by Cary Fagan
And do you think I found one?
Nope. Zip. Nada. Nothing. I scanned the sidewalks, I checked under flowerpots and garbage-can lids. I looked in trees, on ladders left outside, under cats lying on the ground. I had hoped that g.o. had actually let that last card blow past our house, wanting me to see it. That somehow she had found where I lived and would plant more cards for me to discover. No such luck.
All I could do was take out the four cards I already had and prop them up so that I could look at them. Maybe, I thought, there were no more cards. Maybe g.o. had become tired of making them. Maybe I ought to stop thinking about them and work on my final project instead.
In class, Ms. Gorham had slipped me a note just as the bell rang.
Hartley,
Our final project presentations are starting on Monday. Please come see me after school tomorrow. That’s the deadline for telling me your subject. I’m in real suspense!
Ms. Gorham
She was in suspense. Imagine how I felt. I read the note at my locker and then went to pick up George. On our walk home he talked exclusively about spiders. Or rather, he asked questions about them. Why did spiders have eight legs rather than seven, fourteen, or a hundred and forty? Did they go to spider school to learn how to make webs? Did flies taste good or did spiders want to throw up every time they had a meal?
I won’t give you my answers, but believe me when I say I’m no entomologist.
George often asked me to play with him at home, but most of the time I had better things to do. But today I actually offered, remembering what my dad said about us caring about each other. I knew that my good intentions hadn’t lasted very long, but I could still act on them now. Of course George was thrilled, so we sat on the floor in his room making robots out of LEGO. We worked with concentration, and as soon as they were done, we had them fight one another until they fell apart.
Mom and Dad came home at the same time and we ran down to see them.
“We played robots and now I’m starving,” George said.
“Me too,” I added.
“Well, no wonder,” Dad said. “Anybody got an idea for dinner?”
Heather came down the stairs. “How about we go to Pizza Pantastic?”
George and I began to chant. “Pizza Pantastic, Pizza Pantastic!”
“A rare moment of agreement in the Staples household,” Mom said. “Even if I do hate the name. Let’s go!”
We went out to the car. George climbed onto his booster seat between me and Heather, and Dad pulled out of the driveway. We passed front lawns. Flowers blooming. An old lady on her porch knitting.
A card.
At least, I thought it was a card. It sure looked like one, stuck between the spokes of a tricycle that was tipped over on the sidewalk.
I shouted.
“STOP!”
Dad slammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a halt and we felt ourselves thrown against the seatbelts.
“What is it?” Dad cried. “A dog? A child? I didn’t see anything!”
“Wait,” I said. I opened the door and bolted out, ran down the sidewalk, and pulled the card—yes, it was a card—from between the spokes. I put it in my shirt pocket and sprinted back.
Mom turned in her seat. “Listen to me, mister,” she said in her sternest voice. “Never, and I mean never run out of the car like that.”
“For heaven’s sake, you almost gave me a heart attack,” Dad said. “What was it even about?”
“I thought I saw a five-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. But it was just a leaf.”
“You need to have your eyes checked,” Heather said.
“I could have had an accident,” Dad said. “Mom’s right. Don’t ever do that again, Hartley.”
“Sorry.”
Dad drove on.
“That was so fun,” George said.
I had to wait until we had ordered our pizza and then eaten it, and George had finished his bowl of Neapolitan ice cream, for us to go home again.
I got another lecture about dangerous car behavior.
We pulled into the driveway. Heather went to her room to call Jennifer. Mom said George was so sticky with ice cream that if he didn’t have a bath he’d become a mummy in his bedsheets. Dad went to check his email, which meant that he was going to see if anyone had sent him information about Jackson.
I said that I had to work on my final project. When my mom asked what it was about, I put my finger to my lips. “Top secret,” I whispered.
In my room, I turned on the desk lamp and put down the card.
I liked the way the two people were moving through the air. I read the words. Sometimes I felt that way—about me and everyone else in the world going in different directions. But maybe everybody felt that way sometimes. Maybe Jackson really felt that way.
g.o. was pretty insightful, if not exactly a laugh riot.
As usual, I took out the metal box and laid all the cards down so I could see them together. I wondered how many copies she made of each card. Did other people find them too? What did they do with them?
Maybe they used them as bookmarks.
Or as coasters to put their drinks on.
Maybe I had the only collection of g.o. in the world.
17
Doom
Have you ever woken up with a feeling of doom? I mean, you’re not even awake enough to know what day it is but you just sense that it’s a mistake to open your eyes. And that if you do open your eyes, you’re going to see one of those big, sharp scimitars from Aladdin swinging just above your head?
I made myself open my eyes anyway. And then I remembered. Today I had to tell Ms. Gorham the subject for my final project.
As I dressed, I tried to come up with a subject.
Why are rooms rectangles instead of triangles or hexagons?
Why is a bedroom named after the bed when the kitchen isn’t called the stoveroom?
These were not questions I was passionate about.
Walking to school with George, I told him my problem. “And today is the deadline,” I said despondently. “I have to tell Ms. Gorham.”
“How about doing it on your bum?” said George. “Bums are really interesting. Ha ha ha!”
He gave his fake laugh. Served me right for telling him. I took him to the elementary school entrance and then went around to the middle school side.
“Hey, Hartley!”
I looked and saw Stephanie Losurdo. She was holding the end of a skipping rope while her friend Louise Chong held the other.
“Want to try skipping?”
“I don’t think I’d be very good at it,” I said.
“You never know until you try. You might be a natural!”
Did Stephanie really think I might be a natural? Skipping had always looked fun to me. Besides, I could use something to take my mind off the final project. “Okay, I guess.”
“Great. We’ll start turning the rope and you just jump in.”
The girls began to turn the rope, slowly at first and then faster. I put down my backpack and set my feet as if I were about to start a race. I held my breath, ran forward, and jumped in.
Smack! The rope hit me in the forehead. It slid down to my feet.
“Subject number twenty-four,” said Stephanie. “Failure.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s just a little experiment for my final project. You know how passionate I am about skipping, don’t you, Hartley?”
“Terrific,” I muttered, picking up my backpack and heading into school.
It’s common sense that if you have a problem, you should try and figure out a solution. But maybe the opposite is sometimes true. If you think too much, you only get in a worse muddle. I thought all day about subjects for my final project. The history of chalk? How shoelaces are ma
de? Why people say hello? It felt as if all the wires in my brain were tied in knots.
The final bell rang. I had no choice but to trudge over to Ms. Gorham’s classroom. She was standing on a step-ladder, putting up a big, colorful banner.
***Final Project Extravaganza!***
Sometimes Ms. Gorham went a little overboard.
“Hartley, come in.”
I shuffled up to her desk. She smiled in an encouraging way.
“Next week is the last week of school. And also when we get to see the final presentations. You won’t have a lot of time to prepare, but I’ll schedule you at the end. I’m so looking forward to hearing what subject you’ve chosen.”
“Me too.”
“That’s funny, Hartley. So what is it? What’s your subject?”
“Ah…”
Something caught my eye. A movement outside the classroom window.
Blue hair. Rolling by. Like the person was on a skateboard. It was her! It was g.o.!
“I’m sorry, Ms. Gorham, I’ve got to go!”
“What?”
“It’s an emergency!”
I sprinted to the door.
“But what’s your subject?”
I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.
“Tractors! My subject is tractors!”
If Ms. Gorham said anything in reply, I didn’t stick around long enough to hear it. I raced down the hall, hoping a teacher wouldn’t see me, and slid across the polished floor to the front doors. Yanking one open, I almost tumbled down the steps.
To the sidewalk.
Down to the corner.
Nothing.
She was gone. I didn’t even know which direction. Even if I did, I couldn’t keep up with her skateboard. Feeling defeated, I went around the school to pick up George at the other entrance.
George waved at me like a maniac. I thanked his teacher for standing with him and we began to walk home.
“Today I built a really, really tall tower,” he said.
“That’s nice.”
“Then I knocked it down. Kablooie!”
“Ah-huh.”
“Then I built it again.”
“Right.”
“Then I knocked it down. Smash!”
“Okay.”
“Then I built it again.”
“I get it, George.”
“Also, I did a finger painting with my nose.”
“I wondered what that orange spot was.”
“And I found a fan. It keeps me really cool.”
He began fanning himself.
“It’s a million, trillion times better than air commissioning.”
“I think you mean air conditioning.”
“I just love my fan. See?”
He started to fan me, his hand too close to my face.
“Can you stop that?”
“Fine. I’ll just fan myself.”
He moved his hand with genteel little motions. Whatever he was waving, it wasn’t a real fan.
It was a card!
“Where did you get that?”
“Found it.”
“Where?”
“Dunno.”
“Can I have it?”
“But it’s my wonderful, beautiful fan.”
“Please stop waving. It might get bent. I’ll trade you for it.”
George stopped. He put the card behind his back.
“Trade me what?”
“I have a Choochoo bar at home.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.”
“How about my yo-yo? The one that lights up.”
“The light doesn’t even work anymore.”
“A cowboy hat?”
“Blah.”
“Well, what do you want?”
With his free hand George rubbed his chin. He was thinking so hard I half expected smoke to come out of his ears.
“L’il Donkey.”
“My comics? Okay, you can have one.”
“Not just one.”
“I’ll give you two. Three.”
“I want all of them.”
“Oh, come on!”
“This really is such a nice fan,” George said, waving it wildly around.
“All right, all right! You can have them all. Now hand over the card.”
“Not until I have the comics.”
“Walk faster, then.”
But he didn’t hurry up. He began to walk like an alien, with weird arm and leg movements, gurgling and beeping with each step. At last we reached home. We went upstairs and I opened my drawer and handed over all my L’il Donkey comics. It broke my heart to see them go.
George immediately sat on my floor with them on his lap and opened the one on top.
“What do you think you’re doing? Give me the card—I mean, the fan—and go to your own room.”
So much for being nicer. George got up, stuck out his tongue, and handed me the card. As soon as he was out I closed the door. I went to my desk, turned on the lamp, and put the card down.
I pondered it for a long time.
“I believe in you, g.o.,” I whispered.
18
g.o.
Her mother lived on the other side of town. Ever since her parents had split up she had lived in two places, with her dad during the week because he worked at home and with her mom, who was a law clerk in an office, on the weekends. She had to be careful to make sure she spent enough time with both of them so that nobody’s feelings got hurt. Sometimes it felt to her as if she was the adult in the family.
She had come to her mom’s house after school on Friday and now it was Saturday morning. She helped tidy up from breakfast and then told her mother that she needed to go to the mall to replenish her art supplies. Her mom offered to drive her, but she said no thanks and that she’d be back in time for them to have lunch together. Then she got her skateboard from the closet and glided down the drive while her mom watched from the window.
This card-making business had turned out to be pretty interesting. Just yesterday after school she had made a new card, one copy of which remained in the pocket of her hoodie. She needed some more construction paper in different colors and a new glue stick for whenever inspiration struck again.
It was too far to skate all the way, so she went three blocks to the bus stop and waited for a bus to arrive. She rode to the discount mall, where there was a big dollar store with an art supply aisle. The bus door opened with a hydraulic whoosh and she stepped down to the sidewalk. She stuffed her skateboard into her backpack and started to cross the mall parking lot. There was a seagull standing alone in the lot and she smiled, for it reminded her of the card in her pocket. It looked at her and opened its beak to make that lonely call that reminded her of the ocean. But there was no ocean around for hundreds of miles so what was it doing here?
And that was when she saw them.
They had been standing behind a minivan, one of the few cars in the lot. Either they’d been hiding or else doing something they didn’t want anyone to see, but now they just stood watching her. Three of them.
They were all girls her age and they had been tormenting her ever since middle school. First it had been making fun of her heritage, calling her names. Then it had been making fun of her being adopted, saying that she’d been unwanted or worse. After becoming bored with just insults, they started to become physical. They bumped her in the school hall or tripped her or knocked the books from her arms. She had to always be looking ahead through the crowd, or over her shoulder, and she would hurry out of school as soon as the bell rang. The skateboard became her quick getaway. Maybe she could have told somebody—they certainly talked about bullying often enough in her school. But her parents had gone through their divorce and after that her dad had suffered
his accident, followed by months of recovery and rehabilitation. The last thing she wanted was to add to her parents’ problems.
So there they were: Noreen, Layla, and Starr. And as she walked toward the mall entrance they moved into her path, even while pretending not to look at her.
In the books and movies about bullying, it always turned out that the bullies had problems of their own. That they were acting out because of some personal unhappiness. Maybe that was true, but right now she could have cared less what Noreen’s, Layla’s, and Starr’s problems were. She didn’t see any reason why they had to pick on her.
She veered left to walk toward another entrance. The three moved over to match her. Maybe she should turn around and run. Or drop her skateboard. She’d certainly gotten away from them before. She didn’t believe that running made her a coward. She believed in self-preservation.
But she really needed those art supplies. So she kept going.
“Look who’s here,” said Noreen, making a move toward her.
“It’s that girl from our school,” Layla said. “Hey, how come you don’t use chopsticks at lunch?”
Starr giggled. Starr was strictly a follower and didn’t say much, glad to do anything that the others did. Noreen was definitely the leader. And the biggest too.
“What are you going shopping for?” Noreen asked, putting out a hand like a claw to catch her shoulder and pressing down hard.
“Probably some makeup to cover that ugly face,” said Layla.
“Really ugly,” Starr agreed.
Noreen dug in harder, and she winced from the pain. Maybe this was the time they would finally beat her up. And after that it would be easy to hurt her whenever they could.
No.
She gritted her teeth.
The fingers of her right hand made a fist.
She smacked Noreen in the right shoulder.
“Ow!”
It hadn’t been that hard a punch, but Noreen let go. So she took off, running between the other two, straight to the entrance as fast as she could go. She reached the glass doors, pulled one open, and practically threw herself inside. There was no way they would follow her in here.
