Citrus County (18 page)

“Our ice machine. The Best Western donated it.”

“Why do you need an ice machine?”

“I would’ve asked the same question—in fact, I did. But now I don’t know how we ever got along without it.” Mrs. Milner pushed up her sleeves again, this time tucking them into themselves. “We have a blender, too.”

Shelby was tired of standing. She had an urge to accept Mrs. Milner’s invitation, ask her to leave the room, and go to sleep on the tabletop.

“I know there was some ugliness between you and Lena, and she wants me to tell you she holds no hard feelings. And there’s no preaching permitted in this room. It’s a free zone, and to me that includes free of religion.”

Lena was the girl Shelby had pelted with grits. “I didn’t know she was in gifted,” Shelby said.

“She’s very bright and very sincere.”

“I’m going to respectfully decline,” Shelby said.

“Tell me the reason.”

“I don’t want to be sequestered with kids who think they’re exceptional. I prefer kids who are a tiny bit smart and don’t know it.”

Mrs. Milner cleared her throat. She was not impressed. “Gifted gives you options.”

The idea of options sounded odd to Shelby. Options in life. She had no idea what she’d opt for. She had never needed dreams, hopes even. Maybe now she did. Whatever her dreams might be, they’d have nothing to do with being in gifted.

“The real reason is this,” Shelby said. “Someone I trust told me not to join.”

“Who?”

“I won’t say.”

“That person is ill-informed. I take ten students in my class and most of them enrolled in the second or third grade. The only reason a spot is opening is Daphne Biner is moving. If you get in now, you’ll be grandfathered in for high school. You’re going to
need
gifted.”

“Why am I going to need gifted?”

Mrs. Milner looked astonished. “Friends,” she said. “These will be your friends. Do you think those regular kids out there have any idea how to be friends with someone like you?”

“I’ve never seen a lot of point to friendship,” Shelby told her. “Starts as an interview, ends as a job.”

Mrs. Milner turned sad, a woman crumbling under the weight of her unheeded wisdom. She rested her hand on Shelby’s forearm and Shelby gently peeled it off and whispered the word “No.” Shelby stood above Mrs. Milner like a holy person over a disciple, the icemaker humming like a distant choir.

Shelby and Toby followed the main trail to the public library. They walked quickly, outpacing the mosquitoes. They heard the robotic xylophone music of an ice cream truck. The music grew distant, then close, then trailed away altogether.

In the library, Toby went into the computer lab with Shelby and they shared a chair. She saw him reading along as she relayed bits of light gossip from school. Aunt Dale liked middle school gossip. Shelby wrote that she wondered if Icelanders used ketchup, if they went skiing a lot, what the drinking age was. After sitting stumped for a moment, staring at a poster of Mel Gibson reading a book, she pecked in:

I’m dating a boy named Toby. I think about him all day. He’s got a little boy belly but his arms are as hard as a steering wheel. He smells like wet logs and doesn’t have one freckle. He’s not like anyone else. I’m waiting for him to work up the nerve to put some earnest moves on me. I would like one adult in the world I can speak openly to and who will speak openly to me, and I choose you.

That would get Aunt Dale’s attention. Aunt Dale had been sharing plenty about herself, answering all Shelby’s questions. It was time Shelby shared.

She hit send. She let her eyes drift around until she was looking at Toby. He’d read her message and was making such an effort to be blank-faced, he appeared grave. Nobody else could unnerve Toby, but Shelby did it every other day.

“You look insane,” she told him. “You look like the person that wrote the ice cream truck music.”

“
I’m
insane?” Toby asked.

Shelby logged out of the computer and slipped her library card in her pocket.

“Don’t tell your Aunt Dale anything about me,” Toby said. “I don’t want to be included in this experiment. Being honest with adults?”

“Aunt Dale isn’t a normal adult.”

“And I’m not a normal kid. Hard as I try.”

Toby picked up a basket on his way into the grocery store. He put some ground beef and a tomato in the basket, to seem normal. He stood in the medicine aisle. There was a section for upset stomach, and he grabbed something from there. There were pills especially for nausea, and he grabbed those. There were a bunch of boxes with coughing children on them. Toby hadn’t been to the bunker in three days. The sun was going to keep setting and rising. Toby wondered what Kaley was thinking. Toby had skipped a day before, but never two and certainly not three. She would run out of food today or maybe tomorrow. After that, Toby had no idea how long it would take. She was sleeping in her own filth, trying to become as much of a mess as she could, knowing Toby would have to clean her up. Her wounds were getting infected—her elbows and knees. The water and the jug of iced tea and the juice packets wouldn’t last. Toby wondered at what point she would stop expecting him, at what point she would know in the pit of her stomach that she was absolutely alone in the world. She had no allies and was losing her only enemy.

Toby had glimpsed it. While walking alongside Shelby, he’d seen how things could be, how they
would
be, when Toby had nothing to hold him back, nothing squeezing his soul like a terrible vine. He could do it. He could leave Kaley down there. Toby didn’t have to answer to his evil. He could do what was right for himself and for Shelby. The sun kept going down and it kept coming up, and if Toby could keep clear of the bunker then one of these days when it came up it would find Toby unfettered.

Toby told himself he wasn’t in the grocery store to get medicine for Kaley. He was getting medicine in order to restock Uncle Neal’s cabinet, before Uncle Neal noticed and went nuts. Uncle Neal wouldn’t notice, though—not at this point. Toby looked at the ground beef and the tomato in his basket. He got more medicines, not any of the boxes with children on them. There was something meant to boost your immune system. Regular old multi-vitamins—couldn’t hurt. Toby got lip balm and antibiotic ointment. He kept looking at the coughing children on the boxes of kids’ medicine. They were trying to look sad, trying to trick Toby. They weren’t real children.

Springstead’s coach, the rival of the coach who was starting the lawn service, had beady eyes and neck muscles. Mr. Hibma did not go over and speak to him before the game, as was the custom among coaches, and the guy seemed not to notice, wrapped up as he was in the fact that his point guard had a bad ankle. He kept making her try it out, hoping she could play.

The first time Springstead had the ball, Mr. Hibma put on Earl Ray, a half-court press, throwing Springstead’s shaky backup point guard into a profound fluster that remained with her the rest of the game. The poor thing dribbled off her shin, threw the ball in the stands. Meanwhile, Mr. Hibma’s point guard got into the paint whenever she felt like it. She was a magical sprite who’d cast a spell on the ball. She’d also, Mr. Hibma noticed, cast a spell over a spindly boy with long hair who now sat in the second row at each game. Since Mr. Hibma’s regime of beauty had begun, the team had gained four boyfriends, which, added to the three it’d already had—the pretty benchwarmers’—gave the Citrus Middle girls’ basketball team a not-too-shabby following. If Mr. Hibma wasn’t mistaken, he was doing a serviceable job coaching. Maybe he
could
be a teacher. Of course it couldn’t be that hard; look at all the people who managed it. Mr. Hibma had just been lazy. He’d been daunted by the idea of selflessness, of commitment.

His team won, 29 to 5. Mr. Hibma wanted to criticize them, to prevent them from growing complacent, so he raised his voice and informed them that they’d made a liar out of him. He’d made a promise. He’d given his word that they would shut Springstead out.

Mr. Hibma set himself up on his couch and began filling in a fresh grade book. He had a list of all the assignments he’d given and printouts of his class registers. He had to start from scratch. He’d turned his classroom upside-down, but the grade book was nowhere to be found. It had made its way into the wide world and Mr. Hibma would never hear from it again. He could handle it. Every job had difficulties. Everyone’s time got wasted.

Mr. Hibma listed the kids’ names, then the assignments and dates. He had this grade book crisis under control. He could estimate, by this point in the year, what each student would score on each assignment. Once in a while, though, an A student bombed something or a D student cobbled together some lucky guesses. The safe way was to make sure each kid ended up with a higher average than expected. Mr. Hibma plugged away at the grades for over an hour, until his eyes began to feel strange. Very strange. He set his grade book work aside. He felt like he was stoned, except he wasn’t hungry, didn’t feel lazy. It was like being stoned in way that sharpened one’s mind rather than dulling it. Mr. Hibma could smell the garbage in his kitchen trashcan. He could see magnified details from the Springstead game—the mole on the opposing center’s shoulder, the scuffs on the players’ shoes. Mr. Hibma’s identity felt shifty. The vocab words he’d assigned that week ran through his head. Reductionism:
the theory that every complex phenomenon can be explained by analyzing its simplest physical mechanisms
. Reechy:
smoky or sooty
. Mr. Hibma wanted the television on. He dug the remote out from under the couch cushions and hit the power button. Professional wrestling. The wrestlers preened around the ring. One of them luxuriated in the upper hand, tossing his hair.

Mr. Hibma took out the garbage and replaced the bag, then he began dusting. He shoved several rags in his pockets and carried a can of Pledge. In high corners he found cobwebs. He dusted every flat surface he could find, working up a light sweat, then returned to the kitchen and threw out all the rags, clean or dirty. He dug out butter, flour, milk, sugar, eggs. He banged around in his drawers until he found a yellow sheet of paper on which was written a recipe for rugelachs. It was the old man’s recipe, the man who’d given him the inheritance, the man whose inheritance he had blown. Incredibly, Mr. Hibma had all the ingredients he needed.

Preparing the rugelachs did not help. Mr. Hibma got them into the oven, set the timer for twenty-five minutes, and began pacing laps around the inside of his villa. Everything he looked at annoyed him. He fetched a garbage bag from the kitchen and took it to his CD rack. He dropped new wave CD after new wave CD in the bag, until the plastic began to tear. He got another bag for rock, another for classical. He tied the bags and rested them near the door, then advanced to the bedroom and dealt with his wardrobe. His socks had holes in them, T-shirts had pit-stains. He stuffed two more garbage bags. He went to the kitchen, where the rugelachs were almost ready, and disposed of old vitamins and spice bottles and coupons, musty macaroni boxes. He took the rugelachs out of the oven and placed them on a platter to cool. He grabbed all the trash bags he’d filled, heaving them over his shoulders, and lugged them in one load out to the dumpsters.

On the way back, he stopped at the mailboxes. There was a letter, forwarded from Clermont. D. Register. Mr. Hibma rubbed his thumb over the return address. His ears began to buzz. Holy shit, Dale had written him back. Mr. Hibma’s forehead tingled. He had no idea who he was. He was in the middle of Florida, at a bank of mailboxes. He sniffed the envelope and it smelled salty. He wasn’t going to fumble ripping it open. He was going to tear it evenly across the top.

Mr. H,

I have decided to respond to you even with the risk that your plan is not in earnest, because if you fail to do what you propose, your letters themselves may constitute some sort of art. I understand that this is probably a hoax, but the world needs all kinds of people, even perpetrators of hoaxes.

Mr. Hibma didn’t feel stoned anymore. When a stranger from another continent challenges the validity of your very self, you are no longer stoned. Dale had written him back. His letter hadn’t been redirected by handlers. Dale was interested in Mr. Hibma. She
wanted
to believe he could kill someone. She wouldn’t say that, but Mr. Hibma knew. Inside, she was rooting for him. She believed in his old self, the self from before he’d started trying to change. She wasn’t a stranger. Mr. Hibma had something like a friend. For him, this was what a friend was.

Mr. Hibma felt like a con man and he felt gullible. He’d conned himself with this plan to mold himself into a real middle school teacher, a monitor, a mentor, and he’d fallen for it. What was he trying to do to himself—hosting wing meetings and buying greeting cards and forcing his smile on everyone and carrying his burritos across the hall to the lounge to sit in there with the rest of them? He’d seen this as his future and it was coming apart in a matter of moments. He was ashamed. He’d been trying to make things easier on himself, as if they ever could be.

Mr. Hibma went inside and gorged himself on the rugelachs, stopping every couple minutes to read Dale’s letter again. It was handwritten. Mr. Hibma had Dale’s handwriting and she had his. He was getting grease smudges all over the paper. He didn’t care. He had no idea what Dale looked like, and he wished he could picture her at her desk, overlooking Reykjavik, a begrudged grin on her face as she wrote Mr. Hibma’s reply. He had no idea if he was conning Dale as he’d conned himself. He had no idea if he could follow through on his proposal, and he didn’t expect to know. It wasn’t something you guessed at. Mr. Hibma was going to find out if he was indeed a perpetrator of hoaxes. He was going to find out if he could change the basic fabric of his life. He was going to call his own bluff.