The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman

by Meg Wolitzer

  Now everyone watching this show on TV would know Duncan’s nickname, and they would call him that whenever they teased him.

  But when he pulled the letters out and looked at them, he immediately stopped thinking about being teased by Carl or anyone else. He saw that, by pure luck, the tiles happened to be pretty good. He had drawn the Z, among other letters, and the board was still open. Duncan sensed that April and Lucy simply wouldn’t be able to catch up now.

  It was a mixed feeling. Triumph, along with a touch of sadness and regret. Duncan looked at April Blunt’s eyes across the board, but they didn’t reveal a thing. She seemed to be just watching the game carefully, as curious as anyone about how it would turn out. She could handle what happened next, which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be disappointed. But she and Lucy would indeed be okay. After all, everyone said, it was only a game.

  Moments later, as if in a daze, Duncan laid down the last of the Drilling Falls team’s tiles, and he and Carl won by 28 points.

  They all shook hands across the board, the camera catching every moment. Duncan Dorfman and Carl Slater, from the town of Drilling Falls, Pennsylvania, became the new champions of the Youth Scrabble Tournament, with only forty-one seconds left on their clock.

  Someone opened the door to the ballroom. As Duncan and Carl were led through, they could hear the cheering.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Eighteen

  MAKING IT RIGHT

  Later, after the ceremony at which the big check and the trophy were handed to the winners, after the applause and the interviews with TV news shows and websites and newspapers and call-in satellite radio shows, Duncan Dorfman was wiped out. He had never had a day as big as this one, and he knew he would probably never have one as big again. He had come from nothing and nowhere and won everything. Or at least, thirty percent of it.

  An interviewer with a British accent had asked him, “Duncan, why did Carl refer to you as . . . Luncheon Meat, I believe?”

  “Lunch Meat,” Duncan said.

  “It’s just a friendly nickname,” Carl said quickly. “A name that American kids sometimes call their good friends.”

  Carl was piling the lies on thick. And good friends, the two of them? Hardly.

  Now Duncan Dorfman lay on his back on a whaleshaped float in the middle of the pool on the roof of the Grand Imperial Hotel, holding a glass of fruit punch and looking up at the dimming sky at the end of the day. All around him, kids from the tournament splashed and shrieked. There was Nate Saviano, one-half of the third-place team. He and Maxie had split the twenty-fivehundred-dollar prize. Though very few people knew this, on his way out of the ceremony, Nate had walked over to the Wranglers, Tim and Marie. They still wore their giant cowboy hats, though the edges looked a little wilted after the long and difficult weekend.

  “How’d you do?” Nate had asked them. “Where’d you place, finally?”

  “Ninety-seventh,” said Marie.

  “Oh,” said Nate. “Okay. Well, not bad.”

  “That’s right, it’s not. We hope we get to come back next year,” Tim said.

  Nate looked around to make sure they had privacy. “Listen, guys,” he said quietly. “I want you to have my prize money. I’m going to send it to you. Use it for your airfare and expenses next year.” The Wranglers just stared, popeyed.

  “You’re giving us your money, Nate?” Tim said.

  “Yeah, I am,” said Nate. “I want you to have it. It’s yours.”

  Now Nate was swimming under the water like a seal, feeling truly free for the first time in a long while. Maxie saw him and jumped into the water with a wild splash, landing right beside him.

  “Yo!” she cried.

  From his whale float, Duncan watched Nate and Maxie laugh and joke around. They seemed a tiny bit older than everyone else, and it was as if they shared so much. The whole boyfriends-and-girlfriends thing was going to start pretty soon, Duncan knew. They would all become teenagers, and everything was going to change. But everything was always changing; he already knew that.

  “Marco!” Duncan heard Tim shout from the other side of the pool.

  “Polo!” Marie shouted back.

  Someone swam up to the whale and said, “Hey, Duncan.”

  It was Carl, his hair slicked back with water. Ever since the finals today, the two of them hadn’t really spoken. They’d posed together, and they’d been interviewed together, but they hadn’t been alone face-to-face. What had happened in the final game was still obviously a tense subject.

  But now, here they were in the pool. No one was nearby; this was just between them.

  “Hey,” said Duncan cautiously. He didn’t want Carl Slater to start up with him again. He just didn’t have the energy for it. “I know what you’re going to say,” he said to Carl. “ ‘ How could you have used your right hand like that in the final round?’ ‘How could you have been so stupid to almost blow everything we worked so hard for?’ ‘How could you be such a Dwarfman, such a Lunch Meat ?’ ”

  “No,” Carl interrupted sharply. “I wasn’t. And I’ll never call you Lunch Meat again. I told you to make it right, didn’t I? I meant, do the right thing. I couldn’t keep up with you anymore. You were way beyond me. It all made me crazy; it made me so mad, but I figured I had to let you do what you needed to do. And I hoped that maybe if you did the thing that you thought was right, it would work out. And despite everything—you know, the way it all happened, and the way I acted—I guess it did.”

  “Thanks,” was all Duncan said.

  “I’m sorry I was such a jerkface all weekend. I shouldn’t have pushed you. I shouldn’t have been sarcastic. I shouldn’t have called you names during the last game. I guess I’m totally competitive, no matter what I’m doing. I’ve always been that way,” Carl admitted. “When I was, like, four, playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, I tripped this little girl at her own birthday party so I could be next in line. And then I still didn’t pin the tail in the right place. I pinned it on her grandma instead. So I had a tantrum.”

  “And you had another one today,” said Duncan.

  “Yeah. But listen. I also wanted to say that I’m going to split the money fifty-fifty. I was thinking about it, and I decided it’s only fair.”

  “Really?” Duncan said, surprised.

  “Really.”

  Duncan sensed that he would never be Carl’s Scrabble partner again. He couldn’t exactly trust what Carl said. Even now, was Carl being entirely honest in his apology? Duncan wasn’t sure. He was too overwhelmed to think it all through; he had much bigger issues on his mind now, disturbing questions that had been raised as he’d scrambled and unscrambled words in that final game, and which wouldn’t go away on their own. But he was glad Carl had volunteered to split the money.

  In the water, with wet hands, the boys shook on the deal.

  The day was fading fast, and from the lounge chairs where Duncan and Carl now sat side by side in the silence of their uneasy truce, they saw a small airplane forming skywriting. “Look at that,” said Carl. “Writing in the sky.” He smiled slyly. “Or maybe you don’t even have to look,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You could probably just feel that skywriting.”

  “Carl, no.”

  “Come on, Duncan. For old time’s sake,” Carl Slater said. “One last time. No one’s around. Let’s see how far you can take this skill of yours. We’ve never really put it to the test, have we?”

  Duncan hesitated. He had never tested his power in any unusual ways. Would he actually be able to feel letters in the distance, his fingers seeming to be on top of them, but not actually touching them?

  He and Carl walked to the railing at the edge of the roof, and Carl wrapped a towel around Duncan’s head as a blindfold. Duncan put his hand up to the sky where the skywriting was forming. He waited a moment, trying to make it happen. And sure enough, his fingers turned hot, and the heat blossomed in them, and then he actually felt the fluffy cold swirl of t
he skywriting, exactly as if he was touching it. As if he was right up there in the sky.

  He read aloud:

  “THE GRAND IMPERIAL HOTEL CONGRATULATES THE YST WINNERS!”

  He kept his hand over the letters and felt them as they evaporated. It was the strangest feeling ever. Duncan opened his eyes.

  “Whoa,” said Carl. “Incredible. You frighten me, man! I mean . . . who are you?”

  It was a very good question.

  “Wake up, kid,” Nate’s father said in Nate’s ear the next morning. “We’ve got a plane to catch.” Larry Saviano was smiling. He was actually happy. Not only had he made his peace with his loss of many years ago, and vowed to be a different kind of father to Nate, but last night, at the hotel bar, Larry Saviano and Caroline Dorfman had had a long conversation, and they’d said they would stay in touch. Maybe Larry and Nate would even take a drive to Pennsylvania when the weather got nicer.

  A second good thing had also happened to Larry. Walking back to the hotel from dinner last night, two college kids had come up to him. One of them said, “Aren’t you Lawrence Saviano?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why?”

  “We read your Zax books,” said the other one. “We recognized your picture from the back. You’re like . . . brilliant!”

  “I am?” said Larry.

  “Oh yeah,” said the first one. “We’re students at Yakamee U. You’re getting a pretty big following on our campus. Are there going to be any more books in the series, Mr. Saviano?”

  “Yes!” Nate’s father cried in delight. “As of this minute, plenty more.”

  Now, in the hotel room in the morning, Larry sat humming as he pulled on his socks. Nate had arranged to meet Maxie in the hall; he went out with his skateboard and waited for her, and there she was. Her hair was spikier than usual from sleep.

  Nate and Maxie slapped hands in the air, and their hands stayed put for an extra half second. Then Maxie said, “Let’s have one more ride before we go.”

  They walked together down the long hall. Nate thought about the little skate park across the street from the school, and how surprised everyone would be on Monday morning when he showed up there again. And this time, when they said to him, “You’re back?” he would tell them yes, he was back.

  “I’m just warning you,” said Maxie as they headed for the elevator. “The new math teacher is about a hundred and fifty years old.”

  “I can handle it,” said Nate.

  “And she gives pop quizzes every nanosecond.”

  That was supposed to be a warning, too, but all Nate could think as he and Maxie went outside and got on their boards was that for some reason he looked forward to those quizzes.

  He picked up speed, and Maxie kept pace beside him.

  In the Blunt hotel suite that morning, April’s mother went around to everyone in the family who lay sprawled or curled on beds and couches and rollaway cots, saying to them, “Time to go home, team.”

  Slowly, the team opened its eyes.

  In room 1504, where the Slaters were staying, Mrs. Slater shook her slumbering son, saying, “CARL, PICK UP YOUR TROPHY AND LET’S GET READY TO CHECK OUT. DO YOU HEAR ME, CARL? DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  Up in room 1830, Duncan awakened and yawned. It took him a few moments, but when he saw the giant check leaning against the dresser, he remembered that he and Carl had won the tournament. “How does it feel?” people had been asking him the afternoon and evening before. “How does it feel to be the winner?”

  “It feels incredible,” he’d told them. But after a while, the answer didn’t seem completely accurate.

  His mother had hugged him and cried after she came rushing up to him in the ballroom moments after the game ended. They were interviewed together, and he heard her say, “I am so proud of Duncan, I can’t tell you. It’s just the two of us, and I know it hasn’t always been easy for him.”

  Duncan had stood there smiling stiffly. He was happy, although every few minutes, the same thoughts returned:

  What about my father?

  Is he really alive, or am I jumping to an insane conclusion?

  He was no longer at all certain, but still he had to know. He needed to find the right time to confront his mother. Yesterday after the finals hadn’t worked, and this morning wouldn’t work either, because they were going to have to hurry up and pack their things in order to catch the flight back to Drilling Falls. He would ask her at home.

  “Wake up, Mom,” Duncan said. “It’s time to go.”

  At the checkout desk in the lobby of the Grand Imperial Hotel, the kids from the tournament said their good-byes. Lucy Woolery found herself crying as she wrote out her e-mail address many times. “Will you all please come and visit April and me in Portland?” she said. “I’m an only child, and I have plenty of room.”

  “And also please come down to Butterman, Georgia,” said Josh of the Evangelical Scrabblers. “We’ve got a pond with a rope swing that goes all the way across.”

  Nate slung the ratty little Scaly stuffed animal from Funswamp over his shoulder. Stuffing was already leaking out from the seam. Nate was going to take the alligator home and keep it for a few weeks, then it would spend a few weeks at Maxie’s place, and go back and forth. “Come visit New York City,” Nate said to everyone. “Maxie and I will take you on the subway, and to Chinatown for soup dumplings.”

  “But we’ll also take you to P.S. five eighty-five,” said Maxie. “There’s a great skate park across the street. I mean, it’s not great, but we like it.”

  “You should all come to Drilling Falls, Pennsylvania,” Duncan said. “We’ve got freezing temperatures and a Thriftee Mike’s Warehouse superstore, and I’ve got a house that smells of yams.”

  “I’ll visit you, Duncan,” April said to him seriously.

  April knew that all of them would stay in touch, and that they would play online Scrabble games with one another probably a lot more than they should. She was planning to send an e-mail to Duncan that very night, when she got back to Oregon. She would write:Hi, Duncan,

  Long time no see. How does it feel to be national champion? Was Carl annoying on the plane? Did he steal your little bag of pretzels? Did he try to steal your oxygen mask?

  Remember Funswamp? I can’t wait to go back. (JUST

  KIDDING!)

  Bye for now,

  April B. (member of 2nd-place winning team)

  P.S. How’s your maimed knee?

  Duncan joked with everyone now about the place where he lived, but he really was eager to get back to his great-aunt’s house. He needed to sit somewhere quiet with his mother and finally get her to tell him the whole truth about his father.

  In the lobby, everyone except Nate swore they would return to the YST a year from now. (“I promise to possibly return as a special adviser and spectator,” Nate said. “But that is IT.”) Some of the girls hugged some of the boys. The Word Gurrrls went around giggling inappropriately, and the Wranglers ran around shouting good-bye to everyone multiple times.

  “Duncan, you’ll have to come back and defend your championship,” said Maxie.

  “Okay, sure,” said Duncan, although he knew that if he did come back, it would be with a different partner. But Carl would want to come back as well; maybe Drilling Falls could send two teams.

  They all traveled in taxis and shuttle buses and vans to the Yakamee Airport, going past Funswamp, which, April saw from the back of the van that the Blunts and the Woolerys were sharing, had a sign out front that read: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. It had been closed ever since the Lazy Swamp Ride had gotten sabotaged, and who knew when it would reopen again. April sat beside Liz, who had a new interest in her sister. April and Liz were looking at a spreadsheet of Scrabble games that had been played at various tournaments around the country.

  “Check out these kids from Nevada,” Liz said. “They’re only nine. Excellent win record. Next year, they’ll be old enough for the YST. I bet they come here and give you a run for your money.”

/>   “Well, Lucy and I have to start practicing again,” said April. “It’s never too early to think about next year.”

  “We should come up with a new practice schedule,” said Lucy, who was sitting in the middle seat with her parents. “Maybe we could meet after school—”

  “No more talk about practicing from any of you!” April’s mother called from the front seat. “I am putting a temporary ban on all sports, Scrabble included!” (Although the following day, when everyone was settled back at home, Mrs. Blunt would start a new photo album, completely devoted to April and Scrabble.)

  At the airport, April and Lucy sat alone in the terminal by the wall of windows, watching planes take off and land. They would have a long flight all the way across the continent to Portland, Oregon, leaving this sunny climate and heading back to that place of frequent rain that they called home.

  “So, Flink,” said Lucy, “we did okay, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, Curnish, we did,” said April. “Second place is pretty good.” They had won five thousand dollars and the respect of the entire Blunt family. “I have to pee,” she suddenly said.

  “You and Tim both,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll be right back,” said April. She started to walk across the concourse toward the women’s room. Much later, she would wonder if she’d really had to go to the bathroom at all, or whether something else, something unexplainable, had gotten her out of her seat.

  Rounding the corner at that moment came a big group of kids. Some of them wore T-shirts that read JUNIOR GYMNASTS. Others wore jackets that read WASHINGTON STATE ATHLETICS; these were the Seattle entrants in the gymnastics competition that had been taking place in Ballroom B of the hotel, one flight up, all weekend. There had been no overlap between the gymnasts and the Scrabblers, and none of them had met.