Fog City Ground

He wanted a trade. He asked one time, at fourteen, and the man never lifted his head.

Marcus Boyd is the biggest kid on the block and the loudest one on the corner, and not one person out there knows what he actually wants.

He has wanted it since he was eleven years old, standing across the street watching a crew jack a whole sinking house back up onto its feet. So the summer he turns fourteen he irons a shirt, walks down to the plumbing shop on Cabrillo, and asks.

The man behind the bench says two words without ever looking up.

It takes Marcus four years to walk back through that door. Four years of standing on a corner two hundred feet from his own best friends, telling them he's good. And the whole time, a girl named Jordan is watching him from the other side of that street, and she knows exactly what he is, and she is waiting on him to come find out for himself.

What Marcus turns out to be good at is the part of a house nobody ever sees. The concrete. The ground. The work that only pays off on a day that may never come.

And on the night the water rises in the Avenues, the biggest kid on the block finds out that the most important thing he will ever do is stand in a doorway and make sure something doesn't happen.

A big-hearted San Francisco story about getting told no, coming back anyway, and the people who look up when you walk in.

Readers 12 and up. Includes a Reader's Guide, a concrete-and-crawlspace safety page, and a real look at how a person becomes a foundation contractor.