Inside Out

by Terry Trueman

  TERRY TRUEMAN

  HARPERTEMPEST

  AN IMPRINT OF HARPERCOLLINSPUBLISHERS

  DEDICATION

  For Eric John

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Q&A with Terry Trueman

  Excerpt from Life Happens Next

  Praise

  Other Works

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  1

  All I want is a maple bar, but I don’t think these kids with the guns care about what I want.

  I didn’t even look up when they first walked into the coffee shop, even though the little bell on the door went tingaling. But now I look.

  “This is a robbery,” yells the taller, older-looking kid, holding a black gun. He’s around my age, maybe sixteen. The other kid’s hand is shaking, and the little silver gun he’s holding is shaking too; he looks younger than the first kid.

  They both look mad, mean, too.

  “We’re just here for the cash registers,” yells the older kid. “You all just sit tight!”

  I glance out the window, and I see a lady in a blue car. Her mouth has dropped open and she’s staring straight at us. Now she’s talking on her cell phone as she speeds away. I look back at the robber kids. I don’t think they saw the lady in the car.

  I look around at everybody else in this place, and they all look scared, so I’m trying to look scared too. I mean, I guess I’m scared, but this all seems so normal to me. The thing is, I’m used to seeing and hearing really weird stuff, so this doesn’t feel that strange to me at all. It feels familiar. But it’s probably weird to everyone else, ’cause they’re freaking out.

  The two suits sitting over at the table against the wall are white as ghosts. One of them is fat; I don’t want to be rude, but he is. His white shirt is stretched tight over his big belly, and his tie doesn’t reach his belt. The other one is skinny. They remind me of these two old movie characters, Laurel and Hardy, who were a skinny guy and a fat guy too. Laurel and Hardy are my favorites because they’re always arguing and the fat guy yells and the skinny guy starts bawling like a baby. But the fat suit here in this coffee shop isn’t yelling, and the skinny suit isn’t crying … at least not yet.

  Two old ladies sitting at the table next to the two suits are quiet and sit very still. I have to stare at them for a few seconds to be sure they’re even real. Finally one of them blinks, but I’m still not sure about the other one. The girl and guy who work behind the counter are frozen like statues. Even though I sit in here every day after school waiting for my mom, I don’t know the guy’s or girl’s name and they don’t know mine. A lady and her little daughter, who were ordering drinks when these kids with the guns busted in, are just standing with their faces all squinched up, which is too bad because the lady is pretty and her little girl is cute. They could be in a commercial about pretty moms and daughters.

  One of the kids with a gun, the older-looking one, says, “Nobody’s gonna get hurt if you just do what we tell you!”

  I say, “Okay.”

  He seems surprised at the sound of my voice and looks at me real fast, then away again.

  He says, “We don’t wanna hurt anybody.”

  “Good,” I say.

  He looks at me again, “You got a problem?” He asks. I think he sounds mad.

  “Yes,” I say.

  This surprises him too. “Oh, yeah?” he asks. Then he points his gun right at me. “What’s your problem?”

  I’m sort of surprised that he wants to know.

  His gun is big and black, with a wide hole in the end of the barrel. It’s like a tunnel.

  I answer him as truthfully as I can. “I’m sick, that’s my problem; I take medicine two times every day, thanks for asking.”

  The younger kid yells, “Shut up or we’ll hurt you.” He sounds like kids at school sound just before they do something like knock your lunch tray out of your hands.

  I think about what the older kid said, about not wanting to hurt anybody. So now I’m confused by the younger one saying they might hurt me. “I thought you didn’t wanna?” I ask.

  “Didn’t wanna what?” asks the older kid.

  “Hurt anybody.”

  “We don’t.” He hesitates. “So don’t make us.”

  “Make you?” Now I’m really confused. Why would I try to make anybody hurt me? What am I gonna do, say something like “Come on, please, please, shoot me a few times”? And people call me weird?

  The older kid says, “So just shut up and we won’t hurt you.”

  “Ohhh,” I say. “Okay.” I think, Close one, Zach, you almost screwed up again.

  “Zach, you’re a stupid wong-gong, a long-gone wong-gong.”

  I ignore this, but while I’m sitting here being quiet, my palms are sweaty and my throat is dry. I need to decide if this situation is real or not; I need to decide that right now. Sometimes I understand what’s going on, and other times I don’t have a clue. If I don’t figure this one out, I could be in trouble.

  So I look closer at the kids with the guns—they’re not much bigger than I am. They’re both wearing blue jeans and the older one is wearing a baseball hat and a black T-shirt. The younger one doesn’t have a hat on and his T-shirt is yellow. Their faces look pretty normal: noses, eyes, mouths, ears and hair and eyebrows. So far so good. If I were just imagining them, they’d probably be missing some of those parts. So I think that probably I’m not imagining them. I think these are real kids with real guns. After all, it looks like the other people sitting here see them too. Dr. Curt always tells me to use all my senses when I’m trying to figure out “reality.” Like if I’m hearing too much stuff and my ears are being used up, then I need to use my eyes and nose, my sense of taste and touch to figure if things are real or not. But sometimes I can’t trust any of my other senses either.

  The thing is, I am not normal. I’m not, and I can’t help it. I get massively confused. I’ve got two psycho-killer enemies named Dirtbag and Rat after me. My body, most of the time, feels like a foreign country. Like I told the kid with the big black gun, I’m sick.

  “Hey, Zach, think, think, shrink shrink, wong-gong.”

  And then, of course, there’s that crap.

  I mutter back, “Up yours.”

  The younger kid points his gun right at me and says, “I thought we told you to shut up!”

  “Yeah, you did, really, honestly, you did tell me that,” I say. “You said shut up and no one will get hurt.” I’m surprised he forgot.

  “So why are you still talking?” he demands. Maybe this is one of those times when someone asks a question but doesn’t really care about the answer. He’s not really expecting me to answer. I better shut up just to be safe.

  “Hey, Zach, wing-wong, wing-wong, long gone.”

  This bounces around from one side of the room to the other. I know that no one else can hear this—no one else ever does. I glance at the two businessmen across from me. The skinny one just stares at the table; he looks pale and he’s shaking. The fat one looks like he would shoot me if he had a gun. Somehow I always make people mad. I don’t know why.

  I point over at the fat suit, and I say to the r
obbers, “Does he look mad to you?” The robbers, both of them, turn and look, pointing their guns at him.

  The older kid asks the fat suit, “Are you a hero? You gonna give us a problem?”

  When the fat suit opens his mouth to speak, his words squeak out of him. “No way! No, sir!” He looks back at me again, his face all twisted up, his mouth pinched real tight and his eyes bulging even more than before. I can’t tell if he’s sorry or if he wants to kill me. When I look at other people, I usually don’t know what they’re feeling. Hell, most times I can’t tell what I’m feeling—how am I supposed to know what’s happening with anybody else? It sure would be good to know though, especially right now.

  The older kid turns back to me. “Just try to shut up, okay?” he says. Then he adds, actually sounding kind of nice, loud enough for everybody to hear him, “We’ll be done here in just a second, then you can all go home.”

  When he says this, I glance at my watch and I know that won’t work for me. I say, “My mom won’t be here till three thirty.” I look at my watch again. “It’s only three twelve. I have to wait for her.”

  The older kid says, “Okay.”

  I say, “I can’t leave until she comes to pick me up.”

  He shifts his gun a little in his hand and says, “Yeah, okay, that’s fine. You can stay here until three thirty and wait for her.”

  I say, “Yeah, I gotta wait here. I can’t be home alone anymore, even though she got rid of our rifle. So this is where she meets me. She picks me up here every day after school, then I take my medicine right away. I have to—”

  “SHUT UP!” the younger kid screams.

  The whole room jumps, even the statue ladies.

  His words echo. “SHUT UP—SHUT UP—SHUT UP—SHUT UP!!!!!”

  I do it. I shut up right away.

  The older kid says, “You’ve gotta be quiet, okay?”

  I nod my head yes, so that I won’t have to be talking.

  “Wing-ding, long gone, your mouth is stupid but you got a long dong.”

  I ignore this, even though I hate it when anybody talks about my dong.

  The younger robber yells at the girl behind the counter, “Hurry up!” As she takes the money out of the cash register, she tries to move her hands faster, shoving the bills into one of the white paper bags they use for giving you maple bars and stuff.

  I love maple bars.

  Suddenly three cop cars screech to a stop right outside, their lights flashing: red and blue, red and blue, red and blue.

  “Wahooo!”

  The two kids with the guns start yelling, “Everybody up!” “Hurry up!” “Move it now!” “NOW!”

  We’re all up and moving so fast that we bump into each other as the robber kids shove us toward the back room—I glance back at the maple bars; I really want one bad—and I notice out the window the cops jumping out of their cars with their guns. The robber kids look freaked out—their eyes are huge and scared, the older one’s face is sweaty, and the younger one’s face is real red.

  The older kid yells, “Hurry up!” and pushes the fat suit, who stumbles and knocks into the lady and her little girl. They bump into one of the old ladies, who almost falls. I wonder if any of us will ever meet the president of the United States. That’s stupid, isn’t it? I mean, why would we? I trip as the younger robber shoves me hard in my back; I bump into the skinny suit. This is like a kindergarten fire drill, only all of us are lots taller than little kindergarten kids would be—that’s stupid too, isn’t it? I mean, of course we’re taller than kindergartners. I guess I look and act stupid a lot of the time. Lots of people say that to me, so it’s probably true.

  In another few seconds we’re all crammed into this tiny back room of the coffee shop, the part in the back that you never see. I keep thinking how much farther away I am from getting a maple bar—Damn, I hate that!

  2

  Dr. Cal Curtis—Medical School Training Notes:

  Psychotic mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, affect the way people understand things and how they act in social settings. Sometimes these patients grasp what is happening around them, but most of the time they get very confused; they can be aware one moment and unaware the next....

  I wish I had one of those maple bars. If I were a robber, I’d take the money AND the maple bars!

  “Squish-wish, squish-wish, bet you wish you could squish a wish!”

  Maybe I would if I knew what the hell that meant.

  “Wasteoid!”

  I know what THAT means, but lucky for me, it’s not Dirtbag or Rat. I hate when they show up.

  The kids with the guns make us all sit on the floor.

  The younger kid peeks out the door at all the cops and cop cars, then turns back to the older kid and says, “What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do?! The cops are all over the place—they’ll blow our heads off—”

  The older kid interrupts, “They won’t. Just relax. We got all these people in here with us. The cops don’t want them to get hurt, so they won’t do anything.” He pauses a second, then says to all of us, “Just sit there and shut up and you won’t get hurt.”

  I want to stay quiet; I want to relax. But I can’t help myself. “What’s your names?” I ask.

  The older kid looks at me. “You don’t want to know our names,” he says.

  “Yes, I do,” I say back. “Otherwise I don’t know what to call you.”

  “Dang!” says the younger gunman. “We had to pick a place with a retard in it?!”

  The older kid turns to the younger one and says, “Chill.” The older kid turns to me again and says, “You can call me Frosty and him Stormy, okay?”

  “Wow,” I say, really impressed. “Neat names. Are those your real names? What’re your last names? Are you brothers? Wouldn’t it be cool if your last name was Day, you know, like Frosty Day and Stormy Day....”

  There’s a loud sound outside the building, out in front. It’s more sirens from more police cars.

  The older kid, Frosty, ignores the new police sounds and looks at me funny. He asks, “What’s wrong with you?”

  I say, “I’m not retarded.”

  Stormy laughs and says, “Yeah, right.”

  I say, “No, honest, I’m not. Actually, I’m pretty smart. Like ask me anything about school subjects, like math or history. Ask me the number of any president.”

  I wonder if the president of the United States is here right now. That’s stupid again. He’s out trying to protect the free world—by the way, what’s so free about the free world? I mean, everything I see costs money.

  I say, “Come on, just pick any number of president between one and forty-three.”

  Frosty doesn’t think about it for very long. “Seventeen.” He’s looking out the door again.

  “Seventeen,” I say. “Andrew Johnson, seventeenth president of the United States of America. Assumed office upon the assassination, by John Wilkes Booth, of the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln—”

  Frosty interrupts me, “Okay, you’re not a retard, but just shut up, okay? I’ve gotta pay attention or someone could get hurt for real.”

  There’re more sounds of policemen yelling things to each other and running around outside.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Frosty pauses for a few seconds, then says to all of us, “We don’t want to have to kill you, okay? We want to try and get out of this, so do what we say, when we say it, and just shut up.”

  When Frosty says the thing about killing us, the little girl sitting with her mom starts to cry. She’s really a cute little girl, a lot smaller than her mom. That’s another stupid thing to say, isn’t it, but that’s what I notice, she’s little and her mom is bigger. Anyway, the little girl is cute, but I think she’s real scared. I remember being scared when I was little, before I got sick. I don’t get scared now. As the little girl’s crying, her face is all scrunched up and her lips are quivering. Her hands are shaking too, little hands with blue fingernail polish—yep, she
’s scared.

  Stormy looks down at the little girl and says to her, “Hey!” When she looks up at him, he says, “We’re not gonna hurt you, I promise.”

  The little girl smiles at him, and he smiles back at her.

  While I’m sitting here shutting up, I’m thinking about not understanding things faster. I guess in a way I’m embarrassed about it, but I’m happy to still feel embarrassed—Dr. Curt says a lot of people with my kind of brain don’t have feelings at all. He says that would be worse. I guess if he says so, it must be true. One thing for sure, though, I got it bad enough the way I am now, I don’t need “worse.”

  Stormy asks Frosty again, “How’re we gonna get outa this?” His voice is shaky.

  “I don’t know,” says Frosty.

  Stormy says, “But what about Mom? What about—”

  Frosty interrupts. “Just shut up a second, okay? Just chill.”

  “But …” Stormy begins, but when he looks at Frosty, he stops talking.

  Suddenly there’re more loud sounds of cops outside yelling. Frosty and Stormy look up at each other but don’t say anything.

  We’re all so crowded together, but it’s okay, ’cause I’m sitting next to one of the old ladies, who has on some perfume that smells really nice.

  “You smell nice,” I say to her.

  She tries to smile at me, but her mouth can’t quite make it. She has kind of pink-purple hair and real wrinkly skin. I mean really wrinkly. I wonder if she’s a hundred years old. Stupid again, hardly anybody’s that old.

  So I ask her, “How old are you?”

  Stormy says to me, “Jeez, please—shut up!”

  I forgot I wasn’t supposed to talk, or maybe I thought that just counted out in the other room near the maple bars. I guess it counts here, too.