The Keeping Score Box Set

by Tawdra Kandle

  Quinn flushed pink. I stared down at my feet, kicking at the line of white paint on the bumpy asphalt. This was a total Nate thing. Whatever crossed his mind was pretty much what he said. Quinn and I were used to it, but lately, it was making both of us more uncomfortable. Sometimes we didn’t know how to answer him.

  Now Quinn’s mouth twisted as she tried to say the right thing. “Of course I would. You’re both my friends, and I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you if I could help it.”

  “Maybe,” Nate said bleakly. “But Leo wouldn’t need your help. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  The bell rang at that moment, and we all automatically turned toward the school building. Nate began moving in his normal jerky gait. Quinn didn’t follow him right away. I couldn’t read the expression on her face, but I could tell that she wasn’t happy.

  “C’mon, Mia,” I said finally, using the special nickname I’d had for her as long as I could remember. “We don’t want to be the last ones in. Do you know where to line up?”

  She shrugged and started walking. Nate was far enough ahead of us that I didn’t think he could hear our conversation.

  “Do you think he’s right?” Quinn asked me. “Was I wrong? Should I have let them beat him up?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think they were going to beat him up. They were just, you know, trying to be cool or whatever. They were mostly teasing.”

  “What if it had been you?” she persisted. “What would you have done?”

  This was a harder question. No one had ever bullied me in school. I slid a sideways glance at Quinn, wondering how much she really wanted to know.

  “I guess I would have just talked to them. Tried to get them to cool it. They’d probably stop if someone stood up to them.”

  Other kids were forming lines that snaked out along the brick walls. Quinn and I caught up with Nate, and we paused, trying to figure out which line we were supposed join.

  “Fifth graders on the far left!” A pretty young teacher was standing on the concrete steps, calling out instructions to the milling crowd. The three of us walked to the left, keeping our steps slower to match Nate’s.

  For the first time, we were all three in different classes. At Marian Johnson, there were only two classes per grade, so every year at least two of us were together. We separated into our assigned lines. Nate never looked back at us. He stood in the back of his line, his eyes fixed on the hair of the girl who stood in front of him. Quinn looked from him to me and back again. She was still worried.

  I caught her eye and shrugged. There wasn’t any mid-morning recess at Herbert Andrews Elementary, so we’d have to wait for lunch to see each other again. Quinn’s class was the first to go into the building, followed by Nate’s line. I watched them leave me behind.

  When Nate, Leo and I say we’ve been friends since before we were born, it’s true. Everyone thinks we’re exaggerating or being funny, but we’re not. See, our moms all went to the same birth class, where people go to learn what it’s like to have a baby. For my mom and Nate’s, it was their first time having a baby, so they really needed the class. But Leo’s mom already had two boys, so she always said she was just there for a refresher course. I guess she had forgotten how to do it, which sounds weird, but why else would she go back to a class?

  Anyway, it sounds like a movie, but our moms got talking and sort of became friends. They went out for coffee or whatever pregnant women drink (because I think they’re not supposed to drink coffee), and they were going to do it again, like every week, but then Nate’s mom ended up having him early. Not just a few weeks early either; my mom told me once that at first they weren’t sure Nate was going to live. He was in NICU, which is a really scary place for babies, my mom said, for like two months. So all during that time, while my mom and Leo’s were waiting for us to finally be born, they helped out Nate’s parents. My mom used to make food for his family and drive his mom to the hospital to sit with Nate.

  That’s why Nate is different from Leo and me. Something happened when he was born that early, and it left him with a lot of health problems. I can actually remember when Nate started walking. His legs were weak, something to do with the muscles, and we were four by the time he could really move around by himself without this walker he used to have. He was always smaller than us, too, even though he’s the oldest.

  I didn’t realize how different Nate was until we started pre-K. Nate had been in special schools when we were younger, but by the time we were four, he was able to come to school with us. I was glad we were all going to be together, and I was really happy that Leo and I were finally going to school. I had been a little jealous of Nate up to then, because he would talk about people he knew and stuff he did at school. It sounded like a fun place, even though Nate didn’t always want to go.

  In pre-K, though, it was easy to see that Nate wasn’t like the rest of the kids. It wasn’t just his special way of walking, which in those days was a lot worse than it is now. He would almost throw himself from one leg to the other. Leo and I were used to it, and we always walked on either side of him, at just the same speed he did. The other kids in pre-K definitely noticed that. They also saw that Nate was smaller than the rest of us. But what really made him stand out was his way of talking.

  I guess it wasn’t really how he talked so much as what he said. Leo’s mom said once that Nate didn’t have a filter. For a while I thought that meant there was something else that was wrong with him from when he was born, but then my mother explained that it meant that Nate just said whatever he thought.

  “I thought that was telling the truth,” I said.

  My mother sighed and thought for a minute. “Quinn, if I asked you how I looked in my new dress, what would you say?”

  This was easy. “I would say you looked pretty.”

  “Okay, thanks, but what if I didn’t? What if it made me look fat or something?” At the look on my face, my mother laughed. “That’s what I mean. See, you’re trying to think about how you can tell the truth and not hurt my feelings, right?”

  I nodded.

  “All right then. Nate doesn’t understand that. He doesn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings, but he just says whatever he thinks or feels, without considering how it might make other people feel.”

  And in pre-K, there were probably lots of kids who didn’t worry too much about how other people felt, but it was really bad with Nate. He would tell the teacher about every mistake she made. He told the other children they couldn’t read well or counted wrong or didn’t know how to tie their shoes. It was never mean-spirited; it was just matter-of-fact Nate.

  As we went through school, Leo and I tried to gently tell Nate that he couldn’t share every thought that came into his mind the minute he thought it. He never understood, although I think he learned to tone it down a little. Sometimes Leo or I would give him a look, and he would realize he was going too far.

  By the end of pre-K, though, everyone knew and accepted Nate. No one ever picked on him or called him names. That lasted through fourth grade, until we changed schools and moved over to Herbert Andrews Elementary. On the first day, as I walked onto the playground, I saw Nate in the middle of a bunch of bigger kids, and it didn’t look like they were planning a game of tag. Nate was doing his swaying thing, which he only did when he was really nervous. No one else really noticed it, but I knew what it meant.

  Right before I took off to help him, I saw Leo. He was standing between me and Nate, and I knew he saw what was happening. But before I could really wonder why he wasn’t doing anything, I saw one of the boys shove Nate. He almost went down. And if he went down, I knew it wouldn’t be good.

  So I sprinted across the playground. At Marian Johnson, the ground surrounding the school building was a dusty field. But at HA, the whole thing was asphalt, painted here and there with maps and other pictures I guessed people thought were educational. All I knew was that I wanted to get to Nate before those kids knocked him onto that
hard concrete. And I made it. I didn’t plan how I was going to stop them. They were all much bigger than me, and I never was any good at that kind of fighting anyway. Leo always said I used my words better than he used his fists. I wasn’t sure my words were going to make much difference here, but I guessed they did something, because the boys backed down.

  After they were gone, I expected . . . well, I don’t know what I expected. I guess maybe I thought Nate might say thanks. And maybe Leo would think I had done a good thing. But they both acted like I was the one who’d almost beat up our best friend. And I thought Nate was actually mad at me.

  Things didn’t get any better for Nate the rest of the year. We were dealing with more than just the kids who had always been in our class; now we were at the bottom of the school ladder. Fifth graders overall were easy pickings for the older kids, and Nate was an especially attractive target.

  But what really made things hard was what happened with Leo. As the year went on, it seemed like Leo was moving farther away from Nate and me. He didn’t always hang out with us on the playground in the mornings. He ate lunch with us, but then afterward he would sometimes go off with other boys and run around, play whatever game they put together. Nate and I sat on the bottom rungs of the monkey bars or on swings if we could get to them before they were all taken. We talked about school and about our families.

  It was cool, and mostly I didn’t mind hanging out with Nate. He listened to me, and he didn’t think what I said was silly. And I liked hearing him talk about the stuff he was reading, his latest visits to the doctors and what he learned there, and about his mom and dad. But sometimes I would look out at the other kids, running and climbing and playing, and I would want to be a part of that. I didn’t understand how Leo could just leave us there, but at the same time, I wished sometimes that I were out there playing with the rest of our classmates, too.

  If Nate knew what I was thinking, he never said anything. Which of course makes me think he didn’t know, because as I said, Nate didn’t hold anything back, especially with Leo and me. Even after he learned to stop saying everything that crossed his mind in front of other people, he always told Leo and me what he thought. I thought I was pretty good at hiding how I felt. And Nate never said anything bad about Leo either, even though sometimes I saw his eyes follow whatever game everyone else was playing.

  One day toward the end of the year, Nate missed a whole day of school. That was pretty unusual; not that he didn’t have a ton of doctors’ appointments and stuff, but his mom always made sure to make them either first thing in the morning, so he got to school before lunch, or right after school. He didn’t want to miss any classes he didn’t have to, because he almost always got sick at some point in the school year and had mountains of work to make up. So he avoided missing any days that weren’t absolutely necessary.

  In fifth grade, though, Nate was amazingly healthy. He was in school every day until that week in late April, when he had to go for a whole day of tests at the children’s hospital in Philadelphia. He didn’t want to go, and he was grumpy the entire day before, even though I promised I would get all of his work and bring it over as soon as he got home that afternoon.

  That morning, Leo was waiting for me at the bicycle rack.

  “Hey.”

  I brushed my hair back out of my face. It was curly and long and always in my way. “Hey,” I answered. “Nate’s not going to be here today.”

  Leo frowned. “He sick?”

  I shook my head. “No. Tests. Doctors appointments, you know.”

  Leo nodded. “Yeah. So . . . we’re going to play kick ball at lunch. You wanna be on my team?”

  I thought for a minute about Nate. I almost felt guilty for wanting to play kick ball, like I was being disloyal to him. But then I thought about all those days of sitting on the swing watching the rest of the school play.

  “Sure,” I said to Leo. “I’ll play.”

  My first clear memory is of Quinn and Leo. We were at my house, because that was almost always where our mothers met in those days. Our house had everything I needed in it, all my medicine and my nebulizer, and there were ramps so that I could get around with my walker.

  We were standing at my train table, which was my favorite place to play in those days. Trains were my obsession. Whenever I heard the whistle in the distance, I demanded that my mother take me to the crossing that was a couple of miles from our house. Sometimes she would, if we were going out anyway or if she were feeling especially guilty. But mostly she would tell me to go play with my own trains.

  In those days, these were the chunky plastic toys that I could easily move and run around the tracks. Later, when my fine motor skills had improved, my grandparents bought me a more sophisticated set. But it was the first set that I remembered so well with Quinn and Leo. Playing trains was what we did together. When they got to my house, they might ask if we could go outside or watch a movie or play with something else, but we always ended up with the trains. I never thought until much later that maybe they didn’t enjoy it as much as I did.

  I was running my favorite blue engine around the outside track when it ran over Leo’s finger. He yelped just like my grandmother’s dog did when Grandpa accidentally stepped on its tail, and he pulled back his finger, sticking it in his mouth. Quinn’s face puckered.

  “Are you okay, Leo?” she asked, her voice sweet and high. I loved the sound of Quinn’s voice.

  “My finger hurts.” Leo spoke around the finger in question, still in his mouth. I could tell he was trying not to cry. He wasn’t a crybaby at all, so I guessed it really did hurt.

  “Do you want me to get your mommy?” Even then, Quinn took care of us.

  Leo shook his head.

  “He shouldn’t have had his finger so close to the track.” This sounded reasonable to me as I said it. It was true; the train hadn’t moved to run over Leo’s finger. He had put his hand in its way.

  “Nate, it wasn’t his fault,” Quinn protested. “It was just an accident.”

  “It wasn’t an accident,” I insisted. “He put his hand down on the track. He saw the train coming.”

  Leo scowled at me. “Who cares? Trains are stupid.”

  Quinn gasped as though Leo had just spoken high treason. She glanced at me, but I didn’t react. Actually, what Leo said didn’t matter to me at all, because it was so clearly not true. Trains could not be stupid. People could be stupid, but not trains. Now if he had said that trains had square wheels, I would have argued with him.

  “Leo, don’t say that. Nate’s trains are really fun.”

  “They’re stupid and I don’t know why we always have to play with them.”

  “You don’t have to play with them,” I said. “Quinn and I are playing.”

  “No, Leo didn’t mean it, Nate. We can all play. Come on, Leo.”

  But Leo had stomped off into the other room. Quinn watched him go, distress and indecision on her face.

  I resumed playing with my trains as though nothing had happened. “Quinn, you run the red train now. You can make it go over the bridge and stop at the station.”

  Quinn obeyed without speaking. When the red train had stopped at the station, we both loaded the passengers onto it.

  “Leo and I really like your trains, Nate. Don’t be sad about what he said. It was just because his finger got hurt.”

  “I’m not sad,” I answered. “Quinn, let’s make the trains race.” We ran the trains alongside of each other, but Quinn didn’t say anything else.

  A few minutes later, Leo stuck his head into the room. He didn’t look at me at all. “Quinn, my mom says we can go outside and play on the swings. Let’s go.”

  Quinn took one step away from the train table and then turned back to me. “Nate, come outside with us.”

  I was still absorbed. “I don’t want to. I’m playing with my trains.”

  “But don’t you want to play with Leo and me outside?” she persisted.

  I shook my head. “No
. It’s too hot outside. I want to stay in here.”

  “Come on, Quinn,” Leo called. She took another step toward the door. I watched her out of the corner of my eye.

  Finally, she said, “Go on out, Leo. I’m going to stay inside with Nate for a while. Maybe we can go out and play in a little while.”

  Leo didn’t answer, but a few seconds later we heard the screen door slam. Leo’s mom jumped up and yelled at him not to bang the door, and she apologized to my mother, who just laughed.

  “He didn’t mean it, Lisa. That door is so light, I’m always forgetting and letting it slam behind me.” I heard the edge in her voice, which usually meant that I had done something that made her sad or uncomfortable. It was the same thing I heard when the doctors were telling us about new tests I had to have or when we talked about my walking.

  Quinn came back slowly to the train table. She picked up one of the people waiting to board my blue train, and she turned him over and over in her hand. As we played, I saw her glance out the window more than once, and I knew she wanted to be outside. It never occurred to me to say that to her, though. I was always happier when Quinn was playing with me. I liked Leo, too; they were both my best friends. But Quinn made me feel special in a good way. It was like she didn’t see my walker or my spindly arms. She saw the real me, inside.

  Leo was my friend, too, and usually the three of us hung around together. But I didn’t think Leo ever understood me the way Quinn did until the first day of fifth grade. That day, standing on the playground with all those boys standing over me, I was scared for the first time in many years. I wasn’t so much afraid of what they were going to do to me as much as how embarrassing it was going to be, how I didn’t want to be humiliated in front of Quinn. I didn’t know if she was there yet, but I knew she would be soon. The idea of her seeing me on the ground, dirty and maybe worse, made me sway in nervousness, something that I hadn’t done in a long time.