by Gurley, Jan
I tried to make a joke of it, “Get near the Dog and the temperature drops fifteen degrees.”
The fact that everyone nodded in understanding somehow only made it worse. “Not that I care,” I added and popped a segment of orange in my mouth.
“It’s just hard to be around someone who’s so hostile and angry all the time, isn’t it?” said Helena, trying to be helpful.
“Has he said anything mean to you?” As she spoke, I saw Phoebe’s fist bunch out of the corner of my eyes and mentally starting calculating the dates until her next blow-off-steam outing — the short Uni dance wasn’t enough to be really therapeutic. Phoebe needed more before another month passed.
“It’s not that,” I said, “He’s not saying anything.”
Viola added, with a strange note of happiness in her voice, “Drew erased her!”
We all turned to stare at her.
“You know,” she said, like it should be obvious, “that’s why she’s trying to bulk up. He made Kate invisible — she’s not even a ghost. He could walk right through her and never notice.” Viola wore her empty glass frames today and she held the right corner and lifted them up and down on her nose. “You could see it, if you looked.”
We all thought about that for a minute.
Then Helena broke the spell by shaking her head, “So much for moving the Dog to Academy. No friends for him.”
“Hey, all I know is what he’s like around me in class. You don’t know what’s happening at lunch — that’s where people hang with their groups. Everyone knows that lunch is where life happens.” For some reason, my voice sounded defensive.
I realized that everyone was avoiding looking at me — picking at an orange peel, stringing their cheese, spiking up their hair (okay, that was just Gonzo).
“What?” I demanded.
Helena said, “He’s sitting all alone.”
“How can you sit by yourself in a packed cafeteria? Half the people can’t even get a chair!”
Phoebe and Helena exchanged glances, a lightning-fast, silent negotiation over who was going to tell me. Phoebe, clearly the loser, turned to me, “Here’s the way it works. He doesn’t get in line for food, he goes straight to a metal chair, pulls it out from a table at the start of lunch, plugs in his earbuds, crosses his arms and sits, taking up a lot of space. The whole table stays empty the entire lunch period. Everyone stays far away.”
“Everyone?” My voice slid up the scale of disbelief. How is that possible in a pod of 1,300 people?
Phoebe took a deep breath. “I heard Dickie stopped by and tried to chat.”
“Oh no — not that weasel-guy who calls himself Richard the Third?” Dickie’s private campaign to get himself nicknamed after a guy (England’s King Richard the Third) who slaughtered his own nephews never seemed to take — despite the obvious similarities in personality. Instead, everyone called him Dickie the Pharmacist behind his back. People whispered that he was the source of all things contraband at Legacy High. Had I gotten the Dog moved into a worse environment? “What?…” I swallowed hard. “What happened?”
Another non-verbal eye-battle, so intense that eyebrows got involved. This time Helena must have crumpled under the onslaught, because she finally gave a big sigh, turned back to me, and said, “Dickie asked the Dog what’s up. The Dog ignored him. Dickie said he knew where a good party was this weekend if the Dog was interested. More silence from the Dog. Then Dickie asked if he could sit down. The Dog turned those scary eyes on Dickie and said, ‘Do you have a roll?’”
“A roll?” I squeaked. Was this a euphemism for…something I didn’t want to think about?
Helena and Phoebe went at it again, clashing eye-swords. Phoebe lost again, turned to me and said, “That’s what Dickie thought too. Dickie said something about how he knew someone who might know how to get a such a thing, but then the Dog gave Dickie this kind of sneer and said, ‘A dinner roll, fool.’”
“What?”
Viola, of all people, said, “Drew’s really hungry. I gave him a piece of gum yesterday in the hall and I think he swallowed it.”
We stared at each other, eye-whites showing in horror, all of us — Tio, Gonzo, Helena, Alex, Phoebe, Robin — it was like we all realized it at the same time.
“No,” I said, my voice low. “No way. Tell me his mother wouldn’t be that harsh.”
Helena said, “You did say she’s pretty determined. You paid at the dance, remember? And that was in front of all his classmates, which I’d say is even harsher.”
“He’s had no lunch money?” I wailed it. “Why didn’t he just make lunch?”
All our eyes, all 16 of them, swiveled like submarine scopes and locked onto Phoebe’s grocery bag, lying at the base of a tree. Phoebe had to plan weeks in advance to get lunch-food out of her house.
See, the morning rush to school is a pretty intense family time. If you get up and barge into breakfast-making in order to slap together a lunch, that makes a pretty gigantic statement. Especially if you’ve never done it before in your life.
Especially if you’re too proud to cave to your mom and her (in your opinion) ridiculous rules.
Gonzo said, “I heard he had trouble at post-season football practice yesterday. Fumbled a snap and then he was the only one who couldn’t keep up with the coach’s punishment — twenty gut-sprints for the whole team. You could tell everyone was pretty pissed off at him.”
We stared at Gonzo, and after a heartbeat of silence he blurted, “What, I can’t walk by the field and watch a little football on my way home?”
No one had to point out the fact that his home is in the exact opposite direction. He knew we all knew, which is probably why his cheeks seeped a pink color that drifted down to his neck.
“What are we going to do? That camera’s still out there, and now the Dog is being stalked by Dickie the Pharmacist!” I bent, elbows on knees, and shoved my hands in my hair. “All I’ve done is make everything worse.”
If I couldn’t do something, if I didn’t think of something, I would end up destroying everything I cared about. Before I stupidly snapped those photos, we Greenbacks were working hard and earning almost enough (okay, not nearly enough) money from safe things like book sales and rummage sales. Now that I’d stupidly taken those pictures, I could end up suspended, Tio tossed out of school (a target for a new school to mock), with all the trees slaughtered.
And the Dog, isolated, angry and addicted to who knows what.
It was all my fault.
What could fix this? What?
CHAPTER FIVE
Starving the Drew
Chapter 5
I had a flicker of inspiration. The breeze picked up and the treetops, like they approved of my idea, started a hula dance high above.
“I’ve got it! What the Dog needs is friends, right? Tio, Gonzo — you’re guys.”
Everyone carefully didn’t look at Alex and Robin.
I added, “And you’ve got stuff in common with him — you know, Bianca and…stuff.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Tio, his face darkening like a thundercloud. “Don’t you dare suggest I go ‘hang’” — he actually did air quotes — “with the Dog. You show up with that overbearing jerk, both of you spying on me in tutoring for three straight days and now you think we’re going to be buddies? Are you deranged?”
“Tio,” something caught in my chest, like a stitch when you’ve run too far. “I told you — the Dog said he’d pound you and stop the tutoring if I didn’t get him inside as his partner.”
Tio seethed, and I knew the whole thing made him feel even more like a child.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” I asked. “I’ll do it, I swear.”
But that only seemed to make Tio angrier. I realized for the first time how horrible it must be for him. He had Bianca alone for a few minutes every day — with her overprotective brother hanging over the wall of the cube. So close, and so impossible at the same time — like some truly evil form of t
orture. No wonder Tio never said a word to Bianca during tutoring.
“Tio, maybe you can get the Dog to relax around you. You can be really charming.” Tio snorted, one of the least charming noises in the world. “You’d be with Gonzo,” I said. Oh God, I had to get them to do this. If it worked, it would help on so many levels. We both turned to Gonzo, who was now a cherry red, all the way up to his tufts of spiky hair. “You can talk football, right?”
Gonzo said, “I don’t know anything about football. Believe me when I say this.”
“You can both learn!” Okay, now I was flat-out begging. “Think of it as an assignment, like for school, only even more important. It’s something you’ve got to learn, sooner or later. When you’re head of a company or something, you’ve got to be able to talk sports, right? Isn’t that how guys relate?”
Alex and Robin gave each other a smile and Robin said, “Yep. Sports is the ultimate guy language. In fact, that’s why the Dog doesn’t say much — top dog’s always quiet, the guys lower in the pack do the yapping, asking approval.”
We stared.
Alex gave a shrug and said, “We like gender anthropology.”
Understatement of the Century.
Throat clearing erupted around the circle. “Okay,” I said, “so we’ve got a plan? Tio and Gonzo are going to be on Charm-the-Dog duty, with Alex and Robin as behavioral consultants.” Tio had his arms crossed. A shaft of light from the trees blinked over Tio, and he looked, for just a second, weirdly like the Dog. Tio was frustrated and furious, but it was more than that. It was like Tio’s forehead had grown before the rest of his face — that Cro-Magnon look that guys in middle school get. Gonzo, in contrast, looked all fluttery, like he was having trouble sitting still. Alex and Robin gave each other a fist bump.
I felt a subterranean rumble of fear, deep inside me — maybe this was a bad idea. I squelched it. I had no other ideas right now, and doing nothing while everything slid toward disaster was unacceptable. I plowed ahead. “So that leaves us with the camera problem. Any news?”
Gonzo and Tio had both disassembled the entire storage space and replaced everything. During and after school. Twice.
Helena said, “Kate, you’ve just got to give it up. It’s not in the cabinet.”
I took a deep breath. “Then that leaves the Dean’s office.”
“Nooo!” shouts erupted around the clearing and even a gull squawked overhead. “You wouldn’t dare!”
I waited for the protests to die down. By now, everyone in the group had their arms folded, wearing a Dog-like stubborn frown.
“Hear me out. That’s all I ask.”
Silence. No one would look at me. God, I’d messed things up so badly, they weren’t even going to let me speak. For a minute, white-water rapids of fear coursed through me, and I felt my eyes go wet and my face prickle, but I hung on to my determination like it was an inner tube.
But then Viola said, “Tio, isn’t this where you say, ‘To be or not to be — that is the question?’”
Tio jerked a look at Viola, startled and a bit hurt. No one joked about his Shakespeare tic. Not out loud, in front of everyone. Viola said, putting a hand on Tio’s shoulder, “I like your ‘Spears. You always know the right thing to say.”
Something inside Tio seemed to unknot and he leaned back further against a tree. “Go ahead, Kate,” he said, a grudging tone in his voice, “I know you’re going to say it no matter what.”
I took a deep breath, my stomach wobbling like it does after a scary ride. “I thought Gonzo could volunteer to do a photo-shoot of the Dean in her office for the yearbook — stock pictures. That’s all.”
Surprised glances darted around the clearing. Phoebe said, “No breaking and entering? No grand larceny? No pornography? My God, this isn’t like you at all, Kate.”
There was a too-loud explosion of laughter. It sounded like relief.
“Well, I do have my standards,” I said, forcing down the last of my fear, “you know what I always say — “
Everyone chimed in, shouting in a ragged unison — “Kate doesn’t do naked!”
In the exhausted pause after the laughter died down, Helena said, “That’s not a bad idea, Kate. Gonzo can end up in the Dean’s office without breaking any rules. And maybe he can look around the office, or chat up the Dean to find out if someone there knows where the missing camera is — after all, it’s kind of a natural question to ask under the circumstances, right?”
Gonzo said, his lip curled like he’d bit into something surprisingly rotten. “You guys forgot one thing.”
“What?”
“Celia.”
For the last two days, Gonzo said Celia had hovered around the journalism class. Apparently she must have discovered Gonzo’s connection to the Greenbacks and me, because she’d parked herself in a seat next to him.
“It’s creepy,” Gonzo said, “It’s like she’s stalking me, or she thinks I’ve got the camera hidden up my sleeve. Every time I get out of my chair, even to sharpen a pencil or something, I turn around and almost knock her down. No way can I get an assignment to the Dean’s office for a photo-shoot without her pushing her way in too.”
“Well, let her,” I said, giddy that they’d agreed with my idea. “That’s a bridge we can cross when we get to it.”
“We?” asked Phoebe, and there was still, to my dismay, a faint wariness in her voice.
“Yes, we — we’re in this together, right? What do you guys say to all of us having lunch at a table with the Dog tomorrow? My treat. I’ll buy tickets for everyone, including Drew. That way he’ll eat without some public battle over money, and Tio and Gonzo don’t have to take on the Dog alone.”
We left the clearing, everyone talking and joking except Viola, who seemed to be pondering something. Halfway across the field, Viola stopped and said, “I know! — I’ll ask the Dog about his pass-interception ratio.”
We stopped and stared.
“What?” said Viola. “Everyone knows it’s a major factor in QB ratings.”
“So Viola’s into fantasy football,” Robin nodded approval, “Now that, friends, is truly twisted.”
***
“How could you forget today is Hunger Luncheon Day? Didn’t you notice when you bought the tickets?”
Phoebe hissed it at me the next day, but everyone was thinking it. Accusing stares surrounded me. We stood in the lunchroom line. I’d taken a scary-big wad of cash out of my dwindling bank account with my ATM card and then bought nine tickets before school started so we could avoid the purchase lines at noon. I had figured it was going to be hard enough to herd the Dog through the always-packed Academy lunch-crowds as it was.
“I didn’t know!” I said back. “I’m not the only one who forgot.”
Helena said, “Hey, it’s not over. We haven’t got our food assignments yet. The Dog could still get a First World meal.”
No one said it, but we all thought it — the odds were way against it. Oh please, oh please, I thought, probably for the first (and last) time ever — please let the Dog be one of the privileged.
A Hunger Luncheon is a classic Academy event. It’s designed to increase awareness of world conditions, and the impact of poverty. See, the way it works is, you buy the usual lunch-ticket. But when you get to the checkout line, a random-number-generator decides if you’re First World, Second World, or Third World. First World people get this whopping turkey dinner — turkey, gravy, stuffing, perfectly cooked green beans drizzled in butter, sweet potatoes and your choice of pumpkin or apple pie. We’re talking total Thanksgiving splurge. If you’re Second World, you get beans, rice and a glass of milk. If you’re Third World (gulp) you’ve got to make it until after school with just a tiny wad of white rice (no second helpings) and a paper cup of tap-water (they make a point of telling you you’re supposed to be grateful the water’s clean).
Here’s the kicker: so you get an immediate understanding of how the world’s resources are distributed, only 1% of ticket-hold
ers get the turkey meal. That’s one out of 100, folks. Seeing that in real life, when you’re starving for a lunch, is kind of eye-opening. Nineteen out of 100 get the beans. Everyone else (eighty out of 100) gets the tap-water/rice combo. Hunger Luncheon happens once a year at Academy, and all the money goes to support a local food bank.
I had this bad feeling University never did this kind of event. Which was confirmed when the Dog, happily holding his ticket (after three straight days of no lunch), nudged Alex at the back of our group and said, “Man, look at all those people with a spoonful of rice. Is there, like, some epidemic of anorexia going around?”
No one answered. We kept our faces turned toward the server ahead of us. If it was possible to combine brainpower to telekinetically alter reality, I swear, in that moment, the Greenbacks would have done it. We were all, I know for a fact, desperately projecting onto the server a laser beam of mental pleading: give the Dog a First World, give the Dog a First World.
The closer we got to the server, the closer I shifted toward the back of our group. If I got us into this, I ought to be the last in our group, behind the Dog, to take the flak in case the Dog got Third World.
There was a run of Second Worlds, defying the odds — Tio, Helena, Alex.
The Greenbacks who’d already been served hovered at the checkout — not able to leave.
Rice and beans, I thought, that might not be too bad. Maybe the Dog’ll get that.
Then Viola got a First World and we all gasped. The Dog, in front of me, said, his voice bouncier than I’d ever heard it, “That’s what I’m ordering. I’m starved.” A hideous, strained silence descended. I thought, maybe I should explain how this works, before it’s too late.
“Move, people,” said the hairnetted lunch lady, flapping her hand and frowning, “we got lots to serve.” The line pushed us forward from behind and then it was too late — paper plates were slapped down on the counter as we stumbled forward.
Phoebe got a Second World
