Rick

by Alex Gino

  He turned to say see ya to Jeff, but Jeff had slipped several people ahead and was already going down the hall in the other direction. Jeff didn’t like goodbyes, not even when you would see each other again in a few hours.

  Rick checked the numbers painted above the classroom doors until he was standing in front of room 326. This was it, the official start of middle school. “Come on!” groaned a kid behind him, and Rick stepped into the classroom. It was slightly chillier than the hallway, and much brighter. A woman with large, bouncy curls of chestnut hair stood at the front of the room. She looked too young and too happy to be a middle school teacher, but there she was, her name written on the whiteboard in large capital letters: MS. MEDINA.

  Rick stood next to a group of boys who were too involved in a picture one of them was sketching to notice him. The bell rang and a few last kids ended their hallway conversations and dashed into the room.

  Ms. Medina held a sheet of paper in her hand and stood at the desk in the corner. “As I call your name, please come take your seat quietly. Annie Allen,” she began, and a short girl with white-blonde hair made her way up to the desk at the front of the room.

  “Basil Chan, Alia Damon, David Delgado.” Ms. Medina made her way down the desks in a line, calling out the names of the students who were to occupy them.

  “Melissa Mitchell.” The girl with the blue skirt was the first student in the third row. Ms. Medina kept calling out names. At the start of the next row, Rick was assigned to the desk immediately behind Melissa.

  Once everyone was seated, Ms. Medina gave out class schedules along with a speech about the importance of starting middle school on the right foot and making time each day not only to complete your assignments but also to keep on top of what lay in store for the following days and weeks.

  “The bell to move to first period will ring in a few minutes. In the meantime, I want you to turn to someone near you, quietly introduce yourself, and tell them one thing you’re excited for this year.”

  The kid on Rick’s left turned to his left, and the kid behind him had turned to the kid behind her, so Rick was glad to see the girl with the blue skirt turn back and wave.

  “Hi.” He gave a small wave back. “I’m Rick.”

  “I know.” Melissa smiled with a mix of nerves and glee.

  And that’s when Rick realized that the girl in the blue skirt was no stranger. He had gone to school with her since first grade. He even used to play checkers with her, before he and Jeff had become best friends.

  “Wait, is that you, G—?”

  Melissa stopped him with a raised finger as well as her voice. “I don’t use that name anymore. You can call me Melissa.”

  “Oh. Um, hi.”

  “Yeah, hi.”

  They sat there for a moment in the din of introductions, just seeing each other.

  “You look good.” Rick meant it. Not the way Jeff would, but more like she looked happy. Last year, her hair had been in her face and her eyes were almost always focused on the ground. Now her reddish-brown hair was brushed back and her eyes were looking right at Rick.

  “Thanks.”

  Rick’s brain felt like a vacuum, and the next words that came to his mind popped right out of his mouth. “So you’re …”

  “I’m a girl. A transgender girl. I wanted to come to school as myself last year, but my mom said I should wait for a fresh start in middle school.”

  “That makes sense, I guess.”

  Melissa shrugged. “It would have been nice to stop hiding sooner.”

  “That makes sense too.” Rick gave a small, awkward smile. He would have thought it would be weird to meet a transgender girl, but it wasn’t, really. At least, not if the girl was Melissa. He continued, “So I guess I know what you’re excited about this year.”

  Melissa laughed. “Nervous too, but mostly excited. What about you?”

  “I dunno. The regular stuff, I guess. Changing classes sounds kinda fun.”

  “Yeah,” said Melissa. “Wanna see my binder?”

  Melissa brought out a purple binder that she had drawn intricate geometric designs on in permanent marker. Rick brought out his, which was plain black but had already been set up with each class assigned a color tab—red for math, yellow for Spanish, blue for English.

  When the bell rang, the room devolved into a whirl of chaos. Rick found himself right behind Melissa in the rush to the door, where the kid who had been next to Melissa in the yard waited, bouncing in place. From the front, her T-shirt read, WARNING: RUNS WITH SCISSORS.

  “I missed you!” The kid practically pounced on Melissa.

  “Kelly, homeroom was fifteen minutes long.”

  “A person could drown in fifteen minutes!”

  And then they were gone, arm in arm, heading down the hallway and exclaiming over each other’s schedules.

  Rick wondered what it would be like to have a best friend you could throw your arm over the shoulder of without worrying that they might make fun of you. Jeff was great in a lot of ways, but their friendship wasn’t like that. Nor was Jeff the kind of friend who wanted to hear that a person could, in fact, drown nearly four times in fifteen minutes, assuming a standard of four minutes from first struggle to death from lack of oxygen to the brain. When Rick corrected stuff like that, Jeff told him not to think so hard.

  Rick didn’t see Jeff again until lunch. In between, he had been to three different classes with three different teachers and been assigned four different seats to remember, including homeroom. His mind was swirling, and his backpack was heavy with textbooks. By then, the idea that George could be a girl seemed a bit less sensible, and the idea that it would freak Jeff out because he had talked about whether she was cute was a bit more appealing.

  “Remember that girl in the blue skirt from this morning?”

  “You mean the hot one?”

  “Yeah, well, she sits in front of me in homeroom, and I found something out …”

  “How was she close up?”

  But then Melissa’s smile from this morning passed across Rick’s mind and his stomach burbled and it didn’t feel at all exciting to tell Jeff that she was the same kid he had bullied for years.

  “I dunno. Fine, I guess.”

  “You gotta pay more attention. I mean, you’ve gotta notice a good butt when it’s sitting right in front of you. Sometimes, it’s like I have to explain everything to you. So, what’d you find out?”

  Rick hesitated. “Just that her name is Melissa.”

  “So?”

  “I thought you might want to know.”

  “Dude, I don’t need her name. I need info I can use. Does she have anything up here?” Jeff brought his hands up to his chest.

  Rick shrugged. He didn’t want to think about Melissa like that. “Her voice is nice.”

  Jeff eyed Rick with a note of disappointment. “Whatever. There are hotter girls around.”

  “But you were the one who said she …” Rick was too flabbergasted to finish his sentence.

  “Don’t get caught in a web of details, Rick. The point is, we’re in middle school now. We don’t need to get hung up on one girl.”

  If there was one thing that made less sense to Rick than the way Jeff knew someone was cute, it was the way Jeff knew he wasn’t all that interested anymore. It was like he had a switch he could turn on and off whenever he chose, like it was a lamp or something.

  The whole liking people thing was a complete mystery to Rick. And he wasn’t about to ask Jeff to explain it.

  After school, Rick grabbed a handful of quarters from his jar and sat on the living room floor. Twirling Washingtons was relaxing, and he was getting good at a new trick of stopping the quarter mid-spin with the pad of his finger. When he lifted the finger, the coin would stay on its side, at least some of the time.

  Rick was still practicing when Dad came in from his garage office, where he worked as a general contractor.

  “Hey, bud,” Dad said. “How was the first day of m
iddle school?”

  “Exhausting. By the time we each got an assigned seat and a textbook in one class, it was practically time to get back up again. Then we had to search around for the next classroom, where we had to stand against the walls and do it all over again.”

  “And just think, soon you’ll be complaining about homework and tests and wishing all you had to do was stand around and get your textbooks.”

  “Thanks, Dad. That really cheers me up.”

  “It couldn’t have all been bad. Were there any cute girls?”

  Rick shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I was too busy trying to find my classes.”

  “Oh, trust me, Ricky, you’re never too busy to take a look at a girl.” Sometimes Dad was worse than Jeff. “Or a boy.” Mom probably told him to say that part. “You may be a late bloomer, but don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to take in the views, if you know what I mean.”

  Rick knew what Dad meant, and it made him feel like he was coated in a sticky layer of ick. He didn’t even have homework as an excuse to get out of the conversation. “I’ll look around tomorrow. I promise.”

  “I believe in you, bud.” Dad laughed.

  Rick hadn’t meant it to be funny. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Alright, then. I gotta put in another hour before I can call it quits for the day.” Dad grabbed a can of soda from the fridge and headed back to the garage.

  Rick pulled up an old episode of Extreme Calligraphers’ Challenge. ECC was a public television show that was pretty much what it sounded like. Rick and Diane had gotten hooked on the first episode and couldn’t get enough of the swirling cursive lettering and the goofy banter between the competitors and the host. This was the one when C. J. lost the semifinal competition because he misspelled one of the judges’ names. Ever since, “pulling a C. J.” meant really messing something up.

  Rick was pretty sure his liking-people neurons were pulling a C. J. At least C. J. got to leave the show and return to the real world, where no one cared what his calligraphy skills were like. Rick had to keep pretending and deflecting while everyone, even his father, seemed to think he should turn into some sort of hormonal beast now that he was in middle school.

  Rick wished Diane was still around. Not even to talk to, but just to be there. If Diane were home, she would make popcorn and Rick would load up the latest episode of Extreme Calligraphers’ Challenge.

  She wouldn’t ask Rick about hot girls, and if he liked any of them.

  That, Rick thought, would be a big relief.

  “If Grandpa Ray wants to talk to people, why doesn’t he just go out and make friends?”

  Rick sat in the passenger seat of Dad’s car on Sunday. They were on the way to the big block of a building where Grandpa Ray lived, with its crisscross mowed lawn, green bushes that lined the walkway to the front door, and a sign hanging from the second floor that read Sunrise Apartments. Rooms Available. There were always rooms available at Sunrise Apartments.

  “Grandpa Ray has friends,” said Dad. “But sometimes grandparents like to receive visits from their grandchildren, and today the torch has been passed on to you.”

  Rick’s older brother, Thomas, started visiting Grandpa Ray in high school as something to write about on his college applications. When he started college, Diane took his place. And now, Rick had inherited the position. Rick had messaged Diane that morning to ask what her meetings with Grandpa Ray used to be like, but he hadn’t heard back.

  Grandpa Ray was an okay guy, but Rick had mostly seen him at holidays and birthdays, where Grandpa Ray pretty much sat in a corner, listening to the other adults talk. Rick and Grandpa Ray had never said much more than a few sentences to each other at once.

  “It’s gonna be so boring. What are we even going to say for two and a half hours? I don’t think we’ve talked that long combined in our entire lives.”

  “Well, you can always tell him about your first week at school.”

  Rick groaned. Going to school was bad enough without having to run through it all over again. Homework from a legion of teachers was already worse than homework from one.

  “Dad’s quiet in large groups, but I know you’ll like him once you get to know him more one-on-one. Thomas and Diane always had a great time. Maybe he’ll show you some pictures of your Grandma Rose.”

  Grandma Rose had died six months before Rick was born, which meant that he was the only member of his family who had never met her. Rick thought it was weird to call a person he had never met Grandma, but that’s how adults were. Rick didn’t want to look at photos of a dead person, and he really didn’t want to spend the afternoon listening to stories about one.

  “If he’s so great, why don’t you spend the afternoon with him?”

  “I see him for coffee on Thursdays. Today, I’m going back home to spend a kid-free afternoon with your mother.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t make me pull The Parent Card. You’re going. There’s more to your Grandpa Ray than you know. He’s led a full life and has a lot of interests. I’m sure you’ll find something to connect over. There’s plenty about him I still don’t know myself.”

  Rick crossed his arms and would have full-on sulked, but the trip to Sunrise Apartments was so short that Dad was already turning onto the block before he could work up a good one.

  “Tell you what, bud. If you have a terrible time, we’ll pick up ice cream on the way home.”

  “Does that mean I don’t get ice cream if I have a good time? That’s not fair.”

  “Fine. We’ll stop at Robin’s either way.”

  Rick grinned. It was hard to be upset knowing that two scoops of triple chocolate fudge with chocolate sprinkles were just hours from partying in his mouth.

  At the heavy metal-and-glass door, Rick pressed the button for apartment 4E. Moments later the door buzzed and the lock released, letting him into an airy lobby with a marble mantel under a large mirror, and an old, intricate ironwork banister leading up a set of stairs. The door to the left of the stairs had a diamond-shaped window that opened into the darkness of an elevator shaft. He pressed the button and a machine below hummed, clacked, and rattled until the diamond window of the door lined up with the diamond window of the elevator. Then it stopped and Rick waited until he realized he would need to open the door himself.

  Rick had been to Grandpa Ray’s building plenty of times to pick him up on the way to visit his cousins with Mom and Dad, but he couldn’t remember ever going up to the apartment before. He held his breath and counted the diamonds of light as the small window passed the door on each floor, thankful that the lobby already counted as the first. Ka-thunk-a-chunka-creak. Two. Bumpa-bumpa-bumpa-bumpa-rattttttle. Three. Scheee-screee-schreeech-boomp. Four.

  Rick exhaled with relief as he pushed open the door and stepped out into the hallway. Grandpa Ray was waiting at the door of his apartment and waved Rick inside. He was stocky, with tufts of bright white hair, a full face, and an even fuller smile.

  “Welcome to my bachelor pad!” Grandpa Ray flourished his hand palm-up around his one-room apartment.

  “It’s nice,” Rick replied, hoping he sounded like he meant it.

  “It’s cozy and it’s all mine. There’s my kitchen”—he gestured at a small stove, a mini-fridge, and a sink lined up along one wall—“and this is the dining room.” He pointed at a table in the corner. “The living room.” A couch across from a television. “This here’s the library.” A bookcase. “And of course, the bedroom suite.” Grandpa Ray turned to the bed that filled one corner of the room, its sheets perfectly flat, with a blanket folded like an accordion at the foot.

  It all looked fine to Rick, even if a single bookcase wasn’t much of a library. He sensed Grandpa Ray wanted him to say something more than It’s nice, though, so he blurted out the only words that landed in his brain. “I hate making my bed. I’m just going to mess it up the next day.”

  Grandpa Ray laughed. “Any other day of the week, and that bed would be a pil
e of blankets and pillows. But I change the sheets and make the bed every Sunday. Rose used to do that, and I don’t want her haunting me over some linens, like some kind of Bzork.”

  “What did you just say?” Rick turned his head so fast his neck hurt.

  “I don’t want Rose to Bzorkava me into a canister of Braxyl & Sons Ultra Goo. And shut your mouth unless you want a Tseel to fly in!”

  “I didn’t know you watched Rogue Space!”

  “Who doesn’t watch Rogue Space?” Grandpa Ray shrugged innocently, but his eyes sparkled and his lips hinted at a smile.

  “My parents don’t.”

  “I tried my hardest with your dad, but he was a lost cause. And your mom, well, she’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but I’ve never seen her watch anything that took more than about three brain cells to follow the plot of, if you know what I mean.”

  “My best friend, Jeff, says only geeks and idiots watch Rogue Space.”

  “Your best friend, Jeff, doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Geeks and idiots have very different television habits. Forget about that kid. Have you seen The Smithfield Specials?”

  Rick shook his head. He had never heard of them. Grandpa Ray explained that they were a series of four movie-length episodes that had never aired on television due to legal disputes. They were filmed in 1997–98, the only two years in the last thirty that Rogue Space wasn’t on the air in some form.

  “The special effects weren’t what they are today, but The Smithfield Specials give some pretty amazing backstory into why the Bzorki and the Garantula hate each other so much, and the dialogue is sharp! And it just so happens I have the complete collection. What do you say?”

  “That sounds awesome!” said Rick. “But Dad said I was here to talk with you.”

  “You’re here for a fun visit. And what could be more fun than Rogue Space?”

  “Not much. But Grandpa Ray, I’ve known you my whole life. How did I never know you were a Roguer?”