by Cary Fagan
Ricky Stackhouse took out his overdue book on beekeeping as well as a pile of pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture.
My former best friend, Zack Mirani, opened…I don’t know what he opened because I made sure not to look. Even a rejected friend has to have some self-respect.
And me? I opened a notebook to an empty page.
I picked up a pencil.
I tapped it on the notebook.
I wrote, Final Project Ideas.
I stared at the page. I looked up at the clock. Three minutes went by.
Seven minutes.
A shadow fell over my desk. Looking up, I saw Ms. Gorham frowning at me.
“I think you better come and see me again after school, Hartley.”
And so, once more I went to Ms. Gorham’s class after the last bell. She was erasing the board and when she turned around she had a chalk smudge on her cheek. It seemed awkward to mention it, so I didn’t.
Ms. Gorham smiled. “Hartley. How nice of you to come.”
“You asked me to, Ms. Gorham.”
“I’m being polite, Hartley. Sit down. It looks to me like you’re still having some trouble coming up with a topic for your final project. I have to say, this problem has never happened in my class before. Not in twelve years of teaching.”
“It’s just that I don’t want to choose a topic that I’ll regret, maybe for the rest of my life. It’s a big decision.”
“It’s not that big. Maybe I can help. How about I prompt you with some more questions?”
“Okay.”
“Good. What do you want to do when you grow up?”
“Get a job, I guess.”
“But what sort of job?”
“A high-paying one?”
“Okay, then. What does your father do?”
“He works at the town hall.”
“How interesting. What are his responsibilities?”
“Well, if a garbage can in the park gets knocked over, he sends a crew to clean it up. Or if there’s a leak in the roof over the Saturday vegetable market, he gets it fixed. Well, he doesn’t actually get it fixed. He tells the person who tells another person to get it fixed.”
“I see. And your mother?”
“She’s an accountant for Old-Time Country Furniture. There are three stores in different towns so she has to add up a lot of numbers.”
“Furniture, huh? How about doing your final project on rocking chairs?”
“Have you ever been in a rocking chair, Ms. Gorham? That movement makes me nauseous.”
“Let’s try another tack. Are you interested in animals?”
“You mean wild animals?”
“Could be.”
“I’m afraid of wolves. Also snakes. I’m a little bit afraid of skunks and really afraid of sharks. Is a squirrel a wild animal? Most people like squirrels, but when I was little, a squirrel threw a peanut at me.”
Ms. Gorham sighed. “Let’s say, Hartley, I were to leave you alone in this room for ten minutes. What would you think about?”
I knew what I would think about. I’d think about g.o. and the cards she made. I’d wonder why she made them and if she would make more and where card number 3 was. But for some reason, I didn’t want to tell Ms. Gorham about the cards.
“I guess I’d be wondering what you were doing for those ten minutes,” I said.
Ms. Gorham nodded her head. “I understand,” she said. “You don’t want to tell me the truth.”
“I don’t?”
“You don’t want to tell me that you’d be thinking about your brother, Jackson. But I understand. I had thought that doing the project would be a good way for you to think about something else. But maybe it’s too big a challenge for you right now. I’m going to give you an exemption, Hartley. You don’t have to do the project.”
I stared at Ms. Gorham. This was exactly what I had wanted in the first place, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a pass that would allow me to skip the final project and still graduate so that I could go to high school next year.
Why, then, did the thought of it suddenly make me feel awful?
Maybe I didn’t want to be different from the other kids. Maybe I didn’t want to believe I wasn’t capable of doing it. Maybe I just didn’t want to use Jackson’s running away for my own advantage.
“I really appreciate that, Ms. Gorham,” I said. “But I don’t think an exemption would be fair to the other kids in the class. And you were right, it would be good for me to do the final project. I’ll think of something.”
Ms. Gorham looked across the desk at me and her eyes filled with tears. She reached out and put her hand on mine.
“You’re really something, Hartley Staples. I’m honored to know you.”
A tear ran through the chalk smudge on her cheek. I waited until she took her hand away and then I got up and left the classroom. I was so shocked by Ms. Gorham crying that I forgot to pick up George. I had to turn around again.
I was really something, all right.
13
Hello, Cheese
Our walk home from school was even slower than usual. It had become windy, but it wasn’t the wind holding us back. George had learned about four-leaf clovers from another kid and insisted on searching every patch of grass to find one. I finally had to find a three-leaf clover and then split one of the tiny leaves in half to make it look like a four-leaf. Then I had to steer George toward it.
“I found one, I found one!” George sang. He held it up and danced around. “I wish for a pet elephant! I wish that I had rocket boosters on my feet! I wish that when I burped a diamond came up!”
The wind blew the clover out of his hand. “Ahh!” George cried, chasing after it. But the clover was gone.
George walked with his head down, as if he had just lost a million dollars on the stock market. But he was quiet, and I got to think about g.o. It wasn’t as if she was some great artist. (Were the cards even art?) Or a great poet. (Were the words poetry?) Or a great philosopher either. She was just a teenager with blue hair making weird little cards that probably nobody cared about.
Nobody but me, anyway. Maybe I envied g.o. because she had something she liked doing. That she felt passionate about, to use Ms. Gorham’s word. I bet g.o. hadn’t had trouble coming up with her final project when she was in eighth grade.
At last we reached our front door. Mom was working from home today and put out a snack of carrot sticks and squares of cheddar cheese. Snacks always cheered up George. He began to make his food talk.
“Hello, carrot.”
“Hello, cheese.”
“Hey, we’re both orange! Let’s get married!”
It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but Mom and I laughed. I turned my head to watch some leaves blowing past the kitchen window.
“That wind blew all my laundry off the line,” Mom said.
More leaves flew by.
A couple of birds.
A card.
Yes, a card! I was sure of it. Doing somersaults in the air.
I pushed back my chair and ran. “Back in a sec!”
“Can I eat your cheese?” George asked.
“Don’t go outside without your shoes,” Mom called.
But I didn’t have time for shoes. I threw open the front door and ran out in my socks. The wind was stronger now, making the leaves rattle on the trees. I looked up and down but I didn’t see any card.
A plastic shopping bag rose up into the sky. I followed it with my eyes as it made a loop the loop and then came twisting down to the road. It skidded along until it was caught against the curb.
And there was the card beside it!
Leaping, I landed on a stone and yelped. I had to hop the rest of the way but I got to the curb and snatched up the card. I hurried back into the house.
&nb
sp; “You’re going to have to learn to darn your own socks,” Mom called from the kitchen.
Heather was just coming down the stairs. “Nobody darns socks anymore,” she said. “Not even nerds like Hartley.”
I rushed past her to get to my own room. Closed the door. Went to the desk. Turned on the light. Put down the card.
I thought that the dog looked friendly. A lot more friendly than the Doberman pinscher that lived down the street and always chased me on my bike. Maybe the dog on the card would understand me too.
Maybe he’d understand why I couldn’t come up with a topic for my final project.
This one was number 5, so I hadn’t missed another one. Now I took out the metal box and laid all the cards on the desk.
It was like having my own little art gallery.
I put them back in the box and put the box in the drawer.
It felt good to have found another one, really good. But I still wanted to know something about g.o. I knew she was a teenage girl who lived around here. That meant she went to high school. The same high school as my sister, Heather.
Maybe Heather knew who g.o. was.
14
The Room
The idea of my sister helping me was enough to send me into a fit of bitter laughter.
This is me, laughing bitterly.
Now Jackson was different. If you said, “Hey, Jackson, can you help me pick this extremely heavy sofa up over my head for no reason?” Jackson would answer, “Sure, man,” and run over. The problem occurred when you asked Jackson to do something in a day or two. Because he never remembered. With him it was out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes I thought that he forgot he even had a brother named Hartley. If he passed me somewhere outside the house, like on the sidewalk in front of school, he would look at me as if he’d never seen me before. If I said, “Hi, Jackson,” he would nod and give me a half smile, at the same time squinting his eyes as if trying to figure out where he might have met me.
Heather certainly never forgot me. That is, she never forgot to insult me. “You actually think that’s funny?” she would say if I laughed at the television. She said my handwriting looked like “mouse diarrhea.” She barked, “Get out of my chair,” no matter where I was sitting. And when she couldn’t think of anything in particular, she just said, “You have a revolting personality.”
All these insults should have killed any desire to actually be friends with her. They would have if I were a normal person. But I guess that I’m not because they didn’t. Last month I found a pile of free music magazines that somebody had left in a box. I took the one with Heather’s favorite band on the cover and left it by her door. The magazine was gone an hour later, but I never got a thank-you from her.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought a package of black licorice. Knowing she likes licorice too, I offered her one.
“I still think you’re a waste of space,” she said, chewing.
Now I heard Heather go into her room. She was probably texting Jennifer or watching old episodes of The Office. I worked up my measly courage and walked over to her door.
Imagine this as a horror story. He could hear his own teeth chattering with fear.
I knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Ferris Bueller. I’m on my day off.”
“Get lost.”
“I just have something to ask you. It’ll take like two and a half minutes tops.”
“Fine. Come in but do not—I repeat, do not—touch anything. Don’t even look at anything.”
I slowly opened the door. She was sprawled on her bed with one earbud in and her laptop open. Heather’s room hadn’t changed much from the last time I was inside it. There was a row of glass animals on a shelf and some band posters taped to the wall. The only new thing was that she had taped up the magazine cover I had left her.
“I said don’t look at anything.”
My eyes went down to my feet.
“And hurry up. You’re smelling up my room.”
“Okay. Do you know anyone in high school with the initials G. O.?”
“Is this a serious question?”
“Yes.”
“Let me think. Gary Ogilvy. Now get out.”
“No, it’s a girl.”
“Please don’t tell me you have a crush on an older girl. Because that would be the most singularly disgusting thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I don’t have a crush.”
“I just remembered a girl with those initials. Gloria Oxenberg. Now you can get out.”
“Really? What’s she like?”
“She’s captain of the girls’ basketball team.”
“Does she like art or poetry?”
“Well, in English class she thought that The Catcher in the Rye was a book about farming.”
I myself had no idea what The Catcher in the Rye was about. “Does she have blue hair? And is she Chinese or something?”
“Why, are you a racist?”
“No!”
“Gloria Oxenberg is tall, has a blonde ponytail, and is probably a lesbian in case that’s also a problem for you. And if you ever try to speak to her, I have no doubt she’ll pummel you into the ground for having a revolting personality.”
“Is there any other girl with those initials?”
“Look, wingnut. High school isn’t your baby middle school. It’s big. It’s like an Amazon warehouse for teenagers. You can get lost in the building. There are a thousand kids. I don’t even know the names of everyone in my own classes.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t touch anything on your way out.”
Heather put both earbuds in and touched the keyboard of her computer. The screen was turned away from me but I could see it in the mirror on the wall behind her. She was watching a video from our holiday at a rented cottage. The screen showed Heather floating on an air mattress by the dock of the lake. From under the water came a figure that began to splash her. It was Jackson. Heather began to splash him back, and then Jackson turned over the air mattress, sending her into the water.
“Why are you still here?” she asked without looking away from the screen.
15
Not Good Enough
Personally, I couldn’t understand why Jackson would want to leave.
I mean, our parents were perfectly nice. On the annoying scale, they rated three out of ten. And Mom and Dad were both pretty good cooks. We each had our own room. Our allowance went up every year.
We had two streaming services.
So why did Jackson leave? Because he didn’t like us? Because we weren’t good enough?
My parents said that wasn’t the reason. They said it especially wasn’t about any of us kids. But I couldn’t help wondering what Jackson thought of me. Sometimes we would have fun together, throwing a football in the backyard or watching one of those shows he liked, where people pulled pranks on their friends. He liked to collect vinyl records from the punk era and would play his new one for me and I would pretend to like it. Once when my parents were out and he was supposed to make dinner, he made all of us enormous ice cream sundaes with whipped cream.
But that was Jackson in a good mood. When he wasn’t, he didn’t yell or throw things. He just grew dark and silent. If I spoke to him, he wouldn’t answer.
It was with Mom and Dad that he got angry. Not long before he ran away he had an argument with them at the dinner table. It had something to do with losing his new, expensive basketball sneakers. Jackson finally got up and knocked me half off my chair as he went by.
I suppose George was the least affected by Jackson being gone. There was such a big age difference between them that they lived in different universes. George looked up to Jackson the way somebody looks up to a movie star or sports hero, as brilliant but distant, like an actual star in the sky. After Ja
ckson left, George still went on playdates and trips to the zoo. He had a noisy birthday party and went crazy with delight over his mound of presents.
As for my parents—well, their whole life changed. They stopped going out for dinner with friends. They dropped their ballroom dancing lessons, which I was now sorry I used to make fun of. They didn’t talk as much, or smile as much—unless they saw one of us looking at them. They tried to be normal parents, but I knew that every moment was hard for them.
And then there was Heather. She never went to parties or movies anymore. She had dropped all of her friends but Jennifer and spent most of her free time holed up in her room. When some boy she used to talk about finally came to the door to ask her out, she told him that she was too busy. Then she went back to her room. She didn’t become any nicer to me, though. If anything, she was even meaner.
As for me, I’d really only had one friend, and you already know who that was. I wanted to hate Zack, but somehow I couldn’t. There was something about the look in his eyes when he avoided me that made me feel a little sorry for him. Like he wasn’t so happy about it either.
One night my dad came into my room. He said this was a pretty tough time and that it was okay if we had more questions about Jackson than answers. It’s really hard to understand another person, he said, especially a troubled person. For now it was enough for us to care about Jackson and hope he was all right, and to wish for him to come home. And to care about each other too.
I listened but I didn’t know what to say back. I couldn’t even say thanks or okay. But my silence didn’t seem to bother Dad. He put his arm around me, and then he went out, saying, “Get some shut-eye, sailor.”
He hadn’t called me sailor in years.
16
The Quick Stop
Do you think I just waited for another card to come my way?
No, I did not.
Do you think that I looked for one wherever I went?
Yes, I did.
