Dedication
To Gwen and Henry and all their cousins,
who listened patiently to the first draft of this story
over one long Christmas holiday in Austin,
while waiting for the food to arrive.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
One
AFTER SCHOOL, the first thing I do when I get home is take off my jacket and tie and put on my home clothes—a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt.
“Just like your dad,” Mom says, standing in the doorway. “Want a snack?”
“Sure.”
Mom pops two Eggo waffles in the toaster. I grab them when they’re ready and eat in front of the TV. Then I do my homework. If I hurry up, I can see Jake before dinner. He lives on the seventh floor of our apartment building, three floors below us, and I take the elevator down and ring the bell and wait in the hallway until Mrs. Schultz answers the door. She knows me pretty well. I mean, she just says, “Hi, Ben,” and kind of stands aside, like a matador, so I can charge past.
Jake’s in his bedroom. It has a big window with all his trophies on the windowsill. Baseball trophies, basketball trophies. And behind them, and down below, you can see the people on the sidewalk and the taxis on the road, like toy people and taxis. Jake’s walls are covered in posters—he has a big Carmelo Anthony poster over his bed. Jake’s a huge Knicks fan. That’s one of the things he likes to talk about.
Today he’s in a bad mood because he got a 63 on his spelling test. He’s still wearing his school uniform. For boys it’s blue shorts or pants and a white shirt and a blue tie and a blue jacket that says Latymer on it, with a kind of oak tree or something stitched into the name. If you want, you can wear a bow tie instead of a regular one, but only a few kids do that, and everybody thinks they’re—I mean, either they’re joking or they’re weird.
Jake somehow manages to wear his uniform like it’s home clothes, like he’s just slouching around in them on a Saturday morning. His trousers hang down and drag against his shoes; his tie is always crooked.
“What’d you get wrong?” I ask, trying to be helpful. Spelling is one of the things I’m pretty good at, and I look at the paper on his desk.
“Everything.”
It was a contraction test—he put all the apostrophes between the words instead of where the missing letter should be. But he gets up and pulls the test away from me. He doesn’t want to talk about it, because when he gets a bad grade he’s not allowed to play on his Nintendo Wii.
“You know what my dad’s going to say?”
“What?” I ask.
“He always says the same thing. Is this what I pay all that money for?”
Latymer’s a private school—it costs $45,000 a year. Actually, Jake’s parents don’t pay all that; they can’t afford it, so he gets financial aid. But we don’t really talk about that. My dad makes a lot of money, but he doesn’t like to spend it—“throwing it around,” he calls it. So Jake has more stuff than I do, which is weird, because he acts like he has to feel sorry for me when really . . . but it doesn’t matter.
“I can’t believe our parents pay for us to go to school.”
Jake says, “I mean, just give me the money. We wouldn’t have to do any homework, we wouldn’t have to sit there all day.”
“What are you going to do with forty-five thousand dollars?” I ask.
“Think of all the pizza that could buy.”
“You can’t spend forty-five thousand dollars on pizza.”
“What do you think’s the most expensive pizza you could make?”
We can spend hours talking about this kind of stuff.
Jake says, “Caviar pizza.”
“That’s disgusting. The most expensive food you can get is truffles,” I say.
Sometimes I cook with my mom. She buys me cookbooks and baking books for Christmas and my birthday because I like to read the recipes, even if I’m never going to make them and even if I wouldn’t like them anyway.
“Truffles are chocolate,” he says.
“That’s a different kind. This is the kind that grows underground—they’re like mushrooms. You have to get specially trained pigs to dig for them.”
“You’re making this stuff up,” he says.
“It’s true. You can spend thousands of dollars on truffles. You can eat gold, too,” I say.
Jake stares at me. “You cannot eat gold.”
“You totally can. I had it in a restaurant once—pasta with gold leaf.”
“What’s it taste like?”
“I couldn’t really taste it; it just looked cool.”
So instead of going to school for a year, we could make a pizza with caviar, which is fish eggs, and truffles, which pigs have to dig for, and gold leaf on top.
“That is one disgusting-sounding pizza,” Jake says. “I think I’d rather go to school.”
He seems cheered up. “Let’s play basketball,” he says.
Jake’s dad put a backboard and hoop over the kitchen door, so we can play with a foam ball. Our games get pretty rough. Jake is bigger than me; he’s stronger, too. I know this for a fact, because he likes to make me arm wrestle against him, and afterward he always says stuff like That was pretty close, to be nice.
So we go into the kitchen and start horsing around. It always puts him in a good mood to beat me at some game. He pushes me out of the way and dunks on the hoop, which rattles against the kitchen door. “You’re not even trying,” he says. “You have to stand up for yourself.”
This is his idea of a joke, because it’s the kind of thing my dad always says.
They’ve got a big wooden table in the middle of the kitchen that takes up most of the room. Mrs. Schultz is sitting there, drinking coffee and trying to read a magazine. But she says, “You guys are too noisy,” and leaves. “I’ll be in my room. Jake, your father and I are going out tonight.”
This kind of thing happens only in Jake’s house. In my house if we’re too noisy we have to shut up. But anyway, Jake’s mom leaves her coffee mug on the table and when Jake blocks my shot he kind of pushes me, too. I don’t know, I guess he must have knocked me into the table because the mug falls on the floor with a crash and breaks. There is still some coffee in it.
Their kitchen has black-and-white tiles, and now there’s a puddle of cold coffee all over them. I know the coffee is cold because I try to pick up some of the pieces of the mug, and it’s just . . . it’s just a mess. The mug has a photograph on it, a picture of a pine tree with a mountain behind it, and the words Yosemite National Park written around the side. That’s where Jake went on vacation last summer. There are some big bits of broken mug, like the handle, and some kind of chalky powder in between them, which has turned to mush.
“Do you think she’s gonna be mad?” I ask Jake.
“Nah, she won’t be mad,” Jake says. “She won’t even know.”
“What do you mean?”
Jake is the kind of red-haired kid with a lot of freckles. All the m
oms think he’s cute so he always gets away with stuff—I mean, ever since we were little. He has one of those faces where it looks like he’s smiling, even if he doesn’t mean to. But he’s smiling now.
“Well, we’re not going to tell her,” Jake says. He looks at me and shrugs. “I don’t want to get you into trouble.”
Jake grabs a dustpan and brush from the broom cupboard in the kitchen. He gives them to me and I get down on my knees and try to sweep up the pieces. They keep getting stuck on the rubber lip of the dustpan.
“Sometimes my mom glues broken plates or bowls back together,” I say. “Maybe your mom can still fix it up. If we wash off all the pieces.”
“Nah. Just dump it in the garbage,” he says. “She’ll never know.” So that’s what I do.
Jake takes a mop from the cupboard and tries to mop up the coffee, but that only spreads it around. Eventually he finds a roll of Bounty paper towels on the kitchen counter, and we both get down on the floor and start wiping up the mess by hand. We must use almost a whole roll. Our hands are full of soggy bits of paper towel. But we stuff them in the garbage, too. I even dry off the dustpan and brush, because otherwise it seems pretty obvious that somebody has made a mess. We put everything back in the cupboard. Nobody has seen us; nobody came in. The kitchen looks like it did before.
My heart is still beating too fast, and I say to Jake, “I feel like we’re lying about something.”
But he laughs. “We’re not lying, we’re just not telling anybody. Don’t worry. My mom wouldn’t care anyway.”
“But if she wouldn’t care, why don’t we tell her?”
“Forget about it,” he says. “I’m in enough trouble already.” He means the spelling test.
I want to say, But that doesn’t make sense—you’re contradicting yourself. But I let it go. Until I get home, when I tell my mom. It’s supposed to be, like, a funny story, like, look what Jake made me do. She’s putting supper on the table—we usually eat together before my dad gets back from work. At least, that’s what we’ve started to do recently.
She looks at me with a kind of twist in her mouth. She doesn’t seem mad, but she doesn’t seem happy about it either. “Don’t worry about it, Ben,” she says, because she can see my face. “These things happen. I can talk to Mrs. Schultz about it tomorrow. She’ll understand. It’s not a big deal. It’s just—it’s usually better—just to tell people this kind of thing right away.”
“I wanted to, but Jake wouldn’t let me.”
“Jake isn’t the boss of you,” Mom says.
Later that night, when I’m getting ready for bed, my dad checks in on me. He usually works late, but if he gets home in time, he comes in and kisses me good night. But this time he stands in the doorway in his suit and tie and looks at me for a minute. “Hey, Dad,” I say.
“All right, kid. I think you’ve got a little explaining to do. Come on.”
I guess Mom must have told him, because even though it’s almost eleven o’clock and I’m already in my pajamas, he marches me into the hallway. Mom is standing there, looking upset. “What’s the point?” she says to him. “I mean, if I can’t even tell you a dumb thing like that without . . .” But he ignores her and she follows us out to the elevator while we wait for the doors to open.
“What are you doing to him?” she says. “What are you trying to prove? His sense of guilt is already overdeveloped.”
“What does that mean?” My dad keeps pushing the elevator button. It sometimes takes a while for it to come.
“It means he never does anything wrong. He’s scared to. Even his teachers say . . .”
“What do his teachers say?” my dad asks.
I look back and forth between them. They’re talking about me like I’m not even there.
“They wouldn’t mind if he acted up once in a while. Mrs. Klaussen told me that herself. The kids treat him like a Goody Two-shoes.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being good,” my dad says, and the elevator arrives—the doors open, and Mom watches us from the hallway as we get in.
Dad and I ride down to Jake’s apartment in silence.
He rings the doorbell, kind of angrily. Jake’s mother answers it. She’s wearing a long dress and has on bright red lipstick, but her hair is a mess. She keeps brushing it back with her hand.
“I think Ben has something to tell you,” my dad says, in a different voice. I mean, he doesn’t sound angry anymore. At least not with her.
I like Mrs. Schultz. She always lets you have as much ketchup as you want when you eat tater tots at her house. And a second bowl of ice cream. She’s one of those moms who looks younger than the teachers, like she’s Jake’s big sister or something. I don’t want her to think I . . . I don’t want to disappoint her.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Schultz. I think I broke one of your mugs when Jake and I were playing basketball.”
“You think you broke it?” my dad says.
I look down and take a breath. “I broke it.”
“Oh.” But Mrs. Schultz only seems confused. “We have too many mugs anyway,” she says to my dad. To me she says, “Don’t worry about it, Ben. Really—it’s not a big deal. But thank you for your apology.”
She closes the door, and when we’re waiting for the elevator to take us back to our apartment, my dad asks me, “How do you play basketball in a kitchen?”
I think he’s trying to be nice. Maybe he feels bad about embarrassing me, I don’t know. We’re not really used to being alone together, and I have that feeling you get when you run into a teacher on your own for some reason in the school hallway, and they have to think of something to say to you, and you have to think of something to say to them.
“Jake’s dad put up a hoop on the back of the door. They don’t really care what we do in there. I mean, they just let us play.”
I’m still mad at him, but he just nods.
Our building is this old-fashioned building and even the elevator is, like, a hundred years old. Sometimes it takes forever to come—there are these lights over the doors on each floor, which show where it is, so basically you can watch it crawling along, and if it gets stuck somewhere, while people go in and out, you can watch that, too. I stand there looking up at these lights because I don’t want to look at my dad.
My dad says, “Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I got it wrong.”
I don’t say anything, and he goes on: “Because I’m not around very much, when I get home, if I feel like . . . there are things going on that really it’s my job to kind of deal with, as your father, and I have this very narrow window of time in which to deal with them, sometimes I . . .”
Then the elevator opens and we get in. It’s empty—I was hoping somebody might be in it, so we wouldn’t have to talk. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” he asks. “In my job, it happens all the time. Things go wrong that you don’t want anyone to know about. But there are people you can trust and people you can’t trust—that’s the basic dividing line. And, believe me, you want to be on the right side of that line.” He’s getting worked up again. “Ben, look at me,” he says suddenly. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
I turn and look at him, right in the eyes. I don’t even blink.
He’s wearing his dark gray suit, which he always wears to work. It has thin white stripes and makes him look even taller than he actually is. I’m not very tall. In school pictures, the photographer always lines me up at the front, with the big kids behind me. Sometimes I think my dad . . . sometimes I think he’s disappointed that I’m not going to be as tall as him.
He sighs. “I’m not explaining myself very well.”
The elevator opens again, and we walk silently into our apartment.
As I lie in bed (I always leave the door open a little, to let the hall light in), I can hear my parents arguing about me.
Two
MY PARENTS ARGUE all the time. Not argue exactly, but bicker—that’s my mom’s word for it. “Let’s not bi
cker in front of Ben,” she always says. The problem is, my dad has to travel a lot for work, and my mom misses him. “What do you expect me to do?” he says. “It’s my job. What do you think pays for all this?”
He means not only my school but our big apartment on the tenth floor, which has a view of Central Park from the living room window. He means the restaurants and movies we go to and our summer vacations on the beach. Maria, the cleaning lady who comes twice a week, and my mom’s pretty clothes and handbags and stuff like that.
“It must be nice to be such an important person,” she tells him.
Sometimes I think, if I say the right thing, everybody will get along. Like once, when I was seven and they were arguing about money, I said, “You can sell me. How much am I worth?”
And they stopped arguing and looked at each other. There were tears in Mom’s eyes—sometimes she’ll cry at anything, but she’s hard to predict. Sometimes she doesn’t react at all. Dad said, “Ten bucks. I’ll give you ten bucks for him.” And Mom said, “Fifteen. Look at those cheeks. Fifteen dollars.” And Dad said, “Twenty.” And they went on like that for a while, saying stuff like “Look at those nice brown eyes, look at his hair.”
“He needs a haircut. That’ll cost something.”
But when I say stuff like that now, it doesn’t work anymore.
Dad decides to walk me to school in the morning—maybe he wants to make up for last night. It’s only a few blocks. I can see Central Park when I come out of the lobby, which is the big famous park in the middle of New York, with trees everywhere, and funny artificial hills and curvy paths, and even a zoo and a castle. Then we go left to 91st Street, and left again. Everybody seems angry in the morning or in a hurry: drivers honk their horns; you can see school buses stuck in traffic; and I’m happy we don’t have to get in a car, especially when the weather is like this—breezy and sunny.
“Are you going away on business?” I ask my dad. This is sometimes why he walks me in the morning—when I won’t see him for a few days.
“I’m sorry, Son,” he says. “Yes, I’ll be sleeping on the plane.”
I can see Jake and his mom up ahead, waiting for the light to change, and we cross over together. When we reach the sidewalk again, Jake taps me on the shoulder.
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