Lost in the Sun (5 page)

Mr. Gorman just kept shaking his head at me, not saying a word. He really did look pretty mad.

The girls were trickling in from running their laps outside. I kept an eye out for Fallon, but I didn't see her. Good.

Finally, Mr. Gorman must've gotten some words in him. “Everybody, to the locker rooms,” he said. And the guys started, slowly, to head over. “Not you, Trent,” he told me when I tried to get up. “You stay.” Great. On their way to change, the guys all kept looking over their shoulders at me, then turning back to each other and saying something.

Well, Noah didn't look.

“I guess having a P.E. teacher for an uncle doesn't make Noah any good at not fouling people,” I told Mr. Gorman.

Mr. Gorman pressed his fat lips together. “Let's get something straight, all right, Trent?” he said. He did not sound like he was about to tell me some sort of a joke. “In this class, I'm Mr. Gorman , the phys ed teacher. You got that? I am not anybody's uncle. I am not anybody's husband, or son, or second cousin. I am your
teacher.
I'm Noah's teacher, too, plain and simple. Noah knows that, and I need you to know that. You got it?”

“Sure,” I said. The bell rang. Fallon still hadn't come back inside, I noticed. I stood up. “Thanks for the lesson.”

“Sit your ass back down, Trent,” Mr. Gorman told me. “I'm not even close to done.”

He said that. He said “ass.” I'm pretty sure teachers aren't supposed to say “ass.”

“But the bell rang.”

The look Mr. Gorman gave me then—well, I knew in that instant there was a reason he'd become a P.E. teacher. I bet he could've wrestled a bear and won.

I sat my ass back down.

“You listening now?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“Good. Because I need you to hear something. In this class, I am your teacher, and you are my student. I met you today, in this gym, and that's the kid you are when you're here, you got that?” I blinked at him. I didn't say anything. “I don't care who your friends are or aren't, I don't care who you're related to, I don't care if you've robbed a bank or won the Pulitzer Prize. When you're
in this gym,
you're the kid I see
in this gym.
” He poked his first two fingers in the air, pointing at me, every time he said “in this gym.” “So you get to decide who you are
in this gym,
no one else. It's up to you. You got that, Trent?”

I shrugged.

“You got it?”

I was pretty sure that if I didn't get it, he was going to poke his fat fingers all the way through my brain, so I got it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

“Do you want to tell me a good reason you broke my soccer rack?” Mr. Gorman asked me.

I did not.
Because my skin felt clammy
did not sound like a good reason.

“Trent?”

“No, sir,” I answered.

Mr. Gorman looked at me a long time after that, not saying anything. The guys started to leave the locker room, in their regular clothes, and some of them were milling around, waiting for something truly terrible to happen to me on the bleachers, and still Mr. Gorman kept staring.

Finally he nodded, like he'd made up his mind about something. “Today didn't happen,” he told me. “You get a fresh start tomorrow.”

I stood up. Headed to the lockers.

“I want to like the kid I meet tomorrow, got it?” he called to me.

I kept on walking.

I saw Fallon coming in from outside just as I reached the locker room. She was all by herself. I could tell by the look on her face that she hated gym almost as much as I did.

“Hey, Trent,” she called over, and she gave me a little wave.

I rolled my eyes and didn't wave back.

I want to like the kid I meet tomorrow.

I knew better than anybody that that was never going to happen.

•   •   •

The rest of the day went about as well as you can imagine. Ms. Emerson glared at me all through language arts. All through literature. All through social studies. The only time she didn't glare at me was when she confirmed that I did, in fact, have detention, young man.

Someone had swept up her precious potted plant. I hoped it was having a very happy life in the garbage can.

During lunch, I didn't feel like getting glared at by anybody, so I spent the whole time in the bathroom, hiding out, scribbling in my Book of Thoughts while perched on the back of the toilet tank. That was about as much fun as you can imagine, too.

Even detention was a disappointment. Ms. Emerson sat behind her sink-counter for a long time, just staring at me, looking like she was going to give me some big lecture or whatever, but she never did.
I
certainly wasn't going to be the first one to talk. Finally she said, “Trent Zimmerman, I have lessons to plan. Why don't you sit there and be silent until I decide you can go home?”

So she planned, and I drew in my Book of Thoughts until she decided I could go home at 4:15, which was way too early. But I walked my bike instead of rode it, and I took four detours, too, so by the time I got home, it was 5:03. There was a note from Aaron on the table.

Trent—

I told you 4:50. We had to leave without you.

—Aaron

I crumpled the note into a ball and threw it in the garbage, and fixed myself some soup for dinner. Mom got home just after Aaron and Doug, and neither of them mentioned that I'd skipped dinner, and Dad didn't call about it either. Mom did say, “Detention on the first day of school, huh?” with her eyebrows raised to the ceiling. And then when I told her that it was an accident, with Ms. Emerson's stupid plant, she looked at me for a long time, studying my face like she was deciding whether or not to believe me. I guess believing me must've been easier, because finally she said, “You can always talk to me, Trent.” And I agreed with that, because, duh, I wasn't about to say anything otherwise. And then, thank goodness, Mom turned on the game.

The Dodgers beat the Padres, 5 to 4, so I guess the day wasn't a total loss.

Am I going to like the kid I meet today?” That's what Mr. Gorman asked me as I walked into the gym on Tuesday morning. He was standing in the doorway, holding his clipboard, like he was waiting for me or something.

“I don't know,” I told him. “Are you?”

And I walked straight up to the bleachers—didn't even bother to go to the locker room and change into my gym clothes—and I sat.

“Trent?” he asked me. “You planning on participating today?”

“Can't,” I said. “I twisted my arm helping my mom move furniture last night.” And I made a big show of rubbing my arm, my right one. “I forgot my note. I'll bring it tomorrow.”

Mr. Gorman frowned at me, but what else was he going to do? He couldn't exactly pick me up and force me to play basketball. So he just sort of made an “
Mm-hmm
” noise in his throat, and checked something off on his clipboard. Probably the box that said I was a screw-up.

I spent the whole period watching other kids play basketball, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds.

I spent all of lunch in the bathroom again, which is even less fun than it sounds.

•   •   •

“Am I going to like the kid I meet today?” Mr. Gorman asked me on Wednesday. Still standing at the door. Still holding his clipboard.

“I don't know,” I told him. “Depends if you like kids who can't play basketball because of their horrible colds.” I fake-sneezed. I think a little got on Mr. Gorman, which was an added bonus. “I'll bring my note tomorrow!” I said as I made my way up the bleachers.

Mr. Gorman made a check on his clipboard.

•   •   •

By the time lunch on Wednesday rolled around, I was getting pretty sick of the bathroom. So, even though I really didn't want to, I went to the cafeteria. Bought myself lunch. Sat down at a completely empty table in the corner.

Guess who decided to sit down next to me.

“Trent!”

I tried to make myself look so large that I took up the whole table, but Fallon found room anyway.

“Hey,” she told me. “You're here.”

“Yeah.” I held up my tuna sandwich to show her. “It's lunch.”

“But you weren't in the cafeteria yesterday,” she said. “Or Monday, either.”

I just shrugged. No way I was going to tell her I'd been hanging out in the bathroom.

“Well, I'm glad you're here now.” She opened her chocolate milk like an expert. Took a long swig. “I wanted to tell you something.”

I sighed. I didn't want to talk to her about her stupid scar anymore. I didn't want to argue with her about drawing her weird pictures. “Don't you have any friends?” I asked her.

All right. It came out meaner than I meant it.

Fallon froze, halfway to her apple. Hand just frozen in midair, like she'd been zapped or something. But then, just when I thought she was going to burst into tears like a real girl, she unfroze herself and grabbed the apple, like nothing had happened at all. Like the freezing had just been a fritz in my vision. “Don't
you
?” she asked.

Well.

That was a fair point.

I sighed again. “What did you want to tell me?” I asked.

She took a bite from her apple. Today, I noticed, she was wearing a yellow-and-pink-checked dress with a rounded collar, like a four-year-old might wear for Easter. Where did she
get
these clothes? “I was going to tell you the real story of how I got my scar.”

Oh, brother.

I still had half a sandwich to finish, plus a whole bag of chips, and I had nowhere to be but a bathroom stall, so finally I gave in. “Fine,” I said. “Tell me.
How
did you get that mysterious scar of yours?”

Her eyes lit up, on either side of the scar. It really was a thing to look at.

“Lightning bolt,” she told me. “I was standing under a tree during a lightning storm—you know how they tell you never to do that?—and
I got struck.” She made a slicing motion with her non-apple-holding hand. “
Boom!
I was out cold for an entire hour. When I woke up, I had this scar.”

I focused on my sandwich. A glop of tuna was threatening to fall onto my cardboard tray. I caught it with my tongue. “Were you all by yourself when it happened?” I asked as I chewed. Fallon nodded. “Then how do you know how long you were out for?”

“Good point,” she said. She took another bite of apple and chewed slowly. Swallowed. “I'll work on that.”

“Don't you ever talk about anything else?” I wondered. I'd been thinking about it, and actually I was pretty sure that Fallon Little wasn't friendless. She wasn't one of the loner kids like Ian Holt, who spent every recess huddled in a corner behind the handball court playing Connect Four by himself. Or even like Mindy Fitzgibbons, who made best friends with the librarian and hung out with her every day for all of elementary school. In fact—not that I'd spent a lot of time paying attention to Fallon, but just on remembering—it seemed like she always had someone to sit with at lunch, always had someone to partner with on projects. But I was pretty sure it was always someone different.

I was starting to figure out why.

“Like what?” Fallon asked. “What else is there to talk about?”

“I don't know,” I said. “
Anything.
Baseball. The Dodgers. How about that?”

She took another bite of her apple.

“Have you seen
Field of Dreams
?” Fallon asked me.

Well. I didn't see
that
coming.

“
Field of Dreams
?” I said.

“Yeah. It's a movie. About baseball. This farmer guy hears this weird voice and decides to make a baseball field, and then all these old baseball players who are, like, dead or whatever, come play baseball.”

“I know what it's about,” I told her.

“But you've never seen it?”

“I saw part of it.” I didn't want to tell Fallon that my mom had been trying to get me to watch it forever, because she said it was the best baseball movie of all time, but when she first tried to make me watch it when I was six, I got freaked out by all the creepy whispering—“
If you build it
 . . .”—and I screamed until she turned the TV off.

“You should watch
all
of it,” Fallon said. “If you like baseball. Or
The Sandlot.
Have you ever seen
The Sandlot
?”

“No.” Talking baseball movies was way better than weird scar stories, but I was still trying to figure out which was worse, eating lunch with Fallon or starving in a bathroom stall.

“I have both of them,” Fallon said. “You could come over and watch with me sometime.”

I choked on the last of my sandwich when she said that.

“You okay, Trent?” she asked. She looked like she was about to start giving me the Heimlich, right there in the cafeteria, so I nodded and downed some apple juice until she seemed to believe I wasn't going to die. “Well, what do you think? Want to come over sometime?”

I was still coughing a little bit, so luckily I didn't have to answer right away.

Here's what I knew for sure: Fallon wasn't asking me over to her house, as, like, a
date
or anything. I'd seen the way girls acted when they liked boys that way (heck, hang out with Aaron for more than three seconds and you'd see plenty of it), and that wasn't the way Fallon seemed to be acting.

She seemed, if I really thought hard about it, like she wanted to be my friend.

But here's the thing I couldn't figure out: Why
me
? Out of all the kids at Cedar Haven Middle, why me? I wasn't particularly funny, or nice, even, and I was good at sports, but Fallon didn't seem to care so much about that.

“Maybe,” I told her. “Probably not.”

Fallon nodded as she took another bite of her apple, like that was exactly the answer she expected. “Okay,” she said. And she grinned, apple flecks showing in her mouth. “Then how 'bout you draw me a picture?”

•   •   •

I thought about breaking another one of Ms. Emerson's plants, just to get detention, but I figured two phone calls in one week might be too much for my mom. Also, the wrinkled old crone would probably just kill me instead. (I'd been ignoring her, mostly, in class. Not answering questions, scribbling thoughts instead of doing homework, that sort of thing. You could tell the wrinkled old crone hated me back, because she didn't seem to mind so much about the ignoring.)

Anyway, there were other ways to miss dinner.

First I went to the Episcopal church on Summit Avenue, because
they had the best parking lot for practicing wheelies. Then I biked down Bufflehead Lane (mostly because I really liked the word
bufflehead
) and wound my way in and around the fallen leaves on the street, until an old lady honked her horn at me and told me to stop being a nuisance on her block. Then I biked past the high school, where someone had set up a collection of lawn gnomes from who knows where on the front lawn. After a while I wandered over to Knickerbocker, although I pedaled really fast as I passed the Richardses' house. I soared down Maple Hill, closing my eyes, for just a second, as I went. There was just enough wind pushing me back against the road that between the pushing and the soaring, I could almost believe I was flying.

Floating.

Two tacos, that's what I had for dinner. They were two for five dollars if you got them from the take-out window of Rosalita's. Mom and I picked food up there a lot when we were working late at Kitch'N'Thingz, because it was right down the block, and Marjorie, who ran the window, was always really nice.

“Nothing for your mother?” she asked when she handed me the bag.

I shook my head, sliding five dollars from my shift last weekend across the wood counter. “She might come by later,” I said. Which, then, I wished I hadn't said, because maybe it would come true and Mom
would
go over, and then Marjorie would tell her she saw me, and then Mom would be mad that I wasn't having dinner with my dad like I was supposed to on Wednesday nights. But I figured there was no fixing it now. I waited until Marjorie was busy at the fryer, and I
turned left instead of right, the way I would normally go to get back to the store. And I hopped back on my bike and headed to the park.

It wasn't the worst, eating delicious tacos on a bench in the park. Even if I was all by myself. And it was a little chilly, too, especially since I was just in my sweatshirt and jeans.

Friday I'd have to remember to wear a jacket or something.

I guess I did a real good job with the wandering, because Aaron and Doug were already there by the time I got home. Aaron slugged me in the arm and called me an idiot, and said that he was done—“absolutely
done
”—covering for me with Mom and Dad, and if I was going to miss dinner one more time, I was going to have to explain it myself.

He didn't say anything about Dad being super sad to miss me or anything, so I could figure out how that went.

Mom had to work late, so it was just me and Aaron watching the game—Padres again. Although you could hardly call what Aaron was doing “watching,” because he had his head half buried in his trigonometry book the whole time. Normally Aaron was nearly as fanatical about baseball as Mom, but I didn't bother asking why he didn't feel like watching, because knowing Aaron, he'd only use the opportunity to lecture me about responsibility or something. Doug didn't care so much about baseball. You could tell he didn't care because he spent most of the first inning poking me in the back, saying he needed to talk to me “in private.” He was working on another prank, obviously.

“Doug, quit it,” I told him. “I'm trying to watch the game.”

Doug finally stalked off until Aaron's cell phone rang and Doug
snatched it off the table before Aaron could get it and immediately started gushing like a baby.
“Aaaaaarooooon,”
he said, like our brother's name was a million syllables long. “It's a
giiiiiiiiiiiirl
calling you. Who's
Clariiiiiiiise
?”

Aaron hopped off the back of the couch, his trigonometry book tumbling to the floor, and grabbed the phone away from Doug. “Give me that.” He went to his room to take the call, and Doug plopped into Aaron's seat beside me.

“You think Aaron has a girlfriend?” Doug asked me.

I shrugged.

“You gotta hear my prank,” Doug said. And I couldn't really argue, because it was a commercial anyway.

“Fine,” I said. “Shoot.”

“Okay.” Doug was bouncing already, even sitting down. “Rebecca has a hamster, right? So what if I borrowed it, and me and her and Annie let it loose in Aaron's room, and then while he was sleeping, it would, like, nibble at his toes? It would totally freak him out.” I guess he saw me rolling my eyes, because he said, “What? You don't think that's good?”

“That's a horrible prank, Doug. No way will Rebecca let you borrow her hamster. And anyway, it would just get lost or end up in the toilet or something, and then Rebecca would hate you.”

Doug stuck his lip out, pouting. But I guess he couldn't really argue with me. “You got any better ideas?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

I did. I had plenty of good prank ideas. Hiding all of Aaron's underwear. Tying his doorknob to the bathroom across the hall, so
he couldn't get out of his room. Reprogramming his voice mail to something embarrassing. I was full of ideas. And I hadn't done a good prank in a long time.

But if I told Doug any of those things, he'd just want to do them with
his
friends. With
Annie.

“The game's back on,” I told Doug. And he stuck his lip out again like a little baby, but really, what did I care?