Trout and Me

by Susan Shreve

  And I knew Meg was probably right about Trout. She is always right about people, especially kids.

  When I got to school the next morning, Trout was waiting for me. I was late because it was raining and I had left my math homework on the kitchen table, so I went back to the apartment, and when I got there, the dog had peed on my mother’s favorite rug in the living room. First I had to clean that up and take the dog out and put him in the kitchen so he wouldn’t do it again. By the time I got to school, the second bell had rung. Homeroom was under way and Trout was standing in the rain on the bottom step of the school.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was afraid maybe you were going to be absent.”

  “Nope. I’m never absent,” I said. “But you shouldn’t wait. You get in trouble if you’re late.”

  “No problem,” Trout said, taking the steps two at a time.

  He stood beside me while I put my books away in my locker. He had a way of standing very close so I could almost feel his breath on my neck, as if he were afraid I might escape. It drove me crazy, but in a funny kind of way I didn’t mind. No one had ever liked me so much and so quickly.

  “So what’re we doing this afternoon?” he was asking.

  “I have an appointment,” I said.

  “Doctor’s?” he asked.

  The fact is, I had tutoring in reading as usual, but I wasn’t ready to let Trout know. Not yet, at least.

  “Nope,” I said, and then, realizing I had to give an answer, I told him I had an appointment with the dentist.

  I was rearranging the books in my locker, getting my social studies book out of my backpack, looking for my library book, and when I stood up and turned around to face Trout, I noticed something different about his chin.

  “So what’re you looking at?” he asked.

  What I had noticed was that the ink of his tattoo was running in a thin red line down his chin, falling onto the front of his shirt.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, heading for the classroom, Trout right beside me. “It looks a little like your tattoo is melting.”

  He reached up and touched his chin, took his hand, now smudged red, away from his face and looked at it.

  “Jeez.” He wiped the red on his jeans. “I’m going to the bathroom and see what’s going on.”

  I was at my desk getting ready for social studies when Trout came back, checked in with Mr. Baker, and passed by my desk, which is at the front of the room, leaning his chin towards me so I could check out the question mark.

  “So?”

  “Looks okay to me,” I said.

  “You were right,” he said. “It was melting.”

  Later I wondered how a tattoo could melt. I don’t know very much about tattoos. Most of Meg’s friends have tattoos, flowers on their backs or little snakes crawling up their legs, dumb things to get painted on yourself for the rest of your life, my mother said. So Meg isn’t allowed to have a tattoo and wouldn’t get one anyway. She thinks for herself, like I said. What I know is that a tattoo is made by sticking needles with dye in your skin, so your skin is actually colored forever and should never melt.

  I wouldn’t want to do something on purpose that hurts. And needles hurt. So I sat in homeroom imagining what it must have felt like for Trout when he was six years old to have this red question mark made from needles on his chin.

  When the bell rang for social studies, Trout was beside me, fiddling with his chin as if he were afraid the whole question mark was going to fall off on the floor.

  Next we went to Spanish and math and language arts and lunch and gym and visual arts and community service. In each class, he sat at the desk beside me, slid halfway down the wooden chair so it looked as if he was going to fall on the floor, and looked at the teacher through half-closed lizard eyes.

  “Hello, Trout,” each teacher would begin at the start of class. “And what’s your last name? Even though it’s your second day at Stockton, your name hasn’t been added to our roll lists yet.”

  “O’Donnell,” Trout said in Spanish class.

  “Barrigan,” he said in math.

  “Jobman,” he said in language arts.

  “Harper,” he said in community service.

  No one contradicted him, but by the time we got to gym, where he said his last name was Raven, we were struggling not to laugh.

  “How come you change your name all the time?” I asked after gym.

  “I get bored easily,” Trout said.

  “So what’s your real last name?” I asked.

  “Benefit,” he said.

  But it wasn’t Benefit either. And not Trout. I found that out at the end of school that day when Mr. Baker said goodbye.

  “Sanger, right?” Mr. Baker asked. “Your papers were finally sent down from the office. Morris Sanger, nickname Trout.” Trout considered for a moment, but he left the classroom without answering.

  “So is Mr. Baker right?” I asked when I got to my locker, where he was waiting.

  “Trout is my name.”

  “No last name?”

  “No.”

  “Cool,” I said. But there was something in the tense way he held his body that made me nervous, as if at any moment he might slam his fist into a wall.

  “So I’ll go to the dentist with you and then we can go back to your apartment,” he said.

  It had stopped raining, but the streets were wet, and we slopped through the muddy sidewalks headed away from Stockton Elementary. I was on my way to tutoring in a building behind my mother’s pharmacy, where all the kids who have to be tutored in Stockton, New Jersey, go after school. It’s call the Reading and Math Center and I usually slink in the back door and up the steps to Ms. Sutton’s office so no one will see me. I certainly wasn’t planning to take Trout along.

  “You can meet me at my apartment in about an hour,” I said.

  “What about the dentist?”

  “I go to the dentist alone.”

  I gave him directions to my apartment.

  “Just wait outside,” I said, and headed off to tutoring.

  And he did.

  There he was when I got back from tutoring, sitting on the top step of our building looking for me.

  He followed me into the building and asked could he stay for dinner.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was after five o’clock and my mother’s night to cook, and she’d probably gotten just enough food for four on her way home. We shop every day for dinner just in case we decide at the last minute that we want a pizza or to go to the movies and eat popcorn instead of dinner or to go to my grandparents’ in the next town. Every day is different in our house. We make last-minute decisions and change plans and have picnics by the Stockton lake when the day is particularly warm and ice cream sundaes at Lotsa Love Shoppe on Main Street for dinner. Most of my friends eat dinner at six-thirty and then homework and then TV and then bed. Our life is nothing like that.

  “So what do you think?” Trout asked as I opened the door to our apartment.

  “About dinner?” I asked. “Sure, why not.”

  We hung out and played Cringe. Belinda came over with some chocolate chip cookie dough, which she shared with us—they never get to baking the cookies at Belinda’s house, only making the dough. Belinda put on my mother’s high-heeled shoes and a red beret and a ski parka, and sat on our couch staring at Trout’s chin. Although it was a warm spring day, she seemed happy in winter clothes watching us play Cringe.

  Cringe is a game that my father made up when I was having the worst trouble in school. We made the whole game working in the back of his hardware store. For a couple of years we played most nights, my treat after I finished my homework.

  The Cringe board is like a checkerboard except yellow and black. There is a stack of cards and each player gets fifteen cards, some blank and some with a figure of a creep on the front. There’s the Bully with the head of a bull and the body of a wimp, and the Brains with an enormous he
ad spilling yucky green stuff all over the card, and the Tease, which is a girl octopus—curly hair, ribbons, that sort of stuff—with a tiny knife clutched in each one of her tentacles. The object of the game is to get rid of the creeps and end up with a hand of blank cards. The person with the most blanks wins. It’s my favorite game, and for the worst years at Stockton Elementary, when I failed everything and was always in trouble, playing Cringe was the only thing that made me happy.

  “So we’re friends, right?” Trout asked after the first game of Cringe, which I won. “Real friends, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Are you guys best friends?” Belinda asked, climbing down from the couch.

  “He’s my best friend,” Trout said. “We’re kind of matching kids, don’tcha think, Ben?”

  I shrugged. “Except for the invisible cream.”

  “But you’re not still mad at me, are you? I didn’t mean to do anything bad to you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I liked Trout and of course I feel important when someone likes me a lot. But I didn’t want him to be my best friend. Not yet.

  “Dunno,” I replied.

  “Well, I don’t think you should be best friends with Ben,” Belinda said to Trout.

  She took off the beret and my mother’s high heels, put her hands on her hips, and told Trout she thought he was weird.

  “Weird,” she said again, and took her bowl of cookie dough, walked across the living room and out the door, leaving my mother’s high heels in the middle of the room.

  I would have made her put the shoes back except the telephone was ringing, and when I answered, it was Mr. Baker, and when I told him she was still at work, he said he’d call back. He didn’t sound happy.

  I hate it when teachers call our house. It’s never about something good. And every year, sometimes every month or so, my teacher calls to talk to my mom about something I’m doing wrong. I wish my mom understood how much I try to be good and it never works. Even with Mr. Baker.

  So I was surprised and worried about Mr. Baker calling. Not that he likes me. But he doesn’t dislike me as much as some of the other teachers I’ve had. I don’t drive him crazy, at least.

  Trout left after dinner. My mother cooked halibut and split it five ways and gave Trout her piece of blueberry pie and then drove him to his house because it was dark.

  “He’s an odd boy, isn’t he?” she said when she got back and Meg and I were finishing the dishes.

  “You mean he’s odd because of the question-mark thing?” I asked.

  My mother sat down at the kitchen table.

  “Well.”

  “It’s a tattoo he got when he was six,” I said. “He probably didn’t know any better.”

  “He got a tattoo so he wouldn’t feel invisible,” Meg said.

  “So he told me,” my mother said. “He didn’t mention invisible but he told me about getting the question mark burned on his skin.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said.

  “It’s not a tattoo,” my mother said.

  “Did he tell you that?” Meg asked.

  “No, he told me it was one.”

  “So?” I said, suddenly protective of Trout. I don’t know what happened to me because usually I don’t argue with my mother. But suddenly I wanted to tell her that Trout was my best friend and she better be nice to him, better believe what he told her.

  “It isn’t a tattoo,” my mother said quietly.

  “How do you know?” Meg asked.

  “Because it weeps.”

  “Weeps?” That was me speaking.

  “I was looking at his face as he got out of the car and the red ink from the question mark was dripping down his chin. A tattoo doesn’t do that.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that I’d seen the same thing, that I’d wondered about a dripping tattoo as well. I wasn’t going to betray my friend, even with my mother, and I didn’t like to hear that my mother, of all people, doubted him. I didn’t like that at all.

  “What if he wants you to think it’s a tattoo?” Meg asked. “What if that’s important to him?”

  “I was concerned that he felt the need to lie,” my mother said.

  My mother is like that, worried about right and wrong all the time, which drives me crazy. Because as far as I can tell from eleven years on the planet, what feels like right is sometimes wrong and what feels wrong is sometimes right.

  But that’s another subject we’ll get into later in this story.

  “I lie to you, Mom. I need to lie two or three times a day,” Meg said. “‘Why were you late for dinner tonight?’ you asked me. ‘I was at the dry cleaners picking up your clothes,’ I answered. But that wasn’t true. I was actually at Viv’s house and only picked up the dry cleaning at the last minute. I tell that kind of lie all the time.”

  The telephone rang just as my mom was about to lose her temper at Meg, which she sometimes does and it makes her face go red as cranberries and her top lip quivers. It was Mr. Baker.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Baker,” Mom said. “I’m so glad you called.”

  So I went into my room and Meg turned on her music quite loud so I couldn’t possibly hear my mother’s end of the conversation, which went on and on and on. All I could do was watch through a crack in my bedroom door as my mom paced the living room, mostly listening to Mr. Baker on the other end of the phone. Finally I checked Meg’s room and she was painting her fingernails purple and didn’t want to talk, so I climbed into my bed and waited.

  That’s when my mother came in.

  “Mr. Baker has been pleased with you recently,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He says your attitude is better. Not great but better. He says you’re becoming more of a citizen.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just a good guy.”

  I could tell bad news was coming. Good news first to soften me up, and then slammo, the bad news explodes.

  I sat up against my headboard.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Well, Mr. Baker is worried about Trout.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why doesn’t he call Trout’s father?” I said. “Not you.”

  “Because he’s worried about the effect Trout could have on you,” she said in that way she has, her voice soft enough, almost friendly. But that doesn’t mean she’ll put up with disagreement from me.

  “Like what effect?”

  “Like getting in more trouble instead of less.”

  So there you have it. “The Trout Problem.” Before the end of fifth grade, “The Trout Problem” got so awful I was forced to do something surprising, something I can’t believe I had the courage to do, even now, a year later, with Trout gone.

  The next morning Trout called me with a plan. He called very early, even before I went in the kitchen for breakfast, and told me he’d already left his house and was calling from a phone booth. He wanted to meet me outside school at eight o’clock.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked, still in my pajamas.

  “It’s going to be really funny,” he said.

  “Like how funny?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you now,” he said. “Just meet me on the blacktop behind the school.”

  So I got dressed in a hurry, brushed my teeth, and went downstairs for breakfast with my book bag already packed and ready to go.

  “Why so early?” my mother asked. She was suspicious, I could tell. She worries about me, not that anything bad will happen to me but that I’ll cause trouble. Every afternoon—this is what Meg told me—she’s afraid some teacher is going to call the pharmacy to tell her more bad news about me, like Ms. Becker did when the invisible cream turned into ASS.

  “Where did you get that cream?” my mother had asked that evening. “Max?”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to tell her Trout had given it to me and I’d already told Mr. O’Dell about Max, so I said nothing at all, and by the next day, my mom sort of forgot it. But she
did say, because she worries all the time, “You should never put anything on your face unless you know what it is. It could’ve been poison.”

  “It’s not so early to go to school,” I said. “I just promised to meet some guys from fifth grade on the blacktop behind school.”

  I poured milk on my cereal and pretended to be interested in eating, which I wasn’t. I only wanted to get out of the house and meet Trout and find out about his plan.

  “Benjamin.” My mother sat down at the table beside me, speaking quietly so Meg, who was making toast, wouldn’t hear what she was saying, even though I tell Meg everything. “Are you leaving early to meet Trout?” she asked.

  I considered lying. I thought I could name a few guys in my class who I might be meeting before school, but my mother seems to know what I’m thinking about even when I don’t say it. It’s as if she can see straight through the skin and bone to my brain. So I didn’t make up a story. I mean, I didn’t lie exactly, but I didn’t tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” as my father would say.

  “I’m helping Trout with his math homework,” I said, finishing my cereal, dumping the extra milk in the sink.

  “I see.” My mother gave me one of her looks.

  I could have said, “I can tell you don’t believe me,” or “I’m almost telling the truth,” or I could have said, “I’m meeting Trout Trout on the blacktop and we’re going to make plans to get kicked out of school,” but instead I followed Meg out the front door and down the back stairs.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Mom didn’t believe I was going to be helping Trout with his math homework.”

  “She’s right,” Meg said. “You’re flunking math.” My sister is straightforward and I like that. She says what she thinks and doesn’t seem to care whether what she thinks will make a person mad.

  “I mean, I’m meeting Trout, but he didn’t say anything about math homework.”

  “So Mom’s worried about you meeting Trout because he’s a troublemaker and you made up a reason, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s what Mom said. ‘I see.’ What is it with you guys?”