by Lisa Graff
That time, the ball swished through the hoop.
At the end of the day, Julie said Annie and I were a natural team. She grinned at us. “See you both next Saturday?”
I glanced sideways at Annie, who was glancing sideways at me. “Sure,” I said, just as Annie said, “Yeah, okay.”
I was kicking up the kickstand on my bike outside the Community Center when I sensed somebody behind me. I turned around.
It was Annie.
“I don’t need an older brother,” she told me. “I had one already and—” She stopped. Blinked at me. For a second I thought she was going to say, “and you killed him,” which I think might’ve gut-punched me so hard, I’d’ve fallen over. But she didn’t. Blink, blink. “He’s gone now.”
“Well, good,” I said. I wasn’t feeling particularly great about myself, but at least I wasn’t feeling gut-punched, either. Besides, I sort of liked this Annie girl. She wasn’t some weepy sad-sack little priss like I thought she’d be. I could kind of tell why Doug liked hanging out with her. “I mean, not about him being gone. But . . . Anyway, I don’t need another little sister. I have one of those already, and a little brother, too. And he stinks.”
Annie thought about that. “Doug does stink,” she agreed.
I threw my leg over my bike and placed my feet on the pedals. “See you next week?” I asked.
She nodded. “I still hate you,” she told me.
I nodded back. “See you then,” I said.
• • •
It wasn’t until I was all the way home that I realized my arms hadn’t gone clammy once the whole day.
NINETEEN
Mom told me I could work at the store on Sunday again, to make a little money. I wasn’t sure I wanted to, what with her being so mad at me, but really, what else was I going to do? Doug was hanging out with Annie and Rebecca. Aaron was hanging out with his girlfriend. (He said he wasn’t, but it was a lie, obviously. Doug stole his phone and saw that Aaron had called Clarisse the night before. Then Doug squealed like a girl and ran all over the house until Aaron socked him and made him give him the phone back.)
So all day Sunday, I was at Kitch’N’Thingz.
At first, I mainly ignored Ray. I made Mom hand him his doughnut, and when he waved at me and told me good morning, I just sort of grunted. But it wasn’t like it was a big store. I knew I was going to have to talk to him eventually.
He came over when I was rearranging the baking shelf. November was a big month for the store, usually, because people were getting ready for Thanksgiving, and that meant lots of kitchen gadgets. Basters, fat separators, roasting pans and roasting racks, oven thermometers, fancy dishes and napkins with orange leaves all over them, and all sorts of other boring stuff I couldn’t have given two hoots about. For the store it meant lots of money, but for me it mostly meant rearranging and restocking.
“Hey,” Ray told me. I was moving the fancy pie plates to the front of the shelf, like Mom had told me to. You had to be careful with those because they were really fragile.
I thought about icing Ray out, but I didn’t.
“Hey,” I said back.
He stood there for a while, watching me rearrange pie plates, sort of leaning against the shelf. Which seemed dangerous to me, because there was a lot of breakable stuff right where he was leaning, but it was his store, so I didn’t mention it.
“I think you know I like your mom, right, Trent?” he said after a minute.
I darted my eyes quick across the store. Mom was at the register, going over yesterday’s numbers.
“I should hope so,” I said, picking up a pie plate super carefully and swapping it for a slightly uglier one. “Otherwise it would be weird that you were kissing her.”
I thought Ray was going to get mad at me for that one, or sigh a big grown-up sigh at least, but he didn’t. He snorted.
“A fair point,” he said.
“Look, I don’t need, like, a man-to-man talk,” I told Ray, still rearranging. Jeez, there were a lot of pie plates. “I’m twelve—I know about dating and stuff. You like my mom, my mom likes you, fine. We don’t need to talk about it.”
Ray rubbed the top of his bald head, thinking. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Well, that’s good, I guess.” He rubbed some more. “Sometimes I forget how old you are, Trent. I’ve known you since you were a toddler.”
I wondered if Ray had liked my mom even back then, even when she and my dad were still technically married, even if they probably shouldn’t have been.
“Do Aaron and Doug know?” I asked. I hadn’t told them yet—who wanted to talk about their mom’s love life?—but I figured they should probably find out sometime.
“Aaron might be beginning to figure it out,” Ray said. “I don’t think Doug knows.” I nodded at that. If no one told Doug, he probably wouldn’t realize it until Ray moved into our house. “Your mom wants to tell them soon, I think. It’s—” He cleared his throat. “Things are getting pretty serious, between your mom and me.”
“Between your mom and I,” I corrected him.
“Actually I think it’s me,” Ray said.
“Really?”
“We can look it up.” Ray went back to rubbing his head. “The point is, Trent, you’re probably going to see a lot more of me in the future. At your house—some nights for dinner, probably. Maybe you boys might even come over to my house sometimes . . .” He took a deep breath, and I stopped stacking to look at him. He seemed nervous. I’d never seen Ray nervous before. “Is that okay with you, Trent?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“I hope so,” he told me. “Because, Trent?” I waited. “I like your mom, a lot. But part of the reason I like her so much is that she has such great kids. It means a lot to me that you’d be okay with me dating her.”
I squinched my mouth to the side, debating over two pie plates, which one should be at the front of the shelf. Part of me really wanted to tell Ray where to stuff it. It seemed like the thing to do in this situation. But the other part of me . . . Well, I kind of actually liked Ray.
“It’s okay with me,” I said. “For now. I mean, I get to change my mind if I want.”
“Fair enough,” Ray told me. And he left me to my pie plates. When he got back to Mom at the register, I noticed that she bumped his shoulder a bit, smiling, like she was really happy.
I liked seeing Mom really happy.
“Trent!” Ray called over to me a minute or so later. I jerked my head up. He had his phone out, looking at something.
“Yeah?”
“It’s between you and me. I looked it up.” He held up his phone, to prove it. “I was right.”
“Well, aren’t you special?” I called back, and he just laughed.
• • •
Mom could tell I was getting bored late that afternoon, I think, because she assigned me the job of “brightening the store window,” which basically meant arranging things so they looked pretty. I don’t know why she ever asked me to do that, because she always changed whatever I did the next morning when I wasn’t there, but I guess it was better than stacking gravy boats.
So anyway, I was on my knees in the store window, arranging the turkey stuffed animal that Mom had bought for the display case last Thanksgiving, only I’d decided to make it even better than last year and give it basters for butt feathers (which I knew Mom was going to hate, but I was doing it anyway). And that’s when I happened to look up at exactly the right moment to see Fallon’s parents standing outside the movie theater across the street, reading the movie times.
I jumped down from the window display, knocking over an entire pile of basters.
“Be right back!” I called to Mom. I was out the door before she had a chance to say anything about it. I didn’t even think to grab my coat.
“Um, Mr. and Mrs. Little?” I said whe
n I reached them. I was sort of out of breath, from the running, and I think they were surprised to see a kid they hardly knew darting across the street and then stopping right in front of them to talk. They’d probably just thought they were going to see a movie.
Fallon wasn’t with them, which I thought was a good thing, given what I wanted to talk about.
Mr. Little looked down at me, his chin tucked into his thick blue scarf. Right this second he was looking more than a little intimidating.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m, um, Trent,” I told him. “Fallon’s friend. We met before?” I gestured vaguely across the street to Mom’s store, like that might help them place me.
Mr. Little frowned at me. “I know who you are, Trent,” he said.
“Aren’t you cold?” Mrs. Little asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just saw you guys from the window, and I wanted to talk to you really quick about—”
“We were about to go in,” Mr. Little told me, nodding toward the theater.
“It’ll only take a second,” I said. “I promise.”
He raised his eyebrows at me, but didn’t say anything. Mrs. Little looked like she was just worried about my body temperature.
“Um,” I said slowly. Because now that they were actually listening to me, I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d wanted to say. “Um,” I said again. “I know this is none of my business probably, but you shouldn’t make Fallon be in the school play. She really hates being a tree.”
“Look,” Mr. Little said. I could tell he was getting impatient. “I know you must think it’s unfair, our not wanting Fallon to spend time with you anymore.”
“Wait,” I said. “What?”
I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t cold at all.
“Trent, you have to understand,” Mrs. Little said, leaning down a bit to talk to me, even though I was just as tall as she was. “We’re sure you’re a good kid. But Fallon is our only daughter. And given her past trauma . . . we just don’t think that it’s healthy for her, being so close to someone with a history of violent outbursts.”
I blinked at her. “What are you talking about?” I blinked at Fallon’s dad, too. “You told Fallon she’s not allowed to hang out with me?”
Now they were both frowning. “Oh,” Mrs. Little said softly. “Oh dear. You didn’t . . . ?”
I shook my head. “I just knew she didn’t want to be a tree.”
My chest burned. My neck, my stomach, my legs down through to my sneakers.
“Trent,” Mrs. Little said. Fire. I was on fire. “Please understand. We only want the best—”
But I wasn’t listening anymore. I was backing away. “I understand fine,” I said. I was not going to shout. I was not going to yell.
I was not going to cry.
“Thanks for talking to me,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
I may or may not have done one of the things I swore not to do on my way back to the store.
“Trent?” my mom said. She was standing in the doorway. I think she’d been watching me. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I forgot my coat,” I told her. That’s all I said. No matter how many times she asked.
When we left for the night, Mom told me she loved my baster turkey. I knew she was lying, but I think it was the only thing she could think of to cheer me up.
TWENTY
I didn’t know what to say to Fallon on Monday at lunch. What was I supposed to say? “I know you’re not allowed to hang out with me”? “Why do your parents think I’m so terrible?” “Why didn’t you just tell me?” None of that seemed right, and anyway, when Fallon sat down next to me, instead of whipping open her pre-algebra book and not talking to me, she actually smiled and said, “Hey, Trent, what’s shaking?”
An actual smile.
I’d missed that smile.
“Ummmm . . . ,” I said, peeling the wrapper off my cafeteria hamburger. “Saltshakers? Or . . .” I tried to think of a good one. “Maracas?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Maracas?”
“Yeah,” I said. I bit the edge off a mustard packet and began to squeeze a little onto my burger. “You know, those weird gourd instruments we had to play in music class in kindergarten?” I did a fake shake in the air with both my hands, as though to demonstrate. “Maracas,” I said again. “That’s what’s shaking.”
She laughed that laugh that took over her whole face. “You’re one weird dude, Trent,” she said.
“Thanks,” I told her, and I took a bite of my burger.
If she didn’t need to talk about her parents, I figured neither did I.
• • •
On Tuesday, I brought Noah Gorman his own Mike Lupica book to read, one about football. Only because otherwise I knew he’d just go on staring at me, looking pathetic and bored.
Sitting on the bleachers not playing volleyball was pretty boring.
“Keep it,” I told him when the bell rang. “Aaron has, like, a million.”
“Thanks,” Noah said.
On Wednesday while we were reading our books, I don’t know why, I decided to say something. “You know,” I decided to say, “apparently you can fail sixth grade just for not participating in P.E.” Maybe it wasn’t my business, but it had taken me a long time to figure that one out, so I thought I might as well spread the word.
Noah shrugged and turned the page. “He can’t make me participate if I don’t want to” was all he said.
On Thursday, I brought the flyer for the Basketball Buddies program that Ms. Emerson had given me. It had spent more than a week at the bottom of my backpack, so it was mashed and wrinkled, but Noah took it anyway.
• • •
Fallon might have been talking to me again, but she was still acting weird. She wouldn’t talk about the play at all, for one thing.
“You should at least make them let you be something better than a tree,” I told her. “You’re way too good an actress to be a tree. Do you even have any lines?”
She pushed her peas around on her tray. “I get to throw an apple at Dorothy,” she said.
“You should be Dorothy.” Just the thought of a really great actress like Fallon, stuck inside a tree suit, made me seriously furious. “I’m going to tell that stupid play director what’s what,” I said. “I’ll make him re-audition you. I bet their Dorothy sucks.”
“Trent.”
“What?” I said, starting to really get excited about the idea of yelling at some hack middle school theater director who clearly didn’t even know a star when he saw one. “So you maybe had a bad audition, so what? That doesn’t mean they have to make you a tree. You should get to try out again.”
“Trent.”
“If they just knew how amazing you were, I’m sure they’d—”
“Trent!”
Fallon slammed her spork on the table. It didn’t make a lot of noise, because it was plastic, but it did send up a tiny spray of peas.
“I asked to be a tree, all right?” she said. She said it so quietly, I almost didn’t hear her. She was staring straight into her lunch tray.
“What?” I said. “Why would you do a thing like that?”
Instead of answering, Fallon pushed her tray across the table, straight into the garbage can. It fell in with a thunk.
“I don’t feel so good,” she told me. “I think I need to go to the nurse’s office.”
I didn’t follow her, because I could tell she didn’t want me to. I stayed at the table and finished my lunch by myself, thinking about how Fallon had just added one more thing to the list of things we couldn’t talk about.
• • •
It started raining that afternoon, really hard. Buckets, practically, dumping out of the sky. It got worse while I was in Ms. Emerson’s room, watering plants.
> “I hope I haven’t kept you too late,” Ms. Emerson told me as I was leaving. It was dark outside the window, and the wind was howling, rain throttling the glass.
“No,” I said. “That’s okay.”
“You know,” she said, “if you don’t mind staying here another twenty minutes or so, I can give you a ride home. I usually leave school around five o’clock.”
I squinted an eye at her. Getting in a car with a wrinkled old crone did not exactly sound like my idea of a good time.
Then I glanced outside the window, at the rain.
“Yeah, okay,” I told her. “I’ll read my book, maybe. Or do some homework.”
“That sounds grand.”
Ms. Emerson graded papers until 5:00 on the dot, and then the wrinkled old crone drove me home, with my bike in the back of her car. She was silent as stone the whole way, only nodded as I told her which corners to turn.
“Trent?” she said when she’d pulled up in front of my house and I was about to open the door into the rain. I turned to look at her. “The plants will be thirsty again tomorrow,” she said. Then she popped open the trunk of her car. “And don’t forget your bicycle.”
• • •
It rained the next day, too. Not nearly as hard, but still, when Ms. Emerson asked me if I wanted a ride home again, I said sure. I wasn’t a moron.
We were almost halfway to my house when I recognized something out the window, in a place I wasn’t expecting.
“Wait, Ms. Emerson, can you stop for a second?”
It was Aaron’s car, in the parking lot of the library. I squinted through the darkness. Aaron was there, too, peering under the hood.
There was a girl standing next to him, crossing her arms around her body and squeezing her hoodie sweatshirt closer to her for warmth.
“Everything okay?” Ms. Emerson asked me as she pulled off the road into the parking lot, on the far end from where Aaron was standing at his car. The lot was empty, apart from our two cars.
“That’s my brother,” I told her. “Aaron.”
She shut off her car. “Huh,” she said, looking at the clock on the dashboard. 5:08, that’s what it said. “The library closes at four thirty on Fridays.” She glanced back at me. “Let’s go see what’s going on, shall we?” And just like that, she hopped out into the drizzle. I followed her.
