Mom closed her eyes and smiled just about as widely as I'd ever seen her smile.
"It's a great name, Jimmy," she said as Grandma put her arm around my shoulder again and started pulling me through the door. "He'll always be there when you need him. He'll always be there to lead the way. Really, it's a great name, Jimmy."
I waved goodbye to Mom and chuckled to myself as we walked out into the busy hallway.
"It's a great name, Jimmy," were the last words I ever heard Mom say.
Chapter Three
Dad and I didn't see much of Grandma after everything happened with Mom. I can remember her driving me home from the hospital that night and I can remember her shushing Trex as we walked through the door. The little guy was yapping away from inside his tiny cage. She made me drink a glass of warm milk - which she said would "make you dream about your mother" - and tucked me into bed, but that's the last significant memory I have of Grandma.
I know she stuck around for the next few days and took care of me (like Mom normally would have) while Dad was at the hospital all day long, but it all seems like a big, messy cloud now.
Dad eventually came walking up that same gravel driveway, this time just pushing a folded-up wheelchair and mumbling to himself.
"Where's Mom?" I asked as he approached the door I was leaning against, Trex sitting patiently at my feet. "Is she staying at the hospital still?"
"Mom's not coming to live with us anymore, Jimmy." He tossed the wheelchair to the side of the porch and shoved past me through the door. Trex's head shot up and whipped around to watch Dad cross the kitchen to the refrigerator. He plopped his little, furry head back onto my feet just as Dad slammed his beer against the counter to pop the top and threw back a hard gulp. "Sorry I don't have another puppy for you," he said without looking up at me. "I guess you'll have to make do with the one your mother gave you."
I didn't even bother to acknowledge what Dad had said and, instead, knelt down to pet Trex before slamming the door behind me.
"Don't you slam that door," I heard him say from inside the house as I lifted the wheelchair off the porch and unfolded it.
I rolled the wheelchair right up behind the porch railing, sat down in it, and scooped Trex into my lap. It smelled like it might rain and the clouds moved fast across the dark sky. I closed my eyes and thought about what might have happened to Mom, where she might be, and my fate as "man of the house." I had no idea what Dad and I were going to do without her, but it didn't look good in my mind.
Trex nudged his head further into my lap, scratched his ear, and looked up at me as if he were wondering the exact same things.
"I know, buddy," I said and petted the dark brown fur between his ears. "I know."
Chapter Four
When you're in third grade and your father tells you that you're almost-sister isn't coming home to live with the family after all, it's pretty shocking, but not exactly something that you don't get over. I mean, I never even knew Charlotte (other than as a lump in Mom's belly) so I didn't really have much to be upset about. But when your father comes home from the hospital, three weeks later, without your mom and tells you that she won't be living with you anymore either, things start to get a little weird. No more almost-sister and no more Mom makes for an upset Dad.
Between all that happening to us and Grandma taking off, it seemed like things were never going to get back to normal. If I hadn't had Trex, I don't know what I'd have done.
Dad worked all the time and, when he wasn't working, he'd come home, go to the fridge to grab a beer, and plop down in front of the TV. It didn't matter if I was already sitting three feet in front of the screen, he'd flip the channel to something he wanted to watch, take a long swig of beer, and lean back into our old, brown couch.
"Come on, Trex," I'd say before storming out of the living room, my dog following right behind me. "Dad's watching TV now."
I would have been surprised if Dad even realized that I basically ran out of the room. Ever since he came from the hospital without Mom, he'd been different. It's hard to describe, but he was just different. He didn't seem like Dad anymore, no matter what Trex and I tried to do.
Once I made it down the hall, slammed the door to my room, and flopped face-first onto my bed, I heard my dad's muffled voice barely reaching through the door. Trex curled up at the bottom of the bed, his chin resting on his paws. When he heard Dad's mumbling, he raised his head and gave me a quick bark.
The last thing I really wanted to do was get off my bed and find out what Dad wanted, but it probably would have only made it worse if I ignored him.
As I got closer to my door, I could hear that Dad was still rambling about something. I swung open the door and stuck my head out into the hallway.
"What's that, Dad?" I asked, trying desperately to sound as polite and genuinely concerned as possible. "Trex was barking and I couldn't hear you." I knew he'd have no idea whether Trex was really barking or not.
"You know, Jimmy," he said and coughed loudly. "If you could shut that damn dog up, you might be able to hear what your father is telling you every once in a while."
I stood silent in the doorway waiting for him to say something (anything) else. I didn't want to ask him again (because I knew he hated that), but I had a good feeling that he wasn't done talking.
I heard Dad cough again, and realized that I was right. He definitely wasn't done.
"So, Jimmy," he yelled loud enough for me to hear down the hall. "I was thinking. Charlotte. Your mother. Your grandmother." He coughed again and I scratched my head, wondering just what he was getting at with all this.
"What's that, Dad?"
Uh oh. Big mistake. I think I actually heard him growl after I asked that question.
"Do you think you could do your father a favor, Jimmy?" He paused for a second, as if I were really supposed to respond to that question. "How about you pay your father enough respect to at least walk down the hall and join him in the living room when he asks to speak with you?" He paused again and I opened my mouth to speak, but he beat me to it. "Or is that too much to ask?"
"Sorry, Dad. I'll be right there."
I tapped my leg and nodded my head for Trex to follow me to the living room. He jumped off the bed, ran over to my bedroom door, and sat up straight right next to me. "Good boy," I whispered and patted him on the head.
"Oh," I heard Dad say from down the hall, "and leave that damn dog in your room."
I sighed, lowered my chin to my chest, and pointed back toward my bed. Trex whined quietly and walked back into my room, his tail between his legs.
When I reached the living room, I heard the TV blaring. Dad must have turned the volume way up, which he usually did when he was falling asleep on the couch. The second sign that he was probably falling asleep: some stupid infomercial about knives playing on the screen. I know he wasn't really watching it because Dad must have told me about a thousand times how he'd never buy a knife off the television. "They're all crap," he'd say. "Knives aren't something you can just buy without touching them, Jimmy. They’re something you have to hold in your hand first."
I sat down in the faded, green chair right next to the TV, reached over and turned the volume down, and looked across the room at my dad. He was sprawled out on the couch, his legs hanging over one of the arms and his hand with the beer in it draped over the back of the couch. I knew he saw me turn down the television, and I was sure that he wasn't very happy about it. He looked at me close and squinted - his way of saying that I should have let him turn down the TV.
I sat, with my hands in my lap, and didn't say anything. I just looked around the room and waited for Dad to tell me what, I guess, he thought was really important.
"Do you know why I asked you to come down here and talk to me, Jimmy?"
Oh geez. I had no idea what he wanted me to say to that question, and I certainly wasn't about to say no, so I just sat there and didn't say a word.
"Charlotte," he started again. "Your mother.
Your grandmother." He paused and looked down at his chest. "They're all gone, Jimmy. They're not coming back to live with us again."
"I know, Dad. You told me all about Charlotte and Mom, and we haven't seen Grandma in a long time."
Dad took a long gulp of his beer, swung his legs off the arm of the couch and onto the floor, and sat up closer to my chair. He took another sip and dropped the empty bottle onto the coffee table in front of him.
"Exactly," he said and stared at me.
The only thing I could think to do was stare down at my shoes.
"If they're not coming back," he said, really leaning in close to me this time like it was the most important thing he's said to me in months, "then why are we still here, Jimmy?"
I was pretty close to completely checking out at that point. He was talking to me like I was someone that could answer his question. I had no idea what he even meant. How could I have possibly answered that?
"Why?" I asked.
"Exactly," he said again and stared even harder at me.
"Ok," I said. "Is that all then, Dad? I've got some homework to do."
"We're moving, Jimmy."
"Moving?"
"Yes," he said. "We're moving."
"Moving," I said. If I had laser beams that shot out of my eyes, I would have probably burned a hole through my shoes and the floor by then. I couldn't bring myself to look up at him.
"There's no reason for us to stay. It's just us now, Jimmy. Charlotte. Your mother. Your grandmother. They're all gone and they're not coming back. I think it's time for us to move."
"But what about my school," I said, "and my friends?" He didn't have to know that I hated going to school and I had maybe one or two friends.
"Let me tell you something, Jimmy." He got up from the couch and went back to the kitchen for another beer. "Friends are a dime a dozen. You'll have plenty of friends." He popped the top off the beer and threw back a huge swallow. "And don't worry about school. We'll find you a good one."
He dropped back onto the couch, grabbed the remote, and turned the volume back up to where it was when I came into the room.
I pulled myself up from the ratty, old chair and shuffled down the hallway to my room, mumbling the word "moving" to myself the whole way there. I sighed and laid down on the bed next to Trex. I guess I had to tell him about the great news.
Chapter Five
Dad and I (oh, and Trex too) have been living in "rural Pennsylvania," as he calls it, for the past two years. Rural Pennsylvania? More like Boredsylvania. There's nothing to do here, and it's not bad enough that I miss Mom - have missed her like hell for the past two years (I'm in fifth grade now so I'm allowed to say "hell" now, or at least Dad doesn't seem to care), but there's not even a movie theater anywhere near us. If I want to go see the newest movies - not that I'd know what they were; Dad won't let us get cable and thinks that the "Intraweb" (another word he seems to have made up) is just "another way for you to rot your brain" - I have to go with Dad so he can drive us into the middle of town. And the chances of getting Dad to drive me twenty-five minutes to go see a movie were almost nonexistent.
If it weren't for Trex, I'd probably die of boredom. It's that boring, and I'm not even kidding you. I'm not allowed to have video games or iPods or any of that stuff that everyone at school is always talking about either. Every time I ask Dad for one (even for the smallest little bit of something cool), I get the same response: "What do you want all that junk for, Jimmy? We've got all this land all to ourselves. We've got cows and sheep and even a few horses. What more could all those kids at school want?"
"I don't know, Dad," I'd say. "Maybe something cool and not totally lame like sheep and cows."
"Why? So they can be in the house all day getting fat and brainless?" This was always the point in the conversation where he'd stop talking, look at me hard, and go to the 'fridge for another beer. "You should be outside, or cleaning out the stables, or playing with your friends anyway."
It was at that point in our exchange that I knew I was defeated. I may be young, but I wasn't stupid, and I knew that there was no way I was going to win that argument with Dad. He's the kind of guy that won't back down, and he'll stick to what he believes forever. If it were up to Dad we'd probably all still be using lanterns to light our houses. "To hell with that electricity crap," he'd say. "It can only make us lazier and stupider."
Yeah, exactly. He'd actually say stupider.
So if you think the transition from living with Mom, Dad, and almost-Charlotte in a place where I had friends (well, maybe not, but at least I knew the people I went to school with), to living in the middle of Boredsylvania with Dad and Trex where I knew nobody was easy, all you have to do is remember everything that I just told you. If you didn't sympathize with me already, you sure do now, huh?
I've already spent a year in my new school, Boredsylvania Elementary (all right, fine, its real name is Steckel Elementary), and I still have zero friends. I don't even have someone that I could really even call a buddy or a pal. I'm lucky if my teachers even remember my name (not that it's all that hard, right?). It would be a hell (there I go again - being in fifth grade does have its benefits) of a miracle if any of the kids remembered it.
I promised myself, though, that this year is going to be different. I'm going to make friends, and I'm going to have fun, and I'm not going to spend all my free time at home with Dad and Trex. I couldn't. Not again. Not another year of sitting home every single night, doing my homework, and falling asleep with a book in my hand or the radio on (yeah, imagine that, radio is okay with Dad for some reason - "Radio's been around forever, Jimmy, and it's not going to disappear anytime soon," is what he'd say). There's just no possible way that I can live through another year of that.
Maybe if Mom was still around and almost-Charlotte had come home to live with us things would be different. Maybe Grandma would still be around, and maybe Dad wouldn't be working (or drinking his beer) all the time. Maybe I'd have made some friends in my old school and started hanging out with the "cool crowd." And maybe we would never have had to move to this horrible place.
But I guess there's no use in wondering about all that stuff, right? I mean, we're here now and we've been here for over a year. It's a new school year and this is going to be the one where everything changes. I can feel it already.
"You can feel it too," I say, "right, Trex?"
He lifts his furry head to look up at me and yaps quickly to show that he obviously agrees with me.
"Yeah, me too," I say and scratch behind Trex's floppy ears. "I can just feel it."
Chapter Six
So my plan was for this school year to start off on a different foot. Remember how I told you that I just felt like this year was going to be different? Well, it's been two weeks and I'd say that where I'm sitting right now probably tells you everything you need to know about how the year's going so far.
I'm squatting over the toilet in the very last stall of my tiny school's only boy's bathroom, and my feet are starting to get numb. I've been in this same position for almost the entire recess break and, if it doesn't end soon, my teacher might need to come in here and oil me up like the Tin Man just so I can move my legs ever again. If I stay in this exact spot, and be as quiet as I possibly can, no one can even tell there's someone in the bathroom. Sure, if they tried to open the stall, they'd find it locked from the inside, but how many kids my age are gonna do that?
If you're wondering why I'm squatting over the toilet and being all super quiet, it's really not that complicated. I'm hiding from Billy Coogan and his buddies. I figured that this was one of the last places they'd look for me, and by the time they thought about it as a hiding place, asked the lunch aide for permission to go inside to the bathroom, and made it all the way across the halls to the Boy's Room recess should be ending.
From what I've overheard from the other kids, Billy Coogan - his buddies call him Coog - and his group of bullies choose at least one sorry-looking boy eve
ry year to pick on.
Billy's version of "picking on" consists of (but is definitely not limited to) the following forms of humiliation: giving their chosen target wedgies in front of as many people as possible ("atomic wedgies" are permitted but only for special occasions), shooting spitballs across the lunch room at target (extra points for hitting the face or for actually sinking a shot into the target's chocolate milk or lunch of choice), various verbal assaults on target (including calling the target names such as "fartface," "butthole breath," and "stinky mcstinkerson"), and various physical assaults on target which, if executed correctly, are the deadliest of the bunch. You have no idea what a few good trippings can do to your reputation, especially if they get you to drop all your books at the same time. Not to mention the most awful and humiliating of all the Coogan Boys attacks: the dreaded pantsings. If they manage to pants you in front of the other kids (especially the girls), you might as well just quit school, move to Idaho, and grow potatoes for the rest of your life because there's no way you're ever going to have friends again.
Only being in Boredsylvania Elementary for a year and two weeks, I've personally never seen them pants anyone, but I've overheard a few horror stories. This one kid, Ryan Clevgraft (everyone calls him Clev), somehow happened to become their chosen target last year and now he has zero friends, eats lunch at the rejects' table, and basically hides in the back of the classroom all day. The Coogan Boys are bad news, and they have the power to ruin your life in just a few days.
So you can imagine how I felt when I started to realize, in the first few days of school, that Billy and his buddies were setting their sights on me as this year's target. It wasn't a definite thing at first. Apparently, Billy usually took a few days to check out the different options. He'd have his boys bring him notes on who might be a good candidate, take a look at the choices himself, and then decide on who they'd terrorize for an entire school year. I guess it was a very scientific process. All I knew is that I definitely didn't want Billy to choose me.
Jimmy Stone's Ghost Town Page 2
