Tomorrow People

The year they took San Francisco and my sister forever away, I was still a baby. But in 2038, I was eleven years old, going on twelve.

My family lived, in those days, on a cul-de-sac named after an extinguished tribe of Native Americans, in a house nearly a century old, a split-level ranch from the days of roof antennas. Next door, in a house of nearly identical size and design, lived my best friend since kindergarten, a boy who'd learned during the course of our fifth-grade genealogy project that there'd been a lynching in his family tree. In tribute to that great-uncle, my friend had changed his name to Zebedee. Only I still called him Plaxico. Of the twelve families in our subdivision, five (including Plaxico's) were black; seven (counting mine) white. It was an aberration of racial demographics that, since I had moved there, eight years earlier, we'd had no brown-skinned neighbors—until Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed al-Nasr became the son and heir of Franklin D. Banfelder, a widower who every summer would bestow ice pops upon the children of the neighborhood, the same way he'd bestowed chocolate, back in his days as a contract soldier, upon the children of the faraway homeland of Abdelkarim.

Mr. Banfelder had left town a week after school ended, not telling anyone where he was going. No sooner did he disappear than the periodical cicadas tunneled out of their underground cells for the first time since the year 2021. One evening around sunset, we heard a whisper everywhere. The nymphs were coming out. Shuffling by the millions to the trunks of trees and crawling up to the leafy branches. They made no sound that night. By the next morning, they had started to molt. I discovered one in my window, bonded to the fine wires of the screen. The insect wasn't free of itself yet. The nymphal body had dehisced down the back, a divide so clean it looked like the work of a surgeon; and the new body, white and waxen, was humping through the cleft. After the back, the head began to break open—the eyes diverged and new eyes came into view, looking directly into mine.

By the time Mr. Banfelder's micro-compact reappeared, our world was dizzy with their noise. We'd heard a rumor. Mr. B had gone to Iraq. Gone by himself but come back with a kid. My friends and I rode over there, the tires of our bikes crushing a crust of shed exoskeletons; and when Mr. B answered the doorbell and saw the four of us on the porch, he got a look on his face like he'd been waiting all morning, and said: "Boys, there's someone I want you to meet. Dorian, Dean, Zeb, Damian . . . This is Abdelkarim."

And there he was.

The kid who was like us except he wasn't, because his skin wasn't white and it wasn't black. (It was, I would later determine, the shade of the crayon in my box called "tumbleweed.")

"Does he speak English?" Dean asked.

"Ask him," said Mr. B, lighting up a green. "He doesn't bite."

"Okay. Do you speak English?"

"Qalilan," the kid said.

"That means 'a little bit' in Arabic." Then Mr. Banfelder spoke to the boy in his native tongue, nodded encouragingly, pointing to the four of us.

Finally, the kid said: "I pledge allegiance . . . to the flag . . . of . . ."

"Of . . . the United States . . ."

"United States . . ."

"Of . . ."

"Of . . ."

"America."

"Amereeka."

I wondered if they were going to recite the whole thing word by word, then maybe sing the national anthem. But Mr. Banfelder just nodded, as if very proud of the boy's effort. At long last, he said: "Ice pops, anyone?"

We followed him into the kitchen, where there were now five chairs around the glass table instead of the usual four.

"Take a load off," said Mr. B. "How have you boys been? I leave for a week and return to find a plague being visited. What the hell'd you do while...