"He doesn't have a message slip for his balloon," Lydia said, clearly trying to stifle her giggles.
"That won't do," Ms. Randolph told Brent. "You can't send up a balloon without a message. Pick one of the sample sayings I put on the board. Or write one of your own."
Brent couldn't imagine sending aloft a message like MAKE LOVE OR MONEY--NOT WAR. It insulted his dad's memory. It was naive, unheroic, and mercenary, all at the same time. So he said he'd do a message of his own, and Ms. Randolph gave him a noteBook and a felt-tipped pen and guided him to a picnic table on the edge of the gravel yard from which their balloons would soon go flying.
"Chop-chop, Mr. Sarcoxie. You're holding us all up. Lydia's getting chilly."
Brent hunched over the noteBook, considering. Eventually, he printed a message. Then he reconsidered, wrote a second slogan on another page, reconsidered again, tapped his pen on the table, tore out a page, handed it to Ms. Randolph.
She read his slogan aloud: "'THE BUSINESS OF WAR IS TO PRODUCE PEACE. ENLIST IN THAT BUSINESS TODAY.'"
Ms. Randolph's brow furrowed. His message, Brent knew, had a wonky pool-ball English on it that troubled her. But it was a call for peace. She had no grounds to make him write a toe-the-party-line substitute. After all, he was sitting on his real feelings and following her directions. Ms. Randolph distractedly handed his slogan back to him.
"Okay," she said. "Okay." But her brow stayed corrugated, and when she started walking toward the helium dispenser where all the other kids were jostling for a place, she swished her calico skirts as if trying to ward off out-of-season horse flies.
Brent wadded up the message that she had just okayed and tossed it into a nearby trash barrel. Then he ripped out the first slogan he'd written, folded it into a packet small enough to push through the lips of an uninflated balloon, and swaggered to the noisy queue at the helium dispenser.
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