The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin (7 page)

Who am I kidding? Only Devon Smiley will even register my absence, and he is probably too busy getting his nipples twisted in the locker room by D. JONKER. Jonker has really stepped up his harassment of Devon lately for some reason.

Right now it all seems so far away: gym class, Devon’s nipples, Pat, Leigha, Principal Kroener, Fatzy McFatpants.

Suddenly I feel a strong presence. It’s hard to explain, but deaf people definitely sense things. I don’t hear it exactly, but maybe I smell it? Smell the sound waves? Taste the presence on the air? Something is here, and it is getting closer.

In the split second before I jump up and open my eyes, I have several thoughts: Is it Yankowski tracking me down? Or Travis Bickerstokes? Is he going to beat me senseless for getting him in trouble? Or maybe—and this seems the most likely option, even here in my moment of Walden-like peace—I am to be bothered by Devon Freaking Smiley. Odd thing is, I am quite happy at that thought. Just not in a romantic way.

When I open my eyes
, it’s like when you think that thing on your plate is a cube of cheese and then you bite it and you find out it’s actually zucchini. At first your tongue is just totally baffled, and it takes a while for your brain to adjust its preconception to the new reality.

It is a dog—a goofy black-and-white long-haired mutt with a mouth that turns upward into a floppy smile. He ambles over to me like we are old friends. Like it is the most natural thing in the world. And this is so kind that it almost makes me want to cry.

I want to take him home and give him a bath and a great name (maybe FFD, for Friendly Forest Dog, or just Ace because that’s a cool cani-name). I’d let him sleep in my room and lick my face, and we’d be best friends. I immediately feel sad, though, even as Ace (he is definitely an Ace) happily wags his
tail and stares at me like there is no one else in the world so perfect. I can’t keep him. Mom hates dogs. She isn’t crazy about cats either. I guess it’s the fur or the whole “I don’t need another mouth to feed” thing. The only pets I ever had were goldfish, which aren’t that fun and also have a bad habit of dying from neglect.

“Well, at least you can keep me company on the walk home,” I tell Ace, realizing as I do that it is maybe sort of weird to sign to a dog. I have to get home before Mom and Dad but not too early, what with our neighborhood spy (and my love interest), eight-hundred-year-old Mrs. Finkelstein, keeping watch. Ace follows me. The walk home is bleak and strange. Most of our city is as bland and modern as anywhere else in America, filled with Taco Bells and chemical plants (note: coincidence?), but the walking route I take from school to home shows slices of the past. Half-falling-down buildings—relics of the coal-mining era—are still visible. They hang incongruously in the shadows above the shining new construction, receding into the background. Like ghosts.

I walk past a rusty bridge that retreats into the woods for a few hundred yards, then gets swallowed up by trees and the side of the mountain. A bridge to nowhere is probably symbolic of something in this town, of my life maybe. I read the graffiti that marks the bridge’s underbelly. Mostly old band names: Pantera, Metallica, Fugazi, Black Sabbath. I feel very damn sad. There are also declarations of love: “MS + SA.” “Kelly is hot.” “PC + LP.” I feel even sadder. I walk slower and slower, past the old abandoned buildings and slightly surreal
constructions sticking out of the scarred earth. FFD follows alongside, stopping from time to time to whiz on the curb or chew on a stick.

“Do not do that in the basement,” I sign, realizing that I have made some sort of decision about this dog. He perks his head in that angle dogs do when they are trying to understand. One ear standing straight up and the other flopped over. Then I swear he gives me a little nod. Does this dog know sign language? Or, more importantly, can I
convince
people that he knows sign language? I can pretend that he’s my service dog and use it as an excuse to bring him everywhere. He can come to class with me and alert me to when the bell rings. Maybe he can give me a secret signal if one of my farts is audible or I’m chewing too loud in the caf.

I smack my leg, telling him to hurry up. It’s getting late, and he’s taking another whiz. “Come see your new home,” I sign.

I make it home
before the parents. At our happy Halpin dinner, I’m a little sweaty and quite a bit nervous, what with having just smuggled a dog into the basement. My biggest concern? Fear that he’s going to start barking. I gave Ace a leftover pork chop I found in the fridge (now, that’s love), hoping it would keep him busy. I also brushed all the hair off me and look pretty spiffy. So far, so good. Mom is sitting at the table, not noticing anything. Dad, it seems, isn’t joining us. I start wondering: If they get a divorce, who would I live with? Will we sell the house? Who will take me to my Little League games and dance recitals? Will one of them feel guilty enough to buy me a car?

Dad is in the garage, apparently intent on spending the entire night out there. He never tinkers with cars or builds shelves like some dads do. As far as I know, he just stares at the wall and
listens to his old radio—not exactly a hobby rife with father-son bonding opportunities. Fine with me—I like a quiet meal. That’s a joke. I do like meals, though. No joke. Mom is a master in the kitchen. Maybe if she wasn’t so gifted, I’d be a thin and dashing young swimming star or something? Perhaps not. But, oh boy, she sure can cook: pies on a nightly basis, Polish delicacies like pierogi and halupki. (Halpin is a British name, I think, but she was a Kowalski before she got hitched to Ken.) On this night, however, the meal is frozen pizza, frozen peas, and frozen garlic bread. It’s like a school lunch. I half expect Purple Phimmul to plop in the seat across the dining room table and start yelling about credit limits and shopping, dammit.

“How was school today?” Mom asks like always, a simple, friendly question that has surprisingly complicated answers. Like every kid throughout the history of the world, I answer, “Fine.” A total lie.

“Our math teacher was out,” I decide to tell her, thinking it is a safe topic. “We did not have to do any math. That was nice.”

“Why do you hate math all of a sudden?” she asks. “You used to be very good at it. Remember when you won that math challenge at Camp Arrowhead? Are you going to keep up your streak of getting A’s?”

I should have known better.

“We haven’t even had a test yet. But I’ll probably fail.”

Why did I say that?

“Do you want me to get out your report cards?” she says, signing while holding a little piece of pizza in her fingers. “Remind you of all the A’s you got in math?” Hmm … Seems
Mom’s not in a joking mood. But I point to the little bit of pizza in her hand anyway and say, “You should never talk with your hands full.” The first time I made this joke, she laughed so hard that she shot soda out of her nose. Granted, I was eight years old then, a cute little butterball cutup, but it is still one of our favorite lines. No reaction tonight, though.

The conversation is clearly going to come around to whether I should really be in mainstream ed this year. Whether I am making progress with the new hearing devices. Whether the headaches have come back.

So what I say is: “Sure, Mom. I would love nothing more than to sit here and look at my old report cards. Exactly the ideal night for a sixteen-year-old boy.” And then I think about throwing my peas at her, which should produce a fine dramatic effect. But I just get up and storm off to my room. Then I come right back in, grab another piece of pizza, and storm off again.

Pizza in one hand and my mouse in the other, I don’t feel exactly good about what I said to her. Online I select
(not
click) a few bookmarked message boards to see if anyone has taken any of my recent bait. Nope.

The pizza is already gone, and the Internet is letting me down as a source of happiness and renewal. What’s a fat kid to do? Go for a jog? An instant message pops up.

My fingers find their way back to the mouse, then back to the browser icon, then back to another bookmark. They are moving as if on their own toward a page I had been trying to quit like a bad habit. I am in a dysfunctional relationship with someone who doesn’t even know me.

Leigha’s Web page depresses me, but I still visit it. The first thing about her page that makes me sad: you can’t see any of the good pictures unless you are her friend, and even though I’ve tried under about eight different fake profiles to get her to accept my friend request, she never has.

According to her profile, “Music is the sound track to my life.” This is not that deep of a thought, because what else is going to be the sound track to your life? Shut up, Will. Do not make fun of lovely Leigha Pennington. She has very particular tastes and expresses a particular disdain for emo, which apparently is a type of rock or something? (I’m not a big music aficionado.)

Mainly, I just look at her beautiful profile pic. She is wearing jeans and a plain white sleeveless shirt, hair falling down in soft ringlets over her ears. She is smiling a huge smile and hugging a floppy-eared black dog. If you look briefly at the picture, you might think she is happy. But if you look at it for a few minutes (or an hour or two, or maybe a few hundred thousand
hours), something else becomes clear. There is a melancholy around her eyes that the world misses, that no one else can see. Except me?

A lyric quoted underneath the pic says, “No one hears the last note of the song / No one appreciates what you have till you’re gone. / I’m alone even more than most / An empty shell / A shadow of a ghost.” I just know that all she needs is someone to talk to and the weight would be lifted. And since I am the only one who knows it exists, I am the perfect choice. But I can’t talk to her, and so we are both doomed, two parallel planets whose orbits will never cross.

I move over to the “friends” area, and I find myself face to face with the unsettling gaze of Purple Phimmul. I dive in. Purple’s Web page is a strange experience. At school she’s this fascinating foreign object. Online she turns out to be pretty blunt, sharing her life history and inner thoughts with anyone interested in clicking (uh, selecting). They always teach you about online safety and how you shouldn’t make your location clear, but Purple is posing right in front of her house, a famous old mansion that anybody who’s ever been to town can locate in two seconds.

On Purple’s page, the Phimmul blog has some interesting tidbits.

There are a bunch of pictures, some in that new dress she got. The caption says something about being a queen at P.C.’s party. She looks happy enough, if a little flabby. Why is she so happy? She’s not skinny or pretty—I guess rich trumps all that. Am I envious of the weirdly confident Purple? I mean, yeah, I’d like to be rich. But it’s more than that. She cruises around the whole world like it’s her living room. I can pretend to fit in (barely), but do I ever belong? Does she even know what it feels like
not
to belong?

I stare at the pictures. She’s so fully Purple. You have to give her that. I am too embarrassed to have any pictures online. I even try to get out of family pictures. But there is something very similar about us. And her family is from Pennsylvania too?

I am curious (aka nerdy) enough to do a search on her mansion. There is a local history Web site about it with pictures of her family. One of her ancestors, named Andy Phimmul, catches my eye because he has a big, fancy mustache and an ancient hearing aid. They were called ear trumpets back then. It looks like a small tuba sticking out of his smiling face.

OK, it’s getting late. Back to Leigha. Should I send her a message? Maybe I could just reach out to her under a fake
name. Just so she knows somebody knows. Or maybe—and here’s a wild thought—I could send her a message as … myself?

I decide to write it by hand because there is no “save draft” option on this site. I get out my notebook and start composing:

I rip out this page and throw it away. How about … acronyms!

I rip this page out too. I can’t even get the first few words out without coming off as totally lame.

Better.

This too is laid to rest in the wastebasket on top of a pizza-smeared napkin. Is this an impossible mountain I can never climb? And then it comes to me in a flash. A friendly but slightly romantic message that will hit all the right notes, if you will. It will just require that rarest of Halpin emotions: honesty. So I write without really thinking. It is like my hand is moving on its own, channeling these cosmic words: