * *

Langston Hughes Middle School was a wide, two-story brick building with tall windows and a front entrance flanked by two oak trees that were so old they’d buckled a section of the front walkway with their roots. Inside, it smelled the way all schools smelled — cleaning products and old paper and the particular human-sized chaos of several hundred young people gathered in one place five days a week.

Marcus liked school, mostly. He liked his English teacher, Ms. Okafor, who let the class choose their own novels once a month and who sometimes read out loud with voices so dramatic you forgot you were supposed to be learning. He liked his history teacher, Mr. Tillman, who had a wall of maps and made everything feel like a story rather than a list of dates. He was good at math, comfortable with science, and had once won the sixth-grade geography bee with an answer about river systems in Southeast Asia that had surprised even him.

What he didn’t like was the sixteen steps between the front entrance and his locker on the first floor. Specifically, what sometimes lived near those sixteen steps.

He got through nine of them that morning before he heard it.

“Yo. Marcus.”

He kept walking.

“Marcus. Hey. I’m talking to you.”

He made it to his locker. Turned the combination — right, left, right — and pulled it open. He focused on getting his books out in the right order, organizing what he needed for first and second period, keeping his movements calm and deliberate. Like if he just stayed in his own world long enough, the voice might lose interest and drift away.

It didn’t.

Darius Cole appeared at his side like a bad weather system rolling in — sudden and unwelcome and filling up the space around it. Darius was twelve, a year older than most of the other sixth graders, broadly built, with a way of taking up more room than he physically occupied. He was wearing a fresh pair of sneakers and a smirk that seemed to be his default expression, like his face had just gotten comfortable there.

Behind him, half a step back in the way he always was, was Trevor Mills — smaller, quicker, with sharp eyes that darted around constantly as if checking who was watching. Trevor was the audience. He was also the one who laughed, loudly and on cue, at everything Darius said, which Marcus had long suspected was his primary function.

“Didn’t hear me?” Darius said.

“I heard you,” Marcus said, not looking at him. He closed his locker.

“Then why’d you keep walking?”

Marcus finally looked at him. He made his face neutral — not afraid, not challenging, just neutral, a skill he had developed with some effort over the past few months. “Because I had to get to my locker.”

Darius looked at him for a moment, the smirk stretching. Then he reached out and flicked the strap of Marcus’s backpack. It was a small gesture, almost nothing. That was the thing about Darius — he rarely did anything dramatic enough to get in serious trouble. It was always small things. Flicking. Bumping. Saying just enough and never quite too much. He was good at it in the calculated way that some people are good at things they’ve practiced.

“You get that history homework done?” Darius asked.

Marcus felt something tighten in his chest. He knew where this was going. “Yeah.”

“Cool,” Darius said pleasantly. “Let me see it.”

“Get your own homework done.”

There was a small, sharp silence. Trevor made a sound that was either a laugh or a warning — it was hard to tell with Trevor.

Darius’s smirk didn’t disappear. If anything it settled in more comfortably. He leaned one shoulder against the locker next to Marcus’s. “You know,” he said, conversationally, “I think you need to work on your attitude. I’m just asking to see your homework. That’s not a big deal.”

“Then it shouldn’t be a big deal when I say no,” Marcus said.

He started walking.

He made it about three steps before Darius stuck out a foot. It wasn’t a full trip — nothing that obvious — just enough of an obstacle that Marcus caught it and lurched forward, his backpack swinging, and barely caught himself on the wall of lockers with one hand. His history textbook fell out of the unzipped front pocket and hit the floor with a flat slap.

Darius and Trevor were already walking away. Trevor was laughing. Darius glanced back once, not the smirk this time but something flatter, more satisfied.

Marcus stood up straight. He picked up his textbook. He looked at the back of Darius Cole’s head as the two of them rounded the corner and disappeared, and he felt — simultaneously and in no particular order — angry, embarrassed, tired, and something else that was harder to name.

He’d been dealing with Darius Cole since September. That was almost three months. And in that time, not one thing Marcus had tried — ignoring, deflecting, walking away, the neutral face — had made the slightest difference.

He clutched his textbook and walked to first period.

* * *

The rest of the morning was fine. English was good — Ms. Okafor had them discussing The Phantom Tollbooth, which Marcus had read twice already and loved more the second time. Math was fine. He sat with a kid named Jordan at lunch, a quiet, bespectacled boy who was almost entirely focused on his ham sandwich and the book propped open against his milk carton, and they had a comfortable sort of non-conversation that Marcus had come to appreciate. Not everyone needed to fill every silence.

After school, he stopped at Rosa’s and spent his leftover lunch money on a small bag of cinnamon cookies, because he was eleven and it was Monday and he felt he’d earned them.

He ate them on the walk home, one at a time, making them last. The afternoon had turned golden — that particular late-autumn late-afternoon color that made even ordinary streets look like they were lit for a movie. The oak trees along Vine had gone orange and red, and the wind kept pulling leaves loose and spinning them across the sidewalk in small busy spirals.

Marcus walked slowly. He wasn’t in a hurry to get home to an empty house — his mom worked until four on Mondays and his dad would be at the office building with the broken circuit panel until dark.

He thought about Darius Cole.

Not with fear. More with a dull, tired frustration, the way you think about a problem that won’t solve itself no matter how many times you look at it.

Why? was the question he always came back to. Not why me — he wasn’t interested in self-pity. Just why at all? What did Darius get out of it? The tiny power of it? The audience? Marcus had turned this question over and over for months and never arrived at an answer that satisfied him. Some things didn’t have satisfying answers. Grandpa Earl had told him that too.

“Some people are in pain, Marcus, and they push it out. Some people are scared and they act big. Some people are just — for whatever reason — not there yet. That doesn’t make it okay. But understanding a thing is different from excusing it.”

He remembered the way Earl had said it — sitting on the porch, the summer before last, after Marcus had come home upset about something a kid at summer camp had done. He remembered the warm evening air and the way Grandpa Earl’s voice had been — calm and certain, the way deep water is calm. Not performing calmness. Just being it.

He wondered if he would ever be that calm about anything.

He reached 14 Clover Street and climbed the front steps. The lion’s head knocker gleamed in the afternoon light. He let himself in with his key, dropped his backpack in the front hall, and stood for a moment in the quiet of the house.

It smelled like Grandpa Earl still. Just faintly. Mostly it smelled like his parents’ things now, their furniture and cooking and life. But somewhere underneath there was still that old, warm smell — of wood and machine oil and the particular brand of pipe tobacco Earl had quit twenty years ago but that seemed to have soaked permanently into the walls.

Marcus stood there for a moment, breathing it in.

Then he went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, ate the last two cinnamon cookies, and sat at the kitchen table doing homework for an hour until his mom came home and the house filled back up with light and sound and the good ordinary noise of a family at the end of a Monday.

At dinner his dad came home, still smelling faintly of electrical work, and talked about the circuit panel with the long-suffering affection of a man who actually loved his job even when it drove him crazy. His mom talked about a patient who had given her hand-drawn flowers as a thank you, which she’d stuck to the corkboard in the break room. Marcus talked about The Phantom Tollbooth because it was easier than talking about Darius Cole, and because he genuinely wanted to, and because some days the best part of a hard day is the good part you hold onto.

After dinner he did the dishes — his turn — and then went upstairs and read for a while and then lay in the dark with his eyes open, looking at the ceiling.

The running-dog stain was invisible in the dark. But he knew it was there.

He thought about Grandpa Earl’s basement.

His dad had mentioned it twice since they moved in — mentioned they should sort through it, go through Earl’s things, figure out what to keep and what to donate. Each time, something had come up. Each time, they’d put it off. Marcus hadn’t pushed. The basement felt — not scary, exactly. Just significant, in a way he couldn’t explain. Like a closed book he wasn’t quite ready to open.

He didn’t know why he was thinking about it now.

He turned over and closed his eyes.

Just Marcus, he thought, in the almost-asleep drift of it. Just an ordinary kid in an ordinary house on an ordinary street.

He was right.

For about three more days.