The Falls

 

 

 

PUFFIN CANADA

 

 

THE FALLS

 

ERIC WALTERS
is the highly acclaimed and bestselling author of over fifty novels for children and young adults. His novels have won the Silver Birch Award three times and the Red Maple Award twice, as well as numerous other prizes, including the White Pine, Snow Willow, Tiny Torgi, Ruth Schwartz, and IODE Violet Downey Book Awards, and have received honours from the Canadian Library Association Book Awards, The Children's Book Centre, and UNESCO's international award for Literature in Service of Tolerance.

 

To find out more about Eric and his novels, or to arrange for him to speak at your school, visit his website at
www.ericwalters.net
.

 

 

 

 

 

Also by Eric Walters from Penguin Canada

 

The Bully Boys

The Hydrofoil Mystery

Trapped in Ice

Camp X

Royal Ransom

Run

Camp 30

Elixir

Shattered

Camp X: Fool's Gold

Sketches

The Pole

Voyageur

Black and White

 

 

 

ERIC WALTERS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PUFFIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

 

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Published in Puffin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

Published in this edition, 2009

 

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  (OPM)

 

Copyright © Eric Walters, 2008

 

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part
of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without
the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon
request to the publisher.

 

ISBN: 978-0-14-331247-5

 

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without
a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

 

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man isn't defined by
where
he lives,
but by
how
he lives.

 

 

 

 

I
LOOKED DOWN AND SAW
the stain on my T-shirt. It looked like dried ketchup. I scraped at it with my thumbnail and flaked away a little bit, but couldn't remove it completely. Damn. I didn't want Candice to think I was a slob. Maybe I'd go home and change my shirt. My house wasn't close, though, and there was no guarantee that anything I had there would be any cleaner. My mom had just started doing the laundry instead of me, but she'd missed last week because she'd been offered an extra shift at the casino. Besides, it really wasn't that big a stain. Maybe Candice wouldn't even notice. Then again,
I'd
noticed.

I started to tuck my shirt into my pants—not all the way, just enough to hide the stain. There, that took care of it.

I took a deep breath. “Hi, I was just in the neighbourhood and . . .” I stopped myself. That didn't sound right. Besides, what if she asked
why
I was in the neighbourhood?

“Hey, Candice, do you remember me from last night at the party? I'm Jay and . . . what am I saying?” I demanded of myself. If she didn't remember me then I was in serious trouble and shouldn't be going there in the first place.
But how could she not remember me? It was only the night before . . . or, really, early that morning. She hadn't left the party until almost two, and it wasn't like she was drunk or anything . . . I didn't think she'd had more than two or three beers the whole night.

“Hey, Candice, I was just—”

“Excuse me?”

I practically jumped up in the air as I startled out of my trance. There was an old woman with a grocery buggy standing on the sidewalk right in front of me. I'd been so lost in thought that I hadn't even seen her coming.

“I didn't understand what you were saying,” the woman said. “Were you talking to me?”

“I was . . . I was just talking to myself,” I stammered.

She nodded her head. “I do that all the time. That and talking to my cats. Cats are such good company, don't you think?”

“Um . . . sure . . . I guess.”

She smiled. “Are you lost? Do you need help?”

“I'm okay. Thanks, anyway.”

She smiled again. She certainly was a happy old lady. She started tottering away, her little grocery buggy trailing behind her.

Actually, she wasn't that far off when she'd asked if I was lost. I knew where I was, but I certainly was lost in a different way. I probably shouldn't even have been there. I should have just gone home. I'd bump into Candice sooner or later, somewhere around town. It wasn't like Niagara Falls was so big that you could avoid running into people for long. In fact, try as hard as I could, there were always some people I ran into wherever I went and . . . but
she wasn't one of them. We went to different schools, and before last night I'd never even seen her before.

And I
knew
she
did
want to see me—she'd talked to me a lot at the party, and come over to say goodbye before she left, and told me she was happy to meet me, and even told me where she lived. That had to be more than just being polite. You told somebody where you lived because you wanted them to drop in sometime. It had to be that. Definitely. Well, almost definitely.

I looked up at the house. That was the right address. That was her house. There were cement steps leading up from the sidewalk to her walkway. I took the four steps in one bound. It was a long walkway and the grass on both sides was worn and beaten down. The flower bed by the porch was untended and filled with weeds. I stopped again, this time at the stairs leading up to the wooden porch that wrapped itself around the front of the house. There were a couple of missing spindles, and peeling paint. It held some lawn chairs, a bike—maybe it was Candice's bike—and a broken-down old couch.

The house was big, and brick, and tall. When it was built—maybe seventy or eighty years ago—it was probably pretty fancy. Now it just looked faded and tired and in need of repairs and a good paint job—like most of the houses in town. A lot of them weren't even houses anymore, really. They had been subdivided into apartments. On a lot of the houses there were three or even more doorbells at the front door, each leading to a different apartment—one in the basement, maybe two on the main floor, another on the second floor, and sometimes even a tiny one in the attic up on the third floor. It was
amazing how many people—how many
groups
of people—could be crammed into one house.

Me and my mom had our whole house to ourselves. It was the house she'd grown up in, her parents' house . . . until they died. My mom was thinking that maybe it would make sense for us to rent out the basement. That wouldn't be so bad, and the rent money couldn't hurt. Money was always tight. Besides, it would be different having somebody living in our basement than it had been for us to live in somebody else's basement. Over the years we'd lived in a couple of basements, and I never wanted to do that again. I hoped we'd never
need
to do that again.

I climbed the stairs, the second and third steps sagging under my weight. I looked at my reflection in the glass of the front door. My hair looked wild. It stuck up and out in twenty different directions . . . not in a good way. I ran my fingers through it, trying to straighten it out or flatten it down or something. That didn't seem to be working, and I couldn't very well tuck my head into my pants like my shirt. It would have to do.

“Hi, Candice . . . Hello, Candice . . .” I said softly, rehearsing my opening line just one more time.

I raised my hand to knock and the door swung open. A man—balding, heavy-set, his belly hanging out from under his shirt and overflowing over the belt of his pants—stood in the doorway, scowling at me. I took a half-step back.

“Yeah?” he barked.

“Does Candice live here?” I asked meekly.

“Who wants to know?” he demanded.

“Me. Jay . . . Jayson Hunter.”

“Hunter,” he said, and smirked.

“Is this where she lives?”

“I'm her father.”

“Is she home?”

“Yeah, she's here, but you can't see her,” he said, his smirk changing into a scowl.

“Is she busy?”

“She's always going to be too busy to see
you
,” he said.

“I don't understand.”

“What don't you understand? You can't see her.”

“But I just wanted to—”

“I know
exactly
what you wanted and it ain't happening,
buddy boy
!” He'd leaned in closer as he spat out the last few words, and I could smell alcohol. It was still only ten-thirty in the morning. Either he'd already been drinking or he'd had so much last night it was oozing out of his pores.

“My Candy doesn't have any time to waste on a loser like you!” he barked.

I felt my spine stiffen and a flush run over my body. “I'm not a loser!” I protested.

He laughed. It was a loud, raspy sound that was filled with bitterness. “The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, buddy boy.”

“What?”

“You ain't never heard that expression before? It means you're a loser like your old man was a loser.”