Strays Like Us

by Richard Peck

  “Here, don’t forget your lunch.” Aunt Fay handed me a brown bag. Then, as I started away, she said, “Hold it and bend over.” She heaved herself up and took the pair of long scissors out of the knife drawer. “You missed a tag.”

  My jeans crinkled like roof shingles. Then somehow she was whispering in my ear. “Be careful of the McKinney kid.”

  “Why?” I whispered.

  “Don’t ask him about his dad.”

  “How come?”

  “They say he’s in jail.”

  §

  Then Will McKinney and I headed off to junior high. I can see us yet, ambling along in the hotting-up day, like a pair of lost dogs along the side of the road.

  The roots of old trees had pushed the sidewalk slabs out of line, so we walked uphill and down along the flat street. We trudged like we were walking the last mile, and Will didn’t speak till we were waiting at the sign to cross Jefferson Street. “Watch yourself here. A lot of these cars have high-school people in them.”

  He was walking a little taller now. He’d puffed himself up, especially through the shoulders, trying to be bigger.

  Crossing Jefferson, he walked stiff-legged. It didn’t make him look older. It made him look like a wind-up doll, which is funny now but wasn’t then. I caught a glimmer of what boys put themselves through.

  We’d both practiced the route, so we knew the way, making the turn at the 7-Eleven in silence. Big yellow school buses gunned past us. We were in sight of the school when the dam broke and words burst out of him.

  “What I wish is a UFO would set down right here in the street between us and school. You know how they do. They put down a ramp from their space capsule or whatever. The extraterrestrials come off it – Pod People or whoever. They could take us away, knock us out, give us examinations. Then bring us back after school.”

  I thought about it. “Looks to me like we’re the Pod People,” I said. “We’re the ones from outer space.”

  §

  Now the school rose up. Back by the parking lot was a new structure that turned out to be the gym and caféteria, now that this was a junior high. But the main building was old as time. I could picture Aunt Fay going to grade school here.

  Then Will cut out. I figured he would, but I couldn’t believe how fast.

  The front steps was mob of strangers. Inside, it sounded like any school, that roar that pounds your head unless you’re yelling too. I thought I’d have to report to the office and wondered where it was. But a woman was in the hall, trying to outyell the rest.

  “Students from the grade school report to the gym. Students new to the system report to the auditorium.”

  The auditorium looked like classrooms put together, and up on the stage were caféteria tables. In a row on the side the girls had staked out, two girls were sitting together. One threw out her hand to keep me from sitting next to her, so I sat a seat over. It took me a minute to notice that students new to the system filled up half the auditorium. At twelve you always think you’re the only one.

  They sure weren’t from around here. You saw everything – black lipstick, nose rings, bare middles. And a lot of people were too jumpy to sit down. There were ten or twelve just on our side. Across the aisle half the boys were sitting up on their chair backs, and you had everything over there too – a lot of low-crotch denim and novelty haircuts and words written on their hands. But it was quieter in here, more of a dull roar, and you could smell the worry.

  Somebody tramped on my feet and pushed past my knees. I looked up and it was Will. The girl put out her hand to keep him from sitting down but grabbed it back when he didn’t notice. Settling in beside me, he said, “I might as well sit anywhere. Nobody knows anybody, except for these two over here on my other side. You suppose everybody’s been dropped off?”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Couldn’t some of them have moved here with their parents?”

  “Do they look it?”

  “No,” I said. “They look like Pod People.”

  “Well then, it don’t matter. Hey, we could even hold hands if we wanted to. Want to?”

  “No, and neither do you, so quit trying to act older.” But I didn’t mind him being there.

  There was no welcoming speech. It wasn’t that kind of town. Here, people already knew everybody they wanted to. A teacher got up on the stage and told us to line up and bring whatever records we had.

  I inched along with the rest, behind Will, watching how his ears splayed out. They still do, but back then his neck was skinnier. Skinny McKinney, but I didn’t say so.

  “I thought you were already enrolled,” I said.

  “I am, but they wanted a look at my credentials.” He held up a transcript, so he’d been in some school long enough to have one. He wiggled it in the air so I couldn’t see the grades. “California,” he said. “I been all over.” When we were stumbling up the steps to the stage, I dug for my birth certificate.

  “That’s a beginning,” the man said when it was my turn. He had on a ball cap and a sweatshirt, with a whistle around his neck, so he must have been the coach. I didn’t know. That school would never again be as big as it was on the first day.

  I gave him my address when he asked, Cedar Street.

  “Are you living with grandparents?” I didn’t want to be stared at, but he hardly looked up.

  “A great-aunt, Mrs. Fay Moberly.” So that was a blank he could fill in on his form.

  “And you’re a Moberly too.”

  Yes, but we weren’t blood kin, as people say around here. She married a man named Moberly whose brother was Debbie’s dad. So Debbie was a Moberly because her father was. And I was Moberly because I never had a father. I hoped the coach wouldn’t ask.

  “Were you in sixth grade last year?”

  “Yes.” More or less.

  “Then you’re in seventh now.” He pushed across a class schedule, and my hand shook when I took it. But he was looking past me, snapping his fingers and saying, “Next.”

  §

  There were more of us extras than they’d bargained for, so they ran out of desks. They had to drag in straight chairs and line them up across the backs of the classrooms. That’s where I wanted to sit, all day long in every class – on a chair at the back, just visiting.

  Still, you could see how things worked here, even from the back row. We were mixed in with those who’d come from the grade school. The gjrls in their scoop-necks and skirts, the boys’ shirts that were a little bit country, a little bit cowboy. Everybody matched and blended in with everybody else, and nobody sat by newcomers. They were dressed up for the first day, but I didn’t know that.

  The caféteria was a room past the far end of the new gym. It reminded me of the places Debbie and I went to eat free – all those long tables of people eating too fast, or too slow because they were trying to stay in-doors. It was noisier here, of course.

  I was at the end of a girls’ table when Will turned up. He pulled a chair next to me. When I opened my lunch, it was half a tuna sandwich and half Velveeta cheese with bacon. An apple, a box of milk.

  When Will got into his sack, he came up with the same lunch exactly. It looked like the other half of my tuna sandwich, the other half of the Velveeta. Everything the same. I stared, and he noticed too. I was about to ask him why, but he looked off over the lunchroom and said, “I wonder if they let you shoot hoops in the gym after school.”

  §

  We got through the day, and the only thing I learned was that I was so far behind in math, I never would catch up. I could read and write – I’d picked that up along the way. Then after school Will fell into step with me on the way home. It was such an old-time town that the side streets were still brick. It was summer again as we walked past porches screened green with vines. The houses were plain and alike, and I guessed this was the poor side of town, but I’d seen poorer.

  “You ever live in a house before?” Will asked, pushing into my thoughts.

  To keep him from
asking more, I said, “No. And I never had a room of my own until I had Arlette’s.”

  “I wish I did,” he mumbled.

  “Wish what?”

  “Wish I had a room to myself.” Then he peeled off for his house.

  His grandma never seemed to leave the place, and Aunt Fay was rarely home in the afternoon. I went on, not wondering why Will and I had the same lunch or why he didn’t have a room to himself. I flopped down on the top porch step where he’d waited for me that morning. My notebook was on my knees, and the afternoon shadows were beginning to reach across the old brick street.

  Every house had a front porch, though some were glassed in for an extra room. Nobody sat out on them. Somebody, maybe Aunt Fay herself, had once painted her porch ceiling robin’s-egg blue, but it was flaking. There were still two hooks where a porch swing had hung. I wondered if she used to sit out and talk across to Mrs. McKinney, before they got too old and too busy.

  I’d made it through the first day of school, and it hadn’t been as bad as dreading it. So I had a little talk with my mother, just in my mind. Now it was too late for her to come for me before school started. But Debbie, I told her, come when you can.

  ∨ Strays Like Us ∧

  Three

  I hung on the edges of school and watched, learning the names of people who didn’t know mine. Even the teachers seemed slower to know us out-of-towners, and I thought they were eyeing us for signs of trouble. I saw signs they didn’t.

  Somebody wrote on a stall door in the girls’ rest room:

  I’M HERE AND NOT HERE

  WILL I BE HERE NEXT YEAR?

  I could have written it myself, except it was in black lipstick. But it was somebody like me.

  I’d been in rougher schools, and bigger, and I was used to being on my own. I’d never made friends anywhere because I might come back to wherever we were living and find Debbie packing to go. She always wanted to move on to someplace she thought might be better or to follow somebody she liked. Her eyes would be bright that day, not glazed. “Bus station eyes,” I called them. So I wouldn’t be going back to that school, not even to clean out my desk. It wasn’t worth making a friend I’d have to leave. I never got too near people, and I’d never let them get too near me, and that’s the way it had always been.

  If we came out of our doors at the same time, Will and I would walk to school together, sometimes on opposite sides of the street. He had a new shirt from Sears that was a little bit country, a little bit cowboy. He’d sit down at one corner of a boys’ lunchroom table, but I didn’t see anybody talking to him. After school he hung around to shoot hoops or whatever. They’d put together a junior-high football squad, but I figured he was too scrawny.

  Then one day I got acquainted with Rocky Roberts. Real quick.

  I didn’t use the girl’s rest room during the school day. With only three stalls and three sinks, there was a line to get in, and I didn’t want to be late for class. I still thought no teacher knew me, and I was trying to keep it that way. I’d try to wait till after school.

  The sinks were set close to the floor from when it was a grade school, but the toilets were full-size. I was in there one afternoon, trying to imagine Aunt Fay using one when she was in grade school. I suppose I saw her as she was now, gray hair and glasses, but small, with her pinafore hiked up and her legs swinging. I smelled smoke from the stall next door but didn’t think much about it.

  I was at the middle sink washing my hands when one of the stall doors opened behind me. Low in the mirror, I saw Rocky Roberts come swaggering out. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe I wondered if I was in the wrong rest room. He was a boy. And he’d been smoking something in that stall. Two crimes.

  He was short, but tough as a boot, with mean eyes. His little Levi’s rode low to show the waistband on his underpants. The sleeves on his little black body shirt were rolled up over his shoulders. Zigzags were trimmed into the sides of his haircut. I didn’t know if he was wearing gang colors from his last school. He was as far off his turf as I was. I couldn’t quite believe he was in the girls’ rest room, but then he could be anywhere he wanted to be. Short as he was he knew how to look dangerous. He’d put his head down in class and sleep, right through decimals or Where the Red Fern Grows, and the teachers let him.

  Now he was standing behind me, and still I stood there, soaping my hands. I couldn’t see him in the mirror. I could only see me. His hand snaked around, and I felt it grab my chest. He’d had to reach up. I still didn’t believe this was happening, though I’d been to schools where I wouldn’t have dared go into the rest room at all. I whirled around and popped him one. I don’t know which one of us was more surprised. Yes I do. He was. He had a nose full of knuckles before he knew it. His head snapped back, and his boot cleats scraped the floor as he keeled over backwards. I heard his head hit. Now he was scrabbling around like a crab. Why didn’t I run? I looked down, and he was at my feet on all fours. His head sagged, and a drop of blood splattered on the white tile.

  Did I think he was down for the count? Rocky? His fist came up from nowhere and connected with my chin. It was a glancing blow, or it would have jarred loose every tooth in my head. I bit my tongue, and it hurt so bad I went blind for a moment. His little hand, that hand that had grabbed me, reached for the sink. He was heaving himself up, and I didn’t have a lot of time. I brought my knee up fast and caught him on the nose again. This was pure luck.

  I thought I’d bitten off my tongue and would never speak again, and he was wheezing. Since I’d rearranged his nose, twice, he had the sense to duck out of my range. But he was on his feet, boots braced, bobbing and weaving. Then he lunged for my neck with both hands.

  But my arms were longer. I went for him, slapping with both hands in a quick left-and-right to keep him from strangling me.

  The rest-room door opened.

  §

  Miss Throckmorton had Rocky in one fist and me in the other, marching us across to the gym. I suppose her job was to check the rest rooms after school. Well, Rocky was in the wrong one. But when Miss Throckmorton found us, I was winning the fight and I was bigger, so I didn’t know where she stood.

  Then we were in her office off the girls’ locker room. She was the gym teacher and doubled as school nurse because she had a first-aid kit. “You there and you there,” she said in her gym-class voice, separating us on chairs.

  I opened my mouth to say something, who knows what, and blood trickled out of both sides and down my chin. Rocky’s nose was running with blood, like a faucet. There was blood down both our fronts, and a smear of his on the knee of my jeans.

  It was all over by then, the fighting part. Miss Throckmorton jammed some kind of padding into my mouth after she had a look at my teeth, wiping blood off them with her thumb. Then she was standing over by Rocky with one hand on the back of his neck, holding a wet cloth to his nose. I thought I’d have heard it crack if I’d broken it. She was back and forth between us, moving fast in her gym shorts.

  I didn’t know what was coming next. Right now there was nothing to do but look at my knuckles where the skin had been and watch Rocky. His arms dangled and his head was thrown back and his mouth hung open. He was limp as a rag while Miss Throckmorton worked on him.

  Rocky was in shock. Nobody had ever turned on him before, not to mention a girl. You could see that. Wherever he’d been, people had always gotten out of his way. Later in the year with longer to watch him, I might have gotten out of his way too, if I could.

  I thought we’d both bleed to death. The padding in my mouth got bigger and bigger, and I was swallowing blood behind it. But I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. Somebody was standing in the door that opened onto the echoing gym. It was Will, with a basketball in the crook of his arm, watching.

  Mr. Russell breezed in past him. He taught us social studies, and now I figured out he was the principal too. I should have known. He was the only man teacher who wore a jacket and tie, but I hadn’t sorted out
all these people. His eyes skimmed over Rocky and me. I wondered if he was the kind who faints at the sight of blood. Some men do. He went straight to the phone on Miss Throckmorton’s desk and started making calls. I strained to hear but couldn’t.

  They let us cool our heels. It felt like a year. Rocky’s eyes were beginning to dart everywhere but at me. He had sly eyes, and they glittered over the wet cloth on his nose. As he looked back and forth, I could see the lightning bolts carved into his hair. He was thinking about cutting and running, but it was too late for that. Something else happened, in the blink of an eye.

  A woman charged into the office. She wore black leather pants and high-heeled shoes, and a vest that laced up the front, leaving her big arms bare. She had a huge head of stiff blond hair, frosted.

  She saw Rocky and made right for him. In a blur the woman’s big arm came out, and she slapped Rocky off the chair. Again I heard his head hit tile. I nearly swallowed my wadding. First me and now this woman. It wasn’t Rocky’s day. He started moaning, rolling back and forth on the floor and pulling up his knees.

  Mr. Russell had whipped around and said a word I didn’t catch. He was heading for this woman and nearly kicked Rocky in the head to get there. He danced around him, while in the background Miss Throckmorton stared.

  “And that’s for starters!” the woman yelled at Rocky, squatting down on her high heels and bending over him.

  Mr. Russell didn’t risk taking her by the arm. “Who are you?” he said in a wailing voice.

  “I’m his grandmother,” the woman roared, “and you called me away from my work!”

  I wondered what her job was.

  Mr. Russell looked lost. I’d figured everybody knew everybody else in this town, but he was looking at Rocky’s grandmother as if he’d never seen anybody like her in his life.

  “And when I get him home, I’ll turn him every way but loose. I’ll mop and wax the floor with the little – ”

  “Hey, Marlene, how you doing?”

  We all looked at the door, and Rocky’s grandmother pivoted around. It was Aunt Fay there, in her white pants and top with the keys to the Dodge Dart in her hand. She filled up the door. Another big woman. Miss Throckmorton stood motionless at her desk, still staring.