Stick

by Andrew Smith

  Everyone raised kids this way.

  And Dad stopped before they’d gone too far down the hall.

  “Say

  good night, Bosten.”

  My brother whispered,

  “Good night.”

  It was like a game, but it wasn’t fun and there was no chance of winning.

  Maybe a minute later, I stood there not knowing what to do, a door slammed shut down the hallway.

  I stole away.

  When I was at the top of the basement stairs, Mom called out,

  “Good night,

  Stick.”

  It was a game.

  I didn’t answer her.

  “GODDAMNIT, I SAID

  ‘GOOD NIGHT, STICK’!”

  I tried to close myself inside my room.

  It was a game.

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  Dad.

  “Didn’t you hear your mother? Get your ugly ass up there and say good night!”

  He grabbed my hair and pulled me upstairs to the living room.

  To say good night.

  It was a game, and it always went like this.

  * * *

  There was a pipe that ran down a corner of my wall; a drain from upstairs to the septic tank for gray water. It descended along the concrete walls of the basement in the same corner where I kept my bed.

  If I pressed my only ear to it at night, when the house was quiet, sometimes I could hear things from upstairs.

  And with my head pressed like that into the pipe as I lay in my bed, I could hear nothing else.

  The sounds would get into my head and there was no way they could ever get out.

  I would lie there,

  the top of my head resting against the rough concrete,

  so I could

  listen

  to the upstairs.

  I kept my eyes on the small window above my bed.

  It was a perfect rectangle—golden—I’d measured it; and it sat

  right at ground level.

  In spring I could look up and see how the grass grew.

  It was like being buried, and still able to watch and

  listen

  to the living world.

  I heard Bosten crying

  upstairs.

  It sounded like coughing at first,

  but I know my brother.

  I kept a sixteen-penny nail

  on the floor beneath the bedframe.

  I tapped

  on the pipe for Bosten

  and sometimes

  I believed he heard me.

  * * *

  Robert Beckett always smelled like urine.

  It was the clearest memory I had from my first days at school.

  They put me in the mentally retarded class for two years until I started talking.

  The first time I spoke, I told Robert Beckett to stop pissing on himself, and he did. We became friends after that.

  * * *

  I liked the mentally retarded kids. One ear was enough for them.

  In third grade they put me in with the normal kids. In third grade

  they

  put me in with

  the normal kids.

  Inthirdgradetheyputmeinwiththenormalkids.

  Normal kids in third grade do not like

  boys

  without that hole.

  * * *

  I was no good

  in most things, but especially bad in math.

  * * *

  Bosten and I were walking in the woods one day and he announced, “Stick, I did the math. Did you ever think about why there are no pictures from Mom and Dad’s wedding? She was pregnant with me, that’s why!” And he laughed. “I did the math. It was May when they got married. The announcement is in the scrapbook, just two pages before my birth certificate. August was only three months later.

  Ha-ha!

  What do you think of that, Sticker?”

  I didn’t know what to think. At least he was born whole.

  EMILY

  In the morning, I tried to sneak out while they were having cigarettes and coffee.

  Mom stopped me.

  “Stark McClellan.” She said, “You are not leaving this house looking like that.”

  And I knew what that meant.

  Dad glared at me. “You look like a goddamned bum.”

  I stopped at the top of the basement stairs. Mom came out of the kitchen, holding her backwards cigarette in one hand and the electric hair clippers in the other. A green extension cord dragged behind her.

  “Take your shirt and undershirt off and

  go get the broom.”

  I hated when she gave me haircuts.

  * * *

  I stood, stripped to the waist on the front porch, listening to the sound that came around that one side: the insect buzzing of the clippers, fascinated at how Mom could smoke a cigarette without using her hands at all; one hand held my head steady, while the other swept the teeth of the clippers up, up, up—mowing from the bottom of my neck, around that one ear, and over the dead spot on the right side of my skull.

  I liked the way the blades nipped at my neck. But it was freezing cold outside, and I shook.

  “Stay still.”

  Everything itched. My hair fell in spiny tufts over my chest and shoulders and found its way inside the waist of my jeans and down my legs. My arms locked tense against the tickling and the cold and the morning. I tried to blow the bits of needle hair from the end of my nose.

  “Why can’t you stay still?”

  Mom was getting angry.

  “Sorry.”

  She switched off the clippers. “There. Clean this up.”

  I made a broom of my fingers and tried to get as much hair as possible off my skin before slipping on my undershirt and tucking in my shirt.

  There were rules about how we boys could dress at my house.

  Dad made them:

  We could never have hair longer than half an inch.

  We always had to have our shirts tucked in before we left the house, too, and we had to wear white T-shirts under them.

  Always.

  We were never allowed to go outside wearing just T-shirts, like other boys did.

  Dad said that was disrespectful, like walking around in public in our underwear, which also always had to be no other color but white.

  And we never had pajamas, no matter how cold it got.

  Dad said the boys don’t wear pajamas to bed in his family.

  * * *

  Bosten and I never even once thought about the rules.

  They were just rules.

  “And you have to eat some breakfast before you can go anywhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I’d sweep every last bit of the hair from the porch, and then clean out the bristles on the broom, too, before I could come back inside the house.

  I rubbed my hand across my head. The nubs of my hair felt like coarse velvet. I liked that feeling, how I could hear the friction of my hand on the inside of my head. I traced my fingers over the spot where a normal boy would have an ear. That touch made a sound, too. Inside my head.

  I hated my ugliness.

  I looked at the door. Then I crept across the wet lawn and stood outside the window on the spare room. If they caught me here, they’d beat me.

  Why wouldn’t they?

  I would expect them to.

  I tapped with one finger.

  Bosten peeked out from the edge of the dark curtain. He winked at me, and I winked back.

  “Those bombs last night. They were really cool, Bosten.”

  I could tell by the squint in his eye that he smiled. He nodded his head.

  I went back inside and made myself a bowl of Cheerios.

  That morning, I went to Emily Lohman’s house.

  The Lohmans lived on the other side of the road from us, but it was a long walk through the woods to get there. I’d have to squeeze through a barbed-wire fence and cross a cow pasture where E
mily’s family kept two calves; and then follow the shore of their pond for a quarter mile before her house even came into view.

  “Stick!

  Good morning!”

  Mrs. Lohman swung the door open, smiling.

  I thought she was the nicest person in the world, but not as pretty as Paul Buckley’s mom. I untied my shoes and slipped them off on the porch. They were wet from the walk.

  And I took Bosten’s cap off my head and hung it on a brass coatrack when I stepped inside.

  The house smelled like pancakes and flowers.

  “Emily! Your friend’s here!” Mrs. Lohman called out into the vastness of the house.

  I liked the way it sounded when she called me Emily’s friend.

  Mr. Lohman sat at the kitchen table, wearing a stained T-shirt and pajama bottoms. He had glasses on his face, but his eyes smiled when he noticed me standing on the cool linoleum of their kitchen floor. He was reading the paper from Kingston, folded in one hand, with a glass of juice in the other. A big plate smeared with syrup and leftover crumbs had been pushed away from him toward the center of the table.

  “Looks like someone got himself a haircut,” Mr. Lohman said. “You’re lookin’ overly handsome for a Saturday morning, with

  your shirt all tucked in

  and everything.”

  I could feel my face turning red.

  “Dora, fix this boy a plate.”

  They always fed me. I’d been coming over to their house ever since third grade.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lohman never seemed to notice that something was wrong with me.

  * * *

  Emily didn’t have any brothers or sisters.

  Maybe that was why Mr. Lohman didn’t have the same rules as Dad. And if you ever really could eat enough to explode and die, I would gladly do it on Mrs. Lohman’s pancakes. So by the time Emily came down from her room and sat next to me at the table, I already had syrup all over my face.

  She was not like the other girls in eighth grade. Boys in eighth grade could be rough. But the girls could be viciously cruel. Maybe that was why Emily didn’t have many girl friends.

  The other girls were mean to Emily sometimes. They teased her for being stuck up and not playing the other girl games, or because her dad owned the little store by the pier; because she took care of cows. No other girls at school did those things.

  And no girls at school ever talked to me.

  I asked her one time why she was friends with me.

  She just smiled and shrugged. “Who else would I be friends with?”

  I didn’t know who else.

  I was afraid sometimes that Emily felt all alone.

  Even if we never said it, I think we needed each other.

  “Hi, Em,” I said with my mouth full.

  “Hi.” I watched as she smeared soft margarine across the top of her one and only pancake. She said, “What do you want to do today?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  We would usually ask this back and forth at least twenty times.

  Especially on Saturday mornings.

  “How was the basketball game?” Emily asked it like she could see there was a story on my face under all that pancake syrup.

  Mrs. Lohman put a glass of milk on the table next to my plate and sat down beside me. She fixed the collar on my shirt and I felt the back of her fingers on my neck.

  “I swear, you are getting so big,” she said. “Do you want some more?”

  “No, thank you,” I said. I took a drink of milk and looked at Emily.

  She was sitting on my left side. Like she always does.

  “Me and Bosten got thrown out of the basketball game. Bosten got into a fight.”

  Mrs. Lohman leaned around the table so she could look at my face. She’d known Bosten for just as many years as she knew me.

  And Emily said, “With who?”

  “He beat up Ricky Dostal in the boys’ bathroom.”

  Mrs. Lohman frowned, but Emily’s father nodded, like it was fine with him that my brother messed up Ricky Dostal.

  “Ricky Dostal had to have been asking for it,” he said. “What did he do this time?”

  I thought about it for a second. I felt bad when I lied and said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see it.”

  But I didn’t want to tell them what Ricky Dostal did. I drew a circle with fork tines in the syrup that was left on my plate. “Ricky had to go to the hospital. To get stitches.”

  I finished my milk. “And now Bosten’s going to get in trouble at school on Monday, and he’s already being punished at home.”

  Emily put her fork down across her plate with a clink!

  “Want to do something?” I asked.

  Mrs. Lohman let Emily know it was okay for her to leave. “I’ll clear the dishes, sweetie.”

  Then Emily said, “Sure. What do you want to do?”

  She smiled at me.

  We both pushed our chairs back and stood.

  And Mr. Lohman flipped the front page of the paper over, so I could see it. He laughed. “Just don’t

  let the aliens get you.”

  There it was, on the front page of The Kingston Register: a grainy picture of our bomb.

  The handpop flare.

  It was so beautiful and frightening.

  Below it, the headline asked: UFO OR HOAX?

  I leaned over the paper, and Mr. Lohman gave it a push around so it was right side up for me.

  “That…” I looked straight at Mr. Lohman’s eyes. “That is so cool! Do you think I could have that story, please, Mr. Lohman?”

  He chuckled warmly. “Boys like that kind of stuff, don’t they? Sure, Stick. Take it.”

  I began to carefully tear my way around the article, and Mrs. Lohman handed me some scissors from a kitchen drawer. I held the clipping in my hand and stared in awe at the photograph, thinking how Bosten was going to love this.

  “You think that’s really a spaceship?” Mr. Lohman asked.

  I grinned.

  “Yeah.”

  I folded the paper twice and tucked it into the front pocket of my shirt.

  * * *

  It’s a rare March day in Washington when the sky is so clear and blue as it was on that Saturday morning. We went into the woods and followed the trail Emily walked every day to the school bus stop.

  Here, at the north edge of the Lohmans’ property, the trees were dark and smelled of dew.

  “Okay, out with it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me what really happened with Ricky.”

  “Oh.” I stopped. There was a big black slug as long as my middle finger on the narrow trail, right in front of my left foot. “He tried messing with me in the bathroom. He threw my hat in the piss drain. Bosten saw it, so he socked him. One time. Busted Ricky’s face open and knocked him out cold.”

  “You should have been the one who punched him,” Emily said.

  I was embarrassed.

  “I thought about it. I just couldn’t.” I pointed at my zipper. “I was peeing.”

  “Guys like him are never going to leave you alone if you don’t fight back.”

  I started walking again. “I’m pretty sure Ricky’s going to leave me alone.”

  “Sure. If you say so.”

  “Anyway, after the game me and Bosten and Paul Buckley went to Pilot Point, and we shot off a flare from the army. That’s what that UFO picture is on the paper. We did it.”

  “Nuh-uh,” she teased.

  “It really was us,” I said. “Then Bosten and Paul lit off a green smoke bomb in the field by the pool at Wilson.”

  “You guys are dumb,” she said.

  “I know. They made me drive the car home.”

  “Maybe next time, I’ll go with you,” Emily decided.

  We stopped where the creek cut across the trail. Sometimes, we’d come to this spot to catch tree frogs.

  “Paul and Bosten do bad stuff,” I said. Then I whispered, as if som
eone might actually hear me confess it, “They smoke pot.”

  “No wonder they make you drive. You don’t smoke pot, do you?”

  “No way. You should see how stupid they act when they get high.”

  Emily moved ahead of me. She stepped from rock to rock and crossed to the other side of the creek.

  “You know what I want to try?” she asked.

  “What?” I followed her across.

  “Let’s try riding our cows.”

  I laughed. “That sounds dumb.”

  “Want to?”

  “Okay.”

  I followed her along the path toward the edge of their pasture.

  “I want to ask you something, Em.”

  “What?”

  She turned and came back to my left side.

  “Yesterday.” I swallowed the lump that was in my throat. “Why did you touch me?”

  “I don’t know.” She said it so casually. How could I not believe everything she said? “I just wanted to, I guess. Why?”

  “No one ever touches me there. Except maybe Bosten when we wrestle and stuff. That’s why.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I just wanted to see what it felt like. I won’t do it again if it bothers you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just … well, it’s ugly.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think so. I think it’s cool. Everyone else is so … the same. You know?”

  Emily got closer to me. I’m not nervous around her, or embarrassed, ever, but it kind of scared me. I could feel my heart beating really hard, and the sound

  bounced around

  inside my head.

  I didn’t want that heartbeat sound to find its way out.

  She said, “Watch my face if you don’t believe me. Then you’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  Then she reached up, lightly, slowly. It was like watching that missile drifting in the sky. She took Bosten’s cap away from me and put her left hand flat on the side of my head. Emily’s fingers curled softly into my little hair. I watched her eyes.

  I believed I would see her repulsion.

  But she was so soft and perfect.

  She lowered her hand and said, “See?”

  But I couldn’t answer.

  She trapped my heart inside my head.

  Everything was changing.

  Except that quiet half of my head.

  * * *

  We decided we were going to ride those cows and play like we were jousting.