Copyright © 2018 Lesley Choyce
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Choyce, Lesley, 1951–, author
The thing you’re good at / Lesley Choyce.
(Orca soundings)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4598-1804-0 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1805-7 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1806-4 (EPUB)
I. Title. II. Title: Thing you are good at. III. Series: Orca soundings
PS8555.H668T46 2018 jC813'.54 C2017-907682-5
C2017-907683-3
First published in the United States, 2018
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018933733
Summary: : In this high-interest novel for teen readers, Jake tries to help his friend Maria after her parents are deported. A free teacher guide for this title is available at orcabook.com.
Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Edited by Tanya Trafford
Cover images by Unsplash.com/Frank Mckenna (front) and
Shutterstock.com/Krasovski Dmitri (back)
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
orcabook.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
21 20 19 18 • 4 3 2 1
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ALSO BY LESLEY CHOYCE
ORCA SOUNDINGS
Kryptonite (2018)
Identify (2017)
Scam (2016)
Off the Grid (2015)
Crash (2013)
Rat (2012)
Breaking Point (2012)
Reaction (2010)
Running the Risk (2009)
Wave Warrior (2007)
Thunderbowl (2004)
Refuge Cove (2002)
ORCA YA FICTION
Plank’s Law (2017)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
An Excerpt from “Kryptonite”
Chapter One
Chapter One
My father didn’t mean to be so nasty to me. It wasn’t his fault.
He would sometimes (often, well, almost always) have a bad day at the fish-and-chip place he worked at called the Fish Shack. Only he called it the Shit Shack. He’d worked there ever since I could remember. And hated every minute of it. But he was always afraid to quit.
So when he had a really bad day, when customers sent back their fish, when the boss chomped on him a little too hard, he didn’t have to tell me. I knew. He’d bring home a six-pack of malt liquor, and between that and the look on his face, I knew the story of the day. I could even predict the future. Me getting cursed at, shouted at, told outright I was a worthless little piece of shit. That sort of thing.
But nothing physical. He wasn’t like that.
I always made sure my little brother, Luke, was out of the way though. I called him my little brother because he was a year younger than me, but he was actually quite a bit bigger than me. He was fifteen and walked around most of the time looking like someone had just told him some bad news. That might have been because there had been a lot of bad news in our lives. I kept thinking that someday our luck was going to change.
Luke loved to watch old martial-arts movies with a headset on. And he studied books and instruction videos he’d signed out of the library, closing the door to our bedroom to practice whenever he could. He wanted to be a professional wrestler or mixed martial arts fighter when he grew up, even though I didn’t think he had an aggressive bone in his body. I’d never seen him in a fight. He’d been picked on plenty, but I’d never seen him stand up for himself.
Like I said, we were a family that had had a lot of bad luck.
“Our luck ain’t gonna change, Jake,” my father always said. “Nothing is gonna change. No way, no how.”
That was after malt-liquor bottle number one. I’d just nod and try to keep my mouth shut. I used to try to change the subject. But that hardly ever worked.
“I’m sick and tired of smelling like fried fish,” he would say. “No woman wants to be with a man who smells like old deep-fried seafood all the time.”
I understood he missed the company of a woman. There was my mother once. A long while back. But she left after Luke was born. She claimed that living with us was a dead end. “I’m gonna find myself some opportunity,” she said. And left. At least, that’s what I remember. There was probably more to it than that.
My older brother, Cole, was in jail and had a couple more years to go. Everyone had expected him to get busted for selling drugs. But that isn’t what happened. He was involved in a robbery of a gas station. How stupid is that? I was so angry at my brother for doing that. And I stayed angry at him. I refused to talk to him when my father called him up on the phone each month.
As my dad got a little more drunk, he would remind me of my destiny: “None of you boys are gonna turn out to be any better off than me. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that.”
It was always the same. Sometimes the words came out a little different, but after he said something along those lines, my dad would grit his teeth and then look like he was about to hit me. Funny—he never did though.
I tried not to take it personally. I figured he had to unload on someone. I was usually the one nearby.
Afterward he would shake his head and look like he was going to cry. But he never did that either.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” he said each time. “I truly am. Will you forgive me?”
“Yes,” I said.
I always said yes.
Chapter Two
We never ate fish at home. I guess you can figure out why. In the old days, my father would bring home leftover fish they were going to throw out, but now he was sick and tired of being around fish all day, so he didn’t do that anymore.
In fact, I did a lot of the cooking. Spaghetti. Macaroni and cheese. Boiled p
otatoes. Cabbage, sometimes, but we had to open the windows because it made us all fart so much. I always meant to learn more about cooking and food but never seemed to get around to it.
But enough about food and farts.
I had two good friends in my miserable life. There was a girl named Maria. I met her when I was twelve. I was just standing there on the street, minding my own business, when she rode by on her bike. I smiled and said hi. She didn’t hear me. But a few seconds later this car was coming down the road, and the driver was on his cell phone and didn’t see her. He ran her off the road, and she fell onto the sidewalk. The guy driving just kept on going. I could see he was still on his damn phone.
I ran over to her and helped her up. She wasn’t hurt bad. But her bike was wrecked. She didn’t cry and, strangely, she didn’t even seem angry. I started cursing that damn driver, but she just gave me a sad look. I apologized for cursing. I wanted to say something to make her feel better. But I didn’t know what to say. So I walked her and her wrecked bike home. And that’s how we became friends. Just like that.
We started hanging out together from then on. Neither one of us ever fit in anywhere at school. We both came from families that were dirt poor. Not that this was anything unusual in our part of the city. A lot of people were poor. I guess there were other reasons we didn’t fit in. Other kids had labels for us. You know how school is. Everybody has a label. It’s like it’s stuck to your forehead or something.
You’d think school would be all about who is smart and who is stupid. But it isn’t.
As far as I can tell, it’s all about what you look like, who your parents are, what you wear and who you hang out with.
So Maria and I didn’t hang out with anyone but ourselves. Sometimes Luke would tag along, but he usually didn’t say a damn thing. Actually, when it was just Maria and me, we didn’t even talk that much. But we were okay with that.
Maria had a mother and father, but neither seemed to stay at a job for more than a couple of weeks. I didn’t know what that was about. But it sounded like they always had really crappy jobs, even worse than my dad’s gig at the Fish Shack. Maria was an only child and said her mother couldn’t have any more kids. And as it turned out, even though Maria and I had been friends for a long time, there was plenty about her life that I didn’t know about.
Chapter Three
Sometimes I wondered why I never had many friends. When I asked my father about that, he explained it this way. That’s the kind of people we are. Anybody takes a look at any one of us and says to themselves, “I don’t want to be seen with the likes of that.”
My dad usually cut my hair. Badly, with a pair of old scissors. He’d been doing that ever since we were little, and we all looked like we’d spent a month in prison. Maybe that’s why my brother Cole ended up there. He already had the look.
One day I told my dad that I wanted to let my hair grow long. He said no at first, but I kept telling him this was something I really wanted to do. He finally shook his head. “Hell, son. Why not? You wanna be a hippie, go for it.”
I said, “I don’t wanna be a hippie. I just wanna see what I look like.”
He laughed again. “All right. Go be Bob Marley, if you want, for all I care.”
So my hair had a chance to start growing. I didn’t look at all like Bob Marley, but I think it was around then that things started to change. I was still me. Looking mostly lost, walking around in my sad-looking old secondhand clothes that were ten years out of date.
We didn’t have any shampoo around the house, so I had to use dish detergent, the cheap stuff. It always made my head kind of itchy, but, like a lot of things at home, I got used to it.
And like I said, I think something changed when my hair started to grow. No miracle or anything like that. But something.
A kid like me had two choices of what to do once the afternoon school bell rang and that part of the day was over. He could either go home, or he could hang out on the street. Some kids went to coffee shops or took buses to the malls on the other side of the city. But I never had any money to speak of. So all I had was the street.
And the big trouble with the street was that you ran into all kinds out there. Some of the other kids were doing the same thing I was, just trying to keep their heads down, stay under the radar of the nasty ones and just be. Most of the kids from my school who hung out on the street, well, most people would think they were downright criminals. But they weren’t. Not all of them anyway.
They were wannabe criminals. Fakers. Like me, a lot of the others had watched their older brothers do real crimes, looking so cool doing what they were doing and then bragging about it. And they did seem cool to everybody, including me. Until they got taken off to jail like my brother Cole.
Leonard and Tom were a couple of the wannabes. They used to give me shit on the playground even when we were ten years old. When they got older, they started telling everyone to call them Leo and Toe. Everyone did. And for some reason, they decided to give me a break most days and not bust my chops.
Jake the Rake, they called me. Leo liked to say I wasn’t worth his time. “What’s to pick on? Scrawny little thing, not much to him. He sits sideways in the classroom and the teacher can’t see him so he gets marked absent.ˮ
I wasn’t that skinny really. But when they noticed me changing my look, my hair getting longer, Toe said, “This is interesting. Jakey Rakey must be getting into drugs. I bet he’s got his own stash of weed and has a marijuana plant growing in his closet.”
Nope. No weed in my pocket. No plants in my closet. Not me. No way. No how.
On TV shows, parents always ask their kids, “How was school today?” But my father never did. He never asked much about anything I was up to. But Oscar asked me that question all the time. Oscar was friend number two.
Wednesday was trash day in my part of the city, so early on Wednesdays you’d see a few men and women out picking through trash bins in the neighborhood, looking for bottles and cans to recycle. That’s how I met Oscar. He had an old shopping cart, and he always wore a suit and tie. The clothes looked like they’d never been washed and like he slept in them. This was because they probably never had been washed, and he did sleep in them. But the suit-and-tie thing was important to him.
I usually didn’t have much to do after school and mostly wanted to avoid people like Toe and Leo, so Oscar would let me tag along while he did his “rounds.”
Ours wasn’t the best part of town for picking trash. I mean, there was plenty of trash but not a lot of recycling. Bottles and cans worth some money. So Oscar had his work cut out for him.
If you knew my part of the city, you’d know it wasn’t anyplace you would want to live. There weren’t a lot of jobs, so a lot of people were out of work. What work there was, well, mostly it was just crap jobs like the one my father had. And we all pretty much lived in crappy apartments, although some people were worse off and were, like Oscar, living on the street in cardboard boxes.
If you could, you moved out of this part of town. If you were a kid, you were stuck here until you graduated high school. Or until you quit. And if you quit, you usually ended up stuck here anyway. I didn’t know why it worked that way. Maybe because there was no place else that wanted you.
Once upon a time…You know that phrase? They say that once upon a time, people had good jobs here. Or so my father says. But that was before my time. Before the factories shut down, before the school went downhill, before the drugs and the gangs. That probably wasn’t worth thinking about though. Now it just was what it was.
But Oscar never seemed to see it that way. He always tried to be optimistic. “I bet something good is just around the corner,” he would say.
Chapter Four
A couple of weeks after I’d started to let my hair grow, I headed south on Duskie Street after school one day to look for Oscar. I liked hanging out with him because he saw the world so differently from everyone else.
I spotted him with his sh
opping cart from a ways off and waved. When he saw me he did his funny little bow. I’d known Oscar for over a year, and he had never once seemed unhappy with where he was in life.
He was gently untying a blue bag when I caught up to him. Oscar picked trash like he was picking flowers in a field. “Whatever it is you do in life, Jacob, you gotta do it with respect,” he said. He retrieved a Pepsi can and a wine bottle from the bag and then retied it with the utmost care. He held the wine bottle up to the light. “Western Cape, South Africa. Imagine that,” he said. “This little bottle has probably seen more of the world than you or I ever will.”
“And now it’s going to end up at Dirty Dave’s,” I added. Dave’s Recycling was where Oscar and most of the other shopping-cart people took their bottles and cans. Dave’s was the only recycling depot in our part of town. They called the owner Dirty Dave not only because the place was so dirty but also because he regularly cheated homeless guys like Oscar out of a full refund.
The city didn’t like anyone picking through the trash. They tried to crack down on scroungers and even fined them when they could. Dirty Dave knew no one cared about these people, so he only gave them 3.5 cents a can instead of the full 5 cents. For a wine bottle like the one he’d just found, Oscar would only get 7 cents instead of the usual 10. And no one could do a damn thing about it.
Oscar was still studying the light shining through the yellowish glass. “Once upon a time,” he said wistfully, “I ordered a glass of wine in a fine restaurant. In fact, I did that more than once.”
Oscar placed the bottle ever so gently into his cart and moved on down the street. “How was your day, Jacob?” he asked. He always called me Jacob, even though my real name is actually Jake. Oscar liked to be formal about things.
“Like every other day,” I said.
“I don’t believe that for a minute, Jacob,” Oscar said, shaking his head. “Every day is different. Always something new. You just have to watch for it.”
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