Lost in the Sun (4 page)

Eventually Noah had stopped calling. That part I did tell my mom. I just left out the stuff beforehand.

It was too much to tell, anyway.

“Intramural baseball starts in a couple weeks, right?” Mom asked me, poking me in the side with her elbow. I guess she could tell I wasn't going to talk about friends, so she'd moved on to other ways to try to get me pumped about middle school.

I shrugged. “Three, I think.”

“Just think,” Mom said. “Soon I'll have
two
baseball stars. When
you join the Dodgers, just make sure you sign a big enough contract that I can afford the mansion
and
the butlers.” I bit the insides of my cheeks to stop from smiling, but it was no use. Sometimes Mom got a little loopy around her sixth coffee or so. “People always forget about the butlers.”

“I'll see what I can do,” I promised.

When things started to get really slow in the store, about four thirty or so, Ray went to the back to answer emails, and Mom took to dusting, and I didn't do much of anything because I only got paid four dollars an hour. Mom said I could “man the fort” and holler if any customers showed up. So when I was sure no one was looking, I pulled out my Book of Thoughts and started scribbling some more.

I know it was disturbed or something, to draw somebody getting attacked by sharks. Especially if that somebody was dead already. A somebody that you yourself had killed. It was probably disturbed, too, to draw the stuff Jared might be doing that very second if I hadn't hit him with that hockey puck—Jared sleeping, Jared drinking hot chocolate, Jared doing his homework, Jared watching TV with Annie. The nightmares were disturbed, too, I guess. But drawing those kinds of thoughts on paper turned out to be better than keeping them in my brain, because when I kept them in my brain, they sort of jabbed at me like pointy sharp knives, and when I put them on paper, at least they stayed there. Left me alone afterward.

Anyway, like I said, they used to be a lot worse.

“You never told me what the drawings were actually of.”

I was so startled by the voice, I jumped off my stool. Actually jumped.

“Hey!” I shouted. I slammed my notebook closed. “What are you doing here?”

Fallon Little smiled a crooked smile at me. The tip of her lip that tucked into her scar, I couldn't decide if it made her look cute or sinister. “I came to see you,” she said. Like it was so obvious.

“How did you know where I worked?”

“You don't have to be, like, a detective, Trent. It's a small town. Also, I've been in here about nine times with my parents and seen you.”

I guessed that was true. “Where's your dog?” I asked, hoping she'd forget about the notebook and whatever it was she came in to talk about.

“Squillo? He's at home. Where else would he be?”

“What do you want?”

Today Fallon was dressed even weirder than the day before—neon-yellow shorts and a giant green-and-white-striped polo shirt with “#1 Golfer” embroidered on the pocket. Her hair was up in a bun, frizzing out at every angle, and there was what appeared to be a chopstick poking through it. “I want the favor you owe me,” she said.

My mom was still dusting, on the far side of the store, with her back to me. I wondered if I concentrated hard enough I could get her to turn around and force me to refill the mustard cups.

“Are you okay?” Fallon asked me. She waved her hand in front of my eyes, breaking my concentration. “Trent?”

Mom actually
did
turn around then, but she totally failed at being a mother, because instead of rescuing me, she just gave me and Fallon a cheerful wave and moved on to another corner of the store.

I turned back to Fallon.

“I don't owe you any favors,” I told her.

“Sure you do,” she said. “I practically saved your life.”

“You did
not
save my—”

“I want a picture.”

“What?”

“A picture,” she said again. She pointed at the notebook, which I was doing a terrible job hiding under the counter. “You're a good artist, I saw. And I want you to draw me a picture.”

“I'm not going to draw you a picture.”

She blinked at me. One blink, then another. “You want to hear the real story?” she asked me.

This girl was nuts times a million. “What are you talking about?” I said.

“The real story about my scar,” she said. “Everyone always wants to know how I got it.”

I couldn't help myself—I was kind of curious. “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

“It happened when I was three,” Fallon said. She examined my face closely while she told me. “I was playing Frisbee in the park with my dad, and the Frisbee whacked me”—she slammed a hand up as though re-creating the scene—“right between the eyes. Crazy, huh?”

I may not be the smartest kid in the universe, but I know you can't get a scar like that from a Frisbee.

“Huh,” I said. I pretended to think about that, pretty hard.

“You don't believe me?” she asked. She seemed mad that I didn't
believe her obvious lie about her scar. Like she'd told me just so she could get mad at me for not believing her.

“No,” I said slowly. “I believe you. It's just that it wasn't what I was expecting, that's all. I thought it was something even crazier. I thought maybe you got it in a nuclear power plant explosion.” Fallon raised an eyebrow. “And that now you have mutant superpowers or something.”

“Ooh, I
like
that one,” she said. She pointed to my notebook again. “That's the one you should draw.”

“Sorry?”

“That's what I want a picture of,” she told me. “How I got my scar. And that's my favorite story yet.”

“I'm not drawing that,” I said. My notebook wasn't for weird lies about Fallon Little's scar. My notebook was for thoughts.
My
thoughts. “Leave me alone, all right?”

“Not till you draw me a picture.”

“I'm going to get my mom to come over here,” I threatened. Which, all right, was pretty lame, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn't even leave the stupid register.

“Oh, please do,” Fallon said, leaning way too far over the counter, so that I had to step back and almost tripped. “Moms
love
me. Hey, Mrs. Zimmerman!” she called over to my mom, who turned around and gave another friendly wave. “Is it Mrs. or Ms.?” Fallon asked me. “Your parents are divorced, right?”

“Go away now,” I answered.

I thought maybe Fallon would stay in the store until we had to
drag her out by her frizzy hair just so we could lock up, but just as quickly as she'd appeared, she decided to leave. “You're going to draw me that picture, Trent,” she told me as she backed her way toward the door. “Just you wait and see. I'm going to keep bugging you until you do.”

“Can't wait,” I muttered.

Mom came back to the counter right after Fallon left, which just showed what terrible instincts she had as a mother.

“She seems nice,” Mom said. “Friend of yours?”

“Not even a little,” I told her.

And then Mom smiled at me in this way I could only interpret to mean that she thought Fallon and I were in love or something, and wasn't that just the cutest? And I had to roll my eyes at her, because that was the only way to stop myself from barfing in my own mouth.

Mom joined me behind the register. She sat on top of her stool and examined the sheet of voids.

“How do you think she got that scar?” she asked me, still reading the voids sheet.

I looked at her. I was surprised, I guess, that she would wonder, too. That even a mom could be so curious about a thing like that.

“Maybe it's none of our business,” I said. As soon as I said it, I felt like I'd figured something out about Fallon Little. Something real. “People must ask her about it all the time,” I said, running a finger on the edge of my stool top. For all that Fallon talked about her scar, I realized, she didn't really want anyone to know the truth. “I bet it gets really annoying.”

Mom looked up from the voids sheet and smiled in that way she
did when one of us scored really well on a test. “You're a pretty good kid, Trent, you know that?” she said.

I shrugged. I wasn't nearly half as good a kid as Mom thought. Because even though Fallon didn't want me to know the truth about her scar, I still wondered about it. Actually, the fact that she didn't want me to know made me wonder even more. It was like that enormous, mysterious scar across Fallon's face was the end of some great, interesting, terrifying story. The very last line of a book. And now that I'd seen what the last line was, I was desperate to find out how the story started. It was only natural to wonder about a thing like that.

Still, for some reason I couldn't quite explain, I felt like a real jerk for wondering it.

My first clue that sixth grade was going to suck worse than Mom had predicted was when I walked into my homeroom, Room C-78: Ms. Emerson.

Ms. Emerson was a wrinkled old crone. You could tell, as soon as you looked at her, that she'd been teaching for about a million years, and she'd hated every second of it, and that she was most definitely going to hate
you.
Her room, too, was like a wrinkled old crone's lair. Instead of desks, the room was filled with long rows of tables with stools in front of them. And the rows, no joke, had
ovens
inside them. Real ovens, like if you got mouthy, the wrinkled old crone would turn up the heat and shove you inside and roast you. (The knobs on the ovens had been pulled off, and the doors were sealed shut with duct tape, I guess so no sixth graders could roast each other. But I had a feeling the wrinkled old crone knew a way around that trick.) At the very front of the classroom, where there should be the big teacher's
desk, was a huge bank with a long row of stovetops (knobs removed there, too), and a giant industrial sink.

It was weird.

Anyway, I was standing in the doorway, staring at the creepy homeroom with the ovens, when somebody—turned out it was Sarah Delfino—knocked past me into the room and said, “Hey, move it already. Some of us are trying to sit down.” And when she knocked me, my elbow rammed into the shelf beside the door, which just happened to be holding an enormous potted plant, and the thing started sliding off the shelf and probably would've crashed to the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces, but thankfully I'm pretty fast and I caught it.

Ms. Emerson, that wrinkled old crone, she saw the whole thing. She snapped to attention at the front of the room. “Hey, there!” she called over to me. And I knew, I just
knew,
she wasn't going to thank me for my super-fast plant-catching moves, or ask me if my elbow was okay. And I was right. Because instead she shouted at me, “You be careful with that plant! It's very special to me.” Which was idiotic, because how could a plant be special? And also, once I looked around the room, I realized that she had about four bajillion potted plants, stuck on shelves along every wall, against the windows in the back, even tall ones up front. So what was this stupid plant so special for?

I didn't ask, obviously. I shoved the plant back in place, where it wouldn't smash to the ground and shatter (even though I sort of wanted to watch that happen, just to see the old crone's face), and found a stool no one was sitting on yet. And I sat.

Well, I'd never had a homeroom before, so I didn't know what to expect. But it turned out it was about as exciting as every other class I'd had in my whole life, which is to say, not very. Ms. Emerson took roll and then went over the rules with us (the usual: No hitting, no talking out of turn, show respect, blah blah blah). And I stared at the wrinkled old crone and pictured how I'd draw her in my Book of Thoughts, if I ever felt like doing that. She'd have bat wings, like the bat she was, and an old-lady cane, and a speech bubble coming out of her mouth that said, “Potted plants are my very best friends!”

Okay, it needed a little work.

I was tired, anyway, because Doug and his stupid friend Annie Richards had tried to pull their alarm clock prank the night before. Too bad for them Aaron figured out what they were up to before he went to sleep (probably because they didn't hide the clocks in his room very well—I would've given them plenty of good places to hide them if I'd been helping, but I wasn't), and he re-hid them all in
Doug's
bedroom. Which was actually pretty funny, what with Doug waking up at 11:30 at night, and then 12:06, and then 2:27, and all through the night, going, “Gah! Gah!” and tearing through his room searching for the beeping. But the problem was that Doug's room was right next door to mine, instead of Aaron's, which was across the hall, so I
heard
all of that, and I didn't get much sleep either.

At breakfast while Doug and I poured our cereal all blurry-eyed and did
not
talk about alarm clocks so Mom wouldn't know we'd been pulling pranks, Aaron just smiled and drank his orange juice.

“Get some good sleep before the first day of school, little brother?” he asked Doug.

Doug glared at him.

When Mom ruffled all our heads and went upstairs to finish getting ready, Aaron turned to the two of us and said, “Remember, we're leaving for St. Albans at four fifty, sharp. Not a second later, all right?” He looked specifically at me when he said that. “Four fifty, and we're out of here, so be ready or I'm leaving without you.”

“And wouldn't that be the worst,” I muttered, because after Friday I definitely was not looking forward to another fun-filled dinner with Dad the Jerk.

Anyway, so that's what was rolling around in my tired brain when that wrinkled old crone Ms. Emerson was droning on and on about homeroom rules, listing them all on the board with their corresponding “consequences.”

1. Verbal warning
   
2. Written warning
   
3. Detention
   

I squinted at the list and made up my mind.

“So all we have to do is screw up three times and then we get detention?” I asked. I asked it pretty loudly. Didn't raise my hand, either. “That seems easy.”

Ms. Emerson swiveled around from where she was writing at the board. Her black crone eyes zoomed in on me.

The room went silent.

Slowly, Ms. Emerson glanced down at the roll-call sheet on her stovetop desk.

“Trent, is it?” she asked me. She didn't have to ask it. She knew full well. In this town, everyone knew.

“Trent,” I confirmed.

She took a slow, wrinkled breath. “Trent,” she said. “I'm happy to discuss any concerns you may have with my rules after homeroom ends, but just at the moment we have some very important things to discuss that pertain to the whole class, and not much time to do it. Furthermore”—her black eyes darted to the list of rules she'd scribbled on the board—“as we've just gone over, talking out of turn is not permitted in this class. As I've mentioned, rule breaking may be grounds for detention.”

And with that, she moved on, to ask Sarah Delfino to help her hand out student schedules.

“How long is detention?” I asked, interrupting Ms. Emerson again a minute later, when she had just started in about changing periods and lockers.

“I'm sorry?” Ms. Emerson said in that way that indicated she wasn't sorry in the slightest. She narrowed her eyes at me, and everyone in the class sucked in their breaths together. The wrinkled old crone's eyes did
not
look pretty when they were narrowed.

“How long is detention?” I asked again. “How long does it go for?”

Ms. Emerson straightened up her old-crone back. You could almost see the wheels in her head turning, deciding if she should answer me or not. I guess she finally decided she should.

“It lasts as long as I deem appropriate,” she told me. I bet she thought she was being really clever, giving me an answer like that.

I nodded, still thinking. “Could it last all the way to five o'clock?” I said. “I mean, if someone did something really terrible?”

“Trent,” Ms. Emerson said slowly. Like a dog growling, low and menacing. “You'll be staying in your seat after the bell rings for first period. You and I are going to have a little talk.”

Everyone in the class was busy
ooh
ing at that, like I was in so much trouble and they all thought it was amazing. But I knew better.

“No,” I said, and I stood up. “I won't be doing that,” I told Ms. Emerson. “But I will see you in detention.” I walked to the door. And I swung my elbow wide.

And then, just as the bell rang—I couldn't have timed it better if I'd tried—the wrinkled old crone's precious potted plant smashed to the ground, and I swept through the door into the hallway.

It wasn't until I checked my schedule on the way to first period that I realized I had Ms. Emerson for nearly every class.

•   •   •

Lucky for me, first period was
not
with Ms. Emerson. First period was P.E.

I'd always been good in P.E.

Fallon was in my P.E. class, I noticed (I couldn't
not
notice—she waved at me and jumped when she saw me, like we were best friends in the whole world, and I had to pretend I'd never seen her before). But thank goodness they split us up boy-girl, with the girls on the other side of the gym. Different P.E. teachers, too.

Our P.E. teacher was named Mr. Gorman. He was thick, with legs like tree trunks, and you could tell his brain was probably filled
with moss. But I didn't actually figure out how much I was going to hate him until he started roll call and called everyone's name, first and last, like teachers always did, and got to Noah Gorman and just said, “Noah,” no last name. And Noah shrugged up at him from where we were all sitting on the floor, and Mr. Gorman marked him present, and that's when I noticed that Mr. Gorman looked a whole heck of a lot like Noah's dad.

That's right: My P.E. teacher was my ex–best friend's uncle.

Fantastic.

Mr. Gorman spent ten full minutes telling us the rules of his class, which were pretty much exactly the rules of homeroom. Then he started talking about intramural teams. He went through a bunch of them—hockey, football, tennis. Finally he got to baseball, and I sat up a little straighter.

Okay, I admit it. I was interested. My arm was aching just
thinking
about swinging a bat. I guess I'd missed it. I really had.

“Intramural baseball is starting late this year,” Mr. Gorman said, holding tight to his clipboard as we sat around him on the gym floor, staring at him about crotch level. (I have never understood why gym teachers always insist on standing when all the kids are sitting on the gym floor.) (Also, why do gym teachers always have clipboards? What do they even
do
with them?) “Three weeks from today. Anyone who wants to can join the team, and from that group we'll be selecting players for the team in the spring. Intramurals is for learning the ropes. It's a lot of fun, but it's no place for sissies. We meet every day, rain or shine, and we play hard.” He looked around the circle. “Any questions?”

When I raised my hand, I thought I heard a few kids from my homeroom snicker, like they thought I was going to be a smart-ass or something. But I wasn't going to be a smart-ass.

“Yes?” Mr. Gorman called on me.

“
Anyone
who wants to can join an intramural team?” I asked.

You could tell some kids were disappointed that I hadn't been a smart-ass.

“Anyone,” Mr. Gorman confirmed. “Skill level is not important in intramurals. It's an opportunity to learn.”

I nodded at that. If anyone could join, that meant no one could freeze you out. No one could decide you didn't belong.

The day was looking up.

After that, Mr. Gorman broke us up into teams for basketball, and I'll admit I was kind of excited about it. I was really good at basketball, and it wasn't even my third-favorite sport. I leaned forward on the balls of my feet while Steve Bickford dribbled the ball, looking who to pass it to. I loosened up my shoulders, rolling them forward then back, watching the action on the court. I'd missed this, being on a team. It had been a long time.

Too long.

We were pretty far into the game before I got my hands on the ball. Zak Halmeciek passed it to me because I was wide open and had a great angle on the basket, and we both knew it. So he passed me the ball, and I caught it. It felt perfect in my hands. Solid.

I turned to the basket. Bent my knees to shoot.

And then, I don't know why, my arms got clammy. Sweaty, even
though it wasn't that hot in the gym. I could see tiny droplets of water beading up on my skin. And as soon as I saw that, for no reason at all, it got hard to swallow. Hard to breathe.

Before I could figure out what was going on, the ball was suddenly snatched out of my hands, and the guys on my team were groaning. “Trent!” Zak shouted. “What's the matter with you? Why didn't you
shoot
?” And I turned around and there was Noah Gorman, dribbling my stupid ball across the court.

Noah didn't even
like
basketball.

I barreled over to him, fast as I could, and got my hands on the ball easy, because Noah had no idea how to guard himself. Noah tried to yank the ball back, but I wouldn't let him.

“Foul!” Noah cried as I tried to wrench the ball from his grip. “Trent, quit it.
Foul!
”

But it was my ball. I had it. I
had
it. I ripped the ball completely out of Noah's hands, and Noah fell to the floor like a sissy, and I turned to scram back down the court, but everyone on Noah's team was suddenly yelling “Foul!” at me, too, like I'd done something wrong, which I hadn't.

“Shut up!” I shouted back at them. But even as I shouted, my skin grew clammier, my throat got tighter. I didn't like it.

I didn't like it.

“Shut
up
!” I shouted again. And then, to show everyone how wrong they all were about me fouling, to show them that I didn't even
care
about stupid basketball anyway—it wasn't even my third-favorite sport—I threw the ball as hard as I could, across the gym. It smashed
into the rack of soccer balls on the far end. Broke it. Balls everywhere.

“I didn't foul
anyone
!” I shouted. My breath was coming back, just a little. “Just shut up!”

Which is about all I got out before fat Mr. Gorman ripped me off my feet and practically threw me into the bleachers. Everyone was staring at me with their eyes wide and their mouths open. Except for the people whose eyes had gone tiny, squinting. I glared at them all. What did they know?

“Your nephew was the one who fouled me,” I told Mr. Gorman, breathing in deep now that I had air to breathe again. Even with Mr. Gorman inches from my nose, his face angry and purple, his eyeballs practically bugged out of his head, it was easier to breathe here on the bleachers.