“No,” he said. But he shivered too. He shook his head as if to get rid of a sneeze, and then looked at his watch. “I want to see you in the shower in five minutes,” he said. “And don’t forget to eat something.”
Chapter 2
Gus was in the kitchen before me, filling up his silver go-cup with coffee, milk, and four sugars. Gus has been drinking coffee since he was five, but it never stunted his growth. He’s so much taller than me that one time he talked us into an R movie by saying that he was my babysitter. He eats breakfast with us every day because his mom leaves early for work, and it’s embarrassing to still have a nanny, which he did until last year. His dad lives on the East Side with a new wife Gus calls Buffy even though her name is Helen.
“Oatmeal?” Gus said, raising his eyebrows.
Normally, you can’t pay me to eat oatmeal. (Okay, I guess you can. One summer, my dad told me he’d give me five dollars for every bowl of oatmeal I ate, saying it would help me grow, and I ate two weeks’ worth, bought an Xbox game, and never looked back.) Oatmeal, basically, is foul.
But now I wanted oatmeal the way I want pizza on a Friday night on the way to the movies. “I’m freezing,” I said, which is weird because our apartment is so overheated you can wear shorts and a T-shirt when it’s twenty below outside. “I think a nice bowl of oatmeal will warm me up. I want those little rivers.”
“Rivers?”
“You know, how the brown sugar melts into little rivers before you add milk?”
Gus shook his head. He was around for the cash-for-oatmeal summer. He’s been around for everything. He’s been my best friend since he moved into my building in first grade.
Or at least he used to be. Last term he got pulled off the eighth-grade basketball team to play on varsity, and now he sits with the basketball team at lunch. Gus used to hate to go to East Hampton with his dad and Buffy on weekends, but now when they’re out there, he plays basketball with Trip Hall, who is a sophomore, and whose family has so much money that even after his dad went to prison for insider trading, they still have a beach house with two swimming pools, and a big apartment on Eighty-eighth Street, right around the corner from school. Gus hangs out in that apartment now after practice, and he gets invited to parties there. On Valentine’s Day, Siobhan Clarke, a girl in tenth grade who is one of Trip’s friends, sent Gus a carnation with the message: “Guess who?” Here’s what I got at school on Valentine’s Day: a carnation from Gus with a card that said, “You owe me two dollars for the flower.” Ha-ha.
Sometimes I wish Gus wasn’t funny. Then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad that he’s slowly stopping being friends with me.
He put his hand into the box of chocolate crunch cereal. “Since when do you eat oatmeal?” he said.
“Since now,” I muttered. I mutter a lot to Gus these days. I don’t want to talk to Gus about his ditching me at school—it’s too embarrassing. But it’s hard for me not to act like I’m mad at him for no reason.
“I thought you hated it.”
“Did you know my grandpa died?” I said.
“Grands? Oh my gosh.”
“No, the other one.”
Dad started bellowing from the hall, “Okay everyone, it’s time to go!”
“I didn’t even know you had another grandpa,” Gus said.
“Well, I did.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“Let’s go!” shouted Dad. He sounded normal, but he looked kind of weird. Pale. His hair was messed up, like he’d run his hand through it and hadn’t smoothed it back down.
Gus grabbed his coffee and headed for the hall. I still had to brush my teeth and my hair, which, when I caught a glimpse of it in the microwave door, was ridiculous. I wear my curly hair long because it stands up on top of my head and makes me look taller. But my dad is right about it. Today I could’ve been Ronald McDonald, except with brown hair instead of red. And I hadn’t had time to take a single bite of oatmeal.
By the time I rushed into our front hall, where the elevator comes, carrying my half-finished earth science poster, my book bag, my cello, and the oatmeal that I’d decided I would try to eat in the cab, my dad was holding the elevator door, and Gus and Julia were waiting inside. Julia’s hair was slicked back, her shoulders straight under the backpack that holds all her important fat textbooks that she has no problem remembering to bring home every day, a fact my dad reminds me of constantly. I noticed for the first time that Gus had grown taller than Julia. How could he keep growing and growing, while I never budged past five feet?
Just as I was having that thought, I heard the high-pitched screeching that is supposed to let you know it’s time to close the elevator door. The annoying sound coupled with the annoying cold feeling made me feel, well, annoyed. How was I going to get away from this? I wanted to put my hands up to block my ears, but my hands were full—I’d slung the cello strap over my shoulder, the poster board was rolled up under my arm, I was carrying my book bag in one hand, and I’d balanced the bowl of oatmeal in the palm of the other. I tried lifting the arm holding the oatmeal up to my face. Great idea, right?
The bowl slipped instantly out of my hands, and hit the tile floor, breaking—duh—down the middle. As oatmeal oozed into the cracks between the tiles, my backpack, which had fallen next to it, started to get wet. I was stepping on the earth science poster board, and the cello strap had slipped down my arm and was digging into the inside of my elbow. The elevator had moved from screeching to a bleating sound that reminds me of the foghorn they blow at soccer games when Gus has scored so many goals they’re sending kids like me in for substitutions. My head was pounding. My dad’s eyes traveled from the oatmeal on the floor to my face. “Court,” he said. “I have to be in court.”
Why was I getting so cold?
“Will. Someone,” I shouted. “Stop. That. Infernal. Noise.”
Everybody stared. It was the yelling. I don’t really yell. And the word “infernal.” I guess no one expected me to know what it meant. Now that I think about it, I don’t.
After a second, Julia and Gus stepped out of the elevator. The doors closed and the clanging stopped. Julia said, “I’ll get a towel,” and ran for the kitchen. Gus said, “Here,” and lifted my cello from my shoulder and set it down by the elevator door. I was still really cold, but having the cello moved was a big help.
“I have something of importance to impart to you,” I heard myself whisper to my dad when Gus’s back was turned. Of importance? To impart? These weren’t real words. They were vocabulary. “I’m going to leave home someday,” I hissed. “And you’re going to spend the rest of your life wondering if you could have loved me more. The question will keep you alive. And the question will kill you. Are you prepared for that?”
My dad’s small brown eyes grew large. It was almost painful to look at him. But I was distracted by the cold feeling that was getting worse. And by the fact that I had no idea what I was saying. What does “impart” even mean?
But I didn’t have time to think about the strangeness of what I said, because now the cold was growing extreme. Was there a window open? Was the cold coming from the elevator? I felt like I was standing near something dangerous. Maybe the elevator was a giant tunnel of cold, and I could get sucked into it if I took so much as a step toward it.
“Michael,” my dad started, but before he could continue, Julia was crouching down between us to wipe up the oatmeal, and Gus was picking up my earth science poster board from the floor. “Michael,” my dad said again, but the moment had passed—his voice had lost its I’m-figuring-it-out tone, and gone back to a you’re-in-trouble tone. He grabbed the poster from Gus with one hand, and my elbow with the other. “Downstairs,” he said. “Now.” His cheeks were burning bright red, like Julia’s when she danced Cinderella even though she had the flu.
Dad was still holding my arm while George the doorman hailed our cab. “No Xbox,” Dad said through gritted teeth. “No Game Boy. No allowance. No TV. I don’t know what is go
ing on with you today, but I’ve just about had it. This is my house, and if nothing else, you will respect me in it.”
“But Dad—,” I started. I wanted to tell him that I was freezing, that it wasn’t my fault, that I took back what I’d said. I wanted to tell him he hadn’t said anything about Grandpa. But as soon as he let go of my elbow, I felt myself beginning to warm—a little. I slipped into the backseat of the cab between Gus and Julia, feeling warmer still. My dad slid the cello across our three laps and closed the door without saying good-bye.
“What is going on?” said Julia as the cab shot forward one block and stopped at a red light. “Michael, are you okay?” I looked straight out in front of me. I didn’t want to explain what I’d said to my dad, those strange words that didn’t feel like something I’d been thinking. I wanted to wait to talk until the cold feeling went away completely.
But it didn’t. The road through the park dipped down into a trench that cuts through the sunny green lawns of the park. All we could see out of the cab windows were old stone walls on either side, and above us, the bare branches of trees, and a low, gray sky. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering.
Chapter 3
Mr. Morton, the drama teacher, was moderating first-period study hall, drinking coffee out of a paper cup as tall as his forearm was long. He waved the cup in my direction. “Favor us, Michael,” he said, in the fake English accent he uses to read Shakespeare plays aloud, “with at least the appearance of industry.” I pulled out my earth science poster, which had gotten crushed in the taxi, and started coloring.
My project looked worse than I remembered. It was supposed to show the layers of stuff on the inside of planet earth. Except the circle I had drawn for the earth looked more like an oval on one end, and a rectangle on the other—I’d kind of realized it wasn’t much of a circle halfway through drawing it, and tried to backtrack, which turned out to be even more of a disaster.
I was coloring the mantle red, and the red marker was running out. No matter how hard I pressed, I ended up with only a thin stripe of color that disappeared almost entirely when I accidentally rubbed it with my arm. At this point all I could do was make it look like at least I’d tried to color.
But there’s something about just doing the same thing over and over that always makes me feel better. Like, on the first day that Gus didn’t save me a seat at lunch—when I walked into the cafeteria to find him at the basketball table, hunched over because I’m sure he didn’t want to see me looking for him—I went home after school and just started playing Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions. It was weird, by the time I’d gotten through three levels, I kind of didn’t care anymore about Gus. I didn’t feel better, exactly. I guess I just didn’t feel. My whole brain was filled up with remembering all the details of exactly how hard to push the buttons, exactly when to move my guy and how far.
I started to think about The Yakuza Missions as I was coloring, and about video games in general, and it started to hit me that the layers of the earth were kind of like the levels of a video game. They get weirder and you know less about what you’re getting into as you move to the center, and there are these little extra hard parts in between.
Like D-double-prime. It’s this thin ring around the iron ball in the very middle of the earth. No one really knows what is inside D-double-prime, or why the sound waves made by earthquakes can’t get through it. Crazy, right?
It’s funny how quickly I can get into a daydream, because after what felt like no time at all, the bell rang, and there I was just barely done with the iron core. D-double-prime looked nothing like the way I’d imagined it—it was just a whole bunch of green squiggly lines. My red marker was totally kaput, and I still had to finish coloring in the mantle. Not to mention the entire crust of the earth. We have four minutes between classes, and I was supposed to be drawing all the oceans and land masses of our planet. In cross section. There was just no way.
So instead of coloring the crust, I decided to leave the outline of the egg shape, and just label everything. But even then I miscalculated how much space the words would take up, and ended up kind of crunching the letters at the end of “basaltic magma,” and “Mohorovicic Discontinuity.” My poster looked like a three-year-old had done it, like something Mr. Blum was going to write “See me” on, because what he had to say was too harsh to put in writing.
At the sound of the second bell, I rushed out of study hall and ran up the stairs to the instrument room. The instrument room is on the top floor of the school, across the hall from the upper-class lounge. Every time I have orchestra, I have to push past the stream of older kids on their way to the lounge. I hunch over to keep the cello from bouncing on the steps, and the older kids plaster themselves against the wall so I don’t hit them with the big black case. It’s totally embarrassing.
Today I passed Gus’s new best friend, Trip Hall. Trip Hall doesn’t know that I’m Gus’s old best friend. I don’t think he really has any idea who I am, except the really short eighth grader with the really big cello. “Look,” he said, when he saw me now. “It’s Quasimodo.” Siobhan Clarke and Torrance Hisslin were right behind him, and they giggled. All three of them had to line up against the wall so I could pass by. Julia used to be friends with Siobhan and Torrance, but not anymore. “They’ve turned into bimbos,” I remember hearing Julia tell my mom.
Trip said, “What do you have in there, a dead body?” Siobhan and Torrance giggled again. The way I felt as they watched me hitch the cello down one step at a time reminded me of a thin kind of papery crunching noise, like I’d sat on a bag of potato chips in the middle of a quiet room.
But I felt something else as well. The cold feeling—it got worse. It had never really gone away, but now it was like a tingling—like the way your hands feel in the winter when you’ve been back inside for a while, but they’re still a little numb.
Usually when kids make comments about the cello, or about how short I am, it makes me feel small. But today I felt kind of—I don’t know—mad. Like the coldness was waking me up—making me see things. Like I wasn’t the kid being made fun of, but I was watching that kid.
I didn’t do anything about it, though. Just looked down at the ground like a big wuss. And got to orchestra after everyone else was done tuning, so my notes sounded worse than usual. At the end of orchestra, Mr. Pierce gave me a lecture on the importance of being on time, and I was even more late for earth science. At least I had something I could turn in. That would be a relief.
Except that as soon as I walked through the classroom door, I noticed that Tori Lublin was standing up at the front of the room, holding a plasticine model of a volcano. I watched in horror as Mr. Blum plugged in a cord that came from the bottom of her volcano, and a red lightbulb inside it turned on and smoke started to rise from the crater.
Please, please, please, I prayed inside my head. We’re not really religious in my family—my dad was Jewish but is now an atheist, and my mom was Christian but likes the Jewish holidays better. No one ever taught me how to pray, and I’ve just started making up my own way of doing it, primarily in moments of great need, like this one. “Please, please, please—” is generally as far as I get.
“Excuse me, Tori,” said Mr. Blum. “I see we have a late entrant. Please take a seat, Michael, so that Tori can continue her oral report.”
“Oral?” I said. My prayer had definitely not been answered.
“You do remember that today we’re presenting our oral reports?”
I swallowed hard. I found my seat. I tried not to cry. No, I did not remember.
This didn’t make any sense, but I started to be a little mad at the cold feeling, as if it was responsible for my forgetting. Why wasn’t it going away? It made everything else that was annoying so much worse. Usually, I guess I’m pretty good at ignoring things. But the cold feeling was waking me up, and making me see. I didn’t like it.
Meanwhile, Tori started to explain how most volcanoes happen under the ocean without
anyone knowing about them. Is it worth mentioning that Tori’s dad is a movie producer, and one of his assistants helps her with her homework every night? It’s true.
Gus went next, standing up slowly, untangling the sleeves of his blazer—we are supposed to wear blazers all the time but can mostly get away with carrying them.
When he took off his shoes, all the girls were like, “Eww!” His shoes are falling apart, and he has wrapped the left one in duct tape. He put the shoes on Mr. Blum’s desk, on either side of a rubber place mat that I recognized from his kitchen.
For a second, he leaned over the place mat, scratching the back of his knee with his opposite foot, a habit he has. He pushed down on the shoes and moved them toward each other, and the place mat was forced up into a mountain. He made the simple motion look like a magic trick.
“My shoes are the plates that move around on the surface of the earth,” he said. “And this place mat is showing how mountains are formed.”
“Well conceived,” Mr. Blum commented. “If slightly unhygienic.”
Brilliant Ewan Greer went next, and we had to turn out the lights so he could display the computer modeling he’d done of the formation of the Appalachian mountain range. It was basically the same as Gus’s project, except it looked like something developed by NASA, instead of developed by Gus on the way out the door that morning.
Ewan didn’t come to Selden until just before winter break, but even if he had started at the beginning of the year, he wouldn’t have fit in. He doesn’t play sports because of his asthma. He’s on a scholarship. He wears shirts that look shiny, and pants that are too short. He doesn’t wash his hair. He reads during lunch. And he’s always sticking his hand up like he is dying to tell everyone the answers. Even the teachers are annoyed and don’t want to call on him.
At the end of the presentation, he showed a picture of himself on top of some of the mountains in the Appalachian range, and in the picture, he actually looked clean and healthy. He was standing next to a man in a big sweater and a red ski hat, and they were both smiling big goofy smiles.
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