by Meg Wolitzer
When Nate walked in now, he could hear a song by some annoying children’s singer called Kazoo Stu. The song went:
“And if you DON’T take the kangaroo outta my hair/I’m gonna have to dress him up in Daddy’s un-der-weeeeaar . . .”
Which was followed by a lot of kazoo playing.
Nate hesitated in the doorway; he knew what awaited him this weekend. It wasn’t just that his mother’s apartment was so hectic, but also that, whenever he was here, he felt as if he was being watched.
“Just look at him,” his mother said now to her husband. Dr. Steve was a nice guy, but he talked to everyone as if they were five years old. He was always on the phone with worried parents. No matter what time of day it was, Nate could hear him say, “Be sure she drinks plenty of fluids.”
“Hey there, Nate,” said Dr. Steve. “Come a little closer so I can get a better look at you. Your mom says you’re run-down.”
Nate dropped his weekend bag and skateboard and reluctantly walked over. Dr. Steve took a good look at him, putting both hands on either side of Nate’s neck, checking for swollen glands.
“I’m fine, Steve,” Nate said.
“I’m just going to palpate your glands.”
PALPATE, Nate thought. That was a new word for him; he would have to remember to try and play it sometime.
“You getting enough sleep?” asked Dr. Steve. “That’s very important for tweens.”
Nate hated the word TWEENS, even though it was a good Scrabble word. “Yeah,” Nate lied. He had actually only slept for five hours the night before. He would have liked to go lie down right that minute, but it wasn’t possible. He had to share a bedroom here with Eloise, and she was screaming in her crib.
“I don’t believe you, Nate,” said his mother. “I think your dad is making you stay up late at night. Nate, tell me the truth.”
“Dad is being fine,” Nate said.
But soon she was on the phone, saying, “No, you listen to me, Larry—he is twelve. He has to just be a kid. He can’t make you feel better. Oh, he can? Well, he shouldn’t have to make you feel better. You’re a grown-up now. You know what?” she said. “Steve and Eloise and I are going to come along to that tournament on December twelfth, so we can stay on top of everything.”
“What?” said Nate, but his mother waved him away from the phone.
He didn’t want them coming to the YST! Dr. Steve would go up to random players and palpate the glands in their necks. Eloise would explode foul-smelling stuff into her diaper during a tense moment in a Scrabble game. His mother would get into an argument with his father in front of everyone. They didn’t belong down there. But Nate’s mother still felt uncomfortable leaving him with his Scrabble-obsessed father all the time, and she wanted to show that she was a very involved parent, too. Which she was.
When she got off the phone, she said, “Okay, so it’s all settled.”
“No,” said Nate. “It’s not. It’s not settled!”
“Inside voice, Nate, inside voice,” said Dr. Steve.
“It’s just that I don’t need you guys going down there with Dad and me. Really, I’ll be fine.”
“We want to come,” said his mother. “Besides, it’ll make for a nice family vacation. Isn’t Yakamee, Florida, where that weird amusement park is?”
“That’s right,” said Dr. Steve. “Funswamp.”
“Funswamp?” said Nate. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s an amusement park built completely on swampland,” said Dr. Steve. “They’ve got a gator coaster.”
Nate shook his head, defeated. He knew he would have to let them come.
“Who’s your partner going to be, Nate?” asked his mother.
“Maxie Roth,” he answered without thinking; her name had just jumped out of him. Maxie Roth, the ultracool skater girl with the magenta hair and multipierced earlobe. The girl who liked to ride fast and do mental math. As far as he knew, she had no interest in Scrabble. But suddenly, he thought, if I have to go to the YST, then maybe she can go, too. He would text her later and ask her to be his partner.
All Nate wanted—and all that he thought about, many times each day—was that he had to get by until the YST, win first prize, then shout at his father, “Are you finally happy?” At which point he would add, “And can I please go back to school already?”
But now, an awful thought occurred to Nate. For some reason, it had almost never occurred to him before.
What if he didn’t win?
Chapter Six
THE LESSONS BEGIN
Did you know that SPORK is no good?” Carl Slater asked Duncan Dorfman on a cold afternoon in late October. School was out for the day, and the two boys sat at Slice’s, the pizza place in downtown Drilling Falls.
“No. I did not know that,” said Duncan.
“You might have assumed that SPORK is perfectly fine, right? After all, you’ve used a spork before—one of those plastic spoon-forks. But the Scrabble people say nope, sorry, it ain’t good, at least not yet.”
“Huh,” said Duncan. “What do you know.”
“And then there are plenty of words that you wouldn’t think were good, but they are,” said Carl. “Your job is to move letters around until you make real words out of them.” Carl took a bite of pizza, which dripped about a quart of orange oil onto his plate. “Words are like clay, Dorfman,” he went on. “They can be shaped and messed with not only by your hands, but also by your head. So if you want to win at Scrabble, you have to learn how to move words around and totally reshape them. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Duncan nodded. Once in a while the front door of the pizza place would swing open and the little bell would ring, and one of Carl Slater’s friends would see Carl and start to say, “Hey, dude, what are you—” Then he would notice who Carl was sitting with, and understand that a lesson was taking place. “Catch you later,” the friend would say, backing out. Most of Carl’s friends were annoyed by Duncan, because he hogged all of Carl’s attention these days.
Carl Slater was seen as the king of the Drilling Falls Scrabble Club. If someone had a question about whether a word was good or not, they went to Carl. Brian Kalb was particularly unfriendly toward Duncan now, since Duncan had replaced him as Carl’s partner at the upcoming tournament in Florida. Because Brian had gone with Carl last year, he had assumed they would go together again this year. It wasn’t fair that Brian had been elbowed aside by Duncan, a total beginner, but this was the way Carl wanted it.
Carl Slater had become Duncan’s Scrabble tutor. “I can take a total word dummy like yourself—no offense, man—and turn you into a major player,” he’d said.
Ever since the day in the cafeteria when Duncan had revealed his so-called power, Carl had taken it upon himself to show Duncan “the ropes,” as he called it. “I could also say, ‘show you the PROSE,’” he added.
“What?” said Duncan.
“PROSE is an anagram of ROPES. Oh, and SPORE is too. And POSER.”
In the hall closet of Aunt Djuna’s house, among the boxes that Duncan and his mother had brought with them on the bus from Michigan, was a Scrabble set. It was the old-fashioned kind, in a rectangular maroon box, and it had once belonged to his mother, though she never played it anymore. The day that Duncan started playing with Carl, he’d gone into the closet and taken out the box. Inside was the board, folded in half. Also in the box was an old piece of lined paper with oily spots on it, on which a game had been scored a long time ago.
Duncan had recognized his mother’s handwriting. One of the players had been written down as “Caroline.” That was his mother. The other one, Duncan saw from the faded ink, had been written down as “Ms.”
“Who’s ‘Ms’?” Duncan had asked his mother.
“Ms? What do you mean?” she said.
He showed her the name written on the score sheet, and his mother stood looking at it. “Oh,” she said quietly, taking the sheet from him. She paused. “‘Ms.’ That was my teache
r, Ms. Thorp. We played sometimes.”
“Ms. Thorp beat you,” said Duncan, noticing that the final scores were 382 to 261.
“So she did. I remember that she was a good player,” Caroline Dorfman said. She walked into the kitchen, crumpled up the score sheet, and threw it into the garbage under the sink.
So now, as October in Drilling Falls neared its end, Duncan was becoming a good player, too.
Carl didn’t really care whether or not Duncan actually liked Scrabble. Carl simply wanted to bring him to the tournament. And it was only because of the sensitivity of Duncan’s fingertips. Duncan was going to be Carl’s partner so that during the games Duncan could pick both blanks, all four S’s, and all the power tiles from the bag. Not to mention the four-point H’s and W’s, and the five-point K. Or even just so Duncan could pick combinations of letters that could make bingos and earn his team a ton of points.
“Also, Dorfman,” Carl reminded Duncan as they sat in the pizza place with their slices in front of them, the oil making the paper plates look almost see-through, “don’t forget that Scrabble is not just about picking good letters, or finding anagrams. You also have to know how to look at your rack.”
“What do you mean?”
“For instance, when you have an E and a D, you should automatically put them at the end of your rack, hoping that you can make a word that ends in ED. The same is true of ING. And, of course, if you have an S, you should see if it can make a plural. And if you have EST, well, that could be an ending, too. But then again so could TCH, like in the word CATCH. Got it?”
“Sort of,” said Duncan.
“This is true of the beginnings of words, too. You should try to cluster consonants together on your rack, if you have them. Like TH, or CH, or SH. And there are plenty of others. You still with me?” Duncan nodded. “Okay, good. But the most important thing—like basically knowing how to tie your own shoes—is knowing your twos.”
“My what?” said Duncan, his mouth full of pizza.
“Your two-letter words. Every serious Scrabble player learns them, and I have decided that today you are ready. You have to memorize the list,” Carl said. “I guarantee that if you learn these words, your game will improve a million percent.” Carl reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He smoothed it down on a clean part of the table. “Here you go,” he said. “Read it. Learn it. Or, hey, just rub it with the fingertips of your left hand, in your case.”
But Duncan didn’t want to use his fingertips to study the list. He wanted to memorize it the way everyone else did. Since that day in the cafeteria, he had almost never used his fingertips again. He sensed that they were meant for big occasions only. Now that he knew his skill was something of value, he didn’t take it lightly.
He glanced down the list of twos, which was partly made up of words that he had never seen or heard before. But all of these words were acceptable in a game of Scrabble:
AA
AB
AD
AE
AG
AH
AI
AL
AM
AN
AR
AS
AT
AW
AX
AY
BA
BE
BI
BO
BY
DE
DO
ED
EF
EH
EL
EM
EN
ER
ES
ET
EX
FA
FE
GO
HA
HE
HI
HM
HO
ID
IF
IN
IS
IT
JO
KA
KI
LA
LI
LO
MA
ME
MI
MM
MO
MU
MY
NA
NE
NO
NU
OD
OE
OF
OH
OI
OM
ON
OP
OR
OS
OW
OX
OY
PA
PE
PI
QI
RE
SH
SI
SO
TA
TI
TO
UH
UM
UN
UP
US
UT
WE
WO
XI
XU
YA
YE
YO
ZA
“Whoa!” Duncan said when he got all the way to ZA. “I have to memorize all of these? That’s insane, Carl. I’m not good at that.”
“Then what are you good at?” Carl asked.
Duncan was silent. He knew, actually, that he was not particularly good at anything. Nothing had come together inside him and grabbed him by the throat. He had no burning interest yet; he still had no incredible ability in any subject at school or in any sport. Suddenly he felt babyish and ashamed.
“I don’t know yet,” said Duncan.
“Well,” said Carl, “just memorize these twos. Become good at it. I swear,” he went on, “it’s no harder than some of the things you have to memorize for school. Like last year in science we had to learn all these unfamous parts of the human body. Did you know that we’ve got things inside us called the islets of Langerhans?”
“No,” said Duncan. You could never tell, with Carl Slater, whether he was being serious or trying to jerk you around.
Duncan folded the list back up and put it into his own pocket. Sitting here across the table from Carl, he thought about what a long way he had come since the earliest days of school, when he was simply Lunch Meat, lumped together with the Chinaman. His ordinariness and dullness now seemed increasingly far away. As far away as the islets of Langerhans.
LANGERHANS, Duncan thought as he sat in Slice’s. He moved the letters around slowly in his mind, as Carl had told him to do. He saw that you could make HANGERS from LANGERHANS. Or, he saw, you could make LASAGNE. You’d still have leftover letters, of course, but hey, Duncan joked to himself, you always have leftovers when you make lasagne.
“The thing is, dude,” said Carl, “it’s one thing for you to be able to feel the tiles and know what they are. I mean, it’s a great skill, because as I said, you can pull all the best tiles out of the bag. And your opponent will basically be left with a rack made up of EEEIIOA.” He snickered softly. “Or VWULNUG. But once you’ve got the tiles, you still need to keep up your side of the game. I can’t do everything by myself,” he added. “I’m good, but there are kids out there across the country who are a lot better. And we’re all going to meet up in Yakamee. Last year Drilling Falls got humiliated—it was pathetic—but this year, with my secret weapon by my side, we will cream everyone.”
“What’s your secret weapon?” Duncan asked, and as soon as he spoke, he thought: DUH. (A word, he had recently found out, that was good in Scrabble.)
“You are, dude,” said Carl Slater cheerfully. “You’re my secret weapon. And I forgot to mention this, but when we win that money, I will be happy to split it with you seventy-thirty. That would net you three thousand dollars. Pretty nice pay for doing something you do anyway—feeling things on flat surfaces, right? I know your mom could really, really use that money,” he added. Carl stood, shrugging into his denim jacket. “Speaking of moms,” he said, “I see that mine has just pulled up outside. I’ve got to run.”
Duncan looked through the pizza-place window and saw a gleaming black sports car with an ornament of a leaping gazelle on its hood. Inside
was a woman who had an older, female version of Carl Slater’s face, with slightly puffy-looking lips. She was smoking a cigarette, which clouded the inside of the car. She pressed a button to lower the window, and some of the smoke escaped. “CARL!” she called in a hoarse voice. “ORTHODONTIST’S! NOW!”
“See you,” Carl said to Duncan. “Work on those twos. And think about the cash, my friend.”
Duncan Dorfman understood that Carl Slater wasn’t really his friend. Anyone could see that a seventy-thirty split was unfair. Anyone could hear the casual unpleasantness in Carl’s line about how Duncan’s mother could really, really use that money.
“Sounds good to me,” Duncan said.
I am a doormat, he thought. I am Duncan Doormat. And I am also an old piece of lunch meat that’s lying on the doormat, and someone is stepping on it and squashing it forever.
“So it’s a deal,” said Carl. “Seventy-thirty. Seventy me, thirty you. Obviously.”
“It’s a deal,” Duncan heard himself reply. Though he hated himself for saying it, the words were already out of his mouth.
And words, he realized, mattered.
Chapter Seven
THE SEARCH FOR THE BOY FROM NOWHERE
On a Friday night in November, April Blunt and Lucy Woolery babysat together for an extremely hyper four-year-old named Jasper Kroger, who lived across the street from the Woolerys. After insisting that April and Lucy cook him some packaged clown-head-shaped macaroni and cheese, then create a scavenger hunt for him throughout the house, and finally call his father’s cell phone to ask how old he would have to be to get a tattoo (“Thirty-five,” Mr. Kroger calmly replied), little Jasper finally collapsed while listening to a CD of some annoying kiddie singer who played the kazoo, and April and Lucy had a chance to talk. The school week had been very busy, but now that the weekend had come, they wanted to discuss the upcoming Scrabble tournament, and also, once again, the boy from the motel pool.
“Any brainstorms about finding him?” Lucy asked.
“Nope,” April said.
They were sitting in the Krogers’ playroom, on child-sized chairs at a child-sized table, beneath a big painting of a dinosaur on a unicycle, eating Jasper’s leftover clown-head macaroni and cheese, which was an orange color so bright and unnatural that it almost hurt to look at it. Now with even more disgusting neon flavor! April thought the package should have read. A few days earlier, they had gone online and tried to locate the summer camp for allergic kids that the boy at the pool had told her he’d gone to, but apparently it no longer existed.
