by Lisa Graff
Jeremiah cocked his head to one side. “You serious?” he said. “That’s our ball. Don’t be a turd.” Only he didn’t say “turd.” “Give it back.”
“Yeah,” Stig said, “give it back.” Stig Cooper was the fattest kid in town. Dumbest, too. Not to mention an enormous jerk.
Noah stood just behind the two of them, shrugging at the ground, like he didn’t really care if he got the baseball back or not.
“Make me,” I told them.
I think Stig might’ve actually tried to fight me, and even though he was thick like an ox, I bet I could’ve taken him easy. Quick and mean, that’s what Dad said about me when he was teaching me how to defend myself. He meant it as a compliment.
Stig didn’t get the chance to get pummeled, though, because Jeremiah Jacobson, for all his faults, was a lot smarter than Stig was, and he could always find a way to get to you that didn’t involve punching.
My Book of Thoughts. I’d left it in the grass, like some kind of moron.
“Hey, look,” he told the other guys, snatching the book off the grass, “I found the little girl’s diary.” And he held it over his head and started flipping through the pages. Even though I was taller, I couldn’t grab at it, because Jeremiah’s bodyguard, Stig, kept blocking me. “The little girl’s an artist,” Jeremiah said as he flipped. Stig hooted like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, and Noah Gorman didn’t laugh and he didn’t help with the bodyguarding, but he didn’t go away either. The ball of fire in my chest was getting hotter and hotter, till I almost couldn’t stand it. But I couldn’t get that notebook.
Then all of a sudden, when Jeremiah had flipped through maybe five or six pages, he stopped flipping. He didn’t give back my thoughts, though. Instead, his eyes went wide at me and his face went long and he said, “What’s wrong with you?”
Well.
“Give it back,” I said, still trying to pummel through the Wall of Stig to get my notebook. “It’s mine.”
“What’s in it?” Stig asked.
Jeremiah went back to flipping. “He’s like, sick, or something,” he said. “It’s all messed-up stuff.”
It’s not messed up, I wanted to say. It’s just my thoughts. But of course I didn’t say that.
“It’s all, like, people getting attacked,” Jeremiah went on. Still flipping. “A guy getting eaten by a shark, a guy smushed under a tree, a guy falling off a building.”
It was a tightrope, like in the circus. The guy was falling off a tightrope, not a building. I knew I was no great artist, but that seemed obvious.
The grass on this end of the park must’ve been super fascinating, because that’s what Noah was staring at.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jeremiah asked me again.
It was the kind of question you really couldn’t answer.
“Leave him alone.”
Well. That was a voice I hadn’t expected to hear.
“Go away, Fallon,” Jeremiah told her. Like he was in charge of the whole park.
She stood right in front of him with one hand on her hip, her fluffy white dog yanking at its leash. She didn’t look afraid of him in the slightest. “Not until you give Trent his notebook back.” Her little dog yapped.
The fire was up to my hairline now. “I’m fine,” I told her. I didn’t need a girl defending me.
“Go away,” Jeremiah told her again. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah,” Stig agreed. “This has nothing to do with you.”
Noah looked like he was going to write a love poem to the grass, it was so interesting.
“It does too have to do with me,” Fallon argued. Her dog yapped again. (I really wished he’d take a chunk out of Jeremiah’s leg. But it wasn’t that kind of dog.) “Those are drawings of me.”
“What?” Jeremiah said, flipping his gaze from the pages to Fallon and back.
“What?” I said, even louder.
“Yeah,” she said. “I asked Trent to draw some theories about how I might’ve gotten my scar, because I don’t remember. Amnesia,” she explained, as though we’d even asked. Her little dog yapped. “So he made some pictures.”
Jeremiah looked at the notebook one more time. A drawing of a guy standing at the very tip of an exploding volcano. “Is that true?” Jeremiah asked me. “You drew all these pictures of her?”
On the one side of me was Jeremiah Jacobson, standing with his bodyguards, holding my Book of Thoughts. And on the other side was stupid, nosy Fallon Little and her yappy dog. And what was I supposed to say? Those drawings weren’t of Fallon, that was for sure. But if Jeremiah and Stig and Noah knew the truth, they’d think I was even sicker than they already did.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what it is.” And while Jeremiah and Stig were busy hooting with laughter, and Noah was still focused on his love affair with the grass, I managed to snatch back my Book of Thoughts and stuff it safely into the front pocket of my sweatshirt. “Take your stupid ball,” I told Jeremiah, tossing the baseball at him. He caught it easily.
Fallon was grinning big, like she’d helped me out so much. “You boys can leave now,” she told them.
Jeremiah just rolled his eyes. “Tell your girlfriend there’s something on her face,” he told me. And then he and his bodyguards walked away.
When they were safe back on the field, I jumped onto my bike and was ready to pedal my way home when I heard Fallon say, “You’re welcome, by the way.”
I didn’t turn around. “I didn’t say thank you, by the way,” I grumbled.
I could almost hear her shrug. “You owe me one now.”
“Whatever,” I replied. I pushed my right foot down hard onto the pedal.
“Trent?” she said.
I sighed and stopped pedaling. Did turn around, then. “I’m going home,” I told her.
She didn’t seem to care about that. “What are the drawings of, really?” she asked. She had scooped up her yappy white dog and was staring at me now, those two big brown eyes, one on either side of that deep pink scar.
“None of your business,” I replied.
She nodded, like that was true. Her little dog yapped. And I pedaled away for real. “See you later, Trent!” she called after me.
“See you,” I told her. But I didn’t mean it.
The pedaling home was hard, harder than it had been on the way to the park, because my whole body was fire now, all over. I couldn’t believe I’d let anybody see my Book of Thoughts. That was just mine, and no one had ever looked at it before, not even Miss Eveline at school. Stupid, I told myself, with every push of the pedals. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
Those drawings weren’t of Fallon and her lame scar. I wished they were. I’d rather have thoughts about that. Instead my thoughts, every page, the whole five volumes, were all about nothing but Jared Richards.
The kid I’d killed in February.
TWO
I didn’t do it on purpose, obviously. Kill Jared Richards, I mean. Miss Eveline said I shouldn’t say that, that I killed Jared, because it was an accident, what happened, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. But accident or not, Jared Richards died, and I was the reason, so what was the difference? Either way, I killed him.
I hit the hockey puck at a bad angle, that was what happened. We were out playing on Cedar Lake last February (February 12, if you’re counting, but who is?). I’d heard that some of the guys needed another player to make it even, so I’d asked if I could join them. I wasn’t the best skater, but everyone knew I was a pretty good athlete all around, so they said sure.
Funny thing was, when it started, I thought it was going to be a really good day.
Anyway, I hit the hockey puck at a bad angle, and Jared was standing where he shouldn’t have been standing, and it got him—whack!—right in the chest. Which probably wouldn’t’ve been so bad�
��I mean, I got him hard, it would’ve hurt anybody, but it shouldn’t’ve killed him—but it turned out Jared had a bad heart. A “defect,” that’s what they said. No one knew about it before. Only found out when it was too late.
One bad shot, that’s all it took. One bad shot and one bad heart.
So can you blame me if I drew pictures sometimes? If my thoughts were full of Jared? One thing was for sure: If Jared Richards really had fallen off a tightrope, instead of getting whacked in the chest by yours truly, no one would even have to ask if I wanted to join their pickup games.
Anyway, I was thinking about all that, and about Jeremiah and Noah and the park, too, on the way to dinner with Dad and Kari on Friday night. Which was probably a bad idea, because it was making me hot-mad all over again, and at dinners with Dad and Kari it was best to start cold as ice, because that was the only way to get through it.
It wasn’t going to be a good evening, that’s all I’m saying.
“You all right, little brother?” Aaron asked me as we turned the last corner before the diner. I could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, worried and sympathetic. (Doug had called dibs on the front seat, and normally I would’ve Indian-burned him into giving it up, because technically as second oldest I had permanent dibs, but I wasn’t in the mood, so I let him have it.)
“I’m fine,” I told Aaron. Ever since Aaron got his license last year, he’d suddenly started acting like he was the dad in the family, which was ridiculous, because he was only four years older than me and six years older than Doug, and anyway, the last thing any of us needed was another dad.
We pulled into the parking lot of the St. Albans Diner just after Dad and Kari, apparently, because Dad was busy helping Kari out of the car. It looked about as easy as leading a beached whale back to water.
“What if she has the baby at dinner?” Doug asked, whipping off his seat belt and turning around to talk to me with his knees up on the seat. “What if we have to help her deliver it in a taxicab?”
“Why would we get in a taxi if Dad has his car right here?” I asked.
“She’s not even due for three weeks,” Aaron told Doug. “Get your feet off my seat.”
“These aren’t my feet,” Doug said. “These are my knees. See? Kneeeees.”
Aaron sighed a big fatherly sigh. “Let’s go inside, okay?”
“You think if Kari did have her baby right now, we’d still make it home in time to watch the game?” I asked. Aaron rolled his eyes at me in the rearview mirror as he pushed his door open. “What?” I said. “We’re playing the Diamondbacks tonight, and I want to see it.” The Dodgers had been on a losing streak for the past week, but their top pitcher was making his first start after coming off the disabled list, so they were going to turn it around for sure.
“Let’s go.”
“Hey,” Dad greeted us when we beat him to the door. (Kari walked pretty slow these days, on account of the baby.) “You’re on time.”
“Good to see you,” Kari said, which was not very convincing. I was surprised she’d come tonight, to be honest. She skipped out on dinner most nights, to give us more “male bonding time.”
Aaron and I buried our heads in our menus as soon as we sat down, even though both of us got the same thing pretty much every time we came. Doug got to work scrunching up his straw wrapper from his water glass, and dropping water on top to turn it into a wrapper worm. Dad checked his phone, and Kari pretended to admire the curtains.
Aaron squinched up close to me in the booth and whispered, “Three, two, one . . .”
“So, how’s school?” Kari asked.
I fist-bumped Aaron under the table. He had Kari down.
“It’s still summer,” Doug answered, engrossed in soaking the table with water. “School doesn’t start till Monday.”
“Oh,” Kari said. “Right. I knew that.” She laughed a trilly little laugh. “Pregnancy brain.”
“Wait, you’re pregnant?” I asked, in my best incredulous voice. Under the table, Aaron kicked me.
“Trent, please,” Dad said, setting his phone on the table. “Must we?”
Doug finished with his wrapper worm, and Kari handed him a wad of napkins to mop up his mess.
We got our second-favorite waitress, Claudia, who clearly had a thing for Aaron even though she was probably in her twenties. “You all ready?” she asked us. She gave Aaron a little smile, no one else.
We were all ready.
No matter how good a restaurant is, if you go there for dinner three nights a week for a full year, you’re going to get a little sick of it. And the St. Albans Diner wasn’t very good to begin with. When Mom and Dad first got divorced, back when I was five, Dad used to drive out to Cedar Haven every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night to have dinner with us there. Sometimes he’d eat dinner at the house with us and Mom, which was weird but sort of nice, too, but usually we’d go to one of the restaurants in town. He’d take us to the arcade after, or out to a movie even, if there was something we could all agree on. But after Aaron got his license, Dad decided he was sick of the hour drive each way, so we met in the middle. And the only thing in between Cedar Haven and Timber Trace, where Dad lived, was the St. Albans Diner. So that’s where we went.
“How’s the, um . . . ?” Aaron started after Claudia left to put in our order. I could tell he was searching for something to talk about. I wasn’t sure why he bothered. “The construction going?”
“Oh, we finished that weeks ago,” Kari said. She sipped at her tea—decaf, for the baby—and smiled at us. “The room looks just darling. Pink walls and carpet, too. We’ll show you next time you’re out.”
“Can’t wait,” I said.
“Trent,” Dad warned.
What I should have said was that it was news to me that the remodel had been done for weeks. The whole reason we’d been skipping our every-other-weekend overnight visits lately was that Kari thought the construction would disturb us. I guess now that it was over, she still thought we were disturbed.
“Your father’s company picnic is coming up soon,” Kari told us, the smile stretched too wide across her face. She rubbed her belly. “We’ll see if this one holds out a little longer so we can all make it. I hope so. It was so much fun last year, wasn’t it, egg-race champs?” She aimed her smile first at me, then Dad.
“Yeah,” Dad said. “It was.” And for a second I thought he was about to smile or something, but I must’ve been making it up, because Dad never smiled at me. Anyway, he went right back to looking at his phone. So I’d definitely been making it up.
Last fall, at Dad’s company picnic that we were forced to attend every year because Dad wanted to convince all his coworkers that he had his own big loving family to brag about or whatever, Kari got the bright idea that it would be “super fun” if Dad and I entered one of the races together. Which is how the two of us ended up with our legs tied together by a purple handkerchief, our hands gripped tight around the handle of a plastic spoon balancing an egg, for the three-legged egg race, which was somebody somewhere’s idea of a good time. Anyway, turns out we won, because apparently we’re both pretty good at not splatting raw eggs into the grass. We got a trophy and everything—Dad kept it on the bookshelf in his and Kari’s living room. To be honest, it wasn’t the worst time I’ve ever had in my life, winning that race with Dad. But even last fall, being joined at the leg to my father by a handkerchief wasn’t exactly on my top ten list of things to do with myself, and now it definitely wasn’t.
We were all quiet for a while after that, waiting for our food. Dad started answering a message. Doug went to unscrewing the lids of the salt and pepper shakers, which he obviously was not supposed to do, but no one stopped him.
“Me and Annie and Rebecca are going to make cookies tomorrow,” Doug told no one in particular. “With Annie’s old lady friend Mrs. Finch. She makes good cookies.”
/> “That’s nice,” Dad said, still checking his phone.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with those girls lately,” Kari said, smiling that stretched-out smile of hers.
“Yeah,” Doug said. “It’s . . .” He looked like he was thinking about something for a second, but then he shook his head and returned his focus to the salt and pepper shakers. “They’re nice.”
I didn’t know why Doug had to suddenly start spending all his time with two girls, especially those two girls. Rebecca was fine, whatever. Her dad, Dr. Young, was our family doctor. But Annie . . . Annie Richards was Jared Richards’s little sister. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Doug felt it was necessary to become her best friend in the entire world. He’d been friends with her in day care, back when it made sense to be friends with whoever happened to sit next to you during snack time on the first day, and then they’d sort of grown apart, which made sense, too. But in the last few months, Doug had been acting like it was his personal mission to spend every waking second with her. Back in July he’d even turned our entire front yard into an obstacle course that he built just for her, made mostly out of pool noodles that he stole from Aaron’s lifeguarding job.
I mean, it’s not like I thought they sat around talking about how I killed her older brother or anything. But what did they talk about?
I just didn’t get why they had to be friends, that’s all.
“Doug, don’t mess with the salt,” I told him, once I figured out what he was doing. Pouring a thin layer of pepper into the top of the saltshaker, so you’d reach for salt, but get pepper on your fries instead. “They’re going to kick us out.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” Doug snapped back.
“I’ll show you who’s the boss of you,” I told him, making a fist across the table.
“Boys, settle down,” Dad barked at us. “Can’t we have one dinner where you don’t fight?”
“But Doug’s trying to prank people,” I argued. I didn’t know why I bothered. Everyone knew that Dad’s favorite kids went: Aaron, Doug, me. And I was only on the list because you had to put all your sons on there somewhere. “And you hate pranks.”
