by Lisa Graff
• • •
It was close, but the Dodgers won, 6 to 4. “And you were worried,” Mom teased, grabbing me around the neck and giving me a motherly smooch that I would immediately have to rub off. When games got close, Mom was the one who freaked out, not me. She refused to sit as long as they were behind by more than one run. Given the Dodgers’ record so far this season, I was surprised her feet hadn’t fallen off.
Ray went to the front to help a customer, and Mom snapped off the radio and got to the business of grilling her middle child.
“So,” she said, “you excited about middle school on Monday?”
It sounded like she was asking seriously, which was weird.
“I thought you hated middle school,” I told her.
She stuck her tongue in her cheek, thinking. “I did?”
“Yeah, you said that to Aaron once. You said that you didn’t even know why they had middle school, that there ought to be some government program where, as soon as kids graduated elementary school, they got scooped up and sent to a lab where scientists could put them in a deep freeze until they were old enough for high school. For their own sake, that’s what you said. Because middle school sucks so much.”
Mom laughed. “Well, I probably didn’t say ‘sucks.’”
I held my hand up like I was pledging an oath. “That’s what you said,” I told her. “I heard you.”
“Ah.” She straightened out some business cards on the counter. “So, are you looking forward to it? It might be a good chance to make new friends.”
Mom had been on my case about making new friends for a while now. She must’ve asked me about Noah Gorman a million times since February. “I haven’t seen him in ages,” she would say. “Why don’t you invite him over for dinner tonight? It would be nice to catch up, don’t you think?”
I didn’t.
What I should’ve told Mom, so that she’d stop harassing me about what a friendless loser I was, was that it wasn’t like I’d ever had buckets of friends to begin with. I had Noah, and sometimes I’d hang out with some of his friends, but only if Noah was there, too. And there were the guys I played pickup with—Mike Jessup, Steve Bickford, Tommy Lipowitz.
Jared Richards.
But I was never really friend-friends with those guys. That’s what I should’ve told my mom. They were just sports-playing friends. Noah would play sometimes, too, when I could drag him along.
After Jared, though, some of the sports guys didn’t want me to join them anymore. Not all of them, just some. It’s not like I could blame them, really. That’s what I should’ve told her.
I should’ve told her, too, that Noah did keep calling me, for a while. He even offered to go out on the lake with me once (even though he was a worse skater than I was), because of me not being able to play hockey with those other guys. But back then, right after it happened, just looking at my skates made the skin on my arms clammy, like I was sweating something terrible, no matter how cold it was outside. Made it hard to swallow. Hard to breathe.
And I guess I should’ve told my mom that I was the one who’d stopped calling Noah. That I’d said I’d let him know when I wanted to hang out again, and he’d said okay. And I thought I might want to soon, really, but for a while there, thinking much of anything got pretty tough. For a couple of months the drawings in my Book of Thoughts freaked me out so bad, I had to hide them at the back of my closet while I was sleeping. That’s how stupid I could be back then—afraid of my own thoughts. The stuff I drew for a while, it made my shark-eating drawings seem like happy little unicorns munching on cupcakes. What-ifs about it not being Jared that day on the lake, that’s what I drew for a while. What-ifs about it being someone else instead. So I guess I just never did feel like hanging out with Noah Gorman again.
Eventually Noah had stopped calling. That part I did tell my mom. I just left out the stuff beforehand.
It was too much to tell, anyway.
“Intramural baseball starts in a couple weeks, right?” Mom asked me, poking me in the side with her elbow. I guess she could tell I wasn’t going to talk about friends, so she’d moved on to other ways to try to get me pumped about middle school.
I shrugged. “Three, I think.”
“Just think,” Mom said. “Soon I’ll have two baseball stars. When you join the Dodgers, just make sure you sign a big enough contract that I can afford the mansion and the butlers.” I bit the insides of my cheeks to stop from smiling, but it was no use. Sometimes Mom got a little loopy around her sixth coffee or so. “People always forget about the butlers.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I promised.
When things started to get really slow in the store, about four thirty or so, Ray went to the back to answer emails, and Mom took to dusting, and I didn’t do much of anything because I only got paid four dollars an hour. Mom said I could “man the fort” and holler if any customers showed up. So when I was sure no one was looking, I pulled out my Book of Thoughts and started scribbling some more.
I know it was disturbed or something, to draw somebody getting attacked by sharks. Especially if that somebody was dead already. A somebody that you yourself had killed. It was probably disturbed, too, to draw the stuff Jared might be doing that very second if I hadn’t hit him with that hockey puck—Jared sleeping, Jared drinking hot chocolate, Jared doing his homework, Jared watching TV with Annie. The nightmares were disturbed, too, I guess. But drawing those kinds of thoughts on paper turned out to be better than keeping them in my brain, because when I kept them in my brain, they sort of jabbed at me like pointy sharp knives, and when I put them on paper, at least they stayed there. Left me alone afterward.
Anyway, like I said, they used to be a lot worse.
“You never told me what the drawings were actually of.”
I was so startled by the voice, I jumped off my stool. Actually jumped.
“Hey!” I shouted. I slammed my notebook closed. “What are you doing here?”
Fallon Little smiled a crooked smile at me. The tip of her lip that tucked into her scar, I couldn’t decide if it made her look cute or sinister. “I came to see you,” she said. Like it was so obvious.
“How did you know where I worked?”
“You don’t have to be, like, a detective, Trent. It’s a small town. Also, I’ve been in here about nine times with my parents and seen you.”
I guessed that was true. “Where’s your dog?” I asked, hoping she’d forget about the notebook and whatever it was she came in to talk about.
“Squillo? He’s at home. Where else would he be?”
“What do you want?”
Today Fallon was dressed even weirder than the day before—neon-yellow shorts and a giant green-and-white-striped polo shirt with “#1 Golfer” embroidered on the pocket. Her hair was up in a bun, frizzing out at every angle, and there was what appeared to be a chopstick poking through it. “I want the favor you owe me,” she said.
My mom was still dusting, on the far side of the store, with her back to me. I wondered if I concentrated hard enough I could get her to turn around and force me to refill the mustard cups.
“Are you okay?” Fallon asked me. She waved her hand in front of my eyes, breaking my concentration. “Trent?”
Mom actually did turn around then, but she totally failed at being a mother, because instead of rescuing me, she just gave me and Fallon a cheerful wave and moved on to another corner of the store.
I turned back to Fallon.
“I don’t owe you any favors,” I told her.
“Sure you do,” she said. “I practically saved your life.”
“You did not save my—”
“I want a picture.”
“What?”
“A picture,” she said again. She pointed at the notebook, which I was doing a terrible job hiding under the counter. “You’re a goo
d artist, I saw. And I want you to draw me a picture.”
“I’m not going to draw you a picture.”
She blinked at me. One blink, then another. “You want to hear the real story?” she asked me.
This girl was nuts times a million. “What are you talking about?” I said.
“The real story about my scar,” she said. “Everyone always wants to know how I got it.”
I couldn’t help myself—I was kind of curious. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“It happened when I was three,” Fallon said. She examined my face closely while she told me. “I was playing Frisbee in the park with my dad, and the Frisbee whacked me”—she slammed a hand up as though re-creating the scene—“right between the eyes. Crazy, huh?”
I may not be the smartest kid in the universe, but I know you can’t get a scar like that from a Frisbee.
“Huh,” I said. I pretended to think about that, pretty hard.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked. She seemed mad that I didn’t believe her obvious lie about her scar. Like she’d told me just so she could get mad at me for not believing her.
“No,” I said slowly. “I believe you. It’s just that it wasn’t what I was expecting, that’s all. I thought it was something even crazier. I thought maybe you got it in a nuclear power plant explosion.” Fallon raised an eyebrow. “And that now you have mutant superpowers or something.”
“Ooh, I like that one,” she said. She pointed to my notebook again. “That’s the one you should draw.”
“Sorry?”
“That’s what I want a picture of,” she told me. “How I got my scar. And that’s my favorite story yet.”
“I’m not drawing that,” I said. My notebook wasn’t for weird lies about Fallon Little’s scar. My notebook was for thoughts. My thoughts. “Leave me alone, all right?”
“Not till you draw me a picture.”
“I’m going to get my mom to come over here,” I threatened. Which, all right, was pretty lame, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t even leave the stupid register.
“Oh, please do,” Fallon said, leaning way too far over the counter, so that I had to step back and almost tripped. “Moms love me. Hey, Mrs. Zimmerman!” she called over to my mom, who turned around and gave another friendly wave. “Is it Mrs. or Ms.?” Fallon asked me. “Your parents are divorced, right?”
“Go away now,” I answered.
I thought maybe Fallon would stay in the store until we had to drag her out by her frizzy hair just so we could lock up, but just as quickly as she’d appeared, she decided to leave. “You’re going to draw me that picture, Trent,” she told me as she backed her way toward the door. “Just you wait and see. I’m going to keep bugging you until you do.”
“Can’t wait,” I muttered.
Mom came back to the counter right after Fallon left, which just showed what terrible instincts she had as a mother.
“She seems nice,” Mom said. “Friend of yours?”
“Not even a little,” I told her.
And then Mom smiled at me in this way I could only interpret to mean that she thought Fallon and I were in love or something, and wasn’t that just the cutest? And I had to roll my eyes at her, because that was the only way to stop myself from barfing in my own mouth.
Mom joined me behind the register. She sat on top of her stool and examined the sheet of voids.
“How do you think she got that scar?” she asked me, still reading the voids sheet.
I looked at her. I was surprised, I guess, that she would wonder, too. That even a mom could be so curious about a thing like that.
“Maybe it’s none of our business,” I said. As soon as I said it, I felt like I’d figured something out about Fallon Little. Something real. “People must ask her about it all the time,” I said, running a finger on the edge of my stool top. For all that Fallon talked about her scar, I realized, she didn’t really want anyone to know the truth. “I bet it gets really annoying.”
Mom looked up from the voids sheet and smiled in that way she did when one of us scored really well on a test. “You’re a pretty good kid, Trent, you know that?” she said.
I shrugged. I wasn’t nearly half as good a kid as Mom thought. Because even though Fallon didn’t want me to know the truth about her scar, I still wondered about it. Actually, the fact that she didn’t want me to know made me wonder even more. It was like that enormous, mysterious scar across Fallon’s face was the end of some great, interesting, terrifying story. The very last line of a book. And now that I’d seen what the last line was, I was desperate to find out how the story started. It was only natural to wonder about a thing like that.
Still, for some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I felt like a real jerk for wondering it.
FOUR
My first clue that sixth grade was going to suck worse than Mom had predicted was when I walked into my homeroom, Room C-78: Ms. Emerson.
Ms. Emerson was a wrinkled old crone. You could tell, as soon as you looked at her, that she’d been teaching for about a million years, and she’d hated every second of it, and that she was most definitely going to hate you. Her room, too, was like a wrinkled old crone’s lair. Instead of desks, the room was filled with long rows of tables with stools in front of them. And the rows, no joke, had ovens inside them. Real ovens, like if you got mouthy, the wrinkled old crone would turn up the heat and shove you inside and roast you. (The knobs on the ovens had been pulled off, and the doors were sealed shut with duct tape, I guess so no sixth graders could roast each other. But I had a feeling the wrinkled old crone knew a way around that trick.) At the very front of the classroom, where there should be the big teacher’s desk, was a huge bank with a long row of stovetops (knobs removed there, too), and a giant industrial sink.
It was weird.
Anyway, I was standing in the doorway, staring at the creepy homeroom with the ovens, when somebody—turned out it was Sarah Delfino—knocked past me into the room and said, “Hey, move it already. Some of us are trying to sit down.” And when she knocked me, my elbow rammed into the shelf beside the door, which just happened to be holding an enormous potted plant, and the thing started sliding off the shelf and probably would’ve crashed to the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces, but thankfully I’m pretty fast and I caught it.
Ms. Emerson, that wrinkled old crone, she saw the whole thing. She snapped to attention at the front of the room. “Hey, there!” she called over to me. And I knew, I just knew, she wasn’t going to thank me for my super-fast plant-catching moves, or ask me if my elbow was okay. And I was right. Because instead she shouted at me, “You be careful with that plant! It’s very special to me.” Which was idiotic, because how could a plant be special? And also, once I looked around the room, I realized that she had about four bajillion potted plants, stuck on shelves along every wall, against the windows in the back, even tall ones up front. So what was this stupid plant so special for?
I didn’t ask, obviously. I shoved the plant back in place, where it wouldn’t smash to the ground and shatter (even though I sort of wanted to watch that happen, just to see the old crone’s face), and found a stool no one was sitting on yet. And I sat.
Well, I’d never had a homeroom before, so I didn’t know what to expect. But it turned out it was about as exciting as every other class I’d had in my whole life, which is to say, not very. Ms. Emerson took roll and then went over the rules with us (the usual: No hitting, no talking out of turn, show respect, blah blah blah). And I stared at the wrinkled old crone and pictured how I’d draw her in my Book of Thoughts, if I ever felt like doing that. She’d have bat wings, like the bat she was, and an old-lady cane, and a speech bubble coming out of her mouth that said, “Potted plants are my very best friends!”
Okay, it needed a little work.
I was tired, anyway, because Doug and his stup
id friend Annie Richards had tried to pull their alarm clock prank the night before. Too bad for them Aaron figured out what they were up to before he went to sleep (probably because they didn’t hide the clocks in his room very well—I would’ve given them plenty of good places to hide them if I’d been helping, but I wasn’t), and he re-hid them all in Doug’s bedroom. Which was actually pretty funny, what with Doug waking up at 11:30 at night, and then 12:06, and then 2:27, and all through the night, going, “Gah! Gah!” and tearing through his room searching for the beeping. But the problem was that Doug’s room was right next door to mine, instead of Aaron’s, which was across the hall, so I heard all of that, and I didn’t get much sleep either.
At breakfast while Doug and I poured our cereal all blurry-eyed and did not talk about alarm clocks so Mom wouldn’t know we’d been pulling pranks, Aaron just smiled and drank his orange juice.
“Get some good sleep before the first day of school, little brother?” he asked Doug.
Doug glared at him.
When Mom ruffled all our heads and went upstairs to finish getting ready, Aaron turned to the two of us and said, “Remember, we’re leaving for St. Albans at four fifty, sharp. Not a second later, all right?” He looked specifically at me when he said that. “Four fifty, and we’re out of here, so be ready or I’m leaving without you.”
“And wouldn’t that be the worst,” I muttered, because after Friday I definitely was not looking forward to another fun-filled dinner with Dad the Jerk.
Anyway, so that’s what was rolling around in my tired brain when that wrinkled old crone Ms. Emerson was droning on and on about homeroom rules, listing them all on the board with their corresponding “consequences.”
Verbal warning
Written warning
Detention
I squinted at the list and made up my mind.
“So all we have to do is screw up three times and then we get detention?” I asked. I asked it pretty loudly. Didn’t raise my hand, either. “That seems easy.”
