by Susan Shreve
“What does that have to do with Billy’s birthday party?” I asked my mom when she came in to kiss me good night.
“Just that some of the parents of the kids in your class don’t understand Trout, so they don’t want their children to play with him.”
“Idiots,” I said.
“I think so too. But what happens is one set of parents tells another set of parents about Trout and on it goes, and pretty soon everyone is telling his son not to play with Trout. It’s very sad and wrong.”
I decided not to tell Trout what my mom or Mary Sue said. Already he had enough unhappiness with his mother in Hawaii.
During the second week of Meg’s plan, Mr. Baker called my parents to say how well I was doing now that I was taking Ritalin. Which I wasn’t, but my parents didn’t give Mr. Baker that information.
“Just like I used to say to you, Ben,” my mom said. “It’s your behavior. You ought to be able to change it without taking medicine. Or at least it’s worth a try. And you have.”
The next day Mr. O’Dell called me in to the office to tell me how well he thought the Ritalin was working.
I would have liked to tell Mr. O’Dell that it was all me by myself making the difference in the way I behaved. But I didn’t.
“So I wanted to see you today about Trout. Not you. How’s that for a change?”
“Good.” I didn’t trust Mr. O’Dell for a millisecond. He always had something up his sleeve.
“Trout may be leaving Stockton Elementary at the end of this year.”
“He didn’t tell me,” I said.
“He didn’t?” Mr. O’Dell asked.
“Nope. We already planned some stuff we’re going to do next year in sixth grade like try out for the traveling soccer team. I mean, he didn’t tell me anything about leaving.”
“Well, he will.”
“How come he’s leaving?” I asked.
“To go to another school. At least that’s what I’ve heard from his father.”
“Nobody told him,” I said.
“What I wanted you to know is that I think sometimes you are left out of things like birthday parties because some of the parents are concerned with the lack of supervision at Trout’s house.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “That doesn’t have to do with Trout. That’s his father’s fault.”
“I just thought you should know.”
And then we talked about other stuff at school and what it would be like to be a sixth grader, but I forget what we said since all I was thinking about was telling my dad what Mr. O’Dell had told me.
That night my dad said Mr. O’Dell shouldn’t have said anything about Trout to me. It was unprofessional. “Bad character” is what my dad probably thought, but he didn’t say that.
“So what’re you going to do?” I asked.
“Call him,” my dad said. “He should be fired.”
“Roger,” my mom said.
“I mean it, Jane.”
“Are you going to tell him that?” I asked.
“Probably not. But I am going to tell him he shouldn’t be speaking to my son about another student. Those matters are private.”
“Are you going to tell him I’m not taking Ritalin?” I asked.
“Of course not. It’s not his business.”
Later that night Trout called me and said he might have to change schools.
“How come?”
“My dad says that Mr. O’Dell wants me to go to another school.”
He sounded as if he might be crying and Trout doesn’t cry about stuff.
“What school?”
“He didn’t say anything to me. Maybe he told my dad.
But something weird’s going on at school, like the more I try to do well, the worse things are.”
“I thought things were great,” I said. “I mean, we’re hardly ever in trouble.”
“I know,” Trout said. “But my dad says things aren’t going very well. That a lot of the parents of fifth graders think I’m a criminal.”
“A criminal?”
“You know, like a criminal. Not a guy they want their kids to know.”
And then last Saturday, there was an end-of-the-year picnic at the Baileys’ farm and Jonno Bailey said to me I could come but his dad didn’t want the responsibility for Trout, because the Baileys had a lot of animals and farm equipment and just about anything could happen with Trout around.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know, accidents,” Jonno said. “Stuff like that.”
“No problem,” I said. “I can’t come to the picnic anyway.” But I thought about Trout and what was happening to him for no reason, how he was getting blamed for being a boy he wasn’t. It was kind of scary, especially now that he was trying so hard. Like me. As if Trout and me had been chosen to take the blame for all the bad things that happened.
And then on Monday night, the last week of May, two weeks before the end of school, some of the parents in the fifth grade called a meeting with Mr. O’Dell at Mary Sue Briggs’s house and invited all of the other parents, including mine and Trout’s father.
The meeting was about Trout.
“What do you think has happened?” I asked my dad.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Remember I told you about this group of parents trying to get Trout moved to a special school?”
“I remember.”
“They have a ‘bee in their bonnet’ about Trout for some reason.”
“What’ll happen?” I asked my mom.
“You guys have cleaned up your act,” she told me. “I don’t think anything will happen. What can the parents do if nothing is wrong? Answer me that.”
But I was still worried.
Monday night, Trout came for dinner.
“We can’t just let him sit home by himself while this meeting is going on, since he knows he’s the subject of it.”
“How did he find out?” I asked. “I didn’t tell him.”
“Mr. O’Dell called his father and his father told him.”
My parents went to the meeting early, but they got take-out for us and we sat in front of the TV eating lasagna and waiting for Mom and Dad to come back. I don’t even know what was on TV, we were so upset. Especially Trout.
So we just sat there side by side picking at our lasagna, which was kind of glumpy and cold, waiting for the bad news. I don’t remember if we talked much. Probably not.
But at nine o’clock, just about the time we were expecting my parents to come home, my dad called.
“I’ve got a proposal for you, Ben,” he said. “And you’ve got about two minutes to think about it.”
The meeting was not going well, he told me. The things the parents had to say about Trout weren’t true and weren’t fair, but it made no difference. They were a large group and they could very well force Mr. O’Dell to send Trout to a special school for children with emotional difficulties.
“Do you know what I mean by emotional difficulties?” he asked me.
“I think I do,” I said. “I think it means to be upset and a little crazy.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Do you think Trout is upset and a little crazy?”
“He’s upset because people are mean to him. But I think he’s normal, I mean as normal as me. Just a kid with learning disabilities.”
“That’s what I think,” my dad said.
“He hasn’t really done anything terrible, Dad. Just pranks.”
“And he’s different. Sometimes people take off against a kid who’s different. They’re looking for kids all made from the same jelly mold. You’re not like that and neither is Trout.”
“You mean, it’s not that he’s done bad things, but they’re afraid he could do bad things.”
“That’s right, because he’s not just like their child, so they don’t understand him. And someone needs to tell the fifth-grade parents that he’s a great kid, just a little different than some of the other fifth grader
s.”
Which is when he gave me his proposal.
“A person who knows Trout very well needs to speak to the parents. Someone who might help change their minds about him.”
“And that would be me?”
“That’s what I’m hoping, Ben.”
“You mean, come right now and talk to a bunch of parents without even having a speech written to read.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said.
“What should I say?” I asked, my blood turning to thin water.
“Say what you believe, Benjamin. That’s all you can do.”
I’d never been to Mary Sue Briggs’s house and I’ve never even wanted to walk down Magnolia Street, where she lives, which has the largest, richest houses in Stockton, New Jersey. Her father is a lawyer and works in New York City and her mother spends the day at the country club. That’s what I’ve heard. But it was kind of exciting to drive past these mansions, huge mansions, with wide green lawns and tons of flowers, and to walk up the flagstone sidewalk of the house where my worst enemy lives with her parents and her fluffy dog.
On the drive over, my dad and I didn’t talk, although his hand was on my knee the whole time until he parked the car.
“Will everyone be there?” I asked.
He nodded as I followed him up the front steps and into the marble hallway of the Briggses’ house, where a long table of tea and coffee and cookies was littered with old cups and crumbs. The meeting had started at seven-thirty and it was almost nine-forty-five.
There was a wide stairway with steps going up either side as if a person needs two sets of stairs to go to the second floor. At the landing, the fluffy white dog sat looking down at us. I imagined that Mary Sue was lying on her stomach on the top step straining to hear the conversation at the meeting, but I couldn’t see her.
“We’ll go in,” my dad was saying to me, “and I’m going to sit down at the back where Mom is and you’ll just walk down the middle of the living room, which is long, to the fireplace, and stand there to speak. People have been waiting to hear you and I’m sure Mr. O’Dell is still there and he’ll probably say something like, ‘Here’s Ben Carter.’ Okay?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t want to sound afraid. And I wasn’t nearly as nervous as I would have been if I had had time to think about talking to a bunch of fifth-grade parents in front of Mr. Baker and Mr. O’Dell and worst of all my own parents.
“Trout’s father is here. You know that.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
“Have you met him?”
I shook my head. It was strange. I’d never met his father and I’d never been in his apartment, and here we were, best friends.
“There.” Dad pointed as he slipped into the back row next to my mom.
I only saw the back of Trout’s father, but I could tell he was tall like Trout with that silky flying hair, only gray. I looked at him when I walked through the rows of parents, some sitting on the floor, some in folding chairs, but he didn’t turn his head to look at me, just sat facing forward, his arms across his chest.
Mr. O’Dell was sitting beside the fireplace talking to Ms. Briggs, who has yellow hair that she wears in a pony-tail as if she’s fourteen years old. I think Mary Sue will be just like her when she gets to be forty or sixty or however old Ms. Briggs is.
“Here comes Ben Carter,” Mr. O’Dell said, standing up beside the fireplace. “Hi, Ben.”
I didn’t respond with “Hi, Mr. O’Dell.” This wasn’t exactly daytime TV.
“Ben and Trout have been great friends ever since Trout came to Stockton. The best of friends. And I’m glad he’s here to tell us about the Trout he knows.”
Mr. O’Dell has a way of talking that makes me want to throw up, so I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t look up. All I could see were his feet.
The parents were restless, moving around in their chairs, talking back and forth, so I wasn’t walking into silence, which would have made me very nervous. In fact, no one seemed very interested in me until I stepped in front of the fireplace.
“Do you need a microphone, Ben?” Mr. O’Dell asked.
“No thank you,” I said, and at that moment, it was as if I’d had a huge glass of super-vitamins and there was a whoosh of power like the ocean in my blood.
I told the whole story of Trout and me, but I started with Mary Sue Briggs and the drowned teddy bear. I told the truth and I didn’t leave anything out, but I didn’t look at Ms. Briggs, although I had a sense of her sitting just beyond where I was standing. I talked about the question mark and how it wasn’t a tattoo but Trout needed it because he felt invisible without it.
“Trout and I have learning disabilities. It means we spend recess and half of lunch and a free period every morning and after school working with tutors. We are not exactly like the rest of the kids in the fifth grade because we learn differently and sometimes it feels terrible.” I could hear my own voice like an echo in a hollow room, and it sounded good and strong and certain. “You feel stupid and uncomfortable. Teachers think you cause trouble on purpose, that you fail at school because you don’t try. But that’s not true for Trout or for me.”
I told them about the Super Balls and skipping school. About Ritalin and how I wasn’t taking it even though everyone thought I was. And I told them about Meg’s plan. I couldn’t believe my own ears listening to the story I was telling. It was as if the words came from the air.
“Trout Sanger is the best friend I’ve ever had,” I said at the end. “He understands what it is to be in trouble in school when it’s not your fault and what it is to be different from the other kids who know how to read and what it is to feel lonely because you’re outside the group. He has taught me that I’m a good kid whether I’m smart or stupid.”
Everybody clapped. Some people stood and clapped. As I walked through the room towards my parents, people slapped me on the back and said “Good job” and gave high fives.
I didn’t hang around. I walked past my parents and straight out the Briggses’ living room into the large marble hall and to the front door without looking up the steps to see if Mary Sue Briggs was hanging halfway down the steps trying to listen. I opened the door and walked towards the car.
“I want to go home,” I said to my dad, who had followed me out. I certainly didn’t want to talk to any of the parents or hear their congratulations or answer their questions. I was proud of myself, maybe not right away, but the next day, when I thought back to what I’d said. But I was also feeling suddenly quiet because I’d told a lot of strangers the truth about me, things I’d always wanted to keep secret because I was embarrassed.
Trout’s dad caught up with us as I was getting in the car.
“Ben,” he called in a huge, deep voice. He grabbed my hand and then he lifted me up off the ground because he’s so tall and hugged me. “Thank you. That was very brave and very kind.”
My dad took me home. Mom and Trout’s father stayed to finish the conversation about Trout’s future.
“So what do you think?” I asked my dad.
“I think you were amazing.”
“Do you think they’ll change their minds?” I asked.
He was silent, considering.
“I think they will,” he said finally.
Trout was asleep when we got home. The television was off and Meg was in her room listening to music, talking on the phone to Max.
I woke him up.
“Want me to tell you what happened?” I asked, already beginning to be full of myself.
He shook his head.
“In the morning,” he said.
“He’s afraid,” my dad told me in the kitchen, where he was making himself a sandwich.
“Of what?”
“Put yourself in his shoes,” he said. “He’s in trouble, the parents don’t like him for no good reason. And there you are, his best friend, talking about him to a bunch of people who don’t like him. Not a great way to feel, right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“Just go sit down beside him. Maybe he’ll ask and maybe he won’t.”
So I did that and we sat there on the couch, quiet a lot of the time or talking about nothing, kids at school, the soccer team next year, mean teachers. His father brought my mom home from the meeting, but he didn’t come upstairs, so I didn’t have a chance to see him again.
“What happened?” I asked my mom.
“All good,” she said, kissing me on the top of my head. “Trout will be back next year in the fifth grade and I guess you two guys will be practicing for the soccer team all summer.”
Trout said goodbye and went downstairs to meet his father, but he didn’t thank me.
“See you,” he said, and walked out the front door.
“Don’t worry,” my dad said when he came in to kiss me good night. “It’s hard to know what to say when someone’s done you a big favor. ‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem enough. And sometimes you’re embarrassed or feel you owe them something back. This was a big deal. Trout’s got to have time to think about this.”
Still, I couldn’t get to sleep for a very long time.
Trout called just before seven.
“Meet me at the corner,” he said.
We always met at the corner of Euclid, every day for weeks, so I didn’t know why he needed to call this morning, but I headed out early and was waiting for him when he came up the street.
At first when I watched him coming up Euclid, I knew there was something different. I just didn’t know what it was—a different look to his face. And then, of course, I realized the red question mark was gone.
“Is it off for good?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. I’m going to a new school next year, so maybe I’ll put it back on then.”
My stomach fell.
“I thought you were going to be at Stockton. I thought we were doing soccer and stuff together.”
“We’re moving to New Hampshire,” he said. “My dad’s got a new job.”
