The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

by Meg Wolitzer

  Lucy Woolery always nodded and said, “That must be hard,” though she couldn’t relate. The Woolerys were all alike: three tall, skinny, incredibly organized people who were good at everything and had skin of an identical deep brown.

  The Blunts had put April through a series of secret tests over time, as if to reassure themselves that she was one of them. She had failed every test. They gave her the first one when she was eighteen months old, handing her a soccer ball and saying, “Here you go! A ball! A ball for April!”

  She held it in her hands, stuck out her tongue and licked it, and put it down. Then she waddled over to the refrigerator door and moved the magnetic alphabet letters around in a big swirl until they spelled the word BALL.

  “Oh my God,” said her mother.

  “Unbelievable,” said her father.

  They turned to each other and whispered in frantic voices. Her parents had both been shocked at her verbal skills, but disappointed that she hadn’t given the ball a good hard kick or, better yet, a slamming head-butt.

  There were other tests later on that involved memorizing the names of team cheers. At this she was also hopeless. “Go . . . Rainers?” she would chant with doubt in her voice.

  “It’s Raiders, not Rainers,” her parents said. “Try it again.”

  When April was six years old she started playing Scrabble, and right away it was obvious that she was good at it. She read word lists, and taught herself the two-letter words that were acceptable in Scrabble—words like XI and PE and HM, and also a few new ones, including QI and ZA.

  April still didn’t know what many of these words meant, but she knew that ZA was short for PIZZA, even though no one ever said, “Mmm, I’m starving! I wish I had a nice, piping hot slice of pepperoni za.”

  Whoever came up with the words that were acceptable in the Scrabble dictionary seemed to have a warped view of life, April thought. Why was ZA good, but, say, GA wasn’t? More babies probably said GA than all the people combined who called pizza ZA, but those were the rules.

  April had first gotten to know Lucy Woolery a year earlier, in sixth grade, after the Woolerys had moved here from another town in Oregon. She soon learned that Lucy was a talkative and interesting girl who played Scrabble, too. Other kids would say, “Oh, I like Scrabble a lot,” but when April actually sat down to play them, they did something like try to make words on a diagonal, or insisted that something like FLINK was a word.

  “Are you thinking of FLUNK?” April had politely asked a boy.

  “Nope. FLINK,” he’d said, and then she’d challenged him, and the word had had to be removed from the board.

  A few days later, a girl played CURNISH, and April kindly said, “Are you thinking of FURNISH? Because CURNISH isn’t a word.” She offered the girl a chance to take back her word without a penalty.

  But the girl said, “It is too a word. It’s a kind of tree.” So April had challenged her, and that word had had to be taken off, too.

  April didn’t need other players to be really good, but it was more entertaining when they knew the basics. Lucy did, and they became great friends and opponents. There were never hard feelings when one of them crushed the other. They always shook hands across the board at the end, and went to do something else. Occasionally April and Lucy referred to each other by the names Flink and Curnish. Someday, Lucy said, they would become lawyers and open a practice together called Flink & Curnish, Limited.

  “Why do they always say ‘Limited’?” April asked, but Lucy had no idea.

  The two of them talked about everything. “Have you ever noticed,” Lucy asked recently as they sat in her room with her dog, Bear, sleeping on the floor between them, “that dogs smell like corn chips?”

  “No,” April said. But Lucy was right. Dogs—their paws in particular—did smell like corn chips: slightly salty, with a good, tangy, fried odor. Lucy was always right.

  Another time, when they were walking home from school in the fall and kept stopping to step on particularly crunchy-looking leaves, Lucy asked, “How come humans love the sound of leaves crunching? We go out of our way to hear it, to feel it. Why is it so insanely satisfying?”

  April said she had no idea. But of course it was a good question.

  The girls played Scrabble all the time in their middle school. Lucy was good at everything: sports, English, math, science, drawing, and Scrabble. On December twelfth, they would be playing as a team at the Youth Scrabble Tournament in Yakamee, Florida. Though April’s parents had agreed that she could go, they had no interest in anything as unsporty as Scrabble.

  Lately, April had had a persistent fantasy: if she and Lucy made it to the final round of the YST, her family would finally respect her. She had read online that the finals would be broadcast live on the cable sports channel Thwap! TV. If she and Lucy appeared on that channel, her family would realize that Scrabble was a sport. It was a sport of the brain.

  Sometimes April dreamed about sports. Occasionally in the dreams she was actually playing, wedged in the middle of a family scrimmage in a football stadium. Yet at the very last minute, when everyone was counting on her to make the winning field goal, she would freeze.

  “You can do it!” one of her sisters would shout.

  “Come on, April, you’re one of us!” cried her brother. “Do it for the Blunts!”

  “Do it for me,” someone else said quietly, and in the dream she always turned sharply toward the voice in the stands.

  “It’s you,” she would say in amazement. “The boy from the motel pool. Where are you?” she would whisper.

  But right before she was about to find out, April always woke up.

  Chapter Four

  ROAST MULES

  The dreams had started three years earlier, the night after April met the boy. The Blunt family had been on the road; her siblings were playing in travel baseball and softball games that weekend, and so her parents had decided that the family would spend the night at some motel. The one they chose wasn’t very busy, and had a swimming pool. The Blunts went to sleep not too long after dinner, for they were planning to get up early in the morning. April had gotten permission to spend the next day at the motel by herself.

  It was ten A.M. by the time she woke up, and everyone was already gone. April got dressed and went outside onto the second-floor landing. She could see into the fencedin pool area, where a boy about her age was standing in bathing trunks and a T-shirt, looking down into the water. April changed into a bathing suit, too, and soon she was at the pool, sitting on a lounge chair with her travel Scrabble set open in her lap. She often played against herself, drawing two separate racks of tiles. When she traveled with her family, there was no other choice.

  The boy paced the edge of the pool. If he’d been in April’s family, he would have already been in the water, doing cannonballs and shouting, “Look at me, everybody!” But he seemed reluctant. April got up and dipped in a foot.

  “It’s warm,” she announced.

  “I figured,” said the boy. He was thin, with a nice face, and a blue T-shirt that had some words printed on it in white.

  “Don’t you swim?” she asked him.

  “I used to. But then I found out I have serious food allergies.”

  “You can’t swim because of allergies?” April asked.

  “Well, I got kind of skinny when they were trying to figure out what I was allowed to eat. So I don’t like to take my shirt off. I look too scrawny.”

  “You could leave it on,” April suggested.

  “Everyone would say, ‘Why is he swimming with his shirt on’.”

  “No one would say that. No one is here.” In the distance, cars and trucks rumbled by on the Interstate. Then April added, “Well, I’m going to swim,” and she jumped in.

  In a few seconds he was in the pool, too, wearing his T-shirt, which ballooned with water and rose up around him. He smoothed the shirt down and swam. They played tag, darting back and forth, though after a short while they got out and sa
t by the edge with motel towels draped around their shoulders. April saw him notice her travel Scrabble, so she asked, “Do you play?”

  But he shook his head. “No, sorry,” he said.

  “It’s the greatest game,” she said. “I basically live and breathe it.”

  “Show me how. I don’t know anything.”

  For the next hour or so, April Blunt taught the boy how to play Scrabble. “Okay, here are the basics. There are one hundred tiles,” she explained. “You pick seven and line them up on a rack. But I have a feeling that maybe you already know that.”

  “No,” he said. “I actually don’t.”

  She held out the bag, and he pulled out seven tiles and placed them on the rack she’d handed him.

  “Now,” April said, “you and your opponent take turns forming words on the board, just like in a crossword puzzle. Each letter of the alphabet has a point value, and a few letters are called ‘power tiles,’ because they’re worth much more than the others.” She explained the following:

  The J was worth 8.

  The Q was worth 10.

  The X was worth 8.

  And the Z was worth 10.

  There were also two blanks in the game, she told him, and these were very important. “Blanks are a big deal,” April said. “They help you make a lot of different words. You move the tiles to form words—unscrambled words are called anagrams. I sometimes see anagrams in my head at night,” she added. “The letters jump around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I know this sounds majorly strange,” April said. “But take the word INSTEAD. See, you can move the letters around so they spell SAINTED, or STAINED, or even DETAINS.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Plus,” said April, “those same letters make a couple of other words that you’ve never heard of, like NIDATES and DESTAIN.”

  “Those are real?”

  “I swear.”

  “This is pretty impressive,” said the boy in the blue T-shirt.

  “IMPRESSIVE,” April said, “is an anagram of PERMISSIVE. And you know MARASCHINO?”

  “Those cherries in drinks that no one really likes?”

  April nodded. “MARASCHINO is an anagram of HARMONICAS.”

  The boy’s mouth moved a little, as if he was arranging the letters silently. “You’re right,” he said.

  She told him how if you used all the letters on your rack, it was called a bingo. And if you used all the letters of your rack twice in a row, it was called a bingo-bango. And if you used them three times in a row—

  “Does that ever happen?” the boy interrupted. “Wouldn’t it be, like, winning the lottery three times in a row?”

  “It’s never happened to me personally,” April said, “but it definitely happens.”

  “Let me guess what it’s called,” said the boy. “Bingo-bango- bungo?”

  “Close. Bingo-bango-bongo. And if you find a bingo but have nowhere to put it, it’s called a homeless bingo.”

  “Poor homeless bingo,” he said. “Just sort of wandering around with nowhere to live.” The boy seemed to like hearing all these Scrabble facts, and as they began to play he picked up the rhythm of the game. She beat him in the end, but not by an insane amount.

  Eventually the Blunt family came back to the motel. The blue van, with its bumper stickers that read: I’M A SPORTS LUNATIC, and HONK IF YOU LIKE HOCKEY, pulled into the lot, and the doors slid open and her family popped out, chugalugging water from plastic bottles. Her brother, Gregory, sucked the water out so fast that the plastic bottle became indented, making a loud popping sound. Her father saw April sitting by the pool, and he waved and came over.

  “Hey, April,” he said. “We’re all going to take showers in the room, then grab a bite. Come with us.”

  She wished she could stay there with the boy. They were in the middle of a second game of Scrabble now, and he had been telling her about himself. He’d told her about going to a weeklong camp called Aller-ja-wee-a. “It was the corniest place,” he said. “It was for kids who have food allergies—get it, Aller-ja-wee-a?—and I hated it. Any time we tried to do something on our own, a counselor was on our case.”

  “Sounds lame,” April agreed.

  “We had to play a game called Where Are the Nuts?” he said. “The counselors took us out into a field and hid little plastic objects in the grass that were supposed to represent nuts. We had to find them and throw them away like they were hand grenades about to go off.”

  April had told him how different she was from her jockish family. Now he could see that for himself. Her siblings and parents were all around the pool area, telling April to hurry up and pack up her board and racks and score sheets.

  “Can I have five more minutes to finish this game?” she asked her father. “Please, Dad?”

  “Sure, why not,” said her father. “I want to get a couple of snapshots of your brother anyway. You stay here, and I’ll take some pictures.” He took out his camera.

  April’s brother, Gregory, stood in front of her and the boy, saying, “Watch this!”

  Still in his baseball uniform, Gregory turned a somersault off the side of the pool. The shutter snapped.

  April said to the boy, “I’ve got an anagram for you. ROAST MULES.”

  “That’s two words.”

  “I know. But if you unscramble the letters,” April said, “it’ll make one long word.”

  “Are you sure I know it?” he asked. “Maybe it’s a word I’ve never seen before.”

  “You definitely know it,” she said.

  He thought and thought, but couldn’t come up with the answer. Soon April’s father told her it was really time to go. April said good-bye to the boy, and he said, “See you.” Then she returned to the motel room, where her siblings wrestled on the beds and on the foldout sofa, and someone farted, making a putt-putt sound like a faraway car backfiring. Someone else laughed as if that fart were hilarious. Then someone turned on the TV, which was showing a game of futbol from Chile. Everyone in the family was happy to watch, except April.

  When she peered through the heavy aqua drapes of the motel window a little while later, the boy was gone.

  The next morning she’d looked for him in the breakfast room, where sleepy families sat drinking coffee and tea and hot chocolate, and eating cold rolls with butter and jam from tiny plastic packets. He wasn’t there. Later, in the motel office at checkout, he still wasn’t there. His family must have already left, April thought, disappointed. They must have already joined the line of cars heading out onto the Interstate.

  Most kids who met when they were on a trip with their parents never saw each other again. The puppeteers took away the puppets. But even if they did see each other, they might not know it. You could meet someone when you were a kid, and then meet him again when you were both grown up, but you probably wouldn’t even know it was the same person. April Blunt had met the boy in the blue T-shirt only once, and she knew nothing about him, but he still mattered to her after three years.

  In April’s bedroom now, sitting with Lucy, April said, “I never got to tell him the anagram of ROAST MULES.”

  “I’m sure it’s kept him up all these nights,” said Lucy.

  “He probably did wonder about it at first,” April said. But she worried, weirdly, that he had forgotten about ROAST MULES, and about meeting her.

  “Tell me, Flink, what were the words on his T-shirt?” Lucy asked.

  “I have no idea, Curnish.”

  “Think, Flink,” Lucy said. “Maybe the words could give us a clue to his location. Maybe they could help you find him. Not that I totally understand why you even want to.”

  “I don’t totally understand either,” said April. “But even if I knew his location, it’s not like I would recognize him. I barely remember what he looked like. And people’s faces change a lot. Well, anyway, enough about this. We should get back to Scrabble. We want to make it to the finals so my family can finally get it. We
want them to see us on Thwap! TV and be blown away.”

  “And we also want to win the ten thousand dollars,” Lucy reminded her.

  “Yes, that would be a plus.”

  “Let’s go over the list of vowel dumps,” Lucy said.

  Vowel dumps were Scrabble words that used a lot of vowels. Even if you had what looked like a terrible rack, filled with A’s, E’s, I’s, O’s, and, worst of all, U’s, there were many words that allowed you to get rid of extra vowels that had turned your rack into “Old MacDonald’s Farm,” as people said, which was a joke about it looking like EIEIO.

  The vowel dump words were both ordinary and strange, and the four-letter ones included:

  AEON

  AGUE

  AIDE

  ALEE

  ALOE

  AQUA

  AREA

  ARIA

  ASEA

  AURA

  AUTO

  BEAU

  CIAO

  EASE

  EAVE

  EURO

  IDEA

  IOTA

  LIEU

  LUAU (This was April’s favorite, because it got rid of two U’s.)

  MOUE

  OBOE

  OLEO

  OOZE

  OUZO

  UREA

  And the five-letter ones, which got rid of even more vowels, included:

  ADIEU

  AERIE

  AUDIO

  COOEE

  EERIE

  LOOIE

  LOUIE

  MIAOU

  QUEUE

  April and Lucy sat studying the word lists. “About the boy from the pool again,” April suddenly said. “I’d like to try to find him one last time.”

  “Well, just see if you can remember the words on his shirt,” said Lucy.

  “I’ve done that,” April said.

  “All right then,” said Lucy. “We’ll try something else.”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  April did know. Lucy Woolery was an amateur hypnotist. She used an electric toothbrush with a spinning head, and she had successfully hypnotized her own father this way, getting him to walk around the house crumbling a piece of bread and dumbly repeating the words, “Bread is yummy. Bread is yummy.”