Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie (3 page)

At the end of the period, Mr. Franka wrote our homework on the board and passed out a vocabulary book. One class—three books. This was not a good sign.

There was a dash for the door when the bell rang. The hall was jammed with freshmen walking in circles, ellipses, zigzags, and other patterns that marked us as clueless members of the lost generation. Or lost members of the clueless generation.

I saw Patrick in study hall, but the teacher wouldn’t let us talk. For some reason, he thought we should be studying.

We made color charts in art class, which was pretty interesting. On the way out, Ms. Savitch gave us a photocopy of an article about Van Gogh. I was beginning to calculate my reading load by the pound instead of the page. But that was okay. I could handle it.

i
met up with the guys at lunch. I got there late because the cafeteria is not only really far from my art class, but also amazingly well hidden. I probably never would have found it if I hadn’t detected the unique aroma of burned hair, rotting peaches, and cinnamon drifting out the door. Oh—and a subtle hint of butterscotch pudding.

“How’s it going?” I asked. At least this part felt familiar. We’d sat together through middle school. Even the round tables were the same. And the wobbly plastic chairs.

“It’s going fine,” Kyle said.

Patrick nodded. “Yup. As long as you stay out of the way of the seniors, it’s okay. Except for getting lost.”

“Yeah, this place is like a tesseract,” I said.

Three pairs of eyes stared at me.

“You know. A tesseract. From
A Wrinkle in Time
.”

The stares were joined by head shakes.

“A cube twisted into another dimension,” I said.

Head shakes gave way to sighs. Eyes rolled toward the ceiling. Shrugging shoulders twisted into other dimensions.

“Never mind.”

“You’re such a mutant,” Kyle said.

“Yeah, but he’s our very own mutant,” Patrick said. “All the other kids are jealous.”

I reached across the table and flipped open Patrick’s assignment book. There was nothing on the page except some doodles. “No homework?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Patrick said. “It’s the first day.”

I glanced down and noticed Mitch’s schedule. Most of the classes had
T.P
. next to them. “What’s
T.P
.?” I asked.

“Toilet paper,” Kyle said. “If you don’t know that, you’d better run home and change your underwear.”

“Tech prep,” Patrick said. “Isn’t that what you have?”

“Nope.” So that explained why they weren’t in my classes. I was dying to ask if they’d noticed Julia, but I didn’t want them to think I was obsessed with her or anything. So I sat and listened while they made fun of their teachers.

Patrick was definitely right about avoiding seniors. On the way out of the cafeteria, this big guy knocked my books from under my arm. He grinned and said, “Oops. Must suck to be a freshman.” Then he strutted away.

As I was grabbing my stuff, and earning a couple kicks in the rear from passing kids, Kyle sprinted ahead and knocked the guy’s books out from under his arm. “Oops to you, too,” Kyle said when the guy spun around. “Must suck to lose teeth.”

The guy stared at him for a moment. Kyle stared back. Then the guy snatched his books from the floor and walked off.

“Hey, thanks, but you didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“No one messes with my friends,” Kyle said. He’d broken his nose way back in first grade. It had healed kind of crooked, which made him look tough. Everyone figured he liked to fight. The truth is, he broke it falling off a rocking horse. But that didn’t matter. Once you had a reputation, good or bad, it stayed with you.

On the way to my next class, I got relieved of my “spare change” by a guy who could work as a debt collector for the Mob. I was glad Kyle wasn’t around to try to help me. He would have gotten killed. Though I’d bet Bobby could have taken the guy.

My little miscommunication with
tesseract
was nothing compared to the language barrier that greeted me in my next class. I’d picked Spanish for my foreign language because I figured it would be easier than French or German. It seemed like a great idea until the period started.

The teacher, Ms. de Gaulle, opened her mouth and made some sounds that sort of resembled a sentence, though none of it contained any meaning. We all looked at one another and shrugged. That didn’t seem to bother her. She smiled and repeated the sentence.

Everyone stared at her.

She spoke again. And again. Eventually, we figured out that we were supposed to repeat what she said. That seemed to make her happy. It reminded me of when I was little and I used to dream up magic spells.
Abra-ca-dumbo. Hocus mucus. Presto squisho
.

During the rest of the day, I got lost three more times, yelled at twice, and nearly trampled when I headed up a flight of stairs while everyone else on the planet was racing down. My last class was really far from my locker, which was really far from the parking lot. I almost missed the bus. By the time I left Zenger High, my head was stuffed with a jumble of facts and figures, and my backpack weighed eighty-five pounds. Between my homework and a couple comments I couldn’t resist adding, I’d already filled a page in my assignment book. At least it would be a short week, since school had started on a Wednesday. If this had been a Monday, I think I would have just quit right then and joined the army.

“Man, high school is awesome,” Mouth said when we got on the bus. He looked like he’d been forced through a meat grinder at least twice. His clothes were rumpled, his backpack had footprints on it, and one of his shoelaces was missing. But he seemed happy.

I tuned him out as he launched into more details about his awesome day.

m
om was in the kitchen when I got home from school. I thought she was looking through a photo album, but when I got closer I saw it was wallpaper samples.

“You redecorating?” I asked.

She looked up and said, “Hi, hon. How was school?”

“Fine.” The page she’d stopped at had a pattern with little rocking horses on it. “Those things are dangerous,” I said.

She flipped the book closed. “Would you like a snack?”

“Maybe in a bit. I got a ton of stuff to do.” I headed upstairs to face my homework.

I read the story Mr. Franka had assigned for English. It was really good. And creepy enough to give me hope that English would be fun this year. Then I read the article about Van Gogh, which was also pretty interesting, and also sort of creepy in its own way. The vocabulary list wasn’t a problem, since I already knew all but one of the words. I tried to decide what to do next, but none of it looked like much fun, so I read a couple more stories from the book. By then, it was time for dinner. Mom had roasted a chicken, with stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy. I figured I could get everything done easily enough after we ate.

“How was school?” Dad asked. He’d just gotten home from work, but had already changed out of his button-down shirt. He runs the service department for Linwood Mercedes over in Allentown. He’d rather work on cars than boss around the guys who do the work, and he’d really rather work on classic American muscle cars than hugely expensive luxury vehicles, but the offer was too good to refuse. Besides, if he saves up enough, he can open his own garage someday and get to do what he really wants.

“School was fine.” I grabbed the gravy and swamped my chicken.

Dad looked at Mom. “Did you …?”

Mom shook her head.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” they both said. Too loudly, and too quickly.

I figured I should let it drop. But I spotted the newspaper over on the counter by the microwave. I went over, lifted it up, and stared at what lay beneath. Two magazines. I spread them out.

No alien Elvises. No six-legged cows. Something much scarier. The first magazine had a smiling baby on the cover. The other showed a smiling woman who looked like she was smuggling a watermelon under her dress. I spun back to face my parents. “Did Bobby get some girl pregnant?” I wasn’t ready to be an uncle. And Bobby sure wasn’t ready to be a dad.

Another perfect chorus from my parents. “No!”

“Then who …?” I didn’t even need to finish the question. Mom’s face broadcast the answer.

“We just found out,” Dad said. “Dr. Rudrick wanted your mom to take this medicine for her headache, but he needed to make sure she wasn’t pregnant first. As it turned out, she was.”

A baby …

I staggered back to the table. This was so huge, I couldn’t even grasp the full meaning. It was like trying to inhale all the air in a beach ball.

Mom reached out and ruffled my hair. “Now don’t you worry. You’re still my little boy.”

A baby …

Images flashed through my mind, like a multimedia video from hell. I saw the whole house filled from floor to ceiling with dirty diapers. And puddles of baby puke. Clouds of scented talcum powder drifted through the scene like horror-movie fog. All to the background music of constant crying.

“Quite a surprise, isn’t it?” Dad said.

“Yup.”

“We wanted to wait a while before we told you,” he said, “but I guess you suspected something was going on.”

“So now you know our little secret,” Mom said. “We’re thinking Sean for a boy, and Emily for a girl.” She patted her stomach. “Hard to believe there’s a tiny life growing in there.”

Hard to believe.

“It’s a bit of a surprise for all of us,” Dad said.

“But a good surprise,” Mom said. “I’m glad you know.”

They started to eat. Dad worked his way through three big servings of chicken, with lots of gravy. At six-feet-four, he needs huge quantities of fuel to keep going. Mom nibbled one slice of meat and a teaspoon of stuffing.

I kept watching them, as if I could lock away this scene somehow. Keep things the way they were. And I kept looking at Mom, trying to believe that a life was forming inside of her. It had to be some kind of mistake.

Two minutes later, Mom dropped her fork and dashed off. I heard the bathroom door slam shut. A moment after that, I heard the sound of a slice of meat and a teaspoon of stuffing going the wrong way. And I’d been worried about baby puke.

“Think she’s okay?” I asked Dad.

“Yeah. It’s morning sickness.”

“In the evening?”

Dad shrugged. “Whoever named it screwed up. I’ll be back in a second.” He headed off to the bathroom.

Mom seemed fine when she and Dad returned, but my appetite was shot. Dad was pretty much finished, too. “Just in time for the sports news,” he said after we’d cleared the table. “Join me?”

“Great.”

“Do you have any homework?” Mom asked.

“Not a lot. I can finish it after this.” I followed Dad into the living room. I kept looking at him. He kept looking at me. But not at the same time. We took turns. And we didn’t talk about it. Except for two brief conversations.

“Does Bobby know?”

“Not yet. Guess we’d better tell him.”

And later:

“Where’s it going to sleep?”

“We’re turning the spare room into a nursery.”

“What about the slot cars? I thought we were going to put a track in there.”

“I guess that’ll have to wait.”

I had a feeling that wasn’t the only unhappy change headed my way. I watched the sports news and part of a movie with Dad, then went up to my room and sprawled out on my bed.

Oh

my

God.

Them having a baby was as outrageous as me becoming a father. Not that there was any danger of that happening right now. Everything was fine the way it was. The way it had always been. Bobby was the older brother. I was the younger brother.

I sat up as that sank in.
Older brother
. I was going to be an older brother. What did that mean?

Protector. Teacher. Hero. Me? I’d barely survived my first day of school.

I was brought back to reality by a light tap on my door. Dad popped his head in and asked, “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” It was a harmless lie.

He nodded and left.

Maybe I should have asked him if he was okay. This had to be a huge shock for him. But he would probably have lied, too. That’s what guys do. If someone cut my head off, the last words whistling through my throat as my face plunged toward the floor would be, “I’m fine.”

I said it again, to see if there was any truth at all in those words. Hard to know. It’s just as easy to lie to yourself as it is to lie to other people. Maybe easier.

I’m fine. School will be easy. I’m not worried about anything. I’m happy for Mom. It sure will be wonderful to have a baby around the house
.

I got back to work. But my thoughts kept drifting. Babies. Babies. Julia. Babies. Julia. If I could have just one date with her, I’d never want anything again. One date, and I’d be happy. Or if I could even just hang out with her, talking about stories and books. That would be so great.

I tried calling Bobby around nine. He’d had his first girlfriend in seventh grade. And his second. And his third. If anyone could give me a couple tips, it would be him.