Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie (20 page)

I listened as he talked about viewpoint for the rest of the period. It was all pretty interesting. I’d found that with some really good books, I had a hard time remembering what viewpoint they used.

As I was leaving class, Mr. Franka waved me up to his desk. “I’ll need your decision before the end of the month. How about you let me know by the twenty-fifth?”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.” As I spoke those words, my mind searched for any clue to what he was talking about. I desperately needed a dose of omniscience, but his thoughts remained his own. Maybe if I could get him to talk some more, I’d get a hint. “You sure you don’t need it earlier?”

“No. That will give me plenty of time to gather the materials.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Still no real clue. “So, the twenty-fifth? Sure. I’ll make a note.” I hovered there, hoping he’d say something else.

When he didn’t, I headed for the door. I was almost out of the room when he said, “Scott?”

“Yeah?”

He pointed to the wall above the blackboard. I saw a poster that said
april is national poetry month
. I’d completely forgotten that I was supposed to come up with our topic for that month.

“You didn’t forget, did you?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

Thank goodness he wasn’t omniscient either.

The school finally found a new Spanish teacher. Ms. Phong seemed very nice. She smiled a lot. We communicated with gestures since she didn’t appear to understand English.

Even so, I was happy to see her because I was getting tired
of doing calisthenics in class and hearing Mr. Cravutto shout, “Suck it up,
bambinos
.”

Nobody had the guts to tell him that
bambinos
wasn’t Spanish.

I went to the town library after school and spent a couple hours trying to figure out what we should study in English next month. We’d already covered everything I could think of.

On the way home, I stopped at the corner store to look at magazines. As I browsed through the rack of comic books, I got a great idea, but I figured there was no way Mr. Franka would go for it.

I didn’t get back to see Mouth until the end of the week. He’d finally healed enough to talk.

“Hi,” he said when I walked in.

That’s the shortest sentence you’ve ever uttered
, I thought. Damn. Look at me. I was still making jokes. I truly sucked.

He didn’t talk much. His voice was kind of raspy. Maybe it hurt. Or maybe he was all talked out. I wanted to ask him
Why
? Instead, I said, “You feeling okay?”

He shrugged. “I guess.”

I waited for him to say more. But he just lay there, looking kind of spacey. Maybe they had him on some kind of drugs. But I had to know. “Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Why not …?”

“Because you can’t,” I said. “It’s cheating, Mouth. That’s what it is. Cutting in line. Or cutting out of line. You can’t do that. You’ve got to stick with it.” I stopped. In my ears, my voice was starting to take on the meaningless drone of Mr.
Cravutto when he urged us to dig deep and stick it out for another lap.
Come on, babies, suck it up. Hang in there. Pump those legs, you gutless losers. Keep it going
.

“Nobody likes me,” Mouth said.

I didn’t bother replying with the obvious lie.
Oh, don’t say that—you’ve got tons of friends
. “Nobody likes me, either,” I said. “I cope.”

He shook his head. “Lots of people like you.”

“Right. Sure.” I wasn’t there to argue with him. But he knew as well as I did that if I threw a party for all my friends, we could fit in a phone booth and still have room for pony rides and a moon bounce. Mitch was little more than a memory. Patrick was in Texas, and on his way to Japan. Kyle spent all his time with the wrestlers, even though the season was over. I hoped we were still friends, but I didn’t really know. According to the numbering system, I was presently a member of the Zero Musketeers.

I dropped down into the chair next to Mouth’s bed. “Let’s face it—with a few exceptions, nobody likes anybody.”

He nodded.

That was a grim statement. And I didn’t really believe it. I mean, I hoped that deep in my heart I didn’t believe it. Half the time, I didn’t know what I believed. But at least this got Mouth thinking about how his loneliness, or whatever it was that drove him too far, wasn’t unique. We all suffered. And I guess we all had good times, too. Man—if every person who ever felt lonely killed himself, the world would be littered with corpses. And far lonelier.

When I was getting up to leave, I finally asked him the question that had been haunting me. “You remember the dance?”

Mouth nodded.

“You weren’t going to ask any girls to dance. But I talked you into it.” I paused, trying to find the right words. “Did that have anything to do with … what happened …?”

He shook his head. “No way. You were being nice. Nobody else in the whole school cared at all.”

“So I didn’t make you do anything?”

“I made myself do it,” he said.

I nodded and headed out of the room. When I reached the hallway, Mouth called after me, “Scottie.”

“What?”

“Cheer up.”

“I’ll try.”

Even if Mouth said it wasn’t my fault, I still felt that everyone in the school shared the blame. All of us had done our part to crush him. Monday morning, when I got in the car with Wesley, I decided to speak up.

“You shouldn’t take people’s lunch money,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Well, how’d you like it if someone took your money?”

He laughed. “Fat chance.”

“Imagine if you weren’t very strong?”

He frowned for a couple seconds, then shook his head. “I can’t imagine that.”

I searched for some way to get him to understand. “You have any little brothers?”

“Nope.”

“What if you had a little brother? Think how he’d feel if someone took his money.”

“I’d kick the guy’s butt.”

“Sure you would, after you found out. But think how your little brother would feel while it was happening.”

He was quiet for the rest of the ride. But when we pulled into the parking lot, he said, “I guess it would kind of suck.”

“It would definitely suck.”

I hoped this was a sign that the school had just become a bit less stressful for the small and the weak.

By then, the jokes had pretty much stopped. It was like nearly everyone had forgotten about Mouth. Or like he’d never even existed. In a way, as far as Zenger High was concerned, I guess he’d succeeded in dying.

I wondered how small a ripple I’d leave if I vanished.

A couple days later, I got a letter from him. He thanked me for being such a good friend, which made me feel really rotten. He wouldn’t be coming back. His parents were sending him to a different school.

When I told Lee about the letter, she said I should feel good that Mouth took the trouble to write to me.

“But I never liked him,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You were nice to him. At least, nicer than most of the kids. Right?”

“I guess.”

“So what’s harder, being nice to someone you like or being nice to someone you don’t like?”

I saw what she meant, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

School dances
Dentist appointments
Hernia tests
Award shows
Chicken goulash in the cafeteria

• • •

I spent another week looking for ideas for English class. Still no luck. The deadline had arrived. I went up to see Mr. Franka at his desk before class.

“So, whatcha got, Scott? Something hot?” He flashed a grin to let me know he was aware of the painful way he’d phrased the question.

Two words popped out of the vacuum created by my panic. “Comic books.” I backed up a step, expecting a lecture on taking things seriously.

Mr. Franka glanced over at the cabinets where he kept the books. “Good choice.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “At least I won’t have to scrounge around and dig up materials. I was afraid you’d pick something like advertising slogans or bumper stickers.”

“You’d let us study stuff like that?”

“If it’s written in English, we can study it. Even knock-knock jokes are worth studying. Not to mention shaggy-dog stories. But I like your choice. Besides, we’ll be doing slogans for a day or two next month.”

I wandered back to my desk. On the way, I thought up a dozen other things I could have suggested. But I was happy we were doing comics.

The center on the basketball team, Terry, said hi to me in the hall when he went by. He probably had me mixed up with someone else. But maybe I looked familiar to him since I’d gone to almost all the games last season. I’d never received a nod from so far above my head.

Some of the baseball players had started saying hi to me, too. I wondered whether it was because I’d written about how well the team was doing. Even better, this girl on the track team smiled at me. I was actually having fun with the articles. Not like before, where I did all that crazy stuff for football. That was fun, too, though in a different way. Back then, I was trying as hard as I could to avoid writing a sports story. Now I was trying to write the best sports story possible.

Last week, I’d written about how the other team couldn’t seem to get warmed up. When I was doing my rewrite, I changed it to:
Their engine was running but it kept sputtering, like a lawn mower tackling the first grass of the season
. Maybe that was a bit much, but I felt pretty good about it.

As fun as it all was, I was looking forward to a break. Wednesday was a half day. After that, no school for a week. No games to cover, either. There were only three things I wanted to do—sleep, nap, and doze.

In other news, Ms. Phong was gone.
Ahhhdyos nguchachos
. Mr. Cravutto was back. We took two breaks for push-ups.

t
hanks to Scott, we’ll be studying comic books this month.” Mr. Franka’s announcement was greeted with cheers. Then he said, “But first, we’re going to read
about
comic books. So we’re going to start out with a marvelous volume called
Understanding Comics
.”

As he walked over to the cabinet where he kept textbooks, I could feel the mood change in the room. I knew everyone was glaring at me. It could have gotten ugly. But the book Mr. Franka passed out was written like a comic itself. How cool was that? I survived the class without being beaten to death by an angry mob hurling some boring textbook at me.

Naturally, my escape from death was balanced the next day by a foolhardy plunge toward destruction. I was cruising with Wesley after school. All of a sudden he swore and pulled to the curb. There were three guys on the sidewalk, hanging out by the mini-mart on Dwyer Street.

“They’ve been ducking me for weeks,” Wesley said. He hopped out of the car and walked toward them. “Pay up.”

The guy in the middle said, “What if we don’t feel like it?”

“You want to find out?”

I had no idea what this was all about—other than money. I don’t know why they owed him. All I knew was I couldn’t sit there. It was three against one. So I got out of the car and joined Wesley. Now it was three against one and a half. Actually, I knew one other thing. I knew I was terrified.

The three guys barely glanced at me. But the guy in the middle dug into his pocket and pulled out a couple twenties, which he handed to Wesley.

We went back to the car. I went back to breathing.