by Susan Shreve
Max was stopped in front of our apartment waiting for Meg, smoking a cigarette as usual.
“Want a ride to school?” Meg asked.
“Nope, I’ll walk.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
That’s another one of Mom’s expressions. Meg climbed into Max’s red Ford truck.
“Just don’t get kicked out of school,” she called.
“You can’t get kicked out of public school,” I said. “It’s the law.”
“Wrong, Ben. You can get kicked out of any place. Maybe not forever, but for long enough.”
“Even though I’ve got this learning problem?”
“Especially because of that.”
The rest of the way to school, I thought about what Meg had said. I’m not a bad kid—not like a juvenile delinquent. I don’t break the law, but I am always in some kind of trouble at school, like the invisible cream. Not bad, but just enough to give me butterflies. There’s always the thing I didn’t do right or say right. I come to school with unfinished homework or I get punished for lost papers or talking out in class or arguing or falling out of my chair or writing notes during homeroom.
The thing is, I try to be good. It’s as if I can’t help myself, as if there’s some other person inside my skin. And he’s the guy with learning disabilities who can’t sit still.
Trout was standing at the corner waiting for me. He was carrying a large plastic bag from my mother’s drugstore and drinking a grape Slurpee.
“So here’s the deal,” he said, motioning for me to follow him. We stopped just beyond a grove of trees in the park next to school and Trout dropped the plastic bag on the ground and opened it.
“Look,” he said.
I looked.
The bag was full of Super Balls. There must have been a hundred of these tiny bouncy rubber balls in reds and yellows and blues and greens. I’d never seen so many in my life.
I like Super Balls. I have a few at home, like three or four, and I like to lie on the couch at the end of the day, bouncing a Super Ball on the hardwood floor to see if I can get it to hit the ceiling.
“So whaddya think?”
“About the balls?”
“Cool, right?” Trout asked.
“Yeah, pretty cool,” I said. “They must have been expensive.”
“Forty-nine cents each. I put them on my father’s credit card,” Trout said.
“He lets you have his credit card?” I asked.
“Of course not, banana brain.” Trout raised his eyebrows. “I took it out of his wallet this morning while he was taking a shower,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll put it back tonight.”
“And he won’t notice?”
“He’s got plenty of credit cards,” Trout said, slinging the bag of Super Balls over his shoulder, heading in the direction of school. And I followed him.
Trout didn’t tell me his plan for the Super Balls until we were standing in the corridor outside homeroom and he was stuffing the bag from the drugstore into his locker.
“So this is what we’re going to do.” He shut the door to his locker. “Just before lunch when the bell rings and everyone is rushing down the hall to the lunchroom, we stand on the steps leading to the library and dump the balls in the hallway.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“So what happens?”
“So there’ll be all these balls bouncing down the hall and all these kids running to lunch and it’ll be very funny.”
“Not if we get caught.”
“We won’t get caught.” Trout leaned on my shoulder. “We’ll ask to be excused to go to the bathroom just before the bell, like eleven forty-five, and no one will notice. The hall will be empty and then the bell will ring and we’ll dump the balls just as the kids are dismissed for lunch. Get it?”
“I get it.”
“And you’ll help me out, Ben?”
I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know if I really wanted to dump Super Balls in the hallway between homeroom and the lunchroom. It seemed pretty easy to get caught in the first place, and in the second, it didn’t sound funny enough to get into trouble.
I couldn’t decide until fourth period, when we have advanced reading. Fourth period, the Super Ball deal was sealed.
Everyone, including me, has advanced reading even though I really should be in “behind reading” instead of advanced, but there is no behind. Ms. Ashford teaches advanced and we read long books at home, one chapter a night, and we have a discussion in class. I don’t like Ms. Ashford and I don’t like reading discussions and I usually don’t even read the chapter, unless Meg or my mom has time to help me out, since reading is hard for me. If I do read the chapter, I will have forgotten what I read by the time I’ve finished because I’m such a slow reader. By the time I’m at the end of the chapter, I can’t remember the beginning. And that’s just the way it is. Which is why I don’t like Ms. Ashford, because she always calls on me first just to be sure to embarrass me, knowing very well the trouble I have reading long books.
So we’re supposed to be reading the second chapter of this book called Holes. I’ve already read the first chapter and I liked it a lot, but last night I completely forgot about advanced reading, so today, when Ms. Ashford called on me, I mumbled something about forgetting and she said something like, “How are you ever going to learn to read, Ben, if you don’t do your assignment?”
“I forgot,” I said.
“That’s my point,” Ms. Ashford said, and she looked at me with her eyes half closed, as if she couldn’t stand to see me with her eyes wide open. “You are always forgetting.”
That’s when I told Trout I’d do the Super Balls with him.
Lunch for fifth and sixth grade is at twelve and the bell rings at eleven-fifty and it takes a few minutes for everyone to be dismissed and head to the lunchroom. So at eleven forty-five by my watch, after I had finished correcting my vocabulary test and handed the corrections in to Mr. Baker, I asked to be excused to go to the boys’ room.
“Trout has already been excused,” Mr. Baker said.
I was sitting in my chair and started to wiggle so he’d know how much I had to go to the bathroom. Then he said, “Okay, Ben, hustle up. And since the bell’s about to ring, go straight to lunch.”
Trout was already standing on about the seventh step to the second floor with his bag of Super Balls. The stairs to the second floor are at the end of the corridor, and all of the fifth- and sixth-grade students have to walk by this staircase in order to get to the lunchroom, which is at the end of the hall.
Trout was completely relaxed, his chin in his hand, watching down the hall where our classroom is, waiting for the bell.
“You stand right next to me, and when the bell rings, we wait two minutes and then, like lightning, we turn the bag upside down so the Super Balls spill out, and you’re going to die laughing.”
I looked up the stairs to the second floor, where the principal’s office is located, and the younger grades and the library, straining to be sure no one was walking around, and to my great relief, no one was. I was actually excited. My heart was beating too fast and my mouth was dry and I was suddenly very glad that Trout wanted to be my friend. That he had chosen me. Someone brave enough to have a tattoo of a question mark on his chin.
When the bell rang, Trout stayed absolutely still.
“How do you know it’s two minutes before you should dump the balls?”
“I’ve done this before,” Trout said.
“Super Balls?”
“Yup.”
“And what happened?”
“I’ll tell you at lunch,” Trout said.
And just then, the kids from five and six began pouring out of their classrooms and we dumped the balls, and suddenly the hall was a jumble of moving color and kids were heading through the maze of rubber balls and the building rang with laughter.
“Follow me,” Trout said the minute the balls had hit the floor
below. “Don’t look.”
I couldn’t help myself. He had left the drugstore bag on the seventh step, and when I looked, it was lying there in a pile of white plastic.
“Shouldn’t I get the bag?”
Trout shook his head.
“It’ll call attention to us,” he said, leaning over the top railing, looking down at the mass of kids running through bouncing Super Balls, and laughed.
“Look, Ben,” he called to me.
And I was laughing and laughing.
“Let’s go down and check it out,” he said.
“Not me,” I said.
So we watched from the steps. We weren’t alone. A bunch of other kids from the fifth and sixth grade had run over and were looking down the stairwell at the commotion of kids rushing through the clouds of Super Balls. Mr. O’Dell came flying down the stairs behind us from his office, calling, “Quiet. Quiet everybody. Get yourselves under control.”
And then he stood in the hall with his hand on his forehead. There was nothing he could do. The balls were out of control and so were the kids.
“So tell me what happened when you did it before,” I asked Trout at lunch.
He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Were you living in Georgia?”
He shook his head. “Mississippi,” he said.
“And you did it alone?”
He gave me a fishy look. He had opened his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was scraping off the jelly. “I lied,” he said under his breath.
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“I never did the Super Ball thing before. I read about it in a games book last night and so …”
“You don’t think we’ll get caught, do you?”
“You asked me that already. Who’d catch us?” Trout asked crossly. “No one was in the hall to see anything. I checked.”
I walked home alone that day. Trout had tutoring and Meg had choral practice and I don’t really have a pile of friends. That’s the trouble with learning disabilities. I’m kind of quiet and a nice guy and I don’t push other guys around and don’t complain. But most of the time while the other kids in my class are hanging out together, I’m in tutoring. Besides, kids don’t like to hang out with a guy like me who’s always in what my dad calls “hot water.” They think it’s funny when I fall over backwards in my chair or spill my milk all over the lunch table or make farting noises in my armpit during library. But they don’t exactly want to spend time with me. It’s like they think learning disabilities are catching.
That night my parents left straight after dinner for Back-to-School Night. I wasn’t worried. I mean, I wasn’t any more worried than I usually am when it’s Back-to-School Night and I know my parents will come home looking unhappy because of the news they will have heard from my teachers about me.
But it never occurred to me that the story of the Super Balls would be the subject of Back-to-School Night.
I was very glad to see them go because I wanted to call Trout and talk about today. I had the apartment to myself. It was a Thursday night and Meg would meet Max for dinner after choral rehearsal, and then they usually stayed parked in Max’s car about four buildings up the hill from our building until eleven o’clock, which is her curfew. So tonight I was alone.
Trout and I talked about everything. About Tim Burger trying to jump over the balls and knocking over Ms. Pratt, the music teacher. About Bucky Freeman sticking a Super Ball down the front of Molly’s T-shirt. About Tom Stockdale putting two Super Balls in his mouth like a chipmunk. About Mr. O’Dell trying to get control of the pandemonium and finally calling Ted Stringer, the head athletic director, because he couldn’t get the kids to shut up.
“Shut up!” was what he said to us, so you can tell how mad he was.
We talked about everything, from the minute the balls scattered through the hall to the final bell.
“Wait,” Mr. Baker had called. “If anyone in this class is responsible for the mess before lunch today, I hope you’ll tell me privately.” And then he added, “I can promise you that by tomorrow we will know who did this.”
“So do you think they know who did it?” I asked Trout for the hundredth time.
“They don’t have a clue.”
“Maybe someone saw us.”
“I’ve already told you, I’m a professional at this kind of thing,” Trout said.
“Maybe Mr. Baker knows.”
“No one knows, Ben. Don’t worry. Don’t even think about it.”
I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was too excited. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. For a long time, I had been alone at Stockton Elementary and now I had a partner. Trout and I matched. We were like best friends and brothers and twins all at once. That made me feel at home in school, which I hadn’t felt since kindergarten.
When my parents came home from Back-to-School Night, I was lying on the couch in the living room watching TV. Actually, as soon as I heard them coming up the stairs, I turned off the TV, which I’m not allowed to watch during the week, and pretended to be studying my vocabulary words at the kitchen table.
“Ben?” my mother called when she opened the front door.
“I’m in the kitchen,” I replied. “Studying.”
I didn’t look up when my father came in the kitchen, opened the fridge, and got himself a beer.
“Want a beer?” he asked my mother.
She didn’t. She didn’t come in the kitchen either as she usually would, sit down at the table with me, tell me what had happened at Back-to-School Night. My father would talk to me about the meeting too, even though he’s less interested in my grades than my mother is and doesn’t believe I have as many learning disabilities as my mother does.
“What’s up?” I asked.
I knew right away I shouldn’t have asked.
“I don’t know, buddy,” he said. “Nothing good.”
I hate it when he calls me buddy and I know he does it because he’s angry, sometimes about other things but mostly about me. So right away I figured there was a problem at Back-to-School Night.
I put my vocabulary words in the book bag and took out my math book, opening it as my father left the kitchen.
They were in the living room, but I couldn’t hear them talking. One thing about my parents is they talk and talk and talk to each other about everything—dinner and oil in the car and the party they went to and the color makeup my mother likes to wear and my father’s relationship with his mother, who is not the grandmother of my dreams, and Meg and me. I can hear them in their bedroom, which is across the hall from mine, talking before they go to sleep. Sometimes when they’re having a conversation, it’s hard to get a word in “edgewise,” as my father would say.
I sat very still at the kitchen table, even holding my breath so I couldn’t hear my own breathing, and listened. But I heard nothing. So they were just sitting, probably on the couch or my mother on the couch and my father in the big chair across from the TV. Of course, I couldn’t study my vocabulary words, but I did get up and got a carton of French vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and scooped some in a bowl and poured some M&M’s over the top. Just as I sat down to continue my make-believe studying, my mother called “Ben?” and she meant it.
“What happened today in school?” she asked when I’d slid into the wicker chair across from the couch where she was sitting.
“Nothing much.”
“Does the word ‘Super Ball’ mean anything to you?” she asked.
My stomach felt as if it had exploded inside my skin and soon I would die.
She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“Mr. O’Dell tells me that you and Trout came to school with about a hundred Super Balls today and threw them all over the hall where the lunchroom is and people got hurt—a teacher got hurt, for example.” She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “And there you have it, Benjamin. Another wonderful Back-to-School Night for your parents.”
“That’s not the point,
Jane. You know that,” my father said crossly to my mom. “We have to find out what happened today and help Ben with the mess he seems to get himself into.”
“If you insist,” my mother said, “but I’m at the end of my rope, Ben. You’ve got to understand. This has been going on with you since the first grade.”
“I have a learning disability,” I said quickly, before I even thought what I was going to say. “I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can help it,” Mom said.
“Let’s bag the question of a learning disability and figure out what went on today.”
So I surprised myself. I told them about Trout and me and the Super Balls. It’s not that I lie to my parents when I’m in trouble, but sometimes I stay quiet and let them think whatever they want to think. But suddenly I wanted them to know how funny the Super Balls bouncing through the halls was supposed to be. I told them how funny it was, which it was, and I said I wasn’t sorry that I’d done it and that the teacher hadn’t been injured at all and that Trout was my best friend. Which is not what my mother wanted to hear.
The truth is strange, especially if telling it is going to cause a problem. At first when I was talking to my parents, I felt wound up tight as a rubber band, as if I were going to propel in the air and fly out the front window. And then, somehow as if confessing the truth is medicine, I began to feel better, even good. Especially glad to tell my mother and father that Trout was becoming my best friend. The first I’d ever had.
My father got up for another beer and gave my mother a look that said “Be careful,” but my mom didn’t pay attention. I guess she was too angry.
“The first thing that happened tonight when we walked into the auditorium for Back-to-School Night is Mr. O’Dell met us at the door and told us you couldn’t afford to be involved in pranks during schooltime.”
“What does that mean—afford?” I asked.
I had already decided that I wasn’t going to be beaten in this conversation with my mother. That I wanted to fight back. That I didn’t really think I’d done anything wrong.
“I think afford means if you don’t get your act together, you’ll be kicked out of school.”
