Tyler stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I read a book about it,” Ben said. He sounded more confident now that he was talking about something he’d read. “Most bullies are actually insecure and just trying to make themselves feel better by—”
“Shut up,” Tyler said. “Your sister and your girlfriend aren’t always going to be around to protect you, you know.”
Felicia stepped toward him. “But you know what? He’ll tell us. And we know where to find you.”
“What are you gonna do, fatty? Sit on me?”
Felicia didn’t even flinch. “If necessary,” she said grimly.
Sydney put her arm around Ben. “Ben has lots of friends, Tyler. And we don’t like people who hurt him.”
“Just leave me alone, Tyler.” Ben’s voice wobbled slightly. “I don’t do anything to bother you.”
“You breathe,” Tyler said. “That bothers me. Your stupid face bothers me.”
My heart was beating so hard and fast I felt like it might explode. I had to say something. “You’re the stupid one,” I told Tyler. “What’s your problem, anyway? How come you’re such a little jerk?”
Tyler stared at me, taken aback for a second.
I made a loud buzzer noise. “Game over. You lose.”
But Tyler wasn’t backing down. He turned back to Ben. “Look, nerd-boy. You don’t tell me what to do. Your friends don’t tell me what to do. Some time, it’ll just be you and me and then?” He smacked one fist into his other hand. “Pow.”
“Nice gloves,” Victoria said. “I think you owe Ben a pair.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You want to hand them over, or should we come and get them?”
For the first time, Tyler looked uncertain. “You wouldn’t.”
I shrugged. “Well, not if you’d rather I called your mom and told her that you threw Ben’s in the creek.”
Tyler took a step back. “You can’t do that!”
Aha. Finally. We’d found a crack. I nudged Ben to make sure he’d noticed.
Ben smiled. “Well, I’m sure she’d want to know.”
No dummy, my little brother.
Tyler pulled his gloves off and threw them at Ben. “Fine. I hate these stupid gloves anyway.”
Ben picked them up and put them on. “Leather. Nice.”
He looked like he’d just grown about six inches. There were all kinds of things I wanted to say to Tyler, but I thought I’d let Ben take it from here.
“Tyler.” Ben gave him a long look. “There’s a program at school that might interest you.”
Tyler snorted. “I doubt that.”
“It’s an anti-bullying program. Zero-tolerance. You know what that means?”
Sydney nudged me, beaming delightedly. “I’ve been talking to him about this for ages!” she whispered.
“Whatever,” Tyler said. He turned to walk away.
“If you ever hit me—or even threaten me, or chase me, or call me names—again, I’m going to tell. I’ll tell our teacher. I’ll tell the principal.” Ben raised his voice. “And I’ll tell your mother.”
For a moment I thought we’d won.
Then Tyler took a step toward us. “Sure you will.” He lifted his chin and stared at Ben with hard eyes. “Remember what I said. Sometime soon, when it’s just the two of us?” He punched his fist into his hand again. “You’re dead, kid.”
Twenty
For the next few days, I didn’t let Ben out of my sight on the way to and from school. I was worried that I’d made things worse by encouraging him to take a stand. I couldn’t keep an eye on him all the time, and what would happen if Tyler caught him alone? Sitting at my desk, I clenched my fists and felt helpless.
I pushed my worries aside and tried to concentrate. The art project was due the next day, and what did I have? A bunch of cut up magazines and a spiral-bound journal full of scribbled notes about myself. Who is Cassidy Silver? Not an artist, clearly. Still, I had to hand in something. I flipped through my pile of magazine cuttings and looked around the classroom to see who was hogging all the glue sticks.
Joe Cicarelli appeared to have three. I wandered over to his desk and held out my hand. “Got a spare glue stick, Joe?”
He picked one up. “It’ll cost ya.”
“Cost me what?”
He nodded at my T-shirt. I glanced down at it. Light green with black letters: What would Scooby Doo?
“You want my T-shirt? For a glue stick?” I snorted. “No way.”
He laughed. “Nah. I just want to know where you get them.”
I grinned. “Ah, well. That’s top secret information. It’ll cost you at least two glue sticks.”
He reluctantly handed over another one. “So much for my art project. I was going to make a glue stick sculpture and now you’ve ruined it.”
“How exactly would a glue stick sculpture reflect who you are? You have some obsession with glue sticks or something?”
Joe clutched one hand to his heart. “I’m wounded. Cut to the quick.” Then he frowned. “It’s supposed to be about me? I missed that part.”
“Oh, boy. Look, because I feel sorry for you, I’ll let you in on my secret.” I leaned over and wrote the address for my favorite T-shirt website on one of the scraps of construction paper littering his desk. “There you go. Enjoy.” I headed back to my desk, two glue sticks richer and smiling to myself. School was a lot more fun than it used to be.
Half an hour later, I had something to hand in. I just wasn’t sure it counted as an art project. I glanced around the room. Victoria looked like she was deep in concentration over her project, so I wandered over to say hi to Felicia and Nathan. One of the best things about art was that Ms. Allyson let us move about and talk to each other during class.
Nathan grinned. “Hey, so are you getting somewhere?”
“I’m done,” I said smugly. Then I sighed and made a face. “Actually, I just cut some stuff up and stuck it together. I’ve decided that art isn’t one of my strengths.” I tried not to think about how great it would’ve been to tell my mom that I’d won an art contest.
“Want to see mine?” Nathan asked, sliding his painting toward me.
“Wow. That’s totally cool.” It looked like it had started out as a collage of black and white images— photographs, mostly of trees and fences and snow—but he’d painted over top so that the images were stained with color.
“I took all the photographs myself,” he said. “Developed them and everything at home.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s kind of a hobby.”
“More than that, I’d say.” I studied the pictures. “I mean, I don’t know the first thing about photography, but these are amazing.”
Nathan’s face creased with a wide smile. “Thanks. Thanks, Cassidy.”
I grinned back and glanced over at Felicia, who quickly covered her paper. Her desk was covered with pastels. “How about you, Felicia? Are you just about done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She twisted her fingers in her thick tangle of curls. “I keep adding stuff and changing stuff and I can’t tell if I’m making it better or wrecking it completely.”
“Can I see it?” I asked.
Felicia shook her head. “You’ll probably think it sucks.”
“Nah, I’ve already taken first place in the suckage category. Sorry. You can’t compete.” I laughed. “Joe says he’s making a glue stick sculpture.”
“Seriously?”
“Until I took his glue sticks.”
“Aha. Does that mean you’ve finally made something?”
“Mmm. Want to see it?”
Felicia stood up and followed me back to my desk. I lifted the papers I’d used to hide my art project. “See? Not art.”
She stared at it. From a distance of a few feet, it looked like a mixed-up newspaper.
Victoria looked up from her own work. “Can I see?”
I nodded and she came and stood beside Feli
cia, bending down to look more closely.
In the end, I’d given up on painting and sculpture and finding images that called out to me. I’d decided that since I’d used all the art class time to write in my notebook, my notebook would have to be the raw material. So what I’d made was a collage of words and sentences and questions. A Who is Cassidy Silver? collage.
Victoria and Felicia stared and stared.
I squirmed. “Okay, I know it’s not art.”
Felicia finally turned to look at me. “That was brave of you,” she said. “Letting us see that. Read that.”
I met her eyes. “We’re friends.”
Felicia’s cheeks were pink. “Yes,” she said, “we are.”
Victoria didn’t meet my eyes, and I wondered what she was thinking. We hadn’t talked about the telekinesis thing since that day at the tobogganing hill, and I felt like it was kind of hanging between us. If she had made up the whole thing about her powers and Rick and all that—well, didn’t that mean she didn’t trust me with who she really was? And if she hadn’t made it up, and I doubted her? Well, that wasn’t right either.
“You want to see my picture?” Victoria asked.
I nodded. “Sure.”
She flipped it around so we could see. “I had this idea in my head of how it should look, but I can’t get it on to the paper,” she said. “It’s so frustrating.”
She’d painted a face, which I guess was supposed to be hers—it had short brown hair and glasses—and crisscrossed it with lines, so that it looked like a jigsaw puzzle. The face was a bit too small for the paper, so there was a lot of empty white space around it, and one eye was a bit bigger than the other. That was exactly what happened when I tried to draw faces, and for some reason, that made me feel better.
“It’s cool,” I said. “It’s a cool idea. You know, the puzzle thing.”
Felicia nodded quickly. “Yeah, that’s clever.”
“You can just say it,” Victoria said glumly. “I can’t paint.”
“I honestly do think it’s a cool idea,” I said. “And you paint better than I do. And at least you don’t have a mother who’s a famous artist.”
She nodded, looking more cheerful. “Yeah, at least no one expects me to win the contest.”
“Jeez. You don’t think anyone expects me to, do you?” That hadn’t occurred to me. I remembered Ms. Allyson saying she was a fan of my mother’s work, and I hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed when she saw what I’d done. Well, too late to do anything about that now.
I glanced at Victoria’s picture again. A jigsaw puzzle. That was about right, I thought. I wasn’t sure how all the pieces fit together, and it looked like maybe she wasn’t quite sure either.
Twenty-One
I was standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for Ben when Amber, Madeline and Chiaki came out of the school. I braced myself for the usual barrage of insults. Though, come to think of it, Amber had mostly been ignoring me lately.
Amber nodded at me.
I nodded back. A truce, maybe?
Then, wonder of wonders, Chiaki smiled at me. “Hi, Cassidy.”
“Hi, Chiaki. How’s it going?”
She glanced at Amber, a little nervously. “Okay.”
“Come on, Chiaki. Let’s go.” Amber looped her arm through Chiaki’s.
“Um. Okay. See you.” Chiaki shrugged and followed Amber off across the schoolyard.
I stared after them. Wow. An almost friendly interaction. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I didn’t want to hope for too much. If Chiaki wanted to be friendly, that was great. But if not, I’d survive. I had Victoria and Felicia and Nathan and maybe even Joe. Chiaki was welcome to join us, if she ever decided to climb way down the social ladder, but I didn’t need my thumbuddy back anymore.
Ben came barreling through the doors, taking the steps two at a time. I nodded at him and we walked across the schoolyard together. “You okay?” I asked.
He nodded, stared at the ground and shuffled his feet through the snow. “Cassidy?”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“I’d rather just get it over with,” he whispered.
I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Tyler.” His face was half covered by his wool scarf, and he looked up at me from behind fogged up lenses. “I know he’s just waiting to get me alone.”
“He won’t get you alone.” I felt uncomfortable as soon as the words were out of my mouth. Ben was right: If Tyler wanted to get Ben, sooner or later he would find a chance.
Ben just shook his head. He knew it too.
“My art show’s coming up, you know,” Mom told me and Ben over leftover Chinese food. “Next weekend. I was wondering if you two would be willing to help out.”
I eyed her suspiciously. Those big canvasses weighed a ton and were really awkward to move. Usually Dad helped, but since he wasn’t here…
Mom saw my expression and laughed. “Nothing too unpleasant. I’ve got friends helping with the setup, but Friday night is the opening and we’re hoping for a good turn out. There’ll be appetizers and drinks. I wondered if you two would like to help serve them.”
“Like, walk around with trays of crackers and stuff?” I’d done that at one of her shows last year. “Sure, I don’t mind.”
“Can Sydney come too?” Ben asked.
“If he gets to invite Sydney, I want to invite Victoria,” I added quickly. “And Felicia.”
“One friend each. But if Sydney and Victoria want to come, I’d be more than happy to put them to work.”
“Cool.” I started planning my outfit. I’d seen a great hat in the window of the Sally Ann on my way home from school.
Mom interrupted my thoughts. “Invite them here for dinner on Friday. We can order pizza and then all go to the show together.”
I made a face. “Mom? I honestly don’t think I can face another pizza in this lifetime.”
Ben’s head bobbed up and down like it was on a spring. “Yeah, no more pizza.”
“After this show is over, I won’t be so busy.” She frowned. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a bit distracted. With your dad away, I can’t seem to stay on top of things.”
Maybe if you didn’t volunteer twenty hours a week and spend the rest of your time painting, I thought. Then I felt bad. Selfish. Like I wanted her to abandon dying people so that I could have a lasagna. Or burgers. Or a stir-fry. Or a salad. My mouth watered. “Maybe if you volunteered a little bit less? Not quit or anything, but…”
“There’s so much to do at hospice,” she said. “I didn’t intend to do so much, but the nurses are so busy and they keep asking me if I could just do one more thing.”
Ben stood up abruptly. “Just say no, Mom.”
I looked at him, startled.
“You’re never here anymore,” he said.
“I didn’t know you felt like that.” She turned and looked at me, her forehead wrinkled in an unspoken question.
I swallowed. “It’s hard, Mom. When you’re so busy, and everything you’re doing is so important, it’s hard to talk to you about stuff that seems less important.”
“Less important?” She looked startled. “What are you talking about? Nothing is more important to me than the two of you.”
Ben and I looked at each other. “It hasn’t really felt like that,” I said. “Not lately. Not since Dad left.”
I turned to Mom and saw, with a shock, that her eyes were shiny with tears. “I’m sorry,” I said, backtracking. I hadn’t seen her cry for years, not since her father died when I was a little kid. “I mean, it’s okay, we’re okay.”
She ignored me and started talking fast, like she just wanted to say whatever it was she had to say. “When your dad left on this contract, I couldn’t stand it. I worried all the time. All those news stories about bombings and kidnappings.”
“You said it was safe,” I said, horrified.
“It is, it is. The area he’s in is considered relatively safe,
otherwise he wouldn’t have gone.” She rubbed her hands across her face. “But I couldn’t stop worrying. I’d spend half the day on the Internet, scaring myself silly, waiting for the phone to ring. I couldn’t go on like that. I decided I needed to keep myself busy somehow.”
“Well, you sure managed that.” I looked at her carefully. To my relief, the tears were gone and she looked a bit more like her usual self. “I guess you’ll be pretty happy when Dad’s home then.”
She nodded. “Forty-seven days to go.” Then she laughed. “Pathetic, huh? Missing him so much.”
I thought of Victoria’s parents and how they argued all the time. “No,” I said, “it’s not pathetic at all.”
Twenty-Two
On Friday, I handed in my art contest entry. On Saturday, I woke up with a stuffed up nose, a sore scratchy throat and a killer headache. I spent most of the weekend lying on the couch feeling lousy, and on Monday I was still too sick to go to school.
So Tyler finally got his chance.
Ben and Sydney burst through the front door after school. “Cassidy!” Ben shouted.
I’d been half asleep on the couch. I sat up. “What?” I croaked.
Ben came running into the living room, still wearing his winter boots and scattering lumps of ice across the carpet. “You won’t believe this.”
I stared at him. His hair was full of snow and his left eye was red and puffy, but he was grinning. “What happened?”
“Well, Sydney and I were walking home—”
I interrupted. “Mom told me she was going to pick you up.”
“Yeah.” Ben made a face. “I didn’t want her to, so I told her that I’d be fine if I was with Sydney.”
I sat up straighter and narrowed my eyes at him. “What about Tyler? What were you thinking?” I remembed what he’d said before. “You weren’t just trying to get it over with, were you?”
He shook his head and started unzipping his jacket. Sydney appeared beside him, having already shed her boots and coat. Ben grinned at her and turned back to me. “We were walking along and all of a sudden this snowball whacked me in the side of the head. A real muddy icy one.” He rubbed his reddened eye.
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