by Susan Shreve
“Are you worried?”
“I don’t know. What can Mr. O’Dell do? I’m already in tutoring all the time and I’m sent to his office about every other day and I spend at least one day a week after school in detention. I guess I could go to jail.”
“That’ll be next week,” Meg said, and she tossed me a bag of peanut M&M’s and left for school.
It was almost eight when Meg went downstairs to meet Max and I called Trout. I expected him to answer the phone as he always did, but his father answered.
“Trout isn’t here,” he said. “He’s gone to school. Is this Ben?”
I wasn’t expecting that and my heart flip-flopped when he mentioned my name.
“Yes,” I said.
“Trout’s in a lot of trouble and I imagine you are too,” he said.
“I guess,” I said. I could hardly breathe. It’s not that Trout’s father sounded mad. Worse than mad. He sounded huge, as if in person he was a man twice the size of my father or Mr. O’Dell or any other man I knew. His voice was big, and mainly it was the sound of his voice that scared me.
“I’ll tell Trout you called,” he said, and hung up.
Mr. O’Dell called attention deficit disorder a disease. “The symptom of the illness is that a child can’t pay attention or sit still.”
We were sitting in his office. I was on the couch with my mom, and my dad was in a chair across from Mr. O’Dell’s desk and he looked furious every time Mr. O’Dell opened his mouth. I’ve never seen my father lose his temper, but I was thinking maybe he’d lose it at Mr. O’Dell. That would be nice.
“I don’t believe it’s fair to call it a disease, Mr. O’Dell,” my father said. “That’ll make Ben think he’s ill, and he’s not.”
That’s the trouble with Mr. O’Dell. He thinks he knows everything. He probably thinks he could be President of the United States if he had some free time. And what does he know about diseases? He’s a principal and not a doctor. Not even a very good principal. So he doesn’t know anything about diseases. He doesn’t even know that he’s mentally ill. At least that’s what Trout and me think.
I happen to know a lot about attention deficit disorder, since I was told I had it when I was seven. Even though my father says I’m a perfectly normal boy, I know my mom is right when she says I have more trouble sitting still than other kids, especially girls. So maybe I do have ADD and maybe I don’t.
But I don’t plan to take any medicine. Every morning, unless I have a cold or the stomach flu, I get up and feel great. If you feel great without medicine, why take it? Right? That’s what I told my mom and dad and Dr. Fern and Mr. O’Dell, when Mr. O’Dell said to my parents that I had to go to a special school.
“Does that mean you’re kicking me out of Stockton?” I asked.
“It means I want you to try Ritalin as Dr. Fern recommended, at least for the remainder of the school year, which is less than six weeks,” Mr. O’Dell was saying.
He went on to say how half the boys in the world take Ritalin, even his own son, like that will change my decision. I know his own son. He’s a grade ahead of me and he’s a weasel.
“Otherwise I’m kicked out of public school?”
“If you can’t get control of your behavior, you need to be in a place where you’ll get some help.”
“Like where?”
“Brazillier Learning Center is where some of the children from Stockton go to school until they can catch up with their peers.”
Brazillier Learning Center is a place for dummies worse than me and Trout. Three boys in my class have gone there in the last two years and one girl. It’s on the other side of town and I couldn’t walk there and I wouldn’t have any friends unless Trout got sent too and so I made a quick decision about Ritalin.
“I’ll try Ritalin,” I said. “I mean, I won’t die from it,” I told Mr. O’Dell straight off, as if I’d really changed my mind, that sure I’d try Ritalin.
This made Mr. O’Dell very happy and he thanked my parents for coming in and said that in no time he expected to notice a great improvement in my behavior. That almost all of the children on medication showed improvement, and some turned into excellent students, like his very own stupid son.
I smiled, or at least I think I smiled, and said I was sorry about skipping school and I certainly wouldn’t do it again. Which wasn’t true. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
As for the Ritalin, my parents promised I’d never have to take a single pill.
I met Trout at my locker. He was waiting for me.
“I guess you know what happened,” he said.
“To you or me?” I asked.
“To me.”
“I don’t know anything except Mr. O’Dell says I’ll have to go to a special school unless I take Ritalin,” I said.
“I’m being switched to the other fifth grade,” Trout said. “Mr. O’Dell told my father that I was becoming a bad influence on other boys in the class, especially you.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“So you and I need to be separated, is what Mr. O’Dell said. And also that some of the parents won’t let their kids play with me.”
I shrugged. “Stupid parents.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” Trout said. It wasn’t as though he was about to cry. He was quiet but not upset. Maybe mad. Maybe he was mad at me.
And I don’t blame him since my stomach sort of fell when he told me he was moving to the other fifth grade.
“I’m really sorry about changing classes,” I said. I told him that he was my best friend. I’ve never had someone I thought of as my best friend unless it’s Meg. So maybe Trout was the second.
“I’m not coming back here tomorrow. I probably won’t ever come back,” Trout said, and he lifted his book bag on his shoulder and left.
I called after him, but he didn’t turn around, just kept on walking down the corridor and out the front door of the school.
I hurried, hoping to follow him, but by the time I got outside, he was gone.
I walked to tutoring alone. Usually Trout and I walked together, talking about how we hated school and how we wished we were grown up and then we’d talk about what we’d do if we were grown up. Trout wanted to buy a Toyota truck and drive to California. I wanted to be smart.
“How do you think you’ll suddenly turn smart?” Trout asked.
“It could happen.”
Most of the time, I believed that I was smarter than people thought. My parents told me that, my dad especially. He said that people, especially teachers, didn’t know me very well. If they did know me, they’d know that I’m just not regularly smart like A students. One day, my dad said, I’d wake up in the morning and my brain would be on a fast track and I’d be able to do all of my school-work without thinking about it.
I crossed Main and headed downtown past the pharmacy to the tutoring building. I was hoping to see Trout. Usually on Thursday, we’d go together and then go to my mom’s drugstore and buy some candy. But I didn’t see him ahead of me, so I guessed that he’d probably gone home. That he’d decided not to have tutoring any longer and maybe his father had decided they should move again. It made me sad to think about.
And then just as I was walking up the steps to the tutoring building, I saw him. He was across the street, sitting on the ground at the edge of Stockton Park, leaning against a tree. I waved, but he may not have been looking.
So I crossed the street and walked along the sidewalk until I came to the place where he was, and sat down on the ground beside him without saying a word since he didn’t seem to want to talk.
It was three-forty-five exactly. I had forty-five minutes of reading with Ms. Sutton. So now I was skipping tutoring. I didn’t even feel guilty.
We sat for a long time without talking. I saw Ms. Sutton come to the front door of the building and stand on the top step looking around for me.
“There’s Sutton,” Trout said finally.
“Yeah.”
“So y
ou’re not going to reading?”
“Are you?”
“Nope,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference anyway.”
We stayed like that for a while. His tutor, Mr. Grady, came out of the building, got into his car, and drove away.
“Did you cancel?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
The sun began to dip behind the tree and, without it, the air was cooler and the ground under us felt damp. From time to time, I glanced over at Trout and he hadn’t moved. He sat with his knees up to his chest, his chin resting on his knees, staring across the street.
“So what’re you going to do?” I asked.
It was almost time for tutoring to be over for me, and my mom would be expecting me at the drugstore just to check in. Meg was taking me out to dinner, since it was my parents’ anniversary and they were having dinner alone.
“Nothing,” Trout said.
“I mean, are you going home soon?”
“Nope.” He reached in his pocket and took out a pack of Parliament cigarettes. “Want one?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
He opened the package and took out one cigarette for me and one for him.
I don’t know whether I had ever held a cigarette before. My parents don’t smoke. My grandparents don’t smoke. Meg doesn’t. Max does, but he’s never offered me a cigarette.
I took it. Trout had put his in his mouth between his lips right in the middle. I did the same.
“I don’t smoke, so I don’t have a match,” he said.
“S’okay,” I said.
So for a long time we just sat there smoking unlit cigarettes.
“Do you know how to inhale?” Trout asked.
“Nope.”
He breathed in very deep through his lips.
“Like that,” he said. “I’m not supposed to smoke because cigarettes kill you.”
“I know,” I said.
“But they have to be lit to kill you, right?”
“I think,” I said.
I wasn’t sure. I actually have never been interested in smoking cigarettes, but I liked sitting on the ground with Trout and pretending to smoke. It felt friendly, as if it was us against the world.
“So what do you think’s going to happen to us?” he asked.
“Nothing. I mean, you’ll change to the other fifth grade and I’ll say I’m taking Ritalin and throw it in the toilet, and then school will be over and we’ll have a great time this summer.”
Trout said nothing.
“Isn’t that what you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
I was looking at him sideways. Close up in daylight I could see the cracks in his tattoo, little bits of skin showing through the red. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe nothing at all, maybe about the tattoo.
“I’m going to wash it off,” Trout said.
“I thought it was permanent. A tattoo. That’s what I thought it was.”
“I lied,” he said. He licked his finger and rubbed the red question mark just at the bottom so the red came off on his finger. “See?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. There was suddenly something different about Trout, something old. As if he’d grown up while he was sleeping last night. He seemed quiet and silent, not unfriendly but not particularly friendly either. Not stuck to me like Velcro as he had been.
“Do you want to come over to my house?” I asked.
“Your parents hate me.”
“My parents don’t hate you.”
“They will. Pretty soon they’ll hate me like the other parents do because I’m disturbing your work like Mr. O’Dell says and getting you in trouble. I know all about that because Mr. O’Dell had a meeting with me and my father this morning.”
“My parents have no reason to hate you. They love me and I’m in as much trouble as you are.”
Trout shrugged. “That’s the way it is,” he said.
We stayed there until I could feel that it was starting to get dark, and it wasn’t until I checked my watch and saw it was five o’clock and knew I’d better get home that Trout began to talk.
He told me about his mother first. How his mother had gotten a boyfriend and moved to Hawaii and left Trout with his father when he was seven years old.
“Do you visit Hawaii?” I asked.
“Once when I was eight,” he said. “It wasn’t fun.”
“Hawaii wasn’t fun?”
“My mom really didn’t want me there. She wanted to hang out with her boyfriend, so she kept saying didn’t I want to go home early and I said no and so I stayed. But she didn’t ask me the next year. She comes to visit on Christmas, but that’s all. And now she has a new baby.”
He told me about his father and how his father is a salesman and travels a lot and changes jobs and moves to different towns. Every time Trout moves to a new school, it’s okay for exactly a week and then he’s in trouble again.
“So I don’t have friends because kids are afraid they’ll be in trouble if they hang out with me,” he said. “Or,” he went on, “maybe they don’t even like me.”
“And since you move all the time, you don’t have time to make friends.”
“Right.” But he was thinking of something else. “It’s not just that we move all the time because my father gets a new job. We move because I get in some kind of trouble at school and my father gets embarrassed because I’m not perfect or the school says I have to go to a special school and then my father looks for another job in another place. So it’s my fault, sort of,” he said. “At least, that’s what my dad says.”
The end of my cigarette was getting too wet, so I turned it around and pretended to smoke the other end. I didn’t know what to say to Trout. His story was the saddest story I’d ever heard. I began to think that here he was, my best friend, and I hadn’t known anything at all about him, not about his mother or his father, and worst of all, not about the terrible life he’d had.
“I think you should come with Meg and me to dinner tonight,” I said. “It’s my parents’ anniversary, so they’re going out together.”
Trout didn’t answer right away. He thought about it and then he decided that it’d be okay since Meg wasn’t my parents and so we walked to the corner of Euclid and Main and he used the pay phone to call his father. His father must have said no because Trout said it didn’t make any sense for him to go home unless his father was going to be there for dinner, too, and why should he stay home alone. And that he’d be home by eight or his father could pick him up at our apartment.
Meg took us to a Japanese restaurant called Mikado, where you sit on the floor and eat with chopsticks, and we sat in the back of the restaurant at a small table on the floor, just the three of us, and we talked. I was surprised. Trout told Meg all the same stories he had told me and told her that his tattoo was a fake. He drew it on with Magic Marker every morning and washed it off at night. He told her about his learning disabilities and flushing Ritalin down the toilet at night. And then he said he was never going back to Stockton Elementary again. All he did was skip school one day and now they were changing him to the other fifth grade and next year he was being sent to a school for dummies.
Meg listened quietly. Every once in a while, she got a sad look on her face and she’d touch Trout’s arm or shake her head or say how awful his life sounded. Then she had a plan.
The plan was simple. Every morning we’d meet at the corner like we already did and walk into school together, promising each other to be quiet and well behaved all day long. For every hour of the school day we were not in trouble, Meg would give us a surprise. And so, if there were eight hours of no trouble, that meant eight surprises.
“What if one of us is bad and not the other?” I asked.
“No surprise. That’s the deal,” Meg said. “It’s up to both of you.”
“It’s a deal,” Trout said.
And “that was that for this,” as my father w
ould say.
Meg’s plan worked. At least we thought it was working. We didn’t miss tutoring. We didn’t interrupt classes or get sent to Mr. O’Dell or have to sit outside the classroom for rudeness or talking out of turn. We even did all our homework.
Every afternoon at around five o’clock, we’d meet Meg, sometimes at The Grub and sometimes at home, to tell her about our successful day. And she’d get us our prizes. One day it was eight M&M’s each. Another day, it was eight stickers each. Another, it was eight pencils. And once it was eight cents each. So we thought we were doing really well.
But as it turned out, we were wrong. I don’t understand how things happened the way they did. But they did.
We should have caught on. That’s what I said to Trout later.
I mean, the first week of Meg’s plan, Billy Blister had a birthday party and invited all the boys in the class, at least all the ones I know except for Timbo Wirth, who’s a juvenile delinquent, and Trout and me.
“So did you get invited?” I asked Trout at recess, when all the boys were talking about Billy’s birthday party.
“Nope,” he said. “Billy doesn’t like me.”
“Well, he likes me and I didn’t get invited.”
Trout shrugged.
“Maybe he forgot.”
“Maybe,” I said.
I didn’t ask Billy how come he didn’t ask us, although I wanted to. But Mary Sue told me on the way home from school one day that she heard Billy was having an all-boys birthday party and I wasn’t invited and neither was Trout because of the parents.
I shouldn’t have asked Mary Sue anything since she has such a bad character, but I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know.
“What about the parents?”
“Billy’s parents,” Mary Sue said. “They said you couldn’t come because Trout is such a bad influence on you. A lot of parents feel that way.”
“Wrong,” I said. “Trout isn’t a bad influence on anyone.”
But later that night, after Meg had given us our prizes for good behavior, I did ask my mom what she thought I should do. And she asked my dad and he said he couldn’t stand the way people are like sheep and move around stupidly in herds and never think for themselves.
